Indoctrinating the Youth of Post-War Spain: A Discourse Analysis of a Fascist Civics Textbook

Abstract

During the period following the Spanish Civil War, the regime of Francisco Franco utilized an authoritative discourse rooted in Fascist ideology as a means for justifying absolute power and indoctrinating the masses. Perhaps the demographic group most heavily targeted by this aggressive campaign of propaganda was children, who in the eyes of Franco, had to be indoctrinated early before their noble feelings of youth were corrupted. This desire to reach out to the youth is evident in Así quiero ser: El niño del nuevo Estado, an elementary school textbook that imposes a rigid Fascist ideology. The totalitarian rhetoric of the text includes unyielding adoration of the Caudillo, a Utopian vision of reality, and covert strategies of persuasion and control that together comprise a powerful tool of manipulation. Taking into account both the sociopolitical context of the era and the genre of didactic literature, this critical discourse analysis of Así quiero ser incorporates the Bakhtinian notion of authoritative discourse with other approaches to analysing persuasive discourse, such as those employed by Kinneavy (1971), Harré (1985) and Menz (1989), among others.

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