The Spanish Civil War ninety years on

Today is the ninetieth anniversary of the out break on the Spanish Civil War. What began as a largely unsuccessful military coup against the leftist government as political violence by radical elements escalated, and, followed as it was by a vicious and bloody attack by the left on the Church and conservative or traditionalist individuals and groups turned into a vicious civil conflict that lasted two and three quarter years. This in turn attracted the support, on both sides, of individuals and, tacitly, of governments across Europe and the US.

The events of those years remain divisive, not just in Spain itself, but across a much wider scene. Books and films about the war are immediately perused for bias.

Wikipedia has what appears to be a neutral account at Spanish_Civil_War

All civil wars produce atrocities and the same sources covers these with one about the clergy and religious who were murdered at Martyrs_of_the_Spanish_Civil_War

and two articles about the actions of each side in Red_Terror_(Spain) and White_Terror_(Spain) 

That Spain today is a stable constitutional monarchy with lively multi-party politics that can welcome the Pope with huge crowds only very recently and witness the near completion of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia shows that the country has come far from the events of the 1930s - and to my mind raking over the embers of the past with the Law of Historical Memory is unwise.

Now regular readers will not, I think be surprised if I say that had I been alive in 1936 I would have naturally supported the Nationalists, and that I still do. Without their victory Spain, and quite possibly France, could have fallen to communism or one of its crazier versions, and the economic and commercial growth since the 1960s would not have happened.

Francoist victory poster from 1939

Image: propagandopolis

My interest in the Civil War began as a schoolboy in the 1960s, and was nourished by reading C.E.Lucas-Philips’ The Spanish Pimpernel and Luis Bolin’s Spain: The Vital Years. I recommend both books.

Attitudes to the events of those terrible years remain entrenched. I was staggered to read an article in, I think, the Daily Telegraph some years ago, when Mr Cameron ( remember him?) desperately wanted to bomb Syria. The article was written by an Anglican clergyman with whom I am acquainted and who has gone on to have a public persona as a commentator, in which he argued for foreign intervention and wrote that Britain and France should have intervened in the Spanish Civil War - on the side of the Republic. Hmm, well he hasn’t faced being murdered and his church burned down, has he?