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Fernando Sánchez Dragó (Madrid, October 2, 1936) is a Spanish writer.

Early years

Born in Salamanca, one of the 21 districts that form the city of Madrid, he studied at the El Pilar. He is posthumous son of Fernando Sánchez Monreal, journalist and director of the news agency Febus, director and owner of the agency Noti-Sport and editor-in-chief of the newspaper La Voz, which has a conservative republican ideology (relative to the party of Miguel Maura, Conservative Republican Party), who was murdered by the insurgents in September 1936 near Burgos after being reported to the fascist authorities. The circumstances after the civil war do not allow him to find out which side had killed his father until 1956. Dragó narrates the trip of his father, since he has left Madrid to report on the military uprising 17 of July of 1936 until he dies murdered in Burgos, in his novel Muertes paralelas. Graduated in Romance Philology (1959) and in Modern Languages, specialized in Italian (1962), and Doctor of Letters by the University of Madrid. He taught Spanish Literature at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. Throughout the fifties and sixties, he participated in anti-Franco protests, especially in the events of 1956 which led him to prison.

During his youth, he was a member of the Communist Party of Spain, whose Spanish acronym is PCE, and as a result of his opposition activity against the Franco dictatorship, he served sixteen months in prison and remained in exile for seven years. Despite his initial communist affiliation, he has subsequently defined his ideology as individualist anarchism. His political thinking is based on a heterodox and radical liberalism, building his own thought, intermingling Perennialism, Greek philosophy (especially the pre-Socratic, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynic and Hellenistic school) and the Eastern, such as Taoism or Hinduism, and a defense at the extreme of individual rights such as life and private property. He also defends Bullfighting and he declared himself to be seditious, anti-statist and Eurosceptic. It is for this reason that on the day of Spain's entry into the European Union (an organization which he described as a "Leninist monster"), he sent a telegram to the Ministry of Justice requesting "against the infamy and the crime of high treason committed" the Statelessness. Clearly, he may be considered a libertarian individualist anarchist sui generis (Anarcho-capitalism), to which he himself has sometimes alluded publicly. Dragó detests Puritanism, Developmentalism, Multiculturalism (which he compares with the Fall of the Western Roman Empire), Goodism, Progressivism, Protestantism, Technology, Gender ideology, Globalization, Neoliberalism, Political correctness and Postmodernity.

“As José Ortega y Gasset said, being right-wing or left-wing is one of the infinite ways the human has available to be an idiot. The result of this little occidental world is the monotheistic dualism. For instance, outside of this topic, no one has ever told me about left-wing or right-wing in Asia. I repeat, no one ever. On the other hand, both wings are developmentalism and I think that what can save the world, if there is still time to do it, is to stop the economic growth." Sánchez Dragó In terms of international politics, he has criticized the United States of America, the NATO, the European Union and the UN for trigger “all the great wars in the last 20 years: the Gulf War, the Iraq War, the Yugoslav Wars, the American war in Afghanistan, the Libyan Civil War and, if common sense does not block us, the Syrian Civil War”. He has accused Obama (who for Sáncez is a warlike) and he has referred to him as “the multinationals’ wimp, the Federal Reserve’s puppet, an invertebrate Don Tancredo, the Islamic fundamentalism’s fifth columnist”. Moreover, he has accused Cameron and Hollande for “praising the Islamic fundamentalism because Syrian rebels are mostly Al-Qaeda’s partisans and of breaking the weak balance in the Middle East”. He also supports Marine Le Pen and he regrets a party with the same characteristics does not exist in Spain. He supports Vladimir Putin due to the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation. He classified it as “the most significant historic event since the Berlin Wall became pieces of rubble”. Nowadays, he supports a Spanish political party called Vox. He claims “the voter in Europa has two opposed options: the centripetal identitarian movement, which is conservative and sovereign, represented by Vox in Spain or the centrifugal multiculturalism, which is Europeanist, progressive and supports the Islam represented by all the other parties.

