essay on spanish civil war

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Looking Back on the Spanish War

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First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things.

It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front – the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those particular men because I remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who were mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that all of them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been about twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.

One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish Civil War. The Latin type of latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so often to recur; ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is about something, and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.’ Many other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.

The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.

Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now. Our memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of New Masses or the Daily Worker , and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the Lunns , Garvins et hoc genus ; they go without saying. But here were the very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the ‘glory’ of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted into the Daily Mail of 1918. If there was one thing that the British intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from ‘War is hell’ to ‘War is glorious’ not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions equally violent. There must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the intelligentsia, who approved the ‘King and Country’ declaration in 1935, shouted for a ‘firm line’ against Germany in 1937, supported the People’s Convention in 1940, and are demanding a Second Front now.

As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be ‘pro-war’ or ‘anti-war’, but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. When they enthused over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army the experience of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less, discipline was less irksome. You have only to glance at the New Statesman to see that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the Red Army at this moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is worth writing down shows what the years of rentier capitalism have done to us.

In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on atrocities.

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish Civil War. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.

In the present war we are in the curious situation that our ‘atrocity campaign’ was done largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously; partly also because official war propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-18 was the exaggerated pro-German reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won?’ even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them.

But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason for scepticism – that the same horror stories come up in war after war – merely makes it rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the ‘whites’ commit far more and worse atrocities than the ‘reds’. There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. The volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes from the German press and radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads – they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.

Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I think, giving one a certain insight into the atmosphere of a revolutionary period:

Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat beet-field with no cover except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still dark and return soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.

What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.

One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European make; one in particular – the arm outstretched, the palm vertical – was a gesture characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible – I mean the attempt to wipe out an injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could not be wiped out.

Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare, horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think, resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting men: ‘Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist!’ etc. etc. As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got!’ ( ¡ No hay cabo como el! ) Later on he applied for leave to exchange into my section.

Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself. The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a normal time. It was a time when generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters, the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarity’, pathetically repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No, you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.

The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda – that is to say, lies. The broad truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.

I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War. Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues – namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.

The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre ( vide the Catholic Herald or the Daily Mail – but these were child’s play compared with the continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point – the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention, at the same time as the Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their ‘legionaries’. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable – even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica , you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past . If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?

Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways – the breaking-up of families, for instance – the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don’t grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a régime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus . Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom, ‘ Felix fecit ’. I have a vivid mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence.

The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working class, especially the urban trade union members. In the long run – it is important to remember that it is only in the long run – the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the working class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.

To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and their comrades abroad, linked to them in theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be, seemed less interesting and less important than yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreoever they can be bribed – for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war – and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings – there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.

The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been partly influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out in 1939 was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.

The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a clairvoyant to foresee that war between Britain and Germany was coming; one could even foretell within a year or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were, and yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to stand up to Germany. It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question. As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they, as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to prevent a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any rate, the Spanish Civil War demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to their Spanish Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having ‘gained what no republic missed’.

Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. I myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on the grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged, weaponless armies of the Republic held out for two and a half years, which was undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But whether that dislocated the Fascist timetable, or whether, on the other hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the Nazis extra time to get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.

I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my mind. One is of the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing some song with a refrain that ended:

‘Una resolucion, Luchar hast’ al fin!’

Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of the war the Republican armies must have been fighting almost without cigarettes, and with precious little food. Even when I left Spain in the middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce, tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost unobtainable.

The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the Spanish war, and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I remember – oh, how vividly! – his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man’s probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the G.P.U. But that does not affect the long-term issues. This man’s face, which I saw only for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Pétain , Montagu Norman , Pavelitch , William Randolph Hearst , Streicher , Buchman , Ezra Pound , Juan March , Cocteau , Thyssen , Father Coughlin , the Mufti of Jerusalem , Arnold Lunn , Antonescu , Spengler , Beverley Nichols , Lady Houston , and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the ‘changes of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. Pétain attributes the fall of France to the common people’s ‘love of pleasure’. One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant’s or working-man’s life would contain compared with Pétain’s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what not who lecture the working-class Socialist for his ‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life livable without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we are now fighting. I don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that wouldn’t solve anything in itself. It is merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible. All the considerations that are likely to make one falter – the siren voices of a Pétain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain, with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing politics – all this fades away and one sees only the struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later – some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the present war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.

I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these verses in his memory:

The Italian soldier shook my hand Beside the guard-room table; The strong hand and the subtle hand Whose palms are only able

To meet within the sound of guns, But oh! what peace I knew then In gazing on his battered face Purer than any woman’s!

For the flyblown words that make me spew Still in his ears were holy, And he was born knowing what I had learned Out of books and slowly.

The treacherous guns had told their tale And we both had bought it, But my gold brick was made of gold – Oh! who ever would have thought it?

Good luck go with you, Italian soldier! But luck is not for the brave; What would the world give back to you? Always less than you gave.

Between the shadow and the ghost, Between the white and the red, Between the bullet and the lie, Where would you hide your head?

For where is Manuel Gonzalez, And where is Pedro Aguilar, And where is Ramon Fenellosa? The earthworms know where they are.

Your name and your deeds were forgotten Before your bones were dry, And the lie that slew you is buried Under a deeper lie;

But the thing that I saw in your face No power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst Shatters the crystal spirit.

Written August 1942, Sections I, II, III, and VII printed in New Road , June 1943

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Fisted by Foucault

The Spanish Civil War in Retrospect: Why Did Spaniards Rebel Against Their Government?

It is impossible to understand the 20th century without understanding this conflict, one that continues to resonate to this day.

Author’s Note:

I was recently asked to write about the Spanish Civil War and why people turned against the Republican regime and sided with Francisco Franco and other military figures who attempted to launch a coup d'état to overthrow the government in July of 1936. This essay will attempt to answer this question by painting a broad portrait of the events that lead up to that bloody conflict. This will not be a comprehensive treatment of the subject of what led Spain to fall apart that summer, as it will mainly focus on the interests, concerns, and arguments of one side (which contained many different factions, often at odds with one another). Therefore, it will not be an objective look, and will instead be very partial to one side in order to answer the question that was posed to me. A lot of obvious (and less well-known) facts will be missing from this piece due to the constraints put on it by the question I intend to answer, and for the sake of brevity.

If this essay generates enough interest, I will happily continue the story, beginning with the conservatives forming a government led by Gil Robles and CEDA…but this is entirely up to you.

“Don Ricardo was a short man with gray hair and a thick neck and he had a shirt on with no collar. He was bow-​legged from much horseback riding. ‘Good-​by,’ he said to all those who were kneeling. ‘Don’t be sad. To die is nothing. The only bad thing is to die at the hands of this canalla. Don’t touch me,’ he said to Pablo. ‘Don’t touch me with your shotgun.’

“He walked out of the front of the Ayuntamiento with his gray hair and his small gray eyes and his thick neck looking very short and angry. He looked at the double line of peasants and he spat on the ground. He could spit actual saliva which, in such a circumstance, as you should know, Inglés, is very rare and he said, ‘Arriba Espana! Down with the miscalled Republic and I obscenity in the milk of your fathers.’

“So they clubbed him to death very quickly because of the insult, beating him as soon as he reached the first of the men, beating him as he tried to walk with his head up, beating him until he fell and chopping at him with reaping hooks and the sickles, and many men bore him to the edge of the cliff to throw him over and there was blood now on their hands and on their clothing, and now began to be the feeling that these who came out were truly enemies and should be killed.

From Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”

The above excerpt is a piece of historical fiction courtesy of American author and legend, Ernest Hemingway. At a crossroads in his life, he decided to go to Spain to cover the conflict for a newspaper chain. Out of his experiences in that war came “ For Whom the Bell Tolls ” (1940), one of his most celebrated novels. In this excerpt, he uses the female character ‘Pilar’ to relate the story of how Republican forces massacred a group of people in a small town who were opposed to the government and supported the Spanish Generals seeking to overthrow it. Derided as “fascists”, each of the men were forced to pass a line of pro-government peasants who would beat them with flails before throwing them off of a cliff. Civil wars are indeed the most vicious, even in fictional depictions like this one.

The Spanish Civil War is odd for two reasons, the first one being that more than any other war that I can think of, historians have placed a much stronger focus on the politics of the conflict to the detriment of its military aspects. The second reason is much more important overall, and particularly germane to the subject of this essay: it is the only war that I can think of where the histories have been overwhelmingly written by the losers. 1

If you ask a random, somewhat educated person in the West about the Spanish Civil War, they will generally say that “Franco was a fascist who allied himself to Hitler and Mussolini and won the civil war in the most brutal fashion possible. He was a dictator who hated democracy and killed thousands upon thousands of innocent people.” Beyond that, they might make mention of Hemingway and his novel, or even Pablo Picasso’s painting entitled “Guernica” 2 , that depicts the victims of the German Luftwaffe bombardment of that small Basque town in the north of Spain. Others still will relay the fact that the term “Fifth Column” came out of the Spanish Civil War. 3 Added up all together, the most simplified take becomes “Franco bad, Republicans good”.

Of course this take is wrong, as this conflict was too complex to arrive at such a ridiculous reductionist conclusion no matter which side you sympathize(d) with. To give you a quick illustration of just how complex this conflict was, here is a list of the major domestic factions that took part in it:

Spanish Republican Side:

People’s Army (the armed forces of the Spanish Republic)

Popular Front (left-wing electoral alliance of communists, socialists, liberals, anarchists)

UGT (very large trade union affiliated with the Spanish Socialists)

CNT-FAI (massive trade union of anarchist militants)

POUM (anti-Stalinist communists, including some Trotskyites) 4

Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonian Autonomists)

Euzko Gudarostea (Army of the Basque Nationalists)

Spanish Nationalist Side:

Spanish Renovation (monarchists supporting the Bourbon claimant to the throne, Alfonso XIII , who abdicated in 1931)

CEDA (the main conservative party, Catholic conservatives)

Requetés (traditionalist Catholic monarchist militants who supported the Carlist Dynasty, mainly from the region of Navarre )

Falange Española de las JONS (Spanish Fascists)

The Army of Africa, including the Spanish Legion (Spanish Army in Spain’s then-colony of Morocco, with many Moroccans serving in it)

Add to this mix the International Brigades 5 that fought on the side of the government, and the German and Italian forces who backed the rebels. To list off all the political groupings that participated in the war is a mouthful, but necessary to hammer home the point of the complexity of this conflict. So here goes: nationalists, monarchists (from two competing royal houses), fascists, conservatives, liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists (from two competing camps), anarchists, and regional autonomists. In short, this war had something for everyone, which is why it caught the attention of so many foreigners (especially famous ones) at the time. But before we dive into the run up to the civil war, we need to understand some of the history of Spain that lead up to this “world war in miniature”.

A Very, Very Brief History of Modern Spain Up Until the Establishment of the Second Spanish Republic

Together with Portugal, the Spanish Empire led the world in the exploration of the globe and its colonization, opening up trade routes across oceans to exploit the natural wealth that they found in these new lands. Silver came first, and then gold. This propelled Spain to be the world’s foremost power in the 16th century, ruling the waves until its Armada was defeated by the English in 1588. Despite expanding in the 18th century, the Spanish Empire was already in decline by the mid 17th century, as the French, English/British, and Dutch overtook them diplomatically, militarily and technologically.

The 17th century was marked by economic stagnation and decline, as inflation, heavy taxation and mismanagement of the economy (including repeated plundering of the royal treasury by the nobility) were rampant, leading many Spaniards to emigrate to the colonies in the New World. Some parts of Spain even began to deindustrialize during this era, compounding its woes.

By the early 18th century, a Spanish nation-state began to emerge as Castile began to exert its dominance over the Iberian Peninsula, and the various non-Castilian peoples on it like the Aragonese, Galicians, Basques, and Catalonians. Castile would form the core of Modern Spain, a condition that prevails to this day. 6

In 1715, the Wars of the Spanish Succession ended with a Bourbon victory over the Habsburgs, transferring control of Spain and its empire to the victors. Despite some reforms that improved the economy, empire, aristocracy, and the Church were still its main concerns, with The Enlightenment (that was spreading across much of Europe at that time) almost completely passing it by. Spain became involved in the tug-of-war between Britain and France over the next century, ending in disaster during the Peninsular War when erstwhile ally Napoleon occupied Spain, leading to a bloody rebellion that economically devastated it. It also sparked a series of rebellions in its colonies in North and South America, resulting in the loss of possession of all of them (except Cuba and Puerto Rico) by 1826. With the loss of those colonies, Spain’s international presence, importance, and prestige were significantly eroded.

A much reduced Spain was firmly in the hands of the nobles and the Church, with a large landowning aristocracy, and a very large peasant class that either owned tiny plots of land to cultivate, or no land whatsoever. A middle class did began to grow in size in urban settings, providing a new addition to the social dynamic during that period. But the devastation wrought by the French occupation (and the rebellion against it) combined with the loss of its colonies impoverished the Spanish Kingdom. Outside of Catalonia, industrialization was absent. The exploitation of natural resources like coal were hampered by a primitive transportation system. Demographic decline set in with massive emigration to former colonies in the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1812, a very liberal constitution (the Constitution of Cadiz ) was adopted by the Spanish royals. Despite its formal adoption, significant resistance to it from Ferdinand VII and his conservative allies made it little more than a piece of toilet paper, at least to them. It was this fight between liberals and absolutists that would colour the rest of 19th century Spain, one dominated by conspiracies, palace intrigues, coups, and military interventions. So riven was Spain by factionalism between parties and within parties that Amadeus of Savoy , elected to be its King Amadeo I, famously concluded that the Spanish people were ungovernable. He immediately abdicated the throne and left the country for good.

Amadeus’ flight into exile created a political vacuum, one that was quickly filled by radicals and Republicans who declared the First Spanish Republic . This initial foray into republicanism ended in a little over a year due to the immense opposition it encountered from monarchists, the Catholic Church, and military figures who launched a successful coup that restored the Bourbons to the throne. This republic also saw regional unrest and rebellions in Catalonia and Navarre, and just as significantly, it also was witness to pro-republican socialists demanding revolution i.e. redistribution of land.

In 1898, Spain experienced a “disaster”; the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and The Philippines to the USA in the Spanish-American War. The so-called Spanish Empire was reduced to colonial holdings in Morocco, the Sahara, and Guinea. It had finally been evicted from the Americas and the Pacific as well. This resulted in a turn towards liberalism from intellectuals and politicians who felt that Spain’s anachronistic system was hopelessly uncompetitive against its modernizing rivals. On the other hand, Geoffrey Jensen argues that it was this catastrophic defeat that led the once relatively liberal military officer class to turn to the right. 7

Even though Spain avoided the First World War and actually economically profited from it, the regime was still very unstable due to regional nationalism, widespread poverty, and severe political factionalism that paralyzed the state. The coup de grace was delivered by another military disaster: a serious defeat of the Spanish Army in Northern Africa at the hands of Berber tribesmen in 1921 at the beginning of the Rif War . 9,000 Spanish soldiers were killed or executed in this catastrophe in a matter of days, shaking Spain to its core.

King Alfonso XIII gave his secret backing to yet another military coup that resulted in a dictatorship under Miguel Primo de Rivera , lasting from 1923 until 1930. During this period, Spain ended the rebellion in the Rif thanks to aid from France. Economic conditions improved over the course of the decade, but the arrival of the Great Depression quickly erased all those gains, leading to a collapse in support for both Primo de Rivera and Alfonso XIII. The king removed the dictator from power, but this action only bought him a short window of time, as he had already lost the support of the urban masses of the lower and middle classes. In April of 1931, local elections proved to be a plebiscite on the Spanish Monarchy, with republican parties overwhelmingly winning the vote. Alfonso XIII read the writing on the wall, abdicated his throne, and headed into exile.

The Second Spanish Republic

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

-William Butler Yeats “ The Second Coming ” (1919)

This was finally it! The moment that millions of Spaniards had been waiting for had finally arrived! Shorn of its ‘regressive’ Monarchy, Spain and its citizens could finally enter modernity with pride and say goodbye to its backward past once and for all. Liberalism had finally won and Spain could now look to the future with an optimism so sunny that even an Andalusian summer would envy. Poverty and illiteracy would be eliminated, reason would replace superstition, and land would be redistributed to the poor.

Most of you reading this essay are American, and many of you are not familiar with this slice of history. When you see, read, or hear the word “republicanism”, you will naturally mentally associate it with your country’s version of it. Us non-Americans are very used to Americans informing us that the USA “is not a democracy, but is instead a constitutional republic”. I do like to mention from time to time that I have always admired how civics lessons were drilled into the heads of American students from a very young age. In your minds, republicanism is not a negative concept, and you would be right to view it that way considering just how stable and successful your country has been serviced by this system of governance.

Not all republics are created equal, nor do they all perform at an equal level. The First Spanish Republic ended in less than two years thanks to enormous resistance and a military coup that overthrew it. The Second Spanish Republic lasted eight years, with a military coup that attempted to overthrow it five years into its existence, failing to do so, resulting in a horrible, tragic, and bloody civil war. The story of the Second Spanish Republic is the story of a centre that could not hold, with powerful and passionate forces far from its centre pulling in totally opposite directions, tearing the country into two pieces.

“A republic, if you can keep it”

In the first election for the Spanish Cortes (parliament) since the proclamation of the Second Republic, the Spanish right was in disarray and wholly unorganized due to the shock of Alfonso XIII’s abdication. With little options for an alternative to the new state of affairs, conservatives and right wingers largely threw their lots in with the Radical Republican Party , as its platform was viewed to be the least damaging to their interests. Others backed the Liberal Republican Right (DLR) as it openly defined itself as Catholic, the only major party to do so in this campaign.

The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) fared the best overall, urging a “legal revolution” to resolve Spain’s economic and social ills. Despite this pledge to uphold legality, the party contained many extremist factions who sought to either use incrementalism to usher in a socialist state, or radicalism to do it quickly. These radicals were almost a carbon copy of the Radical Socialist Party (PRRS), a grouping who sought immediate socialist revolution for Spain, as “there is nothing to be conserved”. 8

These Republicans and Socialists were in an electoral coalition, allowing them to win the elections handily. Now it was time for them to govern.

Covering the centre-right, bourgeois left, and socialists, Spain’s first republican government found itself to be swimming against the anti-democratic tide sweeping Europe. Democracy was seen as not capable to solve the many, many debilitating issues caused by the Great Depression, with authoritarianism of the left or right viewed as better suited to tackle them. The fact of the matter is that this democratic system did work to impede many of the reforms sought by the coalition government, and by millions of Spaniards as well. Paralysis in government, caused at first by unwieldly governing coalitions, and then by unrest, strikes, and violent rebellions, led many who were initially enthusiastic about the democratic aspects of republicanism to quickly conclude that the democracy part should be done away with.

