Martians!

What will happen when Putin signs an alliance with the little green men?

There is a danger greater than Putin, greater even than Trump—it is aliens, those that in our childhood we knew as Martians. The Yankee establishment seems very interested in drawing the attention of the American public to non-human technologies and extraterrestrial threats, which seem as problematic to demonstrate as the climate apocalypse. The Pentagon declassifies files with a transparency that would delight the late Dr. Jiménez del Oso. Those who once laughed at UFOs now seem to be convinced that we already have them here. The viewer cannot believe his eyes, while the shadow of a mothership looms over the defenseless United States: What will happen if Putin signs an alliance with the little green men? We can imagine panic on the West Coast, chaos in Washington and desperation in London: Putin is going to enter Paris, escorted by scaly Cossacks.

Such a threat to national security well deserves an increase in the Defense budget, two, three, four, five, as many times as necessary to provide us with the reverse technology that will allow us to overcome the challenge posed at Roswell. Soon, without a doubt, we will see the autopsies of the big-headed Martians who crashed their saucer after a reckless maneuver. And the public will swallow the millstone and cry out for the Military-Industrial Complex to defend them from the legions of Ummo or Ganymede. If intellectual and scientific credit is given to the girl Greta, why not give it to the abductees? At least these have been through a psychiatrist.

Popular Revolutions in Black Africa

Further down, a few thousand kilometers away from this decomposing Spain, in that Africa which we care so little about and from which so many problems come and will come to us, the wrongly labelled “European” Union is witnessing the volatilization of its influence in the Sahel, because of Russia, according to the press addicted to the Regime? Of course, since Putin replaced the coronavirus, all the evils of humanity come from Moscow.

However, the African military leaders who have taken power in recent years in Mali (2021), Burkina-Faso (2022), Guinea (2021) and this year in Niger have not resorted to the Wagner coup d’état, unlike in the past with French paratroopers and mercenaries hired by Paris. They have been military and popular coups that were fueled by France itself, a mere executor of the policies of the American Africom. After the overthrow of the Libyan state in 2011, the jihadists have found a terrestrial paradise in the lands of Fezzan and from there have intervened in Niger and Mali. France orchestrated two interventions to halt the march of the Tuareg fundamentalists on the Sahelian space, but soon discovered that it was much more practical to appease the Salafists in order to maintain their influence in Africa. The military of these countries began to see from their sad experience that the French services always had time to warn the members of the Islamic State of government attacks, in time for them to get their Qatari instructors to safety, for example. Meanwhile, and taking advantage of the occasion, Nigerian uranium was transported to France at ridiculous prices. Somehow the “protection” had to be paid for.

The Sahelian coups are true popular revolutions, like the Egyptian one of 1952, and which have been greeted with enormous popular support. Russian flags and portraits of Putin are more an expression of rejection of French (and European) perfidy than anything else. Macron, completely overwhelmed by his African debacle, has urged a military intervention by ECOWAS (a sort of African NATO) in Niger, as this country provides more than thirty percent of France’s nuclear fuel. However, knowing the internal rejection that an intervention by the sepoys would bring to their regimes, the governments of the zone refuse to move their forces. The United States, that faithful ally of Europe, has already negotiated on its own with Niger and has left Macron and dressed up and nowhere to go, as our grandmothers used to say. It was not for nothing that it was Victoria Nuland—she of F**k Europe!—who was in charge of negotiating the new state of affairs with Niger’s leaders. In case anyone thinks that this does not affect them, they should check their electricity bill in the coming months. France is the powerhouse of Europe.

Nor does it seem to be news that a good part of the weapons destined for Ukraine by NATO are turning up in Africa, where a certain power, very concerned about gender identity, climate change and aliens, is training its jihadist partners for a future pan-African war. Apparently, they can’t find a better way to end the growing influence of China and Russia on that continent. The Sahel and the Caucasus seem to be the next theater of global warfare. And we are not talking about aliens here, but surely the well-informed viewer, who knows where the star Sirius is and also knows that there are sixty genders, has no idea what Nagorno-Karabakh is or who the members of Boko-Haram are. He will find out eventually. And at his own expense.


Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifiesto.