His view of Europe is pessimistic: “Europe is drowning. It is a disaster. There is nothing to do. Europe will be the third world soon”. His view related to the emergence of new geopolitical blocs is: “ in the universal history there are telluric movements that gain access at breakneck speed when the time comes and there is no one who can stop them. There was a Mediterranean millennium: the one of the Nativity, of Hellas, of Egypt, etc. Then, there was an Atlantic millennium: of the United States, England, the colonial empires, etc. Nowadays, we are in the millennium of the Pacific. There are three big blocs that emerged in the world: one is Russia, other is China and the last one are the Muslim countries. Muslim countries are fragmented but, when they unite themselves Europe will become a theme park, a museum”.

The writer believes we are living the Kali Yuga stage of the Hinduism. We are in a flabby totalitarianism where there is only emptiness, like: Brave New World of Aldous Huxley, Ugliness raised to the category of art, the criteria excellence suppression and corruption of the language, demagogy and revolt of the mob, the yardstick of the egalitarianism, the bereft of levelling (men’s feminization and women’s masculinization) against the ontological distinction of both sexes, the transformation of free thinking in the inanity of it, materialistic and reductionist scientism, the substitution of real for virtual, tweeters who believe they are Shakespeare and they act like Girolamo Savonarola, the globalization that kneels down before the altars of the sacred consumption, the utmost mercantilism and the political correctness as the new Inquisition.

[...]

He has been professor of Spanish language, literature and history at the universities of several countries like Japan, Senegal, Morocco and Kenya. He has cultivated journalism, literary criticism and journey storytelling (he has traveled more than seventy countries as a journalist or as a simply traveler). Currently, he lives in Castilfrío de la Sierra in the Spanish province Soria with his young japanese wife, Naoko, who is 37 younger than him. He has four children, each one from a mother, and one of them is the actress, writer and TV presenter Ayanta Barilli.  

Throughout his life, he has won several prizes (see all his awards below). The National Prize of Literature should be pointed, which he obtained in 1979 thanks to his essay work Gargoris and Habidis, a magical history of Spain in which the enigma’s country is analysed.

A new beetle’s species discovered in Namibia was named Somaticus sanchezdragoi to honor him.

Despite their ideological differences, Jorge Verstrynge is a friend of him.

Characteristics of his work

Style

He looks for complex expression and understands literary language as something completely away from common language.This results in the choice of an usual, erudite vocabulary; in the use of several enumerations and adjectives; in the profusion of metaphors and in the use of compound sentences and syntactic structures with a strong sustain. This style has been criticised for being excessively verbal and overelaborated without a content, etc. Nevertheless, other critics have valued the big amount of resources and the writer’s literary registers; they see that verbal excess as a kind of literary torrent.

Subjects

He treats in a recurrent way subjects like spirituality, conscience’s development, wisdom, religions and literature. Some novels as El camino del corazón (The Heart’s Road) or Parallel Deaths are highly autobiographical. Other essays as Gárgoris and Habidis or El sendero de la mano izquierda (The Path of the Left Hand) show the author’s thinking. One of its essential characteristics is the harmony with the philosophical universe of East and the rejection of  modern Western world and “Judaeo-Christianity”. Following that thinking, when he analysed in his novel Gárgoris and Habidis Spain’s history, he rejects European rationalism and Christianity faith (although he understands the figure of Christ as the Jungian archetype of hero and values the pagan legacy syncretised in Catholicism in face of biblical and iconoclastic protestant literalism), opposing to mystical values originating in Gnosticism and in an Antiquity that he considers totally unknown: “The 5th century BC is Buddha’s century, and also Confucius’, Laozi’s, Zarathusta’s, orphic movements’, Pythagoras’, pre-Socratics’... That was the best moment of Universal History. Everything we know was said in that century and from then on, the world is on an unstoppable decline.

“On the contrary, in the East, they assure that time is circular, that everything repeats itself, that history is an eternal return of cycles which are bounded together and everything on the world does not occur, just happens. It is illud tempus of once upon a time from legends, of children’s fables and Bible, of Golden Age, of Apollonian serenity and Dionysian inebriety, of nothing matters from cynics, Stoics and epicureans. There is no place there for the fall and neither, therefore, for deterioration and death. It is possible that the happy man hadn’t a shirt at the time of Arabian Nights, but surely he hasn’t a watch now”.