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| Juan Vásquez de Mella y Fanjul (8 June 1861—18 February 1928) |
Translation my own. Excerpt from a speech delivered at the Parque de la Salud in Barcelona, May 17, 1903; published in Juan Vásquez de Mella, Textos de Doctrina Política, Preliminary Study, Selections and Notes by Rafael Gambra, Madrid, 1953, pp.27-28.This is why every man, even without realizing it and against his will, is a traditionalist, because he begins by being an accumulation of tradition. Let him strip himself, if he can, of what he has received from his ancestors, and he will see that what remains is not the same person, but a mutilated being who craves tradition as the complement of his existence. The most audacious revolutionary, who, in the name of an idealistic theory, formed more by fantasy than by reason, sets out to demolish the social edifice and pulverize even the foundation stones to erect a new one, if, before beginning the demolition, he pauses to ask himself who he is; if passion does not blind him, he will hear a voice speaking to him from the walls he threatens and from the depths of his soul: You are a condensed tradition that seeks to commit suicide; you are the last descendant of a dynasty of ancestors as old as humankind; no lineage is more ancient than yours. If even one link were missing in that chain of thousands of years, you would not exist; you want to overthrow a lineage of traditions, and yet you are partly a product of them.
You want to destroy a tradition in the name of your autonomy, and you begin by denying previous autonomies and disregarding those that will follow; in inaugurating your work, you want a tradition to continue against past traditions and against future traditions, proclaiming the sole truth of your own. Looking back, you are a parricide; looking forward, a murderer; and looking at yourself, a madman who believes he is destroying others when he is killing himself.
Great men are those who know how to preserve, in an intangible society, the heritage of tradition; those who not only preserve it, but also correct it; or those who, not content with preserving and correcting it, perfect and augment it. And the most traditionalist is not the one who merely preserves, but the one who, in addition to preserving, corrects, who adds and increases, because he better follows the example of the founders, not limiting himself to maintaining the existing legacy, but doing what they did: producing and extending their works through progress. That is why the greatest men in history are the most traditionalist; that is, those who leave behind nothing but tradition. Only the common man, who does not create, transmits nothing of his own, and often, without even knowing them, he repudiates the legacies of others. In short, individual autonomy is the solitude of isolation, breaking the social fabric of generations and abruptly interrupting, if its disruptive force is strong enough, the continuity of a people's life. Tradition is the family gathered around the same hearth, where men and flames are replaced, the flames lasting longer than the men.