Featured: “Watching From Mars,” number 13, from the Mars Attacks! trading card series (1962). Drawings by Wally Wood, painted by Norman Saunders.


Families of the Regime

The people have exercised their right, to the acclamation of the candidates proposed by those who are truly sovereign: the parties. And they have voted more of the same. It cannot be otherwise; whatever they do and whatever they vote for, the subjects of the Spain of agendas will always remain entangled in the partitocratic web, in the political spider’s web of the oligarchy. Coffee with cream or cream with coffee.

Since 1982, Spain has been ruled by a single party with two rival factions. One of them leads the ideological agenda and distributes funds among its supporters, among the enormous clientele that lives and prospers thanks to the handouts from the treasury. The other, the conservative one, is dedicated to consolidate the “advances” imposed by their rivals and to fix the accounts that they unbalance. When the numbers add up, they are kicked out amidst the Solanesque jubilation of the countrymen.

The current electoral campaign shows us the exclusively personal, cacique nature of the struggle for the electorate. Not a single idea, because they all say the same thing. Everything has been fixed on Sanchez; the person (not at all interesting) of the President of the Government is central in a campaign in which, however, in everything else the families of the Regime are in agreement. There are practically no differences in anything, only in the distribution of public funds. For the voter everything can be summed up in “Sánchez yes” or “Sánchez no.” In nothing else do the contenders for a seat and a public salary differ.

Only Vox strikes the discordant note and only Vox is radically stigmatized by the unanimous consensus of the beneficiaries of the single discourse.

Is a different government going to change anything, if there is one? Do the math. The Spanish right wing limits its nonconformism to the arcing of public assets, nothing more. It clenches its fist and cuts spending. This puts it in a situation of inferiority in front of an adventurer who happily distributes what he has and what he does not have and who makes pacts with anyone in order to maintain himself. That is why he wins, that is why he rules.

The absolute lack of principles is all that this solemn tacky man needs. The Reason of State is superfluous in a strictly personal project.

As always (thanks to the 78 Constitution, let us not forget) the privileged regions will continue to pimp “Madrid” and the minorities will consolidate their dictatorship. The majority must pay the taxes, which they must. With Sánchez or without Sánchez, with the Galician or the Andalusian. The puppet changes, but the music does not change. And not even the puppet is mute anymore—four more years under the same jackass. The nation is into the rhythm. The cooler, the better. The mass is always female.

And Spain? Well, what the poet said: a name, Spain is dead. It has been dead for a long time. Now all that’s left to do is to shroud it. With crown and all. Just the date of the burial needs to be announced.


Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifiesto.


Featured: Murga gaditana (Street Band of Cadiz), by José Gutiérrez Solana; painted in 1935.


The Sorovkin Line

The best way to verify the failure of the current Ukrainian offensive, at least so far, is the discretion and silence of the media. Had the operation gone differently, it would have grabbed all the headlines. But the sad reality is different: the fearsome German leopards have become an endangered species and a reward of one million rubles is given to the Russian serviceman who catches one of these vermin. Rheinmetall’s shares plummeted when the photos of German scrap metal made into phosphatin in the steppes of New Russia began to be published. But the fault lies not with the machines or the brave Ukrainians who dare to crew them, but with their sponsors—those who devised an offensive to satisfy Western investors’ need for victories. Because this adventure was not designed on military criteria—but on marketing.

In recent weeks, the prestigious Western press has discovered that the Russians do not fight all thatbadly, that they seem to know something about artillery and fortification and that they are not just the horde of drunks and incompetents described to us by our “experts.”

Moreover, it has been proved that the Muscovite barbarians have an overwhelming air dominance and are very effective in electronic warfare, even more so than the invincible Americans. General Sergei Surovikin, who took over the leadership of the front line of the Special Military Operation in September last year, is to blame for all this. When this general took command, the objectives of the Russian intervention in Ukraine were partly achieved: the essential one, which was to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Donbass, and some secondary ones, such as the land link between Crimea and the rest of the Russian Federation, the control of the Sea of Azov and the destruction of the Ukrainian air force and a good part of its army. But the Maidan regime did not fall and the West succeeded in preventing a peace agreement in March and April 2022. Another NATO success was the accelerated rearmament of Zelensky’s battered army. The few Russian troops guarding the front were not reinforced after the April political failure and in August-September the Ukrainian offensives in Kharkov and Kherson took place.