Stanley Payne describes for us the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), the party that captured the most votes:

The Republican left formed only the left-center of the new governing alliance, whose left wing was the Socialist Party. Founded in 1879, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) was a classic movement of the Second International that for decades had been one of the weakest Socialist parties in Europe. …….. Always treated leniently by the Spanish government, the Socialists had on most occasions followed more moderate policies, participating in elections and slowly building a trade union base. The profound structural changes of the 1920s and the coming of democracy enabled the Socialist trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers; UGT ), to expand into a mass movement, reaching more than a million members by 1932. The Second Republic offered the Socialists their first opportunity to participate in a government — something that the French Socialists had not yet done — an opportunity that they accepted without having fully resolved the issues of reformism versus revolutionism in their doctrine. The dominant tendency was to take the position that the Republic would produce decisive changes, opening the way peacefully for a Socialist system to be achieved without revolutionary violence . The UGT leader Francisco Largo Caballero declared at the outset of the new regime that as a result violent revolution “would never put down roots in Spain.” The Socialists also viewed the Spanish changes within a larger context as a new tide of democracy and progressivism that would roll back the trend toward fascism initiated by Mussolini a decade earlier. 9

At first they were dedicated to constitutional legalism, but much of the party began to radicalize very quickly, especially Largo Caballero . Almost immediately, the Socialists clashed with the Radical Republicans over the question of private property, with the Socialists seeking to expropriate land from wealthy landowners to redistribute to campesinos . This led to the departure of the Radical Republicans from government with its remaining coalition partners.

The Agrarian Question

The “Agrarian Question” was one of the key issues that Spain faced for some time. In 1931, some two million Spaniards were landless peasants, forced to work on the big latifundia estates owned by incredibly rich landlords who paid them a pittance to farm their holdings. This issue was highly divisive, as it pitted the wealthy landowning aristocracy and its allies in the Catholic Church against a very large and dirt poor mass that was already politically radicalized, with most supporting anarchism as the best political option to pursue their interests. These anarchists, mainly found in Catalonia, Aragon, and Andalusia, were radicalizing even further, as physical violence was seen as an acceptable tool to seize land from these rich landowners. The campesinos were impatient and demanded land redistribution immediately, “or else”. Furthermore, the various parties supporting republicanism made land redistribution a core issue of their platform. They had to deliver on their promises.

Land redistribution implies forceful seizure of property by government, a very radical act. The emphasis on this issue put the fear of God into many landowners, and into other holders of private property (especially industrialists) as they feared that they would be the next target.

Anti-Clericalism and Anti-Catholicism

“In Spain, Priests are followed by a person holding a candle….or a knife”

More than any state repression, more than any economic exploitation, the republican government viewed the Catholic Church as its primary enemy. The Church was a roadblock in the drive to modernize Spain, and its complete removal from the public square and the destruction of its influence on Spanish society were viewed as the most necessary tasks at hand by the new government. In fact, this all served as the lowest common denominator for the ruling parties. It was where there was the most overlap, the lowest-hanging fruit for agreement.

Radical secularism was the path forward, and, as Payne notes, it began to eerily mirror all the criticism it levelled against the Church and its Priesthood. It took on a fanatical tenor, to the point of resembling medieval religious fervour. Everything wrong with Spain was to be blamed on the Church.

As Payne writes:

The more radical secular ideologies themselves functioned, if not as “political religions,” at least in many cases as politico-ideological substitutes for religion. Only as a kind of religious warfare can the intensity of the clerical-anticlerical conflict in Spain be understood . Much of anticlerical doctrine came from France, and condemned Catholicism for every manner of ills: excessive possession of wealth of various kinds, oppression of the poor, maintaining an authoritarian internal structure, a supposedly overweening political influence, preaching political doctrines in church, sexual abuse and perversion, chaining the common people to ignorance and poverty. The Church was also blamed for historical abuses and the failures of Spain and of its empire . The anticlericals seemed to present a mirror image of what they denounced, exhibiting extreme intolerance and desire for domination , which might be expected to stimulate an equivalent response in Catholics. Anticlericalism also showed a pronounced tendency to replace the sacrificial and liturgical role of the Church, inverting the Passion of Christ in anticlerical rituals, while the worker left advanced its own concepts of the sacrificial, redemptive role of the common people . 10

Laws were passed to deny clergy the right to teach children in the name of ‘public health’.

And then came the violence, years before the actual civil war:

Certain other restrictions were placed on Church economic activity, and public demonstrations of religion were also banned. The Society of Jesus was dissolved, priests were occasionally fined for delivering “political sermons,” and some of the more zealous city councils even fined Catholic women for wearing crosses around their necks . Very early in the life of the new government, Catholic churches and buildings became targets of arson and mob destruction in the famous quema de conventos of 11 – 12 May 1931, in which more than 100 buildings were torched and sacked in Madrid and several cities of the south and east, destroying also priceless libraries and art . The authorities then gave the first example of the left Republican habit of “blaming the victim” by acting to arrest monarchists and conservatives rather than the authors of the destruction . Later, during the spring of 1936, illegal seizures of Church buildings and properties would often simply be winked at by the Azaña – Casares Quiroga governments then in power. At no time did any of the leftist parties take the position that Church interests and properties merited the full protection of a state of law. 11

The government did nothing to stop the evictions of Priests and Nuns from their churches and convents, nor did they try to stop the looting and torching of these same buildings. They were given carte blanche by ruling authorities to forcibly secularize Spain via these acts of violence. Manuel Azaña , then Minister of War in the cabinet (he would go on to become Prime Minister of Spain later that year, and then President of the Republic from 1936-1939), famously proclaimed “ All the convents in Spain are not worth a single Republican life ”. 12 He led the left-liberal republican party Republican Action (AR). To him, it was critical that the Catholic Church be denied any role in education in Spain. Furthermore, civil marriage was to be instituted in place of the Catholic Sacrament, all church property was to be seized, and lastly the Jesuit Order was to be expelled from the country altogether. In Republican Spain, he was slightly to the left of centre.

The first government managed to pass a law on land expropriation, but very little was taken out of the hands of landowners, and none of them were the largest ones. The only ones who experienced land seizures were smaller and medium-sized landowners. The only real successes that they scored were in some labour reforms like the introduction of collective bargaining rights 13 and the extension of the vote to all adult women. Besides barring Catholic Orders from education, divorce was legalized, nobles were stripped of their titles, and the new Constitution enshrined the right of local autonomy for Spain’s regions.

Early Challengers to the Government and the Republican System

Counterintuitively, the first challengers to the new regime appear not from the recently-defeated right, but rather from the left…the hard left.

Spain was unique in that it had a strong anarchist, specifically anarcho-syndicalist, tradition, unlike elsewhere in Europe where the far left was dominated by Bolsheviks, and later, Stalinists. This was due to certain idiosyncrasies belonging to Spain, such a traditionally weak central state combined with localism, and the lack of the development of a large industrial proletariat (which didn’t arrive until much, much later).

The anarchists were fanatically anti-Catholic, much more radical than even the communists, and were the main source of political violence in the first 1/3rd of 20th century Spain. They were THE dangerous extremists.

Their labour union, CNT , boasted up to two million members, and FAI served as their political vanguard. Together they launched three violent insurrections against the republican regime, with all three failing and the result being increased repression of the CNT. The Anarchists were a mass movement with widespread support, strongest both in rural Andalusia and industrial Barcelona.

OTOH, the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) was rather lacking. Entirely directed from Moscow, their party base was miniscule up until 1936. Only then would they begin to take a prominent role in Spanish politics… a very, very prominent one !

The overt Anti-Catholic laws and the violence directed against Catholics and their churches naturally caused the rise of Catholic reaction. Carlists began to train paramilitary forces in the province of Navarre. Other monarchists began to openly call for the return of the monarchy under a centralist and authoritarian regime of their own.

The only insurrection from the right came courtesy of a weak and failed pronunciamento courtesy of General Sanjurjo , and a select cadre of officers in Madrid and Seville.

Only in Seville did the revolt succeed for a few hours, the retired General José Sanjurjo briefly seizing control of the garrison and city before he was forced to flee. This revolt was even weaker than any of the anarchist insurrections and was easily suppressed. Ten people were killed. Sanjurjo was quickly arrested, tried, and sentenced to a long prison term. 14

The republican regime responded to these challenges by repression. The press was clamped down so hard that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini congratulated Azaña for his ‘decisive action’. The government passed the ‘Law of the Defense of the Republic’ which led to the creation of the Assault Guards , a police force that acted quickly and brutally to any perceived threats to the constitutional regime.

Mindful of complaints that the special national constabulary, the Civil Guard, was armed only with Mauser rifles and not trained for modern crowd control, the Republican authorities set about organizing a new urban constabulary armed with clubs and pistols, theoretically prepared for more humane crowd control. Its very name, Guardias de Asalto , indicated the vigorous policy espoused by the Republican regime. Incidents proliferated as strikes, demonstrations, and insurrections produced considerable violence, which in turn prompted harsh repression from the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard. After two and a half years, there had been nearly 500 fatalities in such confrontations, the majority of the victims being anarchosyndicalists, and suspension of civil guarantees had become more frequent than under the constitutional monarchy before 1923 . 15

This government radicalism also threw up the most important challenger, CEDA, a mass political movement of the Catholic right. Even though it had a stated policy of legality and parliamentarianism, it sought to capture the republic in order to create its own non-liberal society, much like how the PSOE sought to use legalism to create a socialist Spain. Its rapid rise was both a reaction to the state’s overt anti-Catholicism and anti-traditionalism, and a result of the right beginning to organize after two years in the political wilderness.

The Casas Viejas Incident

The historical consensus is that the Second Spanish Republic began to break down in 1934 courtesy of that year’s insurrection (which we will deal with next week), but Payne insists that instead the process began with the Casas Viejas Incident (January, 1933).

In the classic Thames Television documentary series “The World at War” (UK, 1970s), a German Social-Democrat who sat in the Reichstag in the Weimar Era explains how The Night of the Long Knives ended any ambiguity about the Nazis as they went from having a chance in governance to being outright murderers. This view stuck with me over the years and I was reminded of it when first learning about the Casas Viejas Incident years ago.

Staying true to form, the anarchists were restless and, as is their nature, opposed the present government in Spain as they opposed all governments, viewing them as inherently oppressive. Their massive labour union, CNT, led by the vanguard of FAI, began demonstrations in various locations across the country, with the greatest actions taking place in Andalusia. Political violence ensued, with two Civil Guards wounded. The Assault Guards, set up by the new Constitutional authorities in the Republic to provide a new force to purportedly protect those who lacked protection under the Monarchy, raided the village of Casas Viejas near Cadiz. They encountered a group of anarchists locked in a house and set fire to it (while disarming others in the village who were armed), and then executed them.

At this point the Second Spanish Republic was already a ‘murderer’.

A Teetering Government

By this point, the central conflict was between the competing visions of the republican parties (albeit divided among themselves) and the Socialists who paid lip service to republicanism, merely seeking to use it to create a socialist state. The Youth wing of the PSOE was even more radical than the main party as it sought to completely move away from parliamentary democracy towards the immediate creation of the a socialist state.

Even though the Socialists sought radical change, they were outflanked by the much more radical anarchists organized around their labour union, CNT. They managed to wrest even greater labour concessions out of the government via demonstrations, strikes, and violent acts than the Socialists did by way of legislation. Socialist collaboration in reform legislation only led to greater labour unrest as the CNT outflanked the UGT (Socialist trade union organization) by direct action. Extra-legislative actions gained more for certain groups than did the legislative process. This lesson was taken to heart by the anarchists who viewed it as a win for their political philosophy, and served as a loss for the constitutional order.

Warning Against Radicalization

Much as there are many people sounding the alarm about the increasing political polarization in the USA, 1930s Spain had its own faces that did the exact same thing. Spanish Socialist Julián Besteiro was one of those faces, and he took the opportunity of speaking before a gathering of Socialist Youth to warn them about the dangers of opening Pandora’s Box:

In July he had blamed Italian and German Socialists for provoking the bourgeoisie of their countries into fascism through the premature use of Socialist power, even though in Germany this had taken the form of parliamentary government participation. Worse yet, the introduction of a Socialist regime in Spain through Bolshevik-style violence and dictatorship would simply inaugurate a bloodbath, “the most sanguinary Republic known to contemporary history.” Besteiro’s Cassandra-like predictions were uncannily accurate, and this was no exception: in the Republican Zone during the first six months of the Civil War in 1936, the rate of political executions would considerably exceed that of the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war . At Torrelodones he once more warned of the folly of extremism, the results of which would be quite di¤erent from what its advocates imagined: “If a general staff dispatches its army to fight in unfavorable conditions, it becomes totally responsible for the subsequent defeat and demoralization,” adding that “often it is more revolutionary to resist collective madness than to be carried away by it.” 16

Powerful Spanish Socialist Indalecio Prieto warned his more extreme youthful comrades not to engage in the same methodology:

Prieto was less challenging but also warned that there were definite limits to what Spanish Socialism could achieve at the present level of development and given the changing relations of political forces both in Europe and in Spain. He too stressed the fallacy of the facile comparisons being made by the left wing of the movement between Russia in 1917 and Spain in 1933. In Russia key institutions had already collapsed before the Communist takeover; in Spain the government, Church, and armed forces were intact, while the bourgeoisie was stronger than in Russia . 17

The Socialists continued to radicalize, despite these warnings, leading to the various republican parties in the governing coalition finally breaking with them, and calling for a new election.

The End of the Coalition Government

When one skims through history, our western liberal bias leads our brains to automatically assume that a democracy would somehow be more inherently moderate than a dictatorship, whether military or monarchical, or whatever. The Second Spanish Republic quickly disabuses us of this notion:

As Ángel Alcalá Galve observes, one of the striking features of the new regime was the manner in which it quickly reproduced key weaknesses of the old monarchist system, demonstrating that the problem was not really one of monarchy versus Republic but of the Spanish political culture of the early twentieth century, which was proving intractable . 18

What this means is that regardless of the form of governance that is adopted, deeper conflicts are at play and it is not the system that is responsible for it. There is a fatalism in this in that some conflicts do have to play themselves out until one side wins and the other loses, or both sides exhaust themselves and arrange a consensus, or a third power removes the first two.

History repeating itself:

Whereas the old system had been threatened by an extreme left, the new system was threatened with subversion and violence by both an extreme right and an extreme left . Just as the monarchist parties had become too internally divided to govern, this internal division now threatened the Republican parties. The Socialists had attempted a revolutionary general strike against the monarchy in 1917; in 1934 they would attempt one against the Republic . 19

A new system can allow for new representations and can create new forms of governance, but it is not necessarily a silver bullet for deeper-seated problems.

Now watch this part and think of the current struggles between liberals and those exact liberals disenchanted with what we call “The Woke” today:

The middle classes were fragmenting into a Catholic right, a liberal center, and a Republican left…… Eventually the gulf between liberal and left Republicans would become unbridgeable. The increasing split in the Republican parties, with only the liberals willing to accept the logic and rules of a liberal democratic system, placed the future of the new regime in doubt. If all the Republican parties did not accept their own system, there was even less to expect from the non-Republican parties . 20

Many liberals, of which I include today’s American conservatives and Classic Liberals, insist on appealing to reason and principle, while the hard left runs them over with the application of sheer power. Here is Popper’s “ Paradox of Tolerance ” but repositioned: should liberals tolerate those from the left that do not tolerate liberalism?

The Elections of November 1933

1931-33 served as little more than a leftist convention in government; conservatives and the right did not put up a fight against republicanism as they sat on the sidelines while the left rammed through a series of reforms that alienated the former. Yet the internal disputes between the various republican parties and the PSOE led to the collapse of the government and the need to call new elections.

The left sought to sandbag their first electoral win by changing the rules so as to allow them to capture more seats in a mixed first-past-the-post and proportional system that favoured large parties to the detriment of smaller ones. What they didn’t bank on was opposition to their rule manifesting itself in an electoral loss.

A violent campaign (this time with the Socialists playing a leading role, and with church burnings making a comeback) saw two ceditas (from the CEDA party) murdered, courtesy of a small republican party out of Valencia. The temperature was high and rising.

Nevertheless, CEDA managed to score 115 seats, with the Radical Republicans 104, and the PSOE only 60, in a system that was supposed to be tilted to the left. They had shot themselves in the foot and immediately cried foul. The granting of the franchise to women served to help CEDA, and Spain’s democratic centre was now strengthened. The left immediately sought to overturn the results of this vote, with various bizarre schemes that all fizzled out. They openly used the arguments that were made against their electoral reforms by the opposition to argue in favour of overturning their loss!

BTW, does this sound familiar?

This whole dismal maneuver revealed what had become the permanent position of the left under the Republic: they would accept only the permanent government of the left. Any election or government not dominated by the left was neither “Republican” nor “democratic,” a position that might well have the effect of making a democratic Republic impossible. ………. When even its own tendentious and unfair regulations were inadequate to give it electoral victory in 1933, the left chose to ignore the very constitution it had been instrumental in writing. From this time forward, the left would flout legality ever more systematically, eventually reducing the legal order to shambles and setting the stage for civil war . 21

A conservative reaction to the first two years of rule by republicans and socialists resulted in an electoral victory. What would they choose to do while in power? In the meantime, the anarchists were up to their old tricks again.

Anarcho-Syndicalist Insurrection of December 1933

Once again, the Anarchists were back at it and this time they had much more success than at the beginning of the same year.

Bombs went off in Barcelona, trains were derailed elsewhere, an armed revolt took place in Badajoz in the southeast of the country. Barcelona and Zaragoza saw the brunt of the action, and FAI-CNT took over towns in Huesca, Alava, and Logroñ, declaring ‘libertarian communism’, torching money and records during their short-lived rule. The Civil Guards once again quickly put down the revolt.

This was the sixth(!) violent insurrection in 3 years. The net effect was the continuing suspension of civil rights and the destruction of faith in the new constitutional order.

Concluding Remarks

This is the perfect time in this story to stop for now. The conservatives are about to form a government for the first time in the Spanish Republic, and will face immense opposition, both legal and extralegal.

The pace of the division and collapse of Spain begins to really pick up from this point onwards, as leftist factions simply refuse to not tolerate being in control of the country. Violence begins to soar as faith in the governing system and its institutions erodes rapidly. Extreme political, social, and cultural polarization sets in as the centre significantly shrinks, with compromise between parties all but impossible. Meanwhile, the officer class watches events unfold closely, and with serious concern as to how they are developing.

