Ramiro Ledesma Ramos

• Name — Ramiro Ledesma • Party — JONS (1931–1934) FE de las JONS (1934–1935) • Born — 23 May 1905 • Birthplace — Alfaraz de Sayago, Kingdom of Spain • Died — 29 October 1936 • Place of death — Aravaca, Spain • Occupation — Philosopher, politician, writer, essayist, and journalist

Born in Alfaraz de Sayago (province of Zamora), he was raised in Torrefrades, where his father worked as school teacher. After studying Arts and Sciences at the Central University of Madrid, where he was a disciple of José Ortega y Gasset, and contributing to La Gaceta Literaria, El Sol and Revista de Occidente, Ledesma Ramos began studying the works of Martin Heidegger. He also wrote a novel for the youth, entitled El sello de la muerte ("The Seal of Death"). Attracted to both Benito Mussolini's Corporatism, and the developing Nazi movement of Adolf Hitler in Germany, he strove to overcome his "middle class roots," which he saw as an obstacle in reaching out to the revolutionary milieu of Spanish politics in the 1920s. In 1931, Ledesma Ramos began publishing the periodical La Conquista del Estado, named in tribute to Curzio Malaparte's Italian Fascist magazine La Conquista dello Stato—one of the first publications of the Spanish National-Syndicalism. It attempted to bridge the gap between nationalism and the anarcho-syndicalist of the dominant trade union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), by revising syndicalism altogether. His admiration for Nazism brought him to imitate Adolf Hitler's hairstyle.

In the very first issue of the La Conquista del Estado (The Conquest of the State), Ledesma published a syncretic program, which promoted statism, a political role for universities, a system of regionalisation, and a syndicalist structure for the national economy. The program's paper was in publication throughout the year, and, although a subject of debate in a CNT assembly, it did not have the intended impact. He subsequently led his group into an October 1931 merger with Onésimo Redondo's Junta Castellana de Actuación Hispánica, creating the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, and its magazine JONS. The group became the Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista (FE-JONS), after it fused with José Antonio Primo de Rivera's group the Falange Española in 1934; he personally designed the movement's badge, the yoke, and the arrows, while he also coined the mottos Arriba España and Una, Grande y Libre, both of which were kept in use in Francoist Spain.

• [On himself:] "The red shirt of Garibaldi fits Ramiro Ledesma and his comrades better than the black shirt of Mussolini."

• Discurso a las juventudes de España (Speech to the Youth of Spain) • ¿Fascismo en España? (Fascism in Spain?) • La Conquista del Estado (The Conquest of the State) • Escritos filosóficos, &c. (Philosophical Writings, etc.)