The first one was a success due to the poor coverage of that front, but the Russians managed to withdraw without great losses and after brilliant rearguard battles in Krasniy Liman, where they broke the Ukrainian encirclement twice. The army of Kiev paid for its military success with a very high number of casualties, because Russian air superiority compensated in part for the low density of its ground forces. At Kherson, the Ukrainian offensive was a bloody failure, especially at the Ingulets, where the ford of that river cost thousands of dead in front a Russian line that remained unmoved. It was Surovikin’s fear that the Noya Kakhovka dam would burst and leave his thirty thousand men cut off from communication—which made him to take the most difficult decision of the Russian intervention: to abandon Kherson and withdraw to the right bank of the Dnieper. Political rather than military defeat for Russia and spectacular propaganda success for Zelensky.

Surovikin announced difficult decisions and the Special Military Operation changed course: three hundred thousand reservists with combat experience were mobilized, the front was fortified, the military deployment was given depth and density, and a war of attrition began in which Russian missiles severely damaged the enemy power grid and destroyed Ukrainian warehouses, airfields and military devices. In August, the liberation of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) by the Wagnerites began and Zelensky took the defense of the city as a personal challenge. After nine months of fighting and repeated refusals to retreat, “Zelensky’s Stalingrad” was conquered by the Russians in May, after causing seventy thousand casualties to the Kiev army. Another important fact: out of every ten Ukrainian dead in Artyomovsk, eight were killed by Russian artillery fire. Nor is it insignificant that, contrary to what usually happens, the casualties of the attackers were lower (about forty thousand, of which there were about twenty thousand dead) than those of the defenders.

There were obvious signs that launching an offensive against the Surovikin Line was madness. But in recent months Ukraine has undergone a mysterious eclipse: General Zaluzhny, the true national hero of that country, disappeared from the public stage and has been seen only in pictures of dubious authenticity. His role in the political and military life of Ukraine has suddenly diminished, which is very important because, undoubtedly, he is the best replacement left for Kiev in case Zelensky’s regime collapses, which is less and less popular among his American sponsors, who are in growing disagreement with the British, the best allies of the current leader. Zelensky has never paid much attention either to military advice or to the human cost of his initiatives. If his heart did not tremble in the Ingulets or in Artyomovsk, neither has it trembled in Orekhovo, nor in the villages of the gray zone: Ukrainian elite brigades, armed and trained by NATO, like the famous 47th, have been sacrificed in an offensive that has barely touched the Russian front line.

More than two hundred and fifty armored vehicles rust before the unmovable Surovikin Line, which reminds us of the excellent tradition of the Russian military engineers, that of Totleben in Sevastopol or the Soviet defenses in Kursk. There is only one difference: Totleben faced an enemy that had far superior armament to that of the backward Russia of Nicholas I. Zhukov’s men at Kursk had Manstein’s Wehrmacht on the other side of their lines. Surovikin faced an army armed and trained by Gayrope, unable to match Russia’s armament production figures. The arsenal of the democracies is stretched to the limit and time is increasingly running on the side of the Kremlin. 2024 is an election year in America and the senile Biden is presenting himself to his electorate with a war he cannot win and which neither Russia nor China are interested in “freezing.” They are in no hurry.

Prigozhin’s “Sanjurjada”

When the Nazi hierarchs were living their particular eve of the apocalypse in Berlin, the news of Roosevelt’s death reached them, which Goebbels immediately identified with the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg in 1761, when Tsarina Elizabeth died and was succeeded on the throne by Peter III, a crowned idiot but a devoted admirer of his uncle Frederick. Old Fritz, who was thinking of committing suicide, made peace with his kinsman and succeeded in pulling Prussia out of the worst predicament in its history. Something similar has happened these days with the Prigozhin Sanjurjada, the product of a power struggle with Shoigu and Gerasimov, which the peculiar condottiero of the Wagner Group has lost. Possibly he knew it long before and his absurd move had to do with a personal solution to the inevitable absorption of his tercios by the Russian command.