If you enjoyed this introduction to this subject and want me to continue, I ask you kindly to click this button below to support my writing. A lot of work goes into these essays, and a lot of time is spent researching and writing as well. The Spanish Civil War is one of my favourite historical subjects due to its significance and also because of how it resonates to this day. Hit the button below and support my work:

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Check This Out!

Jack Posobiec and Blake Neff recently released a podcast special on this exact same topic.

Click this link to give it a listen

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it" - falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, but it makes for a good quote to illustrate the point. From the International Churchill Society: “‘Alas poor Baldwin. History will be unkind to him. For I will write that history.’ And another version often repeated is ‘History will be kind to me. For I intend to write it.’

What Churchill actually said, in the House of Commons in January 1948, was in response to a speech by Herbert Morrison, the Labour Lord Privy Seal, which attacked the Conservatives’ foreign policy before the war:

“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”

In January of 1937, Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create a work of art to display at the upcoming World’s Fair in Paris in order to draw international attention to their cause. At the time, Picasso was living in the French capital. It wasn’t until he read reports of the bombing of Guernica on April 26 of that same year that he felt inspired enough to create something that he felt was worthwhile for audiences to see.

In September 1936, General Francisco Franco supposedly claimed that there were “four nationalist columns approaching Madrid, and a fifth column inside of it ready to attack”.

Leon Trotsky did not support POUM and went on to disassociate himself from them and their actions. George Orwell joined POUM when he went to Spain to volunteer to fight against the Spanish nationalists

Formed by volunteers from outside of Spain and almost entirely Stalinist in leadership and political orientation

For example, the Castilian dialect serves as the basis of the modern Spanish language

“ Moral Strength Through Material Defeat? The Consequences of 1898 for Spanish Military Culture ”, Geoffrey Jensen, War and Society vol. 17, pp. 25-39 (October 1999)

" Spain’s First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931-1936 ”, Stanley Payne (1993)

“ The Collapse of the Spanish Republic: 1933-1936 ”, Stanley Payne (2006)

“ The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s ”, Piers Brendon (2002)

Average wages increased by 10% for workers between 1931 and 1933

ibid., Payne (2006)

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Why the Spanish Civil War Mattered to Writers on Distant Shores

Sarah watling looks at the role literature played in the fight against fascism.

The Spanish war began in July 1936 when a group of disaffected generals—including Francisco Franco, who would emerge as their leader— attempted to launch a coup against their country’s elected government. The reaction of foreign powers was significant from the start.

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany offered decisive material support to Franco’s side (the nationalists) while the Republican government received from its fellow democracies in France, the United States and Great Britain only a queasy refusal to intervene.

As the Republic battled to survive this well-resourced attack, relying on a tenacious popular resistance to the military takeover and on arms from Soviet Russia and Mexico, many observers understood the war as an opportunity to halt the global advance of fascism: one that their own governments seemed loath to take up.

Some months in, Nancy Cunard challenged her fellow writers to make public statements on the war in an urgent call that framed things like this:

It is clear to many of us throughout the whole world that now, as certainly never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do.

This was where the Spanish Civil War began to matter to me. It happened that, when I first found this eye-catching statement, I was living through an era of national and international upheaval that made Nancy’s 80-year-old challenge snatch up my attention.

It was possible, in her day, to see democracy as a teetering edifice, a system that had outlived, even failed, its potential. Alternatives vied for dominance. The Great Depression in America, that “citadel of capitalism,” had not only destabilized economies around the world but shaken faith in the capitalist system itself—proving, to some minds, the validity of the Marxist theory that had predicted its collapse.

The twenties and early thirties had seen military dictators or  non-democratic forms of government gain the upper hand in a raft of countries: Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Japan, Portugal, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece and, of course, even earlier, Russia. By 1936, Germany and Italy had been governed by fascists for years. Their regimes found plenty of sympathizers in countries shaken by the First World War and ensuing Depression.

The British Union of Fascists, for instance, was already almost four years old. Nor was fascist aggression on the international stage something new. Italy had invaded Ethiopia in 1935; Germany was openly remilitarizing—something forbidden by the terms of the peace imposed at the end of the First World War. For some, the great dichotomy of the 1930s was provided by fascism and communism. For many others (including those who weren’t convinced of a meaningful difference between the two), Spain was perhaps simpler still: fascism or opposition to fascism.

By my day it had become fairly common to hear people drawing dark parallels with the 1930s: that decade in which Mussolini and Hitler crushed opposition and raised their armies, and Franco took over Spain, and “Blackshirts” marched in the streets of London. We thought we knew these facts, but it seemed they were losing their power to terrify or forewarn; that acknowledging them belonged to an old tyranny of decency and truth that others were ready to throw off.

It’s an absurd kind of grandiosity, in a way, to relate the darkest past to your own moment and its preoccupations. Yet I felt many of the things I had taken for granted dropping away around the time I first started reading about Nancy Cunard. Democratic processes, mechanisms of justice, truth itself: all were under renewed threat.

My country seemed a less moderate, less peaceful place than I was used to, and newly emboldened extremists were taking eagerly to the public stage. Inequalities of wealth and opportunity were widening. The urgency of the climate crisis felt increasingly clamorous. It was difficult not to simply feel hopeless; pinioned into a narrow space of outraged despair.

And yet, it was quite convenient to have so much out in the open. It was something to respond to. It gave Nancy’s uncompromising position a certain appeal—even offered, perhaps, a kind of permission. I kept remembering a feminist demonstration I had taken part in years before, when I was 21. Meeting friends in a park afterwards, one of them had punctured our exultant mood: the turn-out I’d bragged of was more or less meaningless, he opined, an act of preaching to the choir. What was the point when everyone on the march was already persuaded?

By 2019—a year in which, though abortion rights had just been extended in Ireland, the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights could describe US policy on abortion as “gender-based violence against women, no question” and the anti-feminist, far-right Vox party made unprecedented gains in Spain, raising the uncomfortable specter of  Franco—the response I should have made was becoming clearer to me. My 21-year-old self had marched to give notice of her resistance. There was nothing to be gained by trying to understand the point of view we were protesting (that the way women dressed could provoke rape), but much to be risked from letting that idea exist in the world unchallenged.

Nancy’s “taking sides” has an air of immaturity about it, perhaps precisely because of the playground training most of us receive in it. So much prudence and fairness is signified by resisting these easy allegiances, by seeing “two sides to every story”—a terminology that tends to imply that truth or moral superiority can only ever exist in not choosing either one. And it was becoming clear that polarization serves the extremes best of all.

But something about Nancy’s construction spoke to me. It suggested that there is power in the act of taking a side; that there are moments on which history rests, when nuance or hesitation (perhaps or tomorrow) will prove fatal, when it is vital to  know—and to acknowledge—which side you are on.

The worst times can take on an appearance of simplicity and war is exactly the kind of aberration that removes options, leaving the single choice of one side or another in its place. Yet when Nancy and thousands of other foreigners to Spain acted voluntarily in support of the Spanish Republic, they made their beliefs public. Their actions proposed the worst times as periods of opportunity, too: invitations to reclaim principles from the privacy of our thoughts and conversations and ballot boxes, and make them decisive factors in the way we live and act.

This is why my book is not about the Spanish experience of the war, but rather about the people who had the option not to involve themselves and decided otherwise.

Writers are good for thinking through. I was interested in the question of critical  distance—whether it is always possible or even, as I’d instinctively assumed, always   desirable—and I could think of no better individual to shed light on this than a writer (or intellectual) in war-time.

But people from all walks of life understood the Spanish war as a question, a provocation that demanded an answer. Thousands from across the world volunteered on behalf of the Republic, going so far as to travel to the country as combatants and auxiliaries. Others declared themselves through campaigning and fundraising. Martha Gellhorn defined herself as “an onlooker”: I wanted to explore, too, the experience of people whose commitment drew them closer to the action.

Alongside her in this book are the British Communist Nan Green and her husband, George, who wrenched themselves from their children to volunteer with medical and military units in Republican Spain. There is a young African American nurse named Salaria Kea who saw her service there as a calling. There is one of the boldest photographers to contribute to the memory of the war: Gerda Taro, a refugee from Germany for whom the fight against fascism was personal.

They left their own accounts of the conflict, whether through images or text, and following their stories taught me much about how historical narratives are formed in the first place; why leaving a record can be one of the most instinctive, and contested, human impulses.

They went because, as Martha Gellhorn put it, “We knew, we just knew that Spain was the place to stop Fascism.”

When I went looking for Salaria Kea, the negotiations and challenges her story had undergone became as interesting to me as the missing pieces. A woman of color deemed a political radical, a nurse and not a writer: hers was a voice that rarely received a welcome hearing. My book voices many of my questions, but with Salaria so much was unclear that I realized I could only tell her story by narrating the pursuit and leaving the questions open.

“Rebels,” like Franco, turn military might against the government they’re meant to serve. But I found that all the people I chose to follow fulfilled the word’s other definition, of those who “resist authority, control, or convention.” I wanted to know why they believed that the moment had come, with Spain, for taking sides.

Or, rather, I wanted to know how they recognized the Spanish war as the moment for doing something about the way their present was heading, and what “taking sides” had meant in practice. I wanted to know whether Nancy really thought the mere act of declaring a side could make a difference, as she suggested when she put out that urgent call. I wanted to know why she had addressed it specifically to “Writers and Poets.”

The Spanish war is often remembered for, and through, its  writers—and notably writers from outside the country. Of all the defeats in history, perhaps only Troy has been as well served by literature as Republican Spain was during and after the ascension of Franco, who would eventually rule in Spain for almost forty years. Countless novels and memoirs, a handful of them the greatest books by the greatest writers of their generation; reams of poetry, both brilliant and pedestrian, have preserved the memory of its cause.

As I read, I began to think that their authors’ position had something to say about the nature of writing itself. It seemed significant that each of the writers in this book saw themselves, whether at home or abroad, as an outsider. If not belonging was a fundamental part of that identity, taking sides on Spain only crystallized a series of pressing questions about the purpose and privileges of writers.

The 1930s was a decade of art colliding with politics, of artists determining to marry the two. Presented with the trauma of the Great Depression, the unavoidable phenomenon of Soviet Russia and the spread of fascism, there were journalists and poets alike who sought new modes and new material. Writers questioned their obligations to society, asked what art could achieve; they interrogated the intellectual life to expose its value and its limitations.

The list of foreigners who spent time in Spain during the war reads like a roll call of the most celebrated voices of the era: think of the Spanish war and I imagine you think of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, perhaps Stephen Spender, John Dos Passos, W. H. Auden. Delve a little further and you will find a far greater array of authors, including writers who were female, writers of color, writers who did not write in English (though the wealth of Spanish-language literature falls beyond the scope of a book interested in the outsiderness of writers).

They went because, as Martha Gellhorn put it, “We knew, we just knew that Spain was the place to stop Fascism,” or because they believed in the liberal project of the Republic and wanted to raise awareness of its plight, or because they wanted to observe, or even participate in, the cause célèbre of the moment. They saw history coming and went out to meet it.

__________________________________

From Tomorrow Perhaps the Future by Sarah Watling. Copyright © 2023 by Sarah Watling. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 

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George Orwell (English 246: Fall 2011)

• Orwell’s List
• Final Essay Questions

Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War

October 24, 2011 · 20 Comments

In 1943, three years into WWII, Orwell wrote “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” a long meditation on his memories of his experience in the first half of 1937 which he wrote about later that year. Compare and contrast Homage to Catalonia and “Looking Back.” Pay attention to the different emphasis in both works. What is the intention behind writing “Looking Back” and what does he aim to achieve by writing it? How have his attitudes changed? Is the essay a reconsideration? A recollection? Lastly, how and why does he rework his earlier encounter with the Italian militia man in poetic form? What does he mean by the “crystal spirit” in the last stanza of the poem?

Categories: Orwell and Spain Tagged: Spain

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Kyla Machell // March 24, 2010 at 7:07 pm | Log in to Reply

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is a fantastic account of the spanish civil war in which Orwell offers a kind of autobiographical account of his personal war experiences intermingled with commentary on the political situation of the time. The book seems to emphasize Orwell’s objections to the numerous views and information about the war that he found unjust or incorrect. However it is much more than a historical, journalistic account of his experiences in the events of the war, it is Orwell writing the truth as he confronts his struggle with the modern world.

I believe it is this struggle to write the “truth” that Orwell confronts in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.” Here he speaks of “puncturing allusions” (chapter 1) and pointing out the truths which “the bulk of the British and American intelligista were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now” (chapter 1). With Homage to Catalonia and the lessons of the Spanish Civil War behind him, Orwell seeks to revisit those lessons and experiences in the context of World War II. The emphasis in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” is much less journalistic and much more reflective. Orwell is rethinking the political criticisms and statements he made in Homage as he considers the meaning of “truth.” His dismay at the fact that “atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on the grounds of political predilection” (chapter 2) is a reflection on the progress (or lack thereof) in the world of the intelligista since the Spanish Civil War. Orwell is asking whether or not anything really has been learned from Homage. The fragility of truth and what one believes to be reality can change along with the political climate, which is what Orwell seems to be emphasizing in the essay. I think he is seeking to validate his writing in Homage to Catalonia by reflecting on his memories of the experiences and analyzing the extent to which the truth according to himself is or is not fluid.

The issue of the Italian militiamen, which appears in both Homage to Catalonia and “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War is a memory in which Orwell sees the truth of the war. This man, “the flower of the European working class” is for Orwell a reminder of what the purpose of the war really was. The Italian militamen begins Homage to Catalonia and ends “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.” It is this man and what he represents that Orwell is trying to reflect on and remember in his essay. Orwell looks back on his memory of the Italian militiamen and reworks their encounter to better understand the truth behind it, to remember the “crystal spirit” or the desire for freedom and a minimum standard of living for all people. The “crystal spirit” of the Italian militamen is what the essay is all about; it is, for Orwell, a reminder of the struggle for decency.

Janek Jakubisin // March 24, 2010 at 7:13 pm | Log in to Reply

Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938 was followed five years later with the publication of “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.” Though only a few years had passed since the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Second World War, Orwell felt the need to reiterate, remind, and reinterpret the Spanish Civil War in light of the Second World War. In Homage to Catalonia Orwell is critical of communism in Spain. The classless society he expected to return to after his first 3 month service never occurred and he was met by the language of class division and street fighting. In “Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War” he reiterates some of the street fighting and sifts through events that clearly foreshadowed the rise of fascism and World War Two. Orwell also uses the opportunity to remind the British of how carried away one can get in times of war. He calls upon the time of the Spanish Civil War when the British denounced war, propaganda and the only outcome of it: thousands of corpses. He is quick to point out that the feeling the British expressed toward the Spanish and fascism in that country was quickly dropped as soon as Britain entered the war. Orwell’s “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” is a reemphasis of the his earlier work. He calls for the British to remember how they once felt. At the end of the essay he recapitulates his meeting with the Italian militiaman, but in poetic form. This reworking of the story is homage to the Italian who most certainly died during that war. Poetry, at least in my own mind, always has an air of infinity, and the infinity of the poem parallels that of the Italian man’s spirit. The crystal spirit is the Italian man’s earning for a life of equality, a life of justice. He was killed, but as Orwell points out, his spirit never will be.

Kevin Barber // March 24, 2010 at 7:19 pm | Log in to Reply

“Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” and Homage to Catalonia are companion pieces written by two versions of the same man on the same subject. It doesn’t seem to me that “Looking Back” is a rejection or significant reconsideration of the book, but the essay is inevitably different because it was written after the passage of some time.

Homage to Catalonia is more documentary and “Looking Back” is more anecdotal and analytical. In the book, Orwell gets the reader “on the ground” in Catalonia, making the often humdrum life of the P.O.U.M. soldier familiar—whereas in the essay, Orwell recounts only the episodes that he finds “moving” and “touching” six years removed from the war. “Looking Back” is more interesting to read for this reason, but his purposes in writing Homage to Catalonia seem fundamentally different. Orwell was trying to create a piece of journalism or personal testimony with the book, I think, rather than a broader statement independent of the events he describes. Since the book was written so soon after the events depicted in it transpired, it’s probably a good thing that Orwell stuck to a fairly straightforward account.

Between the two works there are shifts in Orwell’s emotional and political approaches to the war and to the public’s view of it. In both “Looking Back” and Homage to Catalonia, Orwell manages to take a simultaneously cynical and romantic view of the Spanish Civil War. (He represents this idea in the “fierce pathetic face” of the Italian militiaman on pages 3-4 of Homage to Catalonia.) He consistently represents the war as a noble, intermittently fiercely fought, resounding failure.

But his emphasis changes from the book to the essay. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell devotes his attention to the folly, boredom, disorganization, and futility of war, whereas in “Looking Back” he focuses on the popular understandings of the Spanish war and its relevance to World War II. The essay’s treatment of the British thinking Left is brutal; Orwell portrays the British intelligentsia as contrarian and fickle. (“… Official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy.”) In his view, the stupidity that is so endemic on the battlefield in war translates to society quite easily. The newspapers devolve into party megaphones, for instance, eventually amounting to little more than the front-line soldiers in Spain shouting propaganda at the other side to encourage desertion.

Orwell’s concerns in “Looking Back” are big concerns, which reach beyond the minutiae of the Spanish Civil War and even World War II. On the pervasive influence of propaganda Orwell writes in part four of the essay, “What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable.”

I would describe “Looking Back” as a recommitment. Orwell, disillusioned from the start by the Spanish war and disillusioned increasingly by endless intellectual political pivoting in England, is recommitting himself to opposing the tide of totalitarianism that he expects to overwhelm the world.

The poem with which Orwell closes the essay is representative of this recommitment. Orwell clearly feels much of the same warmth he felt for the Italian soldier six years earlier; on the other hand, he speaks of the parts of the war he viewed romantically in Homage to Catalonia more romantically, and speaks of the bitter parts more bitterly. The verse is racked with what we might call today “liberal guilt” (“He was born knowing what I had learned / out of books and slowly”). Despite his insistence that he does not romanticize war and poverty, Orwell occasionally lapses. Nevertheless, war and fascism are now baldly described as a “lie.”

The final line, in which Orwell describes the immortal “crystal spirit” in this Italian man, is cryptic. That phrase may refer to the affection and bond to the Italian Orwell feels but cannot identify or explain at the beginning of Homage to Catalonia. Perhaps that “crystal spirit” lies at the heart of Orwell’s sympathy for anti-Stalinist democratic socialism; perhaps it is another representation of “decency,” an enduring theme in Orwell’s works; or maybe it is the fighting spirit Orwell sees flickering in the face of totalitarianism in World War II. It is a remarkably and unusually optimistic note with which to end the essay.

