A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston
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geographical and human scale, let alone technological horrors, the Spanish Civil War has been dwarfed by later conflicts. Nonetheless, it has generated over fifteen thousand books, a literary epitaph which puts it on a par with the Second World War. In part, that reflects the extent to which even after 1939 the war continued to be fought between Franco’s victorious Nationalists and the defeated and exiled Republicans. Even more, certainly as far as foreigners were concerned, the survival of interest in the Spanish tragedy was closely connected with the sheer longevity of its victor. General Franco’s uninterrupted enjoyment of a dictatorial power seized with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini was an infuriating affront to opponents of fascism the world over. Moreover, the destruction of democracy in Spain was not allowed to become just another fading remnant of the humiliations of the period of appeasement. Far from trying to heal the wounds of civil strife, Franco worked harder than anyone to keep the war a live and burning issue both inside and outside Spain.
Reminders of Francoism’s victory over international communism were frequently used to curry favour with the outside world. This was most dramatically the case immediately after the Second World War when frantic efforts were made to dissociate Franco from his erstwhile Axis allies. This was done by stressing his enmity to communism and playing down his equally vehement opposition to liberal democracy and socialism. Throughout the Cold War, the irrefutable anti-communism of the Nationalist side in the Civil War was used to build a picture of Franco as the bulwark of the Western system, the ‘Sentinel of the West’ in the phrase coined by his propagandists. Within Spain itself, memories of the war and of the bloody repression which followed it were carefully nurtured in order to maintain what has been called ‘the pact of blood’. The dictator was supported by an uneasy coalition of the highly privileged, landowners, industrialists and bankers, of what might be called the ‘service classes’ of Francoism, those members of the middle and working classes who, for whatever reasons, opportunism, conviction or wartime geographical loyalty, threw in their lot with the regime, and finally of those ordinary Spanish Catholics who supported the Nationalists as the defenders of religion and law and order. Reminders of the war were useful to rally the wavering loyalty of any or all of of these groups.
The privileged usually remained aloof from the dictatorship and disdainful of its propaganda. However, those who were implicated in the regime’s networks of corruption and repression, the beneficiaries of the killings and the pillage, were especially susceptible to hints that only Franco stood between them and the revenge of their victims. In any case, for many who worked for the dictator, as policemen, Civil Guards, as humble serenos (night-watchmen) or porteros (doormen), in the giant bureaucracy of Franco’s single party, the Movimiento, in its trade union organization, or in its huge press network, the Civil War was a crucial part of their curriculum vitae and of their value system. They were to make up what in the 1970s came to be known as the bunker, the die-hard Francoists who were prepared to fight for the values of the Civil War from the rubble of the Chancellery. A similar, and more dangerous, commitment came from the praetorian defenders of the legacy of what Spanish rightists refer to broadly as el 18 de julio (from the date of the military rising of 1936). Army officers had been educated since 1939 in Academies where they were taught that the military existed to defend Spain from communism, anarchism, socialism, parliamentary democracy and regionalists who wanted to destroy Spain’s unity. Accordingly, after Franco’s death the bunker and its military supporters were to attempt once more to destroy democracy in Spain in the name of the Nationalist victory in the Civil War.
For these ultra-rightists, Nationalist propaganda efforts to maintain the hatreds of the Civil War were perhaps gratuitous. However, the regime clearly thought it essential for the less partisan Spaniards who rendered Franco a passive support ranging from the grudging to the enthusiastic. The Catholics and members of the middle classes who had been appalled by the view of Republican disorder and anti-clericalism generated by the rightist press were induced to turn a blind eye to the more distasteful aspects of a bloody dictatorship by constant and exaggerated reminders of the war. Within months of the end of hostilities, a massive ‘History of the Crusade’ was being published in weekly parts, glorifying the heroism of the victors and portraying the vanquished as the dupes of Moscow, as either squalidly self-interested or the blood-crazed perpetrators of sadistic atrocities. Until well into the 1960s, a stream of publications, many aimed at children, presented the war as a religious crusade against Communist barbarism.
Beyond the hermetically sealed frontiers of Franco’s Spain, the defeated Republicans and their foreign sympathizers rejected the Francoist interpretation that the Civil War had been a battle of the forces of order and true religion against a Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy. Instead, they maintained consistently that the war was the struggle of an oppressed people seeking a decent way of life against the opposition of Spain’s backward landed and industrial oligarchies and their Nazi and Fascist allies. Unfortunately, bitterly divided over the reasons for their defeat, they could not present as monolithically coherent a view of the war as did their Francoist opponents. In a way which weakened their collective voice, but immeasurably enriched the literature of the Spanish Civil War, they were side-tracked into vociferous debate about whether they might have beaten the Nationalists if only they had unleashed the popular revolutionary war advocated by anarchists and Trotskyists as opposed to mounting the conventional war effort imposed by the all-powerful Communists of the PCE (Partido Comunista de España).
Thereafter, the debate over ‘war or revolution’ engaged Republican sympathizers unable to come to terms with the leftist defeat. During the Cold War, it was used successfully to disseminate the idea that it was the Stalinist suffocation of the revolution in Spain which led to Franco’s victory. Several works on the Spanish Civil War were sponsored by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to propagate this idea. The success of an unholy alliance of anarchists, Trotskyists and Cold Warriors, has obscured the fact that Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Chamberlain were responsible for the Nationalist victory, not Stalin. Nevertheless, new generations have continued to discover the Spanish Civil War, sometimes scouring for parallels, in the light of national liberation struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua, sometimes just seeking in the Spanish experience the idealism and sacrifice associated so singularly lacking from modern politics.
The relevance of the Civil War to Franco’s supporters and to left-wingers throughout the world does not fully explain the much wider fascination which the Spanish conflict still exercises today. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam, it can only seem like small beer. As Raymond Carr has pointed out, compared to Hiroshima or Dresden, the bombing of Guernica seems ‘a minor act of vandalism’. Yet it has provoked more savage polemic than virtually any incident in the Second World War. That is not as some would have because of the power of Picasso’s painting but because Guernica was the first total destruction of an undefended civilian target by aerial bombardment. Accordingly, the Spanish Civil War is burned into the European consciousness not simply as a rehearsal for the bigger world war to come, but because it presaged the opening of the flood-gates to a new and horrific form of modern warfare that was universally dreaded.
It was because they shared the collective fear of what defeat for the Spanish Republic might mean that men and women, workers and intellectuals, went to join the International Brigades. The left saw clearly in 1936 what for another three years even the democratic right chose to ignore – that Spain was the last bulwark against the horrors of Hitlerism. In a Europe still unaware of the crimes of Stalin, the Communist-organized brigades seemed to be fighting for much that was worth saving in terms of democratic rights and trade union freedoms. The volunteers believed that by fighting fascism in Spain they were also fighting it in their own countries. Hindsight about the sordid power struggles in the Republican zone between the Communists on the one hand and the Socialists, the anarchists and the Trotskyist POUM on the other cannot diminish the idealism of the individuals concerned. There remains something intensely tragic about Italian and German refugees from Mussolini and Hitler finally being able to take up arms against their persecutors only to be defeated again.
To dwell on the impact of the horrors of the Spanish war and on the importance of the defence against fascism is to miss one of the most positive factors of the Republican experience – the attempt to drag Spain into the twentieth century. In the drab Europe of the depression years, what was happening