A few short hours were enough and the storm dissolved in the warm breeze of the steppe. Despite the popularity of the Wagnerites, all Russia closed ranks with its president, from the Patriarch to the communists. This was not going to be another February 1917. But it was fantastic to see the headlines in the Western press: Putin was already on his last legs; civil war had broken out in Russia; the Kremlin was showing signs of weakness; a full-fledged putsch; a bunt like that of Pugachev.

There was no miracle for the Zelensky Household, the Ukrainian dictator will not recover his luxurious villa in Crimea, nor will the Czech foreign minister go next summer to its beaches (unless as a prisoner of war). Russia, like the Surovikin Line, is stronger than all that.


Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifiesto.


Featured: Kulikovo Field, by Pavel Ruzhenko; painted in 2005.

History Returns to Europe

The liberation of the Donbas by the Russian army has surprised us all, as I believe that nobody thought that the situation would end in an armed clash. Yesterday, after the commemoration of the Homeland Defense Day, the Kremlin government decided to put an end to a conflict in which the threats of the Atlanticists have been answered with facts by Russia. In these chaotic hours, we have the feeling that history has returned to Europe with the liberating advance of the Russian troops.

A war correspondent in a helmet and bulletproof vest, “reporting” from Ukraine. Behind him, a couple of tourists taking pictures. Source.

It seems that the dogmatic reverie of the foolish social democracy is collapsing, that the old and rotten liberal structure is falling down. NATO, the Western partitocracies, and also we, ordinary Europeans, find ourselves faced with the most unexpected of responses, faced with the thundering echoes of the ultima ratio regum, the motto that Louis XIV inscribed on his cannons and which graphically explains what is the essential core of the sovereignty of a State: force, the element that supports the political decision of a national community. Something the twilight Europeans do not know the meaning of, since they have long since handed over to stateless elites and organizations their ability to act as agents of history. Since the 1960s, Europe has tried to live outside the historical future, to sacrifice community identity—the being of the nation—to the opium of Welfare and the hedonistic aberrations of extreme nihilism. Russia is just the opposite example.

The End of History consisted of the forces of money, personified in the United States, imposing on the whole world the American Way of Life, the free market and democracy according to their regal whim, while Europe limited itself to assisting Washington and justifying its aggressions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or Libya. However, this unipolar conception of geopolitics is not real. In 2016, the Americans themselves showed that they did not want to be the instrument of international elites and elected Trump as president, who could only be removed after a very dubious electoral process, a real coup d’état of the globalist oligarchy.

Russia, a power with a much smaller military capability than the United States and its NATO sepoys, stood up to the attempt to sow Islamist chaos in Syria and is now challenging the Anglo-Saxon hegemony with a bold move, responding unexpectedly to the ultimatums that the U.S.-backed government in Kiev had launched against Moscow in the last month. The bluffing game of the Zelensky histrion was accepted by Russia, and Moscow’s envoy has thwarted with blood and iron all the palaver of the NATO rabbis and the Open Society millionaire bonzes and sycophants.

Today, the end of the End of History has begun. American world hegemony is in question. Russia has broken the borders of an artificial state, which was built on the union of the historical Ukraine and New Russia by Lenin, and has defended the rights of its popular community, of that half of today’s Ukraine which is and feels Russian. Faced with these facts, the stateless plutocracy of the West will have to react somehow, or else its dominance will crumble, its New World Order will become a paper tiger that no one fears. The lapsed Joe Biden already has his war—but this one has blown up in his hands, possibly much earlier than he planned; he thought Putin was going to play by Washington’s rules and timelines.

The awakening has been bitter for the decrepit figurehead of the elites. His entanglements are unleashing a disaster that is dragging down his puppet regime, established after the Maidan coup of 2014, the work of Soros, Brussels and the American embassy in Kiev. The essential objective of the Anglo-Saxon strategy, to antagonize Russia and Ukraine, to prevent concord between the two states, had been achieved. The consequences were calamitous for Ukraine itself, whose political authority was erased overnight in Crimea, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov and even Odessa. Only Putin’s excessive prudence, which limited itself to securing Russian Crimea and protecting the stable rebel nuclei in Lugansk and Donetsk, prevented the dissolution of Ukraine eight years ago. The Kremlin’s big mistake in 2014 was not to have reached out to Kyiv.