Marc Paga // March 24, 2010 at 7:20 pm | Log in to Reply

Orwell’s essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” presents itself as a sort of clarification on points that Orwell feels have been misrepresented about various parts of the war. He also especially expands upon a concern first voiced in “Homage” pertaining to the abuse to the very existence of truth and facts–something he feels is a new occurrence in the age of fascist and communist totalitarianism. Per his explanation, it is almost gradual, first he explains how different ideological sides in Britain would refuse to believe stories reported by various outlets from the front, only to believe them–or at the very least, heavily stress their importance–as it was so convenient. “Truth…becomes untruth when your enemy utters it,” writes Orwell. However, he later settles upon agreed truths; “They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened.” Finally, toward the end of his essay, it is clear that Orwell’s admiration for the Italian militiaman with whom he opened “Homage to Catalonia” with hasn’t faltered. In fact, in light of the other reflections in the essay, he seems to admire him all the more upon reflection. It is because in Orwell’s memory of the man that he has a piece of evidence that defends the socialist fighters for a “decent” life against rightist charges of “materialism.” In the militiaman, Orwell sees a man with pure, genuine motive for fighting; a true hopefulness that a better life can be had by fighting. This pureness, this clear and transparent motive is what Orwell meant by a “crystal spirit.” He mentions how he mentioned to another that history stopped in 1936. When the role of propaganda in a ideological and physical battle has grown to the level of importance as it had during the Spanish civil war and the rise of fascism, the very idea of history is threatened because not only is the verified history of the past purposely erased, the constant untruths about “courageous victories” that never happened and the burying of actual courageous actions that did and other such things makes it impossible for a reasonably accurate account for current events to be recorded for future posterity. Hence, there is no history going forward because what students would read 20, 50 years hence is, at best, a guess of what happened based on wildly competing versions of the events–both equally grossly wrong. As I read “looking back,” I could almost feel Orwell gaining the inspiration for “1984.” The whole first part of the novel is spent explaining life in the post-historic world.

Stephanie Grant // March 24, 2010 at 7:23 pm | Log in to Reply

“Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” re-raises a few issues about the Spanish Civil War that are addressed in Homage to Catalonia. First, Orwell reiterates what it was like to be in the war and writes the surface, giving the reader telling details that develop a vivid scene. He writes, “One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin.” This strips war of any political sides or agendas. Simultaneously, Orwell presents the participants in the war as humans, nullifying external divisions. Orwell recounts his experience as a volunteer for the Republican army: “Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending Democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is about something, and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.” When it came down to it, everyone was the same. Orwell addresses the correlation between popular opinion and the actuality of the war: “At a given moment they may be ‘pro-war’ or ‘anti-war’, but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds.” Orwell justifies his fighting in the war by writing, “To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases.” Next, Orwell takes up the relation of popular opinion to belief and disbelief in events that may or may not have occurred during the war, depending on who’s version of truth one listens to. “The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.” Ultimately, because of the nature of the political divisions, one side did not believe the atrocities of the other side, and vice versa. Orwell is also concerned with truth and a “body of neural fact” that hopefully exists, regardless of who interprets it. Orwell defines two absolutes, or what he hopes to be absolutes, that will hopefully safeguard against fascism’s urge to rewrite the past. The first is “however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back.” The second is, “so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.” His approaches are idealistic, but that is why he writes: to comfort himself and to remember. Fascism strove to annihilate memory, but Orwell posits the working class as a permanent kind of memory. As long as the working class exists, there will be a memory of the past because even though they are “too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism,” they always take up the struggle again. The fact that they are kept in their place as the working class backfires on Fascists who would rather rewrite the past, but the working class’s very existence keeps the past from being rewritten. Orwell rewrites his encounter with the Italian militiaman that originally occurred in Homage to Catalonia in poetic form in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” because he wishes to drive home his answer to the question that he raises: “Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan’t they?” Yes, they should, is his resounding answer to the question he raises. A crystal is a solid material, so a “crystal spirit” would be a spirit that is solid, unwavering. This essay, but particularly the poem, reminds me of Orwell’s quote, “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

Catherine DeGennaro // March 24, 2010 at 7:24 pm | Log in to Reply

“Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” is less of a reconsideration or recollection of Orwell’s experiences than it is a distillation of his experiences given the historical perspective he gained in the midst of WWII. Whereas Homage to Catalonia is a generally narrative account of Orwell’s time in the P.O.U.M. militia, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, “Looking Back” critically discusses many aspects of the politicization of the war given his own experiences. I believed that he aimed to get to the real essence of the war and the reason for fighting it, as well as to break down some of the misconceptions around the Spanish Civil War and war itself, which were certainly applicable during the time he wrote in 1943.

In each section, Orwell addresses a different aspect of this. In section one, he discusses the training and environment he experienced while with the P.O.U.M. militia. In Homage to Catalonia, the beginning of the book addresses this same subject in very descriptive, narrative depth, from the lack of guns and firewood to the “multiforms.” But in this section of “Looking Back,” it seems Orwell has a real point to make about misconceptions of wars: “[the intelligentsia has] no realistic picture of war in their minds” (251). He makes the point that “a louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just” (250). Just or unjust, war is sordid, no matter which side you fight on. He continues to cut through misconceptions in the second section, when he rails against the use of propaganda and politicization to shape public opinion on atrocities: “The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads—they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late” (253). Instead of sticking to a narrative of his experience as he did in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell seems to have an urgency, perhaps due to the time he was writing in, to distill his wartime experience and expose misrepresentations of war. This feeds into the idea Orwell addresses in section IV, “that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world” (258) and that there is an “abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written” (258). With all the misconceptions and delusions about wars and the politicization of them, Orwell worries about partisan history, where the real experiences and truths will be lost and never passed on.

With perspective, it seems like Orwell became very disillusioned by the parties and propaganda. In a way, while Homage to Catalonia is an account of his experience, “Looking Back” is an account of the experience of the people that often goes overlooked. In between clashes between Communists, Socialists and Fascists, there is a very human face to these wars. Orwell highlights this in “Looking Back,” particularly in the section where he revisits his encounter with the Italian militiaman that he wrote of in Homage to Catalonia. To him, the Italian militiaman embodies “the flower of the European working class” (264) that “knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements” (261). In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell offers this description of the man: “Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend—the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. […] I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean—to whom I have taken such an immediate liking” (3). This is a narrative of his encounter and impression of the man, but with time to reflect on it, the Italian militiaman becomes much more than just one man who Orwell met: “When I remember—oh, how vividly!—his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seemed to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright” (264). He revisits this encounter with the man because this man symbolizes and embodies what gets lost in the “complex side-issues” when wars are filtered through the intelligentsia, propaganda, political implications and revisions of history; he represents this “crystal spirit” of the working class, something that is pure and unbreakable in its constant pursuit of a better life, despite hardships and discouragements.

Nolan Johnson // March 24, 2010 at 7:24 pm | Log in to Reply

Whereas Homage to Catalonia makes no separation of the discussion of politics and the actual events in the Spanish Civil War, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” forces a clear distinction between how the soldiers were living and actively struggling for and the politics which were existed in a manner removed from the war. Throughout Homage, Orwell recalls events of the war with reasonable certainty that he was on the proper side fighting the war and that the knowledge that his actions were just made what he was doing better. In “Looking Back,” he makes no such assertions, but rather argues that the life of a soldier was as bad in the Spanish Civil War as it had been in any other times in history. He makes this point by discussing latrines. Latrines have no politics and smelled as bad as any latrines and clogged up in the same way. Whereas soldiers were presented as fighters for justice in Homage, he argues in “Looking Back” that they came because of justice, but fought for one another and for their own survival once they were involved in the war, not for a higher abstract. The intention behind “Looking Back” seems to be to make this very distinction between political rhetoric and the actual events. Orwell does not deny the political elements of the war, but instead argues that in the daily business of a soldier, especially one on the front line, the nobility of fighting for the Republic was easily forgotten or pushed out of one’s thinking for a time. The politics of the Spanish Civil War existed in a vacuum removed from the war. Every country in the world commented on the war and foreigners came from abroad to volunteer to fight; however, once those men became soldiers, they were no longer active political beings; they were just men fighting one another. This separation between the war and politics becomes clear as Orwell admits to being unwilling to kill a Fascist messenger running across the top of a trench. Orwell moved ahead of his own lines for the sole purpose of killing a fascist, yet when he gets the opportunity, he cannot think of the man as a fascist, but instead as solely a human being. For Orwell, the rhetoric and politics that affected the war and influenced its outcome did not interfere with the daily events of the war. Men on both sides struggled to survive, feed themselves, and keep warm instead of struggling with political arguments. These political arguments demonstrated their importance only in winning support for one side or the other in the war and influencing men to fight, but did not matter once the men were fighting. The major exception to the apolitical manner of the war was, according to Orwell’s essay, the possibility of greater loyalty and generosity because of the atmosphere of comradeship amongst the Republicans. By 1943, it appears the Orwell sees the destruction caused by war as different from the politics of the times. Every war causes the same problems for the individuals who fight in them and the countries they tear apart, yet they are all fought for different reasons. The politics are constantly changing, but Orwell realized that the hardships, loss of life, and general chaos surrounding a war, especially surrounding the fighting are always the same at their roots. Orwell does not pull back his own political views, but instead uses the essay to address the realities of the Spanish Civil War which have become apparent to him because it is six years removed and he has now witnessed much of World War II as well. With his new perspective, Orwell understands the political maneuvering that existed during the Spanish Civil War, the English hesitancy to become involved, and the widespread use of propaganda, based on little or no facts, by both sides. He is able to deal with the facts of the Spanish Civil War more clearly than he could do in Homage in this essay and therefore his mixing of politics into his essay and the skewing of facts for political reasons does not exist. The clarity of his understanding of the war becomes apparent when he ends “Looking Back” with a very different account of the same memory he began Homage with. In both pieces, the Italian man Orwell meets his first day in the barracks has a face which shows he is willing to give everything he has for a friend, including his life. In Homage, this willingness to sacrifice is “the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist” (Orwell 3). In “Looking Back,” the Italian man “was born knowing what [Orwell] had learned” (Orwell). In the essay, his is courageous and selfless by nature, not by politics. The cause of the Italian man’s apparent willingness to lay down his life for his friend is apolitical in the essay. Orwell understands that the man is present in the war because of his politics, but he is not selfless because of them. Orwell ends by claiming that this man’s “crystal spirit” can never be shattered by any force. Once again this reminds the reader that regardless of politics or the political structure of Spain or any country, the man will keep his purity because it is his nature, not his politics that define it. Orwell and the Italian militiaman are both fighting for the Republic, but it is not their politics and side that defines them, but rather their willingness to fight for one another when they are forced to make hard decisions in war.

Kristin Halsing // March 24, 2010 at 7:26 pm | Log in to Reply

In “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” Orwell considers the Spanish Civil War, and his memories of it, as a whole, and thus writes a work much more rooted in honest recollection than Homage to Catalonia. It seems that, in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” he hopes to instill in the reader the reality of the war, knowing full well that, by that point, there had been masses of propaganda and incorrect information flowing from the fascist government. In addition, he relates some aspects of the Spanish Civil War to the current war of the time (World War II), in an effort to expose some of the less-discussed aspects of both wars, and war in general. Orwell writes, in “Looking Back…” of many of the same things present in Homage to Catalonia, but adds the perspective of having been out of the war for a number of years, and considered his experiences as they relate to each other and to how people outside of the military (and Spain) saw the war. He acknowledges the fact that, the fascists being in power, much of the information released about the war was extremely biased. He brings up the universal point that whoever is in power creates history. The fascists in Spain were allowed to create their own version of the war and life in Spain before fascism. Orwell writes “Looking Back” partly to dispel some of those myths, but mostly simply to warn his readers that they cannot believe the “history” of whatever government or party currently holds power. Orwell stresses throughout “Looking Back…” the fact that, contrary to what many would have the general population believe, soldiers on the front lines do not fight from any place of belief in their cause. The slogans and messages from both sides mean nothing to members of the military on the front lines. As he says, “People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war” (Looking Back). However, he also states that many men fighting were, indeed, fighting for the rights they believed they deserved; in their mind, they were not, however, fighting for whatever political party they technically belonged to. The members of the militia on both sides, in essence, had the same goal: to secure for themselves and for all the minimum standard of living. Orwell uses the example, in Homage to Catalonia and “Looking Back,” of the Italian militia-man he met to illustrate this point. That man was not fighting for politics; he was fighting for rights he was denied. In “Looking Back,” Orwell composes a poem in honor of this man. The poem uses the militiaman to represent everyone in the war who fought for an idealized reason. Orwell expresses the sadness that so many died for the lie that their political parties fed them, but he also conveys his hope in the human resolve. In the last stanza, he uses the image of a “crystal spirit” to represent the pure belief in freedom and rights that so many men fought with during the war. He says that “No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit,” implying that, though war may kill many men, that hope and idea of rights will always live on.

Gregory Patterson // March 24, 2010 at 7:27 pm | Log in to Reply

When comparing Homage to Catalonia with “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” one major distinction immediately appears. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s focus is primarily on events. It was his desire to describe the war as accurately as possible and with as little political commentary as he could afford. Naturally, as Orwell admits, he had to devote some time to discussing the political parties that fragmented the republican side. In obvious contrast, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” is a highly cynical political commentary. Orwell’s disillusionment with the status of objective truth and his affirmations of the true pro-fascist nature of Britain give his essay a much edgier twist. Yet, at the same time there are interesting similarities. In both works, Orwell talks about the apathy of England when problems are elsewhere. At the end of Homage to Catalonia, Orwell returns to England to find it unchanged, safely sleeping. He finishes, prophetically, with the assertion that England will only be awoken by the sound of bombs. Similarly, in “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell says, “the thing you most fear never really happens” (pg. 259); the “thing” being the takeover by Fascism.

The intention behind writing “Looking Back on the Spanish War” is quite clear. When writing Homage To Catalonia, Orwell wanted to write an objective article of nonfiction. Perhaps he believed that it would effect some sort of change, provide some sort of insight into the drudgery of the life of a common soldier. Yet, with this essay, written three years into WWII and five years after Catalonia, the last shred of Orwell’s hope has dissipated. He rails against the lack of reliable reporting. Every bit of information written in newspapers or expounded by governments is fabricated. In a way, history is false. Orwell, though realistic, is profoundly affected by this. Similarly, he is disenchanted with the false democratic rhetoric of the likes of France and England. He notes that if either country really cared about equality they would have given money and support to the Spanish republic which, in turn, would have crushed Franco and the Fascists with relative ease. In writing this essay, perhaps Orwell wants to allot a measure of guilt to those who stood by and watched; to those we manipulated Spain for political ends. Maybe, it is an ultimatum, “the common man will win his fight sooner or later…” (pg. 266) The prophet Orwell has spoken; England was aroused by the sound of bombs.

Orwell’s attitude has certainly changed from Homage to Catalonia to “Looking Back on the Spanish War.” Though I wouldn’t necessarily portray Orwell as an idealist, I think he did believe that Fascism could be beaten in the Spanish Civil War, that man could be equal as they had for a few moments in Barcelona. With “Spanish War,” Orwell is much more jaded. He has read the words of a hundred journalists; he has seen the propagandists spurting their venom. He says, “I was there, that’s not how it happened.” He has directly witnessed the biases of history and it has severely disillusioned him. And yet, at the same time, he still thinks that the ordinary man will prevail. Through it all, he still holds on to that belief. His essay is both a reconsideration and a recollection. He reconsiders the intentions of all of the parties who acted in the civil war and yet he recollects about some of his memories from that time, particularly the Italian militiaman.

The Italian militiaman had a very strong effect on Orwell right from the beginning. As he explains in Catalonia, the militiaman represented the time and the event, the trenches, the war, the faces. Over the years, it seems that Orwell has further reflected on this image of the military man and turned him into a tragic hero. In his poem, Orwell writes “Your name and your deeds were forgotten/ Before your bones were dry,/ And the lie that slew you is buried/ Under a deeper lie…” (pg. 267) Time has made this militiaman a symbol of the hypocrisy of written history and the negative effect of political power play. He is a symbol for the common man, hidden under lies, waiting to at last claim his prize. His spirit is crystallized; “crystal spirit”. (pg. 267) It cannot die, but is merely biding its time. The spirit of the common man, of the working class, “the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which the knew to be their birthright.” (pg. 264)

Jane Kone // March 24, 2010 at 7:29 pm | Log in to Reply

The impact of the Spanish Civil War was twofold. Firstly, the war set the path for Nazi and Fascist rulers to spread their ideology and secondly, the Spanish Civil War represented a formative period in George Orwell’s career as a writer. With the commencement of World War II impending, Orwell’s attempts to distance his writing from politics necessarily had to be relinquished. Literature could no longer comment on the world without addressing political concerns. This is not to say that the war transformed Orwell into a historian or politician, but rather, transformed his writing to become inherently political. However, I use the word “political” not in the sense that Orwell began writing with a specific agenda or to perpetuate propaganda, but political in the sense that literature could no longer disregard the events of the world occurring during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Thus, the outcome of the Spanish Civil War not only altered the course of history, but simultaneously altered Orwell’s writing style. Homage to Catalonia and “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” are therefore two particularly relevant pieces of work that exemplify two distinct writing styles utilized by Orwell. However, as both texts are written retrospectively, the difference in tone and style between the two works is not specifically a matter of the Spanish Civil War altering Orwell’s style, but rather, the aftermath of the war altering Orwell’s world and subsequently, his writing. Homage to Catalonia was written following Orwell’s service in the Spanish Civil War and although it is a retrospective account of the war, its tone is opposite that of “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.” While Homage to Catalonia may be written in the style of a documentary or memoir, the text is still literary. In several of his works on the Spanish Civil War, Orwell includes the same information present in Homage to Catalonia. The same stories are told and the same characters are mentioned. However, when comparing these texts, one notices that Homage to Catalonia molds this information to fit the form of a literary text and not that of a documentary of the war. The text is conscious of its role as a literary piece of work, rendering modifications of documentations and diary entries aesthetically pleasing. The very title, Homage to Catalonia, mandates that the text adhere to a certain artistic attitude. “Homage” is a public display of honor or respect, and in this work, Orwell displays his reverence for the Spanish Civil War and the cause the Republicans fought to uphold. Although the text is not without its criticisms, the use of homage remains literary. Homage to a place (Catalonia) can be considered an abstract construct of the idea, appealing not to political discourse, but to literary composition. It is not until the end of the text that Orwell explicitly expresses more politically charged opinions. However, he continues to do some in a manner that is conscious of being written well. The “deep, deep, deep sleep of England” foreshadows the disillusionment Orwell expressed in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” without compromising the aesthetic of Homage to Catalonia. I admittedly know little of wars–of their strategies, mentality, or reality–but Orwell’s texts seem to imply that the sentiment surrounding the Spanish Civil War was revolutionary, whereas World War II, from his point of view of as a citizen of the Allied Powers, was a matter of defense. The task of the Allies in World War II was to defend and survive the Nazi and Fascist implementations the world had proactively fought to destroy less than a decade before. Therefore, when Orwell blatantly claims “history stopped in 1936,” one becomes aware that “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” did not attempt to be a literary work. Although both Homage to Catalonia and “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” are both retrospective texts, the latter is written during the course of World War II. Orwell not only faced the challenge of writing about the Spanish Civil War, he had to do so with the awareness that Franco’s victory created the war at hand in 1943. He was therefore in the peculiar position of writing both retrospectively and at the present. As a result, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” is a more hostile text. The tone of writing is not opposite that Homage to Catalonia in the sense that it is disrespectful to the Spanish Civil War, but a certain frustration with war and people’s attitudes towards war is evident within the text. In such a sense, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” is a reconsideration of Homage to Catalonia to the extent that world events entailed a different outlook on the outcome of the Spanish Civil War. However, Orwell’s decision to conclude “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” with a poem is a consciously literary decision that simultaneously comments on the reality of a world that is less apt to take up arms and fight against evils. The “crystal spirit” which ends the poem is therefore the revolutionary sentiment present during the time of the Spanish Civil War that gave those such as Orwell and the Italian militiaman reason to be reverent of Spain.

Lukas Autenried // March 24, 2010 at 7:29 pm | Log in to Reply

In writing “Looking Back on the Spanish War” Orwell’s primary concern was that in observing how the events of WWII were unfolding, he was troubled that many of the injustice he thought was unique to the Spanish Civil War were in fact universal. The disregard for human life, the fear that the truth will be lost to history, the atrocities committed, and the extent of the propaganda being fed the citizens were all things that Orwell saw in Spain and now feared were occurring again in WWII. In this sense “Looking Back on the Spanish War” was a reconsideration of Homage to Catalonia because Orwell’s hope was that the rest of Europe would learn from the example of Spain. Orwell felt that the reason why England had not gotten involved in the Spanish War was that it was too far removed, and he famously said at the end of Homage to Catalonia that nothing short of bombs being dropped on England would wake its people from their slumber. In the case of WWII, this is exactly what happened as Hitler’s air force and V2 rockets descended on London and the rest of England. However, instead of learning from Spain, Orwell saw the intellectuals of England who had been so critical of the handling of the Spanish Civil War make all the same mistakes. The same people who criticized those who chose to fight in the Spanish Civil War as being war mongers were now clamoring about the glory of war. Although those, like Orwell, who had fought in Spain had learned about the horror and misery that characterize war, the people now operating the war against Germany seemed to not have learned that lesson. However, for Orwell, the main reason why he wrote “Looking Back on the Spanish War” was that he was depressed at what he saw as the horrors of Spain being carried out across Europe. When he wrote Homage to Catalonia, there is a sense that he felt that had the truth about what was transpiring in Spain reached the rest the West, there would have been outrage and a clamoring to aid the Republican cause. However, now three years into WWII, Orwell saw the same atrocities that had happened in Spain being carried out across Europe. He lamented about the government feeding its citizens lies about the war, how quickly people demonized those that objected to the party line, the loss of humanity and above all the fact that the inevitable victim of these mistakes was not the intelligentsia, but the common man who was thus denied the chance to enjoy a decent life. Inevitably it was the common man who was forced to endure the squalor and horrors of war, only to have his name tarnished by his own people and his memory lost to the annals of history. That, above all, was what made Orwell write “Looking Back on the Spanish War.” He was distressed at the fact that the loss of truth, the internal bickering, and the victimization of the common man that he hoped England and the rest of the world could avoid by not following the precedent set in Spain were being repeated. Homage to Catalonia was Orwell’s attempt to tell the true story of what happened in Spain; his motivation was to counter all the lies and falsehoods about what really happened. But in “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell realizes that his aim was a pointless one not only because the intellectuals were unwilling to learn from the mistakes made in Spain, but that ultimately it did not matter because the notion of truth had all but vanished and the memory of those who fought and died valiantly for the cause were forgotten. This is why Orwell decided to rework his story about the Italian militiaman that he met when he first came into Spain. In first reflecting on his encounter with this man, Orwell remembers the Italian as representing all the optimism and ultimately the truth about what happened in Spain. He remembers both how this militiaman typified the image of a man who truly believed in the message of the Republican cause, but also who, in his shabby clothes represented the harsh reality of the time. But in “Looking Back on the Spanish War” Orwell changes his encounter as the show that although he had great admiration for this solider, nobody else would really care. For this reason Orwell projects that this man probably died and nobody would hallow the memory of his bravery nor know the truth about those who killed him. Therefore, in remembering this young militiaman, the “crystal spirit” that for Orwell represents the truth and optimism with which he entered the Spanish War is shattered as he now looks remorsefully on the events unfolding across Europe during WWII.

Nicole Tortoriello // March 24, 2010 at 7:30 pm | Log in to Reply

The initially striking element of Orwell’s “Looking Back on the Spanish War” is the lack of enthusiasm that was evident in Homage to Catalonia. He says in the essay, “Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, and the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior… (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war)“ (“Looking”) These sentiments contrast with his recollections in Homage to Catalonia, in which he recounts “Discipline did not exist; if a man disliked an order he would step out of the ranks and argue fiercely with the officer…Even more than the men themselves [the lieutenant who instructed us] insisted upon complete social equality between all ranks” (Homage 9) On a larger scale, the collapse from within the Republican army described in Homage to Catalonia also demonstrates the explicit lack of discipline within the Republican army. As “Looking Back on the Spanish War” was written afterwards, maybe the lack of discipline is to be taken as a partial explanation for the failure of the Republican army. Further, Orwell’s assertion that soldiers do not take the political origins of the war to heart contradicts the format of Homage to Catalonia, about half of which consisted on his, a soldier’s, explanations of the political origins and problems of the Spanish Civil War. Though Homage to Catalonia was written after his experiences in Spain, if the political causes of the war are so insignificant to the soldiers fighting on the front lines, he would not have focused on them so heavily in his recollections of his time on the front lines in Homage to Catalonia. Similarly, at the beginning of the fourth part of “Looking Back on the Spanish War” dismisses the “struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties” and says that “The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established” (“Looking”). Yet, Orwell spends Homage to Catalonia trying to make sense of the what happened to him and to the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War. This essay, written in 1943 in the middle of World War II, seems to have been written after Orwell’s disillusionment from the Spanish Civil War has sunken in, and was probably exacerbated by the Second World War. It lacks the hope, optimism, and compassion for the Republican Army that was present in Orwell’s descriptions of their inadequate conditions and nonsensical practices in Homage to Catalonia. Whereas at the time Homage to Catalonia was written, the outcome of the war was still unsure, and thus Orwell could and did write of the Republican soldiers with a tone of amusement, in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” Orwell writes with the utter disenchantment of a man who has lived through too many wars and does not wish to see them continue.

Brendan Baumgardner // March 24, 2010 at 7:31 pm | Log in to Reply

As it’s title infers, George Orwell’s 1943 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil” was written with a degree of perspective. Whereas Homage to Catalonia was written shortly after Orwell’s return from fighting in Spain, “Looking Back” was written with after he had greater time to reflect on his time there. Additionally, the continued threat of fascism and the outbreak of World War II both color his prose in “Looking Back.” The result is a subtle but important shift in tone between the two works. Whereas Homage to Catalonia was a passionate and ultimately tragic documentation of Orwell’s observances in Spain, “Looking Back” is more historically and ideologically grounded. However, “Looking Back” is underscored by urgency in the face of rising fascism. By comparing the tone of the two works, one can traces the shifts in Orwell’s political beliefs over the interim years.

Homage to Catalonia presents Orwell finding his place in Spain. His descriptions of the struggle and the P.O.U.M. and the Republican strongholds are all realistic, but tinged with idealism. Orwell writes of the working class’ dominance in Barcelona, “All this was queer and moving. There was much in it I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.” He goes on to describe at great length the condition of the country, the conflicts within socialist groups, and every other aspect of the war with restrained admiration. Though Orwell has his criticisms, he remains strong in his belief that the struggle versus fascism was a just one. Despite his political affinity, however, Homage to Catalonia serves as a fairly neutral text regarding historical facts and the nature of the war. Orwell does not glamorize or sermonize the violence and the filth he observed, and it is one of the books greatest strengths.

The tone of “Looking Back” is a less politically idealistic one. Two of the major factors contributing to this were certainly the ultimate defeat of the republic and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The former was devastating on a practical level, as a failure to squelch twentieth century fascism early in its rise. The latter was an ideological devastation to Orwell, as it aligned what many viewed as the model for socialist thought with fascism, the ultimate enemy. As a result, Orwell’s criticisms of the internal conflicts and the intelligentsia in “Looking Back” are more damning. For example, he describes the Left’s willingness to deny the facts and ignore atrocities in the same terms as he describes the Right’s. He writes, “But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.” This quote illustrates the Orwell’s bitterness over the hypocrisy he sees in the Left.

Orwell’s bitterness and disillusionment is evident when comparing his accounts of the Italian soldier. While both descriptions maintain a sort of reverence for the militiaman, the one found in “Looking Back” is much sadder. Whereas the Orwell who wrote Homage to Catalonia clearly respected, perhaps even envied, the militiaman’s dedication to the ideology, the Orwell who memorializes him in verse in “Looking Back” pities his devotion. He sees it as the thing that killed him, having given him nothing back. They are not the words of an idealistic socialist from 1937, but those of a betrayed scholar simultaneously remembering and condemning his older idealism. They are the words of a man in a world that has truly been jerked from its sleep by the roar of bombs.

Anthony Francavilla // March 24, 2010 at 7:32 pm | Log in to Reply

“Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” represents the culmination of Orwell’s understanding of the working class and its position as a victim both in the war in the Spain and in the Second World War that was taking place as he wrote. While his overall attitudes don’t appear to have changed much—he still condemns propaganda on both sides of the war, still bemoans the lack of arms and order during the war and still questions Great Britain’s perceived moral superiority in the face of its foreign policy—but the reflection serves as a reiteration and clarification of his position as a sympathizer of the working class. He supports the working class as epitomized by the Italian soldier, but the dishonesty and contradiction he experience in the Spanish Civil War makes him wary and eventually completely distrustful of political orthodoxy. For this reason he holds the Italian soldier and his blissful ignorance and innocence in such high regard. To him the soldier signifies the spirit of the working class movement without the political bias or intrigue. The “crystal spirit” metaphor, I believe, is meant to show that pure, uncorrupted desire for a better life held by the working class will endure. While a crystal can in fact be broken or shattered, the result is just more crystals that maintain the same luster as the whole.

Aryeh Blank // March 24, 2010 at 7:33 pm | Log in to Reply

In “Looking Back” Orwell draws political judgements and considerations from the Spanish Civil War. His goal is not so much to narrate his experiences in the war, as he did in Homage to Catalonia. Rather, it is to study it, from more distance, and derive conclusions about it.

He aims to describe and discuss the phenomenon of fascism and totalitarianism and uses the Spanish Civil War as a template. He also discusses the phenomenon of propaganda during the course of a war. In this sense, the war is seen to be a less pivotal moment than as he portrayed it in Homage. He is more removed from it, and is fitting it into a context of the struggle for the common people.

At the end, Orwell describes the Spanish Civil War as essentially one battle in the prolonged struggle for freedom and equality for the common people. He uses the Italian soldier to epitomize this man, who continues to struggle for himself. And that is the “crystal spirit” he mentions at the end of his poem. It is the spirit, and the drive of the all common people to continue the struggle for freedom, a struggle that Orwell says may take centuries.

That is why he expands his description of the Italian soldier significantly. He has come to represent so much more. Orwell uses this single Italian soldier to portray the hopes and aspirations and spirit of common people across history.

Peter Barrasso // March 24, 2010 at 7:39 pm | Log in to Reply

Both the essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War (1943),” and the book, Homage to Catalonia (1938), were written after the end of the war which is noteworthy because both amounts of time gave Orwell time to reflect on the events of the war. His use of journals was crucial to his reconstruction of his experience while writing both pieces, but once again, his ability to reflect on the events of the war increased because of the time lapse. It becomes evident that Orwell is much more reflective about the war and its consequences in his later essay. This is primarily because of the perspective that Orwell gained from seeing WWII unfold and how it had related to the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War has often been characterized as the place where Hitler (through Franco) was able to test out technology and strategies that he would later employ in the WWII. All of this is significant, when thinking of the later essay by Orwell, because what he gained in the time between “Looking back on the Spanish Civil War” and Homage to Catalonia was a greater perspective to put the two wars into their historical places. In the narration of the book Orwell’s political analysis is present but it lacks the depth which is present in the essay due to his knowledge WWII. WIth his knowledge of WWII he becomes very critical of the various political actors in Spain. I think that his essay is certainly a reflection and also a reconsideration because it allows him to be more pointedly angry at certain actors in Spain when he sees how they were responsible for the rise of Nazi Germany.

The main difference between the two works is the way that Orwell analyzes the events of the Spanish Civil War. He is much harsher in his criticisms when he saw what the events of the Spanish Civil War lead to in WWII. His analysis is also much broader (in terms of world events), and much angrier about WWII than his political analysis of the Spanish Civil War. His narratives are both analytical, and tell stories about his own experiences and the experiences of other individuals, but in the essay his analysis is much more broad. This is because he simply has witnessed more historic events in the five years that passed between each work. Not only does his reflect on Spain, but he reflects on war and why wars should be fought. But when looking at the two texts, although there are major narrative differences (mostly because the length between the two is so great) the fundamental formula that Orwell uses in his essay and his book are very much the same. Once again, the focus of the essay is much broader than the first, as far as international actors, but the political analysis in the book is very present. It’s only narrow because it isn’t as wide in scope. The depth is relatively the same between the two places, is just what Orwell is analyzing has changed. His attitudes about war don’t seem to have changed a tremendous amount between the pieces. However, his story about the Fascists who was having trouble holding up his pants, who Orwell finds himself having trouble killing reveals something about Orwell. As excited about war and killing as he seems to be in his general demeanor, I think the moment was provides insight into Orwell, and seriously makes the reader wonder about his desire to kill Fascists. Perhaps the event allowed Orwell to reexamine his own opinions about killing by making it both personal and pathetic (the man losing his pants being pathetic – as is the man who won’t kill his Fascist).

As far as the poem. Why he chose to write the poem in the essay, in addition to remembering the man at the beginning of Homage to Catalonia, is not because of the importance of the particular man (Orwell didn’t know him at all) but instead to symbolize the individuals who fought in the war who would probably die and surely be forgotten. I think the poem helps makes this point standout, by setting it apart from the text, but it also serves as a formal way to remember the unremembered (more formal than his portrait of the man in the book). I think that poems generally serve this function better than stories. When Orwell writes of shattering the “crystal spirit” I think it goes back to notions of individuality in the face of war, in which the individual is often lost.

Eric Pilch // March 24, 2010 at 7:53 pm | Log in to Reply

Although Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was not widely distributed or well received upon publication in 1938, the book has been widely praised as an honest account of the Spanish Civil War and also reviled by many Communists because of its criticisms of Soviet actions during the Spanish Civil War. The book was written just after Orwell’s dramatic experiences in Spain that ended with his throat being shot out and a hasty escape from the country after the suppression of the POUM. The literary narrative form of Homage to Catalonia gives Orwell greater freedom to join together the main points he was trying to convey with the a description of events like the revolutionary atmosphere in Barcelona, the realities of trench warfare, the evolution of Orwell’s own conception of the conflict, along with the increasing factiousness of the left wing opponents of Facism. In contrast, “Looking Back” has the benefit of hindsight and the passage of time. Orwell spends less time describing events and devotes greater energy to dealing with more abstract themes like the fallout of the Spanish Civil War, the emotional swings of the intellegista, the nature of truth in a war zone, and the poor decisions made by the British ruling class. This is not to say that the two works solely take up separate ideas and promote different messages. For example, the famous story of the Italian militiaman appears in both works, and Orwell steps back during Homage to Catalonia to analyze the larger international situation.

Placing “Looking Back” in its context for Orwell—“three years into WWII”—sheds light on the message of the essay. Orwell’s experiences as a militiaman, like many other veterans of armed conflict, seem to have instilled a very bad feeling about warfare in all its forms (though he was by no means a pacifist) and a kind of revulsion at comfortable intellectuals who debate the merits of conflicts. This sentiment might be best articulated by his response to the mailings calling for him to take sides in the Spanish civil war. “Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. . . I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet-hole in me at present and I am not going to write blab about defending democracy or gallant little anybody,” Orwell explained. In “Looking Back” Orwell is expressing his shock at the vacuousness of the intelligista who can jump from position to position without even the self-awareness of their contradictions. With transitions from pacifism to nationalism, atrocities committed by one side to those committed by the other, everything is ultimately “lied about and made into propaganda” in the view of Orwell with truth as the ultimate casualty. With the passage of time, Orwell seems to have developed even stronger views about the conflict and the lessons it provides for the Second World War.

After the scathing tirade that composes the bulk of “Looking Back,” Orwell turns to consider the Italian militiaman and the truth he can share about the Civil War. “In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, Orwell writes. “The central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man’s probable end without several kinds of bitterness.” For Orwell, this man seems to symbolize everything that seemed intuitively good and noble about the conflict and many of the Republican supporters. Reworking this impression into poetic form is an exercise both in remembrance and glorification of the ideal revolutionary form. Although this is merely informed speculation, I take the final stanza of Orwell’s poem to say that nothing physical can destroy the beautiful expression of proletarian sacrifice and dedication to a noble cause exemplified by the Italian. One could say that the “crystal spirit” lives on in Orwell’s mind and the minds of others who saw the potential of the revolutionary working class while it was ascendant in Spain.

Jed Feiman // March 24, 2010 at 8:21 pm | Log in to Reply

“Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” was written to look forward. The context in which Orwell writes this essay — World War II — is implicit in his reflection as a whole. And living with a backdrop of world war, his tone has shifted since writing “Homage to Catalonia.” The Orwell of “Homage” seems comparatively more motivated, more aspirational, more idealistic. Orwell’s emotional belief in fighting for a cause – fighting against Fascism – plays a diminished role in “Looking Back,” as the ideal of the soldier is lost to one who is “too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.” War has taken its toll on Orwell by 1943. For example, Orwell, who chose to fight in the war, in “Homage” expresses his fascination with firing a machine gun. In “Looking Back,” he writes, “I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.” Clearly Orwell’s initial impulse to act and fight is lost in “Looking Back,” replaced with an Orwell who is dejected and disheartened. Orwell makes more dispirited generalizations about war. Whereas in “Homage,” where Orwell writes extensively about Spain and the uniqueness of the Spanish people and civilization, the Orwell of 1943 groups war together. He writes of shooting people, “It is the kind of thing that happens all the time in all wars.” The enemy is not a unique cause. He thinks of an opposing force no longer as Fascist or Communist or Franco or Germany but merely an enemy. The “crystal spirit” encompasses the values and energy and, to use Orwell’s phrase, “common decency” of the Italian militia man, shared with others of the working class. The poetic form which Orwell uses does a better job of commemorating the fallen of war and allows the reader to sympathize. While we will never truly know the men who fought, Orwell illustrates that the human spirit is as universal as the essence of poetry is everlasting.

Randall Smith // March 24, 2010 at 9:14 pm | Log in to Reply

The similarities between Homage to Catalonia and “Looking back on the Spanish Civil War” end at the subject matter that they both utilized. Orwell did occasionally use some of the same examples in “Looking back” that he used in Homage. However, he approached it in a completely different way in “Looking Back.” Homage to Catalonia was very much a look into what his experiences were in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. In addition, the tone used was much more detached. He explained what actually happened in trenches, what the food tasted like, how much shooting was done, and the state of their armaments. These facts were never used for analysis, however. “Looking back on the Spanish Civil War” used his experiences in Spain to critique what was going on at that point during WWII. He critiqued the portrayal of atrocities in terms of politics, propaganda, and a slew of other subject matter. The lens he used to make these critiques was the Spanish Civil War but it was only an example, an object for comparison. His goal is to force people to see the hypocrisies that are then present during WWII as viewed through the context of the Spanish Civil War. In Homage to Catalonia, the entire point of the novel was to tell what had happened in the Spanish Civil War as he had experienced it. It gave a glimpse into it from someone who had actually been there. A very good example of the contrast between these two works by George Orwell is his description of the Italian militia man in each. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell describes the man as someone he immediately likes and will always remember. However, in “Looking Back” he described him in poetic form and used him to represent something, his “crystal spirit.” I think this stands for the men actually fighting the wars and what they believe they are fighting for. Orwell never spoke of this in Homage because that was not the point of the novel. These two works stand in stark contrast to each other because they had very different goals.

Roberto Moscoso // March 25, 2010 at 1:02 am | Log in to Reply

Near the end of “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War”, Orwell comments on the Italian militiaman, the one mentioned in the beginning of Homage to Catalonia who had such a deep impression on Orwell. This impression is still visible while he is writing “Looking Back” all those years later, but he is also clear on the fact that he does not wish to repeat himself. We see this in various other parts in this essay as well, most notably in his apprehension to look into the Republican parties (256), a fact that is brought home by the P.O.U.M.’s complete absence from the essay. But while many of these memories are painful for him, he does not wish to delve in them solely for that reason: more importantly, it has become quite impossible for him. Writing nearly 5 years after the events described in Homage to Catalonia, it would be impossible to describe with the detail and the authenticity the trench warfare he experienced. With the current conditions at the time of the writing of ”Looking Back”, with World War II well under way, it might have even seemed pointless to a degree writing about a war that was already done with. So instead of looking at the events that he lived through (the training, the war, the politics in Barcelona), he focuses on the exterior. He looks upon his memories of Spain as an outsider, and in the same vein looks upon the events from an outside point of view, or to put it in better terms, from outside of Spain. The few references to direct experiences in the war (like the “Fascist” who was pulling up his pants, or the Arab soldier who had stood up for Orwell after being humiliated) mostly serve as introductions to commentary on war in general. Other than that, we mostly see opinions on such things as the atrocities committed, the reaction by the English intelligentsia, the reaction by the English, Russian, and German government, etc. This wasn’t a change in ideas for Orwell, seeing as to how well they coincide with the England described at the end of Homage to Catalonia. The “deep, deep sleep” (Homage 252) is echoed in passages like “the British and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, … they have no realistic picture of war in their minds” (“Looking Back” 250-251). By being able to look back, Orwell here is able to truly see what went wrong in the war (lack of British or Russian aide, the distortion of the news along party lines) and by taking into accounts Hitler’s campaign, how what we saw in the Spanish Civil War could be repeated, to a worse degree: “the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past” (259).

It is along these lines that we see the reintroduction of the Italian militiaman. In Homage to Catalonia, the Italian is presented as someone who “typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time” (4). The intense affection Orwell developed for a man he met only momentarily, along with the impression that he stood for everything the war was about, caused the Italian to stick in his mind, so well that we see him again in “Looking Back”. He expresses much of the same ideas, going into even more detail: “a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about. He symbolises for me the flower of the European working class” (“Looking Back” 264). To Orwell, the Italian stands for the fight by the common man to obtain what could only be described as a human right, the right to a decent life. Earlier in the essay, Orwell comments on how the fight against the working class will never end, because regardless of the bribes or of the lies, if their standard of living isn’t increased, they will once again take to arms. This is the “crystal spirit” that Orwell describes, the enduring will of men like the Italian militiaman who will continue to fight in order to reach the sun. They will “keep pushing upwards to the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements” (261).

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Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Spanish civil war periodical collection, 1923-2009.

Description by Sean Beebe, doctoral student in History and Archives & Special Collections assistant.

A large number of periodicals created during the Spanish Civil War were created by the fighting forces, many by particular units within those forces. These publications were intended to promote the image of those fighters and to help maintain unit morale and cohesion. The January 23, 1938 edition of Nuevo Ejercito (New Army), the newspaper of the 47th Division of the Republican army, contained a summary of the division’s recent combat activity; a Catalan-language page; and unit news, all interspersed with photographs of the division’s soldiers in winter action.

A similar approach is found in La Voz de la Sanidad, the newspaper of the international medical brigade attached to the 15th Division. Befitting the brigade’s multinational status, the paper was written in four languages: Spanish, French, English and German. La Voz de la Sanidad’s content consisted of a mixture of the same items reproduced—side-by-side or on succeeding pages—in each of the four languages, alongside items, both informative and comic, unique to each language.

A second type of periodical served to call for material support for the Republican side. In New York City, African-Americans combined this support with efforts to combat racism at home. The Negro Committee to Aid Spain, sponsored by such notables as Mary McLeod Bethune, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright, published a pamphlet entitled “A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain,” which recounted the story of Salaria Kee, an African-American nurse from Harlem who joined the volunteer American Medical Unit in 1937.

Kee’s story was juxtaposed with a more general account of those of African-American men who had volunteered for the International Brigades, as racism at home “appeared to them as part of the picture of fascism,” which could be most directly confronted in Spain. The pamphlet chronicled Kee’s early life, decision to go to Spain and her service there, both in hospitals and directly behind the lines — until a shell wound made her unfit for further service. Kee returned to America, and joined the fundraising campaign for which the pamphlet was produced. The text concluded with a quotation from Kee: “Negro men have given up their lives there…as courageously as any heroes of any age. Surely Negro people will just as willingly give of their means to relieve the suffering of a people attacked by the enemy of all racial minorities — fascism — and its most aggressive exponents — Italy and Germany.”

One further form of publication, that of outright propaganda designed to influence hearts and minds, forms an extensive part of the collection. A 1937 edition of the British magazine Spain Illustrated featured photographs (including those of corpses) and articles portraying “a year’s fight for democracy,” and condemning the Nationalists and their fascist backers for the tremendous suffering inflicted upon the Spanish people. The non-interventionist policy of the Western democracies was vilified as an utter failure, with Parliament coming in for particular criticism for its “pro-fascist” stance. Most dramatically, the magazine contended that the defeat of the Republicans would be but the prelude “for attacking England and France…all hope of peace in Europe would be at an end.”

Finally, the example of quasi-neutral international media opens an interesting window on to how the conflict was perceived outside of Spain, outside of an obvious ideological lens. In August 1936, the famed French illustrated magazine, L’Illustration , published a special edition dedicated to the civil war. L’Illustration ’s version of the war was one of utter tragedy, in which “fratricidal” conflict split the nation apart; its editors “could only see in the two Spains in conflict a single country which we love and which suffers.” Consequently, the magazine presented images of the conflict’s devastation, whether the rather graphic images of corpses left in public places, those of defiled churches, or of cities after bombardments and shelling. These particularly dramatic choices appear to serve an almost fatalistic reading of the conflict, in which no action can be taken but to observe this tremendous amount of suffering.

May 2, 2015

Brandeis University's Archives & Special Collections holds a significant amount of material relating to the Spanish Civil War, including over 4,700 books, close to 400 periodicals and roughly 250 posters. In addition, the Charles Korvin photograph collection comprises 244 black and white images taken during the War. Follow the links below for further information about these holdings:

Spanish Civil War periodical collection, 1923-2009 (finding aid)

Charles Korvin photographs, circa 1937-1938 (finding aid)

Spanish Civil War posters, 1936-1938 on Brandeis University’s Institutional Repository

Spotlight on the Spanish Civil War posters

Spotlight on the SCW poster ¡Jovenes! (circa 1937)

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Unburying Franco and the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War

For six decades, spain told a dictator’s story. for the past 22 years, citizens have been creating a new memory landscape.

Built by political prisoners, the Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen, is a contested site of memory in Spain. Historian Tyler Goldberger writes about recent efforts by citizens to dispel collective amnesia around dictator Francisco Franco’s regime and demand accountability for his forgotten victims. Courtesy of AP Newsroom .

by Tyler Goldberger | January 9, 2023

Provocatively deemed “The Spanish Holocaust” by historian Paul Preston, the Spanish Civil War—a conflict, extending from 1936 to 1939 that resulted in the repression, torture, and death of hundreds of thousands of people—weighs heavily in Spain’s collective memory. The traditional narrative of the war, asserted by the victorious dictator Francisco Franco, held that Franco and his Nationalist forces defeated an oppositional leftist coalition, the Republicans, to restore Spain to its past greatness. This interpretation of events remained essentially unchallenged in Spanish popular memory for decades, aided by censorship and repression during Franco’s own rule from 1939 to 1975, and by informal and institutionalized practices of later governments.

The Nationalist narrative persisted because Spanish authorities stifled any and all opposing memories of the war, silencing the stories of the hundreds of thousands of Republicans killed and exiled during and after the war, as well as those of the estimated 114,000 Republican victims whose fates remain unknown today. That is, until these narratives re-emerged at the turn of the 21st century, brought to light by Emilio Silva, a journalist and human rights activist whose grandfather, who identified as a Republican, was murdered in 1936 by Nationalist forces and tossed in a ditch.

Silva’s search for his grandfather both literally and figuratively unearthed long-silenced stories of the war’s brutality and revealed the myriad of tensions related to Spanish memory. His efforts, along with countless others demanding Spain and those who perpetrated Spain’s bloody past to confront this violence, have opened up avenues to negotiate more equitable and democratic memories today.

There is arguably no better example to illustrate the triumphs and challenges of Silva’s and others’ labor than the evolution of the Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen (referred to here as the Valley), a contested site of memory in a mountainous region overlooking Madrid, the capital city and a strategic battleground during the Spanish Civil War.

Franco decreed the erection of the Valley on April 1, 1940, the one-year anniversary of the Nationalist victory over the Republicans. Hoping to honor his notion of the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and “to further the memory of the fallen in our glorious Crusade” for “a better Spain,” he ordered the construction of a basilica, a cemetery, and a cross extending 150 meters high and 47 meters wide in the Cuelgamuros Valley. Nearby stands El Escorial, a UNESCO site that houses the remains of Spanish kings dating back to the 16 th century, speaking to a sense of royalty that Franco ascribed to this memorial.

Upon the opening of the Valley on April 1, 1959, Franco relocated the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a fascist leader killed during the Spanish Civil War, to the center of the basilica, honoring him with the only engraved tombstone at that time. When Franco died of natural causes in 1975, he, too, received a ceremonial burial with tens of thousands of people mourning at the Valley, as he was lowered into his dignified resting ground.

The almost 20-year construction of this monument to Nationalist glory and Republican defeat relied heavily on the labor of Republican political prisoners. They had to work above and around the bodies of deceased fellow Republicans—an estimated 33,000. Franco had ordered these victims’ remains to be exhumed from elsewhere and dumped under the spot where he built the new memorial. The Valley is a mass cemetery, yet without any signage or interpretation acknowledging these victims, the site continually reinforces amnesia of Republican memories.

In the generation following Franco’s death, the Spanish government preserved this intentional silencing of Republican narratives, institutionalizing forgetting through efforts like the 1977 Amnesty Law, which barred Spanish Civil War perpetrators from domestic prosecution. Yet while Spain refused to judicially confront its own violent past, its courts served as a global leader of universal jurisdiction. In 1998, former Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón issued an international warrant for former Chilean right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, illustrating transnational penal accountability. Ironically, when Garzón sought, ten years later, to bring charges of crimes against humanity committed during the Franco dictatorship, he was promptly convicted of a heinous crime and disbarred from his judgeship, a conviction that still holds today.

Emboldened by Garzón’s stance, non-state actors in Spain increasingly spoke out about reconciling past human rights violations in their own nation. As individuals and through organizations, hoping to create a more just society, Spanish citizens began to act.

Emilio Silva led the way. A trained journalist, Silva sought to write about his family history as he learned about the repressed Republican memories held on to by those who have suffered decades without answers to the whereabouts of their loved ones. Speaking to community members and discovering scant archival records, Silva came to learn that his grandfather might be buried in León. When Silva wrote an article for a local newspaper in 2000 entitled, “ My Grandfather Was a Disappeared, Too ,” it broke the decades-long silence about Republican loss. Immediately, the article connected Silva’s story to those of thousands of other families in Spain searching for loved ones disappeared, forgotten, and silenced during and following the Spanish Civil War. Volunteer archaeologists and anthropologists came to assist Silva, eventually finding an unmarked mass gravesite and exhuming Silva’s grandfather and 12 other previously disappeared victims of Franco’s forces.

In the 22 years since, Silva’s triumph has spurred hundreds of exhumations, many of which have been spearheaded by the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH) , or Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. ARMH, founded and led by Silva, advocates for the state to dedicate more labor and resources towards righting the wrongs of Spain’s past and prioritizing the victims of Franco’s terror and repression over the hagiographic memory of Franco himself.

Since its genesis, ARMH has fueled a new Spanish memory landscape rooted in civil society activism—the efforts of people on the ground rather than edicts from their iron-fisted leaders—that combats the political polarization that has mired Spanish memory activism. ARMH holds elected officials accountable to do more to actively confront and reckon with Spain’s bloody past. It works directly with local social networks to finance and resource reconciliation and exhumation processes, collecting testimonies from around the world to pinpoint loved ones’ last known whereabouts and resting grounds, and serving as a nexus for volunteers specializing in anthropology, history, digital media, and other disciplines to provide additional documentation of life for disappeared persons. ARMH’s grassroots actors have circulated petitions to the Spanish government to condemn Franco’s regime and to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to insert Spain into global human rights dialogue; have created community empowerment outreach programs to raise awareness about the past while bringing suffering families together; and have supported exhumations of forgotten victims of the war throughout the nation, driving Spain to rewrite and rebalance its memories of the past.

Individuals and organizations who contest monolithic state-created and state-sustained narratives create broader, more inclusive tellings of complex pasts. By amplifying voices previously silenced, they prioritize human rights and help societies reckon with and learn from past atrocities. They legitimize the identities, legacies, and memories of all people in society—not just those with the power to dictate how the past has been remembered and forgotten.

This is apparent at the Valley of the Fallen. ARMH’s front-line activism has been integral to reinterpreting the site to work toward memorializing both sides of the war. In 2007, ARMH’s demands to resignify the Valley manifested in the Historical Memory Law that specifically bans any shows of support for Franco and his fascist ideologies within this site of memory. ARMH continued to fight so that, in 2018, this law expanded to limit the burials of the Valley to those who died during the Spanish Civil War, calling for Franco’s exhumation. The leader’s body was exhumed and reinterred at El Pardo-Mingorrubio cemetery in October 2019, now resting next to his wife, his regime officials, and former Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Most recently, ARMH has spoken out about the passing of the Democratic Memory Law, legislation that holds the state fiscally responsible for searching for and identifying victims from the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. While this law makes huge strides in condemning Franco’s regime, ARMH “ criticizes ” this law for not going far enough, denouncing the legislation for failing to eliminate the 1977 Amnesty Law, failing to support or compensate families of the disappeared, and failing to pursue justice against Nationalist perpetrators. ARMH remains committed to fighting for national reconciliation that asserts the state as culpable and responsible for locating, exhuming, and reburying Republican victims and prosecuting those who perpetrated crimes.

Today, the Valley represents a more democratic site of memory as the battle to exhume and return unidentified victims from this space continues. While thousands remain buried underneath the basilica, their stories and memories are slowly becoming unburied.

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Free essays on the Spanish Civil War

Although it’s difficult to deem what the exact crime and evidence used against the “Anarchotrotskyists” would have been if the trial had been allowed to take place.  When assessing “The Claim” it’s difficult to analyse the extent to which the supposed Trotskyist crimes against the Republican government can be deemed to be true as the Communist aspects within the Republican government were predominantly Stalinist sympathising thus their judgement may have been perhaps limited because of such things as the Moscow Show Trials which displayed Trotsky as a supposed opponent to Communism  When looking at the May Days we must bare in mind that at this time that Stalin was not considered to be such a monster as he is now as much of the left simply didn’t accept events such as the purges and Ukrainian famine to have happened to the extent that we know them to have had now. Thus mine and I can imagine a great number of peoples judgement of someone referring to themselves as a Stalinist are clouded by more recent historical truths.   Historic Antagonism   When looking at the history of the Spanish left it begins to appear that the May Days were an inevitable clash between Anarchism and Communism as within Spain these two different ideologies had been vying for popularity for many years. If we briefly look at the history of both groups within Spain this becomes quite apparent.   Although obviously not either an Anarchist or a Communist the most radical movement in the mid-19th were the followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhorn, the most famous of these “federalists”, in Spain, was Fransesc Pi i Margall whom was regarded as being “the wisest of the federalists, almost an anarchist” by Ricardo Mella and also interestingly the only prime minister of the short lived First Spanish Republic of 1873. What we can gather from this is that Spanish “radicals” historically veered to the libertarian side of the left rather than the more federalist communism.[13]   The first major introduction of Anarchism to Spain was through a visit in 1868 by Giuseppe Fanelli the famous Italian Anarchist revolutionary, which was organised by perhaps the most influential figure of Anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin, to recruit members for the newly formed First International[14] (which aimed to unite different left-wing socialist, communist and anarchist political groups as well as trade-union organisations as well as creating a forum for discussion).[15] In 1872 the anarchists split from the International. Anthony Beevor describes this as being because “Bakunin utterly distrusted Marx’s character and predicted that the philosophy of such a man could only lead to dictatorship and deceit.”[16] If Beevor is to believed it seems inevitable that the two would be destined to split and secondly that the ideologies presented by these two intellectuals would not be able to coexist because of their contradictory nature of them as well as the emphasis both put on the problems with the others views and the negative affects such ideologies, if followed, would have.   In 1871 Marx sent his son-in-law Paul Lafargue to Spain after the fall of the Paris Commune.[17] During his time in Spain he is said to have laid the basis of Spanish Marxist socialism in Madrid.[18] Beevor writes that “The Marxists’ lack of success, in comparison to the anarchists, was partly due to the emphasise they placed on the central state. The idea of a ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ was unthinkable in such a blatantly crooked electoral system as Spain’s.”[19] Marx is said to have written to Engels that they would have to leave Spain to Bakunin for the time being.  Due to the popularity of Anarchism in Spain it’s perhaps not surprising that the 1936 revolution was predominantly an Anarchist movement [20] with much of Spain’s economy being put under worker control; in anarchist strongholds like Catalonia, the figure was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with heavy PCE influence.[21]  Any chance of cooperation between the two groups within Spain was further harmed in 1923 when Primo brought the secretary of the UGT, Fransisco Largo Caballero, into his government to set up industrial arbitration boards.[22] This was much against Anarchist principles as it was seen to be entirely “counterrevolutionary” to have any link to the bourgeois government as they were essentially the “enemy”.   It could perhaps be these historic relationships between Anarchism and Communism that caused such antagonism throughout the war as both ideologies had never previously been able to coexist and when present in the same environment tended to clash. Ultimately when the communists sided with the Republican government and attempted to disband the militias in favour of a “Popular Army”,[23] disarm private citizens and create a non-unionised army went against many of the “victories” that the Anarchists had made at the beginning of the revolution. Thus the Anarchists had to make the decision to either put up with these changes in order to form a “Popular Front” against the Fascists or continue their more Libertarian revolution.  When looking at these events from a historically determinist viewpoint it could be argued that the historical antagonism between Communists and Anarchists, both generally and specifically is Spain, caused the Barcelona May Days as at the inception of the “revolution” it was inevitable that it’s final resting place could not be ideologically inclusive of both views. The question therefore lies: if there was no Spanish Civil would these opposition groups have clashed in such a violent manner? At least hypothetically it seems that this would have been unlikely as events like the establishment of a regular army and moves towards more capitalist forms of production transpired to have brought these two groups into a hostility. Without such events it seems that antagonism of the nature seen in the May Days would have been unlikely to occur. We could perhaps therefore look at the Spanish Civil War as a catalyst for the May Days which brought historical opposition to a violent head.  This exacerbation of the situation could perhaps be partially attributed to the split on the Communist side with anti-Stalinists now forming a large group within Spain and  because of their anti-Soviet views be more likely allies of the Anarchists, which naturally would have unnerved the Stalinist aspects within Republican government who were at this time striving for a more Stalinist style governmental system. The Anarcho-Syndicalist Standpoint   Before embarking upon the views of Anarchists we must firstly remember that rather than a small and inconsequential left wing faction, as anarchists are regarded in many European countries, in 1934 and, I dare say, even now anarchists, hold great public support within Spain. In 1934 the CNT’s, “according to a government source”, membership numbered 1.58 million people whereas the UGT’s membership was 1.44 million.[24]   The Anarcho-Syndicalist standpoint is along the line of the May Days being part of a much wider move to make an originally predominantly anarchist revolution more inline with a Stalinist agenda. For this reason the IWA (International Workers Association), essentially the English cousin of the CNT, have written an article about why the May Days were significant as they saw the “Communists made their decisive move”[25] against the CNT and it’s associates as they stormed the CNT controlled telephone exchange which was seen to be symbolic of a much larger aim of “reintroducing capitalist modes of production.”[26] Which is against Anarcho-Syndicalist philosophy that sets out how industry should not be controlled on  a central level but instead by individual trade unions.[27]  The article from the IWA goes on to refer to a “courageous” plea made by the leadership of the CNT which read “Workers of the CNT! Workers of the UGT! Don’t be deceived by these manoeuvres. Above all else, Unity! Put down your arms. Only one slogan: We must work to beat fascism! Down with fascism!”[28] This call was mostly headed, leading to a stop in the fighting and can perhaps explains why Anarchist trade unions were not targeted after the May Days to the same extent that the POUM was. The article however fails to mention that this call to create a “popular-front” and essentially put on hold the “revolution” was not shared by all Anarcho-Syndicalist factions, the more radical Friends of Durruti whom were calling for a all out “revolution” against the “counter-revolutionary” republican government.[29]   To summarise the Anarcho-Syndicalist perspective, groups like the CNT and FAI took the view that the PCE and Republican government were attempting to attack the principles upon which the revolution had been built. However in the most part they took up the opinion that this conflict was one to be had later and at this time it was far more important to stop the Fascists winning the war. However we must also not forgot that there were those within these main Unions as well as in the Friends of Durutti militia who felt that any hope of the prolongation of the revolution depended upon the Republican government being combated at this time. The Trotskyist Standpoint   In the eyes of many Trotskyists a conflict with the republican government was in some ways inevitable and perhaps desirable. This was because the republican government was moving towards a more Soviet Union style system of government[30] which obviously went against the anti-Stalinist views of the “Trotskyists”.  The liquidation of a “revolutionary” atmosphere in Barcelona is no better shown than in George Orwell’s accounts of the Spanish Civil War. When he first arrived in Barcelona on the 26th of December 1936 [31] he described a situation were “there were no private motor cars”, “revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues” and “except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all.”[32] This seemingly couldn’t be more in contrast to his description of Barcelona just prior to the May Days with him writing that “The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolfing expensive meals, while for the working-class population food-prices had jumped enormously.”[33] Understanding this situation, it seems conceivable that the so called “Trotskyists” would want to show there opposition to the Stalinists and the republican government. This would therefore support an argument for the Trotskyists starting the May Days although obviously not in the sense that they were acting under Fascist orders whilst trying to undermine Stalinist elements within the Republican government.   It could therefore be said that although many “Trotskyists” desired a confrontation in order to challenge Stalinist influence within the Republican government, the actual violence of the May Days was in the most part triggered by the Stalinists with the taking of the telephone exchange and the clamping down on Trotskyist militias and leaders both after and before the May Days. Conclusion   It’s obvious that the historical opposition between the Anarchists and Communists and later the Stalinists and Trotskyists played a major part in the creation of a climate in which a conflict could occur. This can be seen by the numerous disagreements in the past that in the case of Anarchism and Communism lead to the Anarchists leaving the First International and secondly the opposition of Trotsky to Stalin in Russia which lead to the Moscow show trials, due to these events it does not seem inconceivable that such groups could clash in such a way in Spain.  What also seems to be clear is that Stalinist influence played a major part in causing antagonism between the Republican government and the POUM as well as Anarcho-Syndicalist groups, through the creation of a “Popular Army” as well as moving towards more capitalist modes of production. It could perhaps be said that it was through the taking of the CNT controlled telephone exchange that the situation was ignited.  In reference to the Trotskyist involvement in causing the May Days, it seems inconceivable that they could have had caused it in the way that many Stalinist insinuate/have insinuated. Although I’m sure that the Trotskyists didn’t cause the May Days in the sense that they were Fascist spies and in league with Hitler. They perhaps contributed to the situation that caused it’s occurrence with many members of the POUM, as I’ve previously mentioned, believing that a confrontation with the Republican government was desirable.   To summarise the “Trotskyist” factions were as far as I can see partially to blame for the conflict as they did nothing to prevent such a clash occurring. Although through my research it seems that the Stalinist government played a far larger part in creating the conflict as they both brought about the events that made cooperation no longer an option for both the Anarchists and Trotskyists as many of their aims had now been marginalised. The aftermath also shows us that the Stalinists capitalised on the conflict in such a way that it seems unlikely that it was simply a consequence of the clashes. Alongside the roles of factions in the immediate build up to the conflict it seems that the role of the long run antagonism within the left in Spain must not be overlooked as it appears to have done more than anything to create a climate in which a confrontation could occur. Footnotes:   [1] Hitchens, Christopher. Hitch 22: A Memoir. London: Atlantic, 2011. 72. Print  [2] Hitchens, Christopher. Hitch 22: A Memoir. London: Atlantic, 2011. 72. Print  [3] Leys, Simon. Orwell & the Anarchists. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/orwell-and-anarchists/. 2011. Web  [4] Durgan, Andy, The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM in The Spanish Civil War: The View From The Left - Al Richardson. Pontypool: The Merlin Press Ltd, 1992. 47. Print  [5] Held, Walter. Stalinism and the POUM in the Spanish Revolution. Quatrième Internationale, 1937. Print  [6] Rees, Tim. International Communism and the Communist International, 1919-43, Manchester University Press, 1998. 154. Print  [7] Souchy, Augustin. A Tragic Week In May. London: Freedom Press, 1987. 17. Print.  [8] Courtouis, Stéphane. The Black Book of Communism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 340. Print  [9] Brockway, Fenner. Arrest of P.O.U.M. leaders. International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity, 1937. Print  [10] Solano, Wilebaldo. The Spanish Revolution The Life of Andreu Nin. ILP: 1974. Print  [11] Ibárruri, Dolores. Memorias de Dolores Ibárruri. Barcelona: Planeta, 1985. 383. Print  [12] Solano, Wilebaldo. The Spanish Revolution The Life of Andreu Nin. ILP: 1974. Print  [13] Bookchin, Murray. To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936. San Francisco: AK Press. 1994. Print  [14] Guillaume, James. Michael Bakunin A Biographical Sketch. New York : Knopf. 1971. 23. Print  [15] Raymond, Walter. Dictionary of politics: selected American and foreign political and legal terms. Brunswick Publishing Corp. 1992. 85. Print  [16] Beevor, Anthony. The Spanish Civil War. Penguin Books. 2006. 24. Print  [17] Heywood, Paul. Marxism and the Failure of Organised Socialism in Spain, 1879-1936. Cambridge University Press. 2003. 6. Print  [18] Beevor, Anthony. The Spanish Civil War. Penguin Books. 2006. 26. Print  [19] Beevor, Anthony. The Spanish Civil War. Penguin Books. 2006. 26. Print  [20] Bookchin, Murray. To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936. San Francisco: AK Press. 1994. Print  [21] Dolgoff, Sam. The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution.  New York Free Life Editions. 1974. 41. Print  [22] Beevor, Anthony. The Spanish Civil War. Penguin Books. 2006. 31. Print  [23] Colberg, Barbara. The Effect of Communist Party Policies on the Outcome of the Spanish Civil War.The Ohio State University. 2007. 33. Print  [24] Beevor, Anthony. The Spanish Civil War. Penguin Books. 2006. 27. Print  [25] http://www.solfed.org.uk/the-‘may-days’-in-barcelona-1937. The ‘May Days’ in Barcelona 1937. Web  [26] http://www.solfed.org.uk/the-‘may-days’-in-barcelona-1937. The ‘May Days’ in Barcelona 1937. Web  [27] Rocker, Rudolf. Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism. Freedom Press. 21.1988. Print  [28] http://www.solfed.org.uk/the-‘may-days’-in-barcelona-1937. The ‘May Days’ in Barcelona 1937. Web  [29] The friends of Durruti group. Towards a Fresh Revolution. 1938. Print  [30] Colberg, Barbara. The Effect of Communist Party Policies on the Outcome of the Spanish Civil War. The Ohio State University. 2007. 33. Print  [31] Orwell, George. Orwell In Spain. Penguin Classics. 2011. 6. Print  [32] Orwell, Geroge. Homage to Catalonia. Mariner Books. 1980. 3. Print  [33] Orwell, Geroge. Homage to Catalonia. Mariner Books. 1980. 98. Print

In July 1936, in parallel to German troops marching in the Rhineland and the Rome-Berlin Axis being signed, the Spanish Civil war broke out. A consequence of complete opposite ideologies, unhappiness towards democracy and an appeal to extreme solutions, Spain soon fell under the same situation happening in neighboring countries, Germany and Italy, where Fascism was taking over. From 1923 to 1930 General Primo de Rivera ruled the country after years of an incompetent government in power. Following the 1929 Wall Street Crash and Great Depression, Spain and many more countries suffered a severe economic crisis, which led Alfonso XIII to abdicate and the end of a monarchy. As unhappiness and lost hope increased among the population in Spain, the popularity of two main opposing groups grew, the right-wing Nationalists and the left-wing Republicans. Professor Alaric Searle describes the civil war as a war that “had a clear division between the major totalitarian participants and the democratic observers.” This essay will in fact analyze and evaluate the difference in ideologies of the two main forces fighting in the Spanish Civil war and how their role and additional complications affected the victory of the Nationalist right-wing party.

José Calvo Sotelo, a leading member of the monarchist and conservative right-wing party in the parliament, was murdered on July 13th, 1936 by a close connection to the leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), Indalecio Prieto. This event was the spark that started the previously planned military coup by the Nationalists, which later failed and officially marked the start of the Spanish Civil War. The so-called Nationalist group led by General Franco was amused by the totalitarian fascist ideology whose popularity was growing in both Italy and Germany around the same time. Supported by the Army, the Church and many landowners, this political group had the tendency to only focus on the military aspects of a conflict. As they all claimed they were fighting for law and order, they also felt the need to protect the Church from godless political parties like the Communists. The Nationalists was how the numerous right-wing groups decided to call themselves prior of the war. However, even though the name may suggest that they all share the same ideology, they didn’t. In fact, it was a group made up of the Carlists, who demanded a restoration of monarchy; the Falange, a fascist group favoring a dictatorship; the Nationalists, who fought for a strong government and a national attitude; and finally the Military and the CEDA, group of right-wing parties leaders. Clearly, all groups had different aims and ideologies in mind, however they shared one similarity which was the enemy, specifically the Communist party. The role of ideology within the Nationalists was crucial, with only one aim connecting all groups it had to be strong, passionate and clear enough for them to fight together. Foreign interest was as equally divided, in fact countries like Britain decided to follow non-intervention. Nevertheless, countries such as Italy, Germany and Russia joined either side due to their immense interest in who would win the war and therefore affect any political, economic or social connections with Spain. I believe the support to the Nationalists from such charismatic fascist countries such as Italy and Germany, definitely played a role in uniting the differences in ideologies from all right-wing countries. The belief of fighting alongside such passionate totalitarian states that shared some of the same ideals and definitely the same enemy, had an impact on how much the groups believed in one another as they fought against the same enemy. Therefore, observing all ideology differences part of the Nationalists the chances of internal fighting was high, however the fact that they shared the same enemy and threat tightened the bond between them.

Foreign investment also played a major role in maintaining fanatic loyalty within Nationalist members and all ideology differences may have become secondary to them while fighting. As Eric Hobsbawm claims, these times, such as the Spanish Civil War years can be defined as “Ages of extremes”, this can suggest how the Republic ideology was the complete opposite of any right- wing beliefs from the Nationalists. After the abdication of the King Alfonso XIII and the fall of the monarchy, the atmosphere of republicanism was growing. The republican left-wing government was elected at the start of 1936, whose ideology wanted radical change after years of instability and skepticism in the government. Supported by army officers, workers and peasants, their ideology to solve problems was based on the organization of strikes, riots and assassinations. Some of their first radical changes, included Catalonia being allowed to be a self-government, attacks on the Church and its power and the nationalization of large states, which were against all different right-wing party’s ideologies. Also known as the Popular Front, the Republican opposition was made up of 3 main left-wing ideology-based groups  whose differences severely weakened their position later in the war. This group was made up of the Anarchists, who believed in no borders, and complete freedom; the Syndicalists, who was a powerful group of trade unions and wanted to overthrow the capitalist system; and finally, the Socialists, who in fact were despised by the two previously stated left-wing groups, because of their ideology appeal to the middle-class groups instead of the workers. Led by Largo Caballero, the Socialists party in charge, decided to not support the government anymore, which gained the support of the communists as well, hoping the government would fail and they could seize power. The clear and tragic differences in ideologies between these 4 left-wing groups, had little to no equal ideologies, similarly to the Nationalist groups. However, unlike the Nationalists, the Republican’s foreign interest and intervention played a weak role in keeping the different ideologies together to fight against the same enemy. Even if the USSR, a communist state, offered intervention to the Republicans, their support was weak, underequipped and old-fashioned. The USSR decided to provide the left-wing army in Spain with old ammunition, aircraft and military resources reserves, which were no longer needed or wanted in the USSR. Stalin also firmly believed that all Anarchists and Socialists should be weakened since they did not support communist ideology completely. As a result, he considered them as enemies as well and murdered many of them. This weak, violent and unstable connection between groups part of the Popular Front, started to affect the final outcome fighting against the Nationalists, leading to Republican defeat in March 1939.

Looking beyond the ideology conflicts which caused the civil war, factors like the Great Depression added pressure and unhappiness among the Spanish population. Just like in numerous other countries, like Britain, Italy and Japan, the Great Depression after 1929 severely caused problems within these nations. Prior to the war, as Spain was still a monarchy, the country was considered quite backwards, with very few industries based on the production of steel and iron, and it mostly relied on the agriculture market. As a result of the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the Great Depression, in Spain, agricultural prices were drastically falling due to the drop in important trades with outside countries in economic instability. Both wine and olive exports declined, as a result peasants and workers unemployment increased. This can explain the support and appeal to the left-wing ideology at the beginning of the 1930s, who prioritized workers, their positions and wages. Although, all solutions  presented by the left-wing parties, soon resulted in little to no change to the worker’s conditions and problems, therefore causing the support loss of many workers contributing to the start of the civil war. Consequently, the small industrialized market in Spain of iron fell by a third, while steel production fell by a half. Looking a few years forward, foreign intervention was very much needed in order to fight a war, since such metal production had drastically fallen, unable to provide ammunition and resources to both Nationalists and Republicans. Just as we can observe a similar situation happening in Weimar Germany, the population was clearly unhappy, exhausted and had lost belief in the government, here the extreme and drastic solutions that both the right-wing and left-wing parties proposed, turned out to be very appealing to the population. In Spain, the lost trust in the government resulted in political and social infighting from different groups in the population, leading a tragic division of ideologies. In conclusion, after carefully analyzing and evaluating how the ideology differences from the right-wing Nationalist party and the left-wing Republican party contributed to the start of the civil war, it is clear to see that there was a great threat posed by opposing ideologies. Such extreme ideologies as these, clearly caused conflicts and severe disagreements within the population and the groups themselves, which could only be heard by the organization of violent attacks or assassinations. While ideology differences inside the numerous groups forming the Nationalists could be kept together with the help of foreign fascist intervention and the aim of defeating the same enemy, the Republican army fell apart due to the same reasons. Both opposing parties appealed to very different approaches of totalitarian states, where the military aspect had a tendency to only be focused on. In addition to these great differences in ideologies, the Great Depression certainly played a major role in the building up to such extreme divisions in the country. Results of the depression such as unhappiness, economic and political problems led the population to follow and believe in extreme ideals, dividing the population further.

 In 1936 a civil conflict broke out in Spain between the country's republican government and a nationalist movement led by Francisco Franco, after over 100 years of social, economic and political disputes. Both Republicans and Nationalists could be considered amalgamations of different political groups, each with differing ideologies. Furthermore, there was great ideological polarization in Europe at the time, which marked the reactions of the other countries when it came to the conflict. Due to this “Evaluating the role of ideological differences in the Spanish Civil War” can be considered quite a broad and vague prompt as said ideological differences found their way into all aspects of the conflict. In order to analyze their role more effectively this essay will describe their influence in starting, fuelling and deciding the victor of the conflict. This essay will argue that while ideological differences played a major role in starting and, on a more minor scale, fueling the war, it was the overwhelming power difference granted to the two combatting sides by the military support of foreign countries, or lack thereof, that ultimately sustained the war and decided its outcome. While Ideological differences were clearly a crucial factor in starting the war, it is not a stretch to argue that they might have had little importance in commencing the conflict. The motivation that most likely sparked the war on July 17th 1936 was the pent up frustration and displeasure on the part of all the exponents of conservatism in Spain, built up by a series of radically liberal reforms made by the government. One of these major exponents being the CEDA party (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas), the most influential catholic force in Spanish politics, who were naturally perturbed by the government’s “separation of the church and the state” which denied, under article 26 of the constitution, funding for the catholic church; repurposing some of their properties, and banning clerics from teaching in schools. Likewise, integral conservative and nationalist parties such as Acción Española, as well as the aristocracy, strongly  disapproved the nationalization of large estates, such as land, banks and railways, in addition to the agrarian reforms and the strides that were being made to give more freedom to Catalonia and the Basque Country. Additionally, the Spanish Military Union (Unión Militar Española), of which Franco was a part of, felt betrayed by the government’s amnesty of left wing political prisoners and the discharging or transfer of various military leaders. Furthermore the fascist Falange group was intent on establishing a fascist government in Spain under the example of Italy and Germany. Lastly, groups like the Alfonsists and Carlists, who advocated for the reinstitution of the Spanish monarchy, were ideologically opposed to the idea of a democratic government in the first place. The rise to power of the Popular Front in the elections of 1936 and their immediate radical liberal reforms, thus forced a strong communion of interests among all the differing right wing ideologies. And together with the structural weakness, due to the clash of ideologies, of the Popular Front, which included a heterogeneous mixture of parties such as the socialists, syndicalists and communists (with the addition of the anarchists), that made a possible war more appealing to the right, a conflict was made inevitable. However the straw that broke the camel's back was the murder of right wing polititian Calvo Sotelo by the Republican guard which led the right wing to believe that force was the only option. On the other hand, it can also be argued that, as AJP Taylor said referring to Hitler rather than the war, the Great Depression put wind in the Spanish civil war’s sails, as the 1929 stock market crash was what caused the great ideological divide present in Spain in the first place. Due to the depression unemployment skyrocketed and the Republic lost support of the working class. Due to this the government was forced to give into the people’s demands more to regain their support, this led to a much more “socialist” way of governing, as well as all the aforementioned reforms. Furthermore, it can also be argued that what truly moved the right wing to action  were the economic interest of different social classes. The military officers were simply moved by their forced premature retirements that caused them trouble economically and in terms of social status. The conservative representatives, who were largely landowners, and the members of the church were hit economically by the nationalization of their estates as well as a general loss of power, which, for the landowners, also came largely due to the agrarian reforms. While the Industrialists were hit hard by the nationalization of railways and the government enforced increase in worker rights and salaries. And while this economic argument does explain the actions that led to the start of the war in a similar way to the previous one, it still represents the polarization of opposite ideologies involving the conceptions of social order, the roles of Church and State, the battle between obscurantism and modernization. As the war progressed, the ideological conflict attracted the interest of major international powers with similar ideologies (Italy and Germany on the side of the Nationalists and the USSR on the side of the republicans). To some extent Hitler and Mussolini chose to get involved in the conflict in order to stop the spread of communism and spread their own Fascist ideology. Much like his fascist counterparts, Stalin was concerned with the recent rise of fascism in europe and offered his help to the republicans in order to marginalize its advance and increase the influence of communism. Stalin however was not alone as the anti fascist sentiment had spread throughout the world, which led to the formation of the International Brigades counting over 40000 men from 53 different nations. These soldiers truly believed in their ideology and risked their lives for it; they believed they were fighting a crucial battle against evil as shown in the Irish song “​Viva la Quinta Brigada​'' in which lyrics like “truth and love against the forces of evil” truly carry the sense of determination and passion these men felt during the conflict. This shows how ideological differences played a key role in turning a civil  war into a global conflict that would affect the lives of people the world over as well as in extending the conflict and fueling the bloodshed. However Hitler and Mussolini’s motivations ran much deeper and were much more strategically based than simply supporting a war of ideologies. The two dictators hoped that a nationalist Spain would be a valuable ally against France and Britain, an alliance that would give them control over much of mainland Europe and an especially strong advantage against France. In addition, well agreed upon sentiments regarding Hitler and Mussolini’s motivations are that of historian and author Eileen Heyes who argues that for Hitler the Spanish civil war was merely “a chance to test the weapons and planes Germany was building” and that of the Naval War College (U.S.) which states that Mussolini “coveted access to bases from which he could easily ravage vital French strategic routes in the western Mediterranean”, access that he would later obtain. This, together with the fact that Franco wasn’t actually a pure Fascist, thus reducing the importance of ideological influence, shows how these countries' motivations for fueling the war were much more tactical than ideological. To further reinforce the idea that pure ideological motivation wasn’t enough of a reason to further fuel the conflict, on the other side Stalin only offered minimal support and mainly focussed his efforts on encouraging the Comintern to act, while France, Britain and the US refused to act out of domestic issues, military incapability and lack of strategic interest respectively. Ideological Differences also played a minor role in deciding the victor of the Spanish civil war. While the nationalists were unified in their aim, had a common enemy and a charismatic leader in Francisco Franco, the republicans were divided by Ideological differences, often clashing with each other. The anarchists and communists fought each other in Barcelona, the communists themselves being divided into Stalinists and Trotskyites. There was even a change in leadership as Caballero was replaced by Juan Negrín. Showing how ideological differences  ended up playing a limited, secondary role in deciding the victor of the civil war. Ultimately, it is evident that the prime reason for the Republican loss in the spanish civil war was the overwhelming discrepancy in military resources between the two armies. As discussed before the Republican army was offered only a fraction of the military support the Nationalists received. Italy offered around 80000 men, 157 tanks and 458 aircrafts and much more while Germany supported the Nationalist army by air dropping them to the continent from Morocco with the use of the Condor Legion, a special aircraft unit, as well as also offering equipment and men. Crucially, the international community signed a non-intervention agreement. The US had their own non intervention policy and therefore refused involvement in foreign countries’ affairs. The United Kingdom was struggling with the consequences of the Great Depression, public opinion was extremely anti war and the army was in no shape to fight a large scale conflict. France on the other hand was already worried by a possible conflict with Germany and thus opted not to participate in the war. Even the aid the Republicans received was limited and subpar. It only included the 40000 international brigade volunteers as well as obsolete weapons and aircrafts from the Soviet Union all heavily priced and whose payment was to be immediate and in gold. Further adding insult to injury, Nationalist war leaders were highly skilled, experienced soldiers as a large part of the experienced army officers aligned themselves with the right wing cause. This exemplifies the relative non importance of ideological differences in deciding the victor of the Spanish civil war as even without internal turmoil, the Republicans were left at an insurmountable military disadvantage. In conclusion, while ideological differences played a crucial role in starting the civil war; as a whole, they did not contribute in a significant manner to the events that followed, and thus played an overall supporting role to that of foreign intervention that was key in fuelling and deciding the outcome of the conflict.

Foreign intervention played a key role in the outcome of the Spanish civil war, leading to a Nationalist victory and Republican loss. Germany and Italy, the fascist powers of Europe, supported the nationalists under Franco, supplying them with weapons, strategy, supplies and to a smaller extent soldiers. The Republicans on the other hand received support from the soviet union, receiving limited and outdated weaponry such as the Heinkel airplanes as well as little manpower other than the International brigades, which contained 36,000 untrained men. Additionally, the republicans did not receive aid from the only other Democratic powers in Europe, Britain and France, as they had a non-intervention policy. This essay will argue that Foreign intervention on one side and limited intervention on the other were the main cause for the victory of Franco’s nationalists. Firstly, a look into the support received by the Republicans is required. The republicans received resources from the Soviet Union in exchange for their gold reserves. This meant that the Republicans no longer had money to buy resources from anyone and were solely reliant on the Soviet Union for support. This can be seen by them not buying weaponry and resources from any foreign power. The Soviets, supplied with the Spanish gold reserves, provided the Republicans with a few hundred tanks and airplanes yet no actual soldiers to support them other than the International Brigades which were organized by the Comintern. This meant that the Soviets were unwilling to provide real assistance to the Spaniards as they did not consider this war important enough for Russian lives to be lost. This is further detailed by George Orwell, as he determines that there were very few Russians within the international brigade and that there were no trained Russian units fighting in the war. The planes and pilots the soviets provided the Republicans ultimately proved ineffective and unimportant in the outcome of the war. The Heinkel airplanes proved no match for the German Messerschmitt’s provided by the Condor legion which ultimately led to a loss of air superiority in 1937. Additionally, the Russian tanks proved ineffective as they broke down and as there were no mechanics nor resources to fix them, the Nationalists gained superiority in the flatlands. The lack of strategy within the Republican army allowed the Nationalists to take the entirety of western Spain within a year. This could have been avoided had the Soviets sent over trained brigades as well as commanders, as they would have been able to put up a strategic defense of the western part of Spain as well the major cities. Ultimately tanks and airplanes were instrumental in the taking of the two major Republican cities of Madrid and Barcelona as detailed by George Orwell when describing the loss of morale within the International Brigades and subsequently the Spanish Republican volunteers. In conclusion, due to the lack of foreign intervention in support of the Republicans they could not keep up with the Nationalists and the support they received from the Italians and Germans However, the Republicans would have been unable to win the war were it not for German and Italian intervention. Firstly, the Army of Africa would have been unable to cross over to mainland Spain as they would not have had any means of transportation. The Germans supplied the army with an airlift while the Italians supplied the ships moving the supplies with air cover. Without this air cover and airlift, the Nationalists would have been unable to cross the Mediterranean. The Army of Africa would have had to go by sea as they had no airplanes in Morocco and the airplanes under Nationalist control in the Mainland would have been unable to carry the soldiers. This can be seen as there were only 10 planes under Nationalist control. The sea was controlled by the Republicans, as they still remained in control of the navy. Therefore, any attempts to cross the Mediterranean by boat would have been stopped and would most likely have made the war far easier for the Republicans. The Army of Africa was instrumental to Nationalist victory. In 1936, the Army of Africa took control of almost the entirety of western Spain, stretching all the way from Cadiz, to Corunna. The reason for this was that the soldiers were trained and under the command of a well-respected General. The soldiers also had far superior supplies to those of the regular Spanish army, as they had machine guns and weapons which were needed in their conquest of Morocco. These soldiers had also experience battles before, as they were stationed in rebellious Morocco, therefore their morale was far higher and rarely decreased. The assistance of Foreign powers was also instrumental in decreasing the morale of the soldiers of the Republican army. The Italians decreased the morale through the destruction of the ships carrying resources for the Republicans using submarines. This can be seen by the lower conscription numbers in 1936-37, the increase in 1938 occurring due to heightened morale after the Italians agreed to stop bombing the ports. Additionally, the gruesome bombing of Guernica by the Condor legion, as portrayed by Pablo Picasso, led to the Germans instilling fear in the Republican cities, as they were now aware as to what will happen if they resist the Nationalists. This can be seen by the swift fall of Bilbao. This meant that the Nationalists were able to move through Spain at a far greater speed as they could take major cities very quickly. Additionally, air superiority as well as tanks played a major role in the taking of the major cities of Barcelona and Madrid. The German Messerschmitt’s outmatched the Soviet Heinkel’s in the war due to their superior technology as they were built far later. The superiority of German planes can also be seen in operation Barbosa were the Germans achieved air superiority over Stalingrad before moving their planes to the west. Addiotionally, tanks played a key role in taking the major cities, as the conscripted soldiers had no tools to fight them, as detailed by George Orwell’s description of the fall of Barcelona. Finally, German and Italian assistance was vital in the Nationalists winning the Spanish civil war. In conclusion, although both sides received foreign aid, the German and Italian proved much more effective than the Russian aid and was the only reason the Nationalists won the war. Had the airlift of the Army of Africa not occurred, the Republicans would have remained in control of the government just as they remained in control after the riots in 1936, they did not require soviet assistance for that and would not have required it to stop the soldiers of the mainland Army that decided to join the Nationalists. 

  From the May 2018 IBDP History Paper 2 Exam

 Examine the long- and short-term causes of one 20th-century war. 

As stated by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “A civil war is not a war but a sickness...The enemy is within. One fights against oneself”. The Spanish Civil War, which took place from 1936-39, began following the failure of a military coup in its aim to take control of the entire country, and was the outcome of political polarisation in Spain that had already been brewing for several decades before the outbreak of the war. It was seen as the equivalent of Fascist takeovers by Mussolini and Hitler. The war led to the intervention of other countries on both sides, with the Nationalists, or rebels, receiving aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, whilst the Republicans were helped by the Soviet Union and the International Brigades, which was made up of European and American volunteers. Regarding the origins of the Spanish Civil War, there were long- and short-term causes that were to blame for this ruthless conflict. This essay will discuss that whilst political issues were the main causes, long- and short-term, there were also other factors, especially when taking the long-term causes into consideration. Officially, the Spanish Civil War began on July 17th, 1936, only four days after the murder of Jose Calvo Sotelo, a Spanish politician and jurist. The assassination followed the victory of the Popular Front government in the general election on Febrary 16th 1936, in which Azaña was restored to power with a liberal but not radical manifesto. This event was seen as both a pursuit to keep democracy and peace and also an operation of extremist communism, highlighting the extent to which Spain was polarised at the time. Furthermore, this threw the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas), or CEDA into a pit of disruption, which was unusual, as usually the CEDA itself was the one at the root of chaos subsequent to its formation in February 1933, shortly after Azaña lost much of the support he once had. For example, it was what sparked the Asturias rising in October 1934, when Catalonia attempted to declare independence, however the act of freedom was suspended after the uprising of the Asturian miners against the right-wing government. Going back a decade, Spain was already suffering, as the country had no resistance to the coup of General Primo de Rivera, who established an authoritarian right-wing regime to solve Spain’s problems. Due to this, he was able to rule ruthlessly for seven years (1923-30) and undermine the legitimacy of the monarchy before his resignation in 1930. Additionally, Spain had twelve unsuccessful governments between the years 1918-1923, further presenting the political instability and struggles between periods of conservatism and liberalism. Moreover, extremists in Spain believed that the country’s problems stemmed from long-term issues that could only be fixed by war, in particular after the establishment of the Second Republic in April 1931. This was also the Republican movement that overthrew Alfonso XIII. These long-term issues were not also political, but also industrial, economic, and army-related. Many of the short-term causes of the Spanish Civil derive from there being ‘Two Spains’ at the time, however this polarisation began long before the war ever broke out. There was the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and VGT controlling urban areas, but the Communist Party, Socialists, and Liberals were also present in Spain, all of which were divided over reforms, which could’ve been the lead up to Spain failing to keep a stable government closer to the start of the war. There were an abundance of different political issues, including corrupt or rigged elections, the church using its wealth to gain political and social influence, and power being held mostly by the wealthy oligarchs of society. In addition, there were struggles between the centralist state and Catalona and the Basque Provinces after Primo de Rivera took  back Catalonia’s self-governing rights. The effects of WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the final loss of the Spanish empire in 1898 also had a further effect on Spain that could have been somewhat at fault for the Spanish Civil War, destroying much of Spain’s political strength. Aside from political injustices and problems, Spain was also faced with industrial issues long before the war. There was a huge need for modernisation and reform, as industrial workers struggled with low wages, long working hours, poor working conditions and housing, and more. Agriculture was Spain’s main source of economy and employment, but it did not provide enough food, as work was seasonal. Furthermore, the agricultural system was feudalistic, with anarchists advocating for the redistribution of land. The expansion of any agricultural land was also limited by poverty. For all of the reasons mentioned above, it is understandable why the country was so divided, not only over politics but also industry (in this case, mainly agriculture), and also the economy. Moreover, there were several different origins of economic issues that contributed to the long-term causes of the Spanish Civil War. The post WWI depression was one of them, as well as the end of the Moroccan war in 1924, which put Spain in severe debt. The Church was also an issue, as it controlled education and certain important elements of the economy, however only really supported the upper classes, therefore was resented by the poor peasants. They saw the Church as a part of the wealthy classes that oppressed them, forbidding them to ever attempt to move up in the economic and social hierarchy. Spain was completely segregated, with land being owned by the ‘Grandees’ (Spanish nobility) in the south, and peasants owning insufficient land in the north who were supported by the anarchists. In the north, there were also riots which were repressed by the Civil Guard, but still even decades before the war there was violence and division within the country. The Spanish army was seen as a protector of the nation that intervened in politics if a crisis ever were to occur. However, it was unpopular due to its brutal reputation