Like Poland in 1939, Ukraine has been thrown into an enterprise from which it will emerge battered and divided. This is what the Maidan “Revolution” and the political adventurism of the global plutocracy and its Ukrainian puppets have led to. America’s credibility will depend to a large extent on its response to this challenge. If it does nothing, the thesis of a unipolar world, of an American sphere, will be no more than a bad dream, a multicultural nightmare dissipated by the cold wind of the Russian steppe.


Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifesto.


Featured: The Return of the Prodigal Son, by Bernardino Licinio; painted ca. 1530s.

Sunflowers with Tomato

The Climate religion already has its iconoclasts. Two planetary suffragettes attacked van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a painting at which they threw a Warholian can of tomato soup to the cry of “Why do you protect art and not the planet?” In this time of permanent performance, the two maenads of the Earth Goddess applied the only principle of their theology—ago quia ineptum est [I do what is stupid]—against a poor canvas whose relationship with the climatic apocalypse is more than doubtful. Given that, according to the most serious scientific hypotheses, it is the cows’ windy breath that is to blame for the agony of our atmosphere, wouldn’t it have been more purposeful, more dignified, more coherent to throw the red lump on some Paulus Potter, for example?

The very purpose of the action does not seem to have been the subject of long meditations, for neither is it very comprehensible that the preservation of art and the preservation of the planet are mutually exclusive ends. Burning five-pound bills at the door of the Bank of England or “tomatoing” Royal Dutch Shell executives, for example, would have had a greater cause-effect relationship, always within that complex system of sympathetic magic that is Woke activism. What does not seem very logical or symbolic is to attack in effigy some defenseless sunflowers, innocent children of Mother Earth. But coherence, logic, sensible analysis of the real and the adequacy of responses to disturbing facts are anathema to Woke subjectivity, macho qualities that surely offend the empowered Ojancanas of the climatic Moloch.

The action of these damsels is the necessary consequence of the kind of education given in Western schools, where instruction has long since become indoctrination, merit anathema, and seriousness and intellectual rigor crimes. Anyone who has had the dubious honor of contemplating the achievements of modern pedagogy knows that performance has become a daily liturgy, a curricular coven, a teaching jalogüín (Halloween) in all educational institutions, where earlier teachers, books, experience and reason explained the sciences and the arts to future professionals, scientists, humanists and technicians. But as now the institutes, lyceums and academies have as a fundamental purpose that the young people explore their trusses and not their brains, the stimuli of the active life are no longer in front of the weak but necessary barrier of the spirit, of the contemplative life, of the intellectual vocation. Therefore, what the iconoclasts of the National Gallery carried out was the application to external reality of what has been common practice in academic centers for decades: Dadaism.

The tomato wallops at van Gogh are the culmination of four decades of anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical, anti-class, anti-racist, anti-macho, avant-garde, inclusive, feminist, resilient, non-binary, trans-speciesist and other long etcetera of antis and -ists that the reader may wish to add. Anything but classical, humanist and scientific.

I have no doubt that these prophets of nihilism have far surpassed the great artist of our time, the woman who best represents the aspirations and achievements of contemporary man (with apologies): Marina Abramovic, who will have to invent something to surpass the two bacchantes of London. Only one superior sacrilege comes to mind: throwing tomato, or pineapple juice, or Coca-Cola or sulfuric acid on some “masterpiece” of Frida Kahlo, the best artist in history, eclipsed until our times by a phallocratic conspiracy of silence. It is true that van Gogh was a sort of hirsute, red-haired, disoriented and suicidal Frida, but with a better technique (which, on the other hand, was not very difficult, either). I think, moreover, that the tomato streaks should remain on the painting, as a sample of what we could call “Hysteric Art.” Worse things have been seen in many exhibitions and have been priced at gold-premium. The National Gallery must pay fair market value for their work to the two girls, since their “action painting,” in addition, has served to make their museum become a trending topic. And isn’t that the chief end of art?

What can bring a museum closer to the people than the opportunity to throw a tomato at the Mona Lisa? Wasn’t that what Duchamp, Jarry and Picabia advocated? Is there anything more interactive and inclusive, more accessible to everyone? Besides, the Planet will be grateful.

If there is one good thing about Woke “education” is that the most valued artists are Rothko, Pollock and Mondrian, not the devalued butches of Titian, Rubens or Rembrandt. Therefore, future tomatinas will not get to (in theory) the representatives of European pseudo art—Boucher, Renoir or Ingres who objectified the female body and who will soon be banished from museums for offending genderist curators as much as they used to offend the confessors of queens. It will be Juan Gris, Miró, Tàpies and other geniuses of our era who will receive the public tribute of the tomato-pelting. Besides, a crimson streak in their works will not be too noticeable, either: it will actually make them more material, more organic—authentic art of the masses, genuine aesthetics of democracy.


Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifesto.

The Debt to Beauty

It is the undoubted attraction, the beauty of women that leads men to become entangled in the combats of the eternal war of the sexes, never finished, never won.

There are those who have defined woman as a sphinx without mystery, without enigma, whose fascination is enclosed in appearance. Mystery or no mystery, it is her unquestionable attraction, her beauty, that leads men to become entangled in the combats of the eternal war of the sexes, never finished, never won, full of battles of attrition, of a few triumphant blows of the hand and of many months and years of trenches, barbed wire and constant, monotonogamous, stultifying bombardments. So much wastage and abundance of hendecasyllables, so many flaming and sublimated madrigals to always end up in a barren and soured bedlam: Dulcinea is always Aldonza and not vice versa. Such is the force and seduction of a simple, imaginary and unrealizable promesse de bonheur [promise of happiness], as the divine Stendhal would write. The beloved is a screen on which the lover projects his dreams, that is the quixotic misunderstanding essential to the whole love struggle, where animal impulses mingle with the fantasies of the spirit: the centaur in search of his Pallas.

For the other side—that of the sphinxes—which is the one with the strategic superiority and the most practical design, this war was resolved in a prosaic and binding objective, but very necessary for society: the family, the house, the polis, the market. That they lived happily ever after culminates all the narratives of the West, and it covers with illusion the inexorable need to reproduce the social body, to give continuity to something that is much more important than the vain and impossible happiness of individuals. Or, at least, this had been so until some members of the high castes decided to change the rules of the game and pervert the natural inclinations of human livestock with the spread of a poison that acts as a solvent of societies and civilizations: the search for an impossible abolition of reality so that even the most delirious fantasies, almost all of them purely corporeal and erotic, become real, something that, of course, cannot happen, but that makes the sphinxes stop thinking about their essential objective and replace it with a phantasm that only produces neurosis for them and great profits for those who invoke it. And when one of the sides—the strongest—is upset, the other is disoriented; the subtle balance is broken. This, fundamentally, is what El deber de lo bello [The Debt to Beauty], the recent novel by Javier R. Portella, is about.

Since the last century we knew that absurdity was the essential note of existence. But it is in this century that it has gone from being a simple intellectual or historical reference to become everyday life—the usual scenario of an increasingly ugly, puritanical, hysterical and imbecilic existence, a product imported from America but with European roots, especially Anglo-Saxon.

The protagonist of the novel, Hector, is overwhelmed (and how!) by the plagues of our time: political correctness, gender superstition and delirious feminism. Hector is the fulminated man, whose true love life was annihilated by Cristina, his former partner, and who seeks in extraordinary adventures the meaning of an existence that moves in a field of shadows where he longs for the light, but has the mania of looking for it inside all the tunnels. His erotic epiphany comes at the hand of Angelica, a prototype of the feminine ideal of our time, liberated but seductive, whose name comes in handy if we take into account that demons are also angels. Fantasy becomes reality for Hector, but it only brings him mild joys and constant ashes. Wounded by beauty and hopelessly addicted to its affairs, our postmodern Werther becomes entangled in a skein of sensual labyrinths that torment him. This comes to an extreme when he encounters a sophisticated sphinx, Margot, with echoes of Faust and Bulgakov, who leads him to his inevitable Walpurgis Night.

All of this is told with humor and with a tone that is more French than Spanish, for it is not a traditional thing to describe with elegance the deviations of the flesh, to untie with care such tender ties. Portella draws a humorous but deep portrait of an empty and full society, satisfied to the point of stupidity, a portrait that takes us from the classrooms of the pathetic Santiago Carrillo High School or from a sordid back room of the Ministry of Equality to the mansions of the European oligarchy; Hector goes through all the circles of the amorous hell of our time, of this unbridled chaos, of the glorified vulgarity that can only be redeemed by the cult of beauty, something that the protagonist misses throughout the novel and that only shines in a few moments—as that which they call “happiness.”


Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifesto.

Radio Moscow Calling…

All they have left is the radio. The rebels no longer have any other instrument than this primitive voice machine to make themselves heard. Nor does the entire population understands them—Arabic has become the second language of the Third Republic and its learning has priority over that of Spanish, or that simplified things that is now called “Spanish.”

The official from the communications department of the Ministry of Equity connected the old transmitters and listened in. Soon, from Moscow, the octogenarian Juan Manuel de Prada will sit in front of a microphone to deliver his subversive message to the few remaining listeners in the Peninsular Confederation of Sovereign Republics, once known by the now-forbidden name of Spain (the New Penal Code punishes with fines of six hundred thousand euros those who call the confederate territory “Spain” and those who call themselves “Spaniards”).

Civil servant number 593,582 of the Ministry of Equity was a lucky man. He had obtained his job in a special promotion that included, exceptionally and with great protests from the female civil servants, sixty white and heterosexual men, especially necessary for the maintenance of the facilities and for certain technical matters, such as, for example, the radio.

The radio was the only mass medium that had escaped the Ministry’s checkers, the only voice that was still marooned and wild, unaffected by all the blockades of the computer networks set up by the agencies of the Global Information System.

593. 582—the old Christian names had been replaced by numbers in the Ministry, the initial phase of a project that was intended to be extended to the entire native minority, so that they would not cling to old signs of identity—tuned in to Radio Moscow.

On the other side of the sea of Hertzian waves was a community of six thousand Spaniards of the old days, who had preferred exile when the Confederation made it obligatory to eat seaweed and insects, to be vaccinated twice a week, to speak and write in simplified Spanish, and to read only the books recommended by the Ministry of Equity.

This last measure, apparently of little importance because nobody read, caused costly expurgations of public and private libraries where supremacist texts of all kinds were stored: from Goethe to Plato, from Calderón de la Barca to Gerardo Diego. It took more than a year to destroy millions of volumes that transmitted the values of the old patriarchal culture, an operation that included classical music, which no one had been listening to for more than twenty years by ministerial order.

When the Minister of Equity burned Goya’s Majas, Murillo’s Inmaculadas and Titian’s Danae in front of Madrid’s Botanical Gardens, the long work of multicultural inclusion, initiated at the beginning of the century by Zapatero, was at last completed.

It was then that thousands of Spaniards could stand it no longer and went into exile in the only European country that remained Christian: Russia, the hereditary enemy of progressivism. From Moscow they began to send subversive messages against the Confederation, in which music by Falla and Albéniz was played, where Quevedo and Bécquer were recited, where they explained what the Reconquest was, what the work of Spain in America was, what the war of 1936 was.

The verifiers managed to block all the channels of diffusion of these messages except the radio, which continued with stubborn presence on the airwaves. That is why 593.582 waited for the moment of Prada’s message to begin jamming it, while meditating on the State Plan of Emasculation, an initiative of the Ministry to castrate the Spanish Christian population and thus put an end to any possibility of Eurocentric supremacism in the Confederation.

“It must not be such a bad thing since the youth of the Popular Party have signed up en masse,” he thought. “It is an essential requirement to obtain a position. And in the Confederation the only source of employment and salaries is politics: the last private company closed down more than ten years ago.”

While 593,582 was meditating on whether or not he should castrate himself to get a promotion and stop being a gender pariah, Prada’s unmistakable, Chestertonian voice started to sound over the airwaves…


Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifesto.


Featured image: “A Young Radio Listener,” ca. 1926 (Mary Evans Picture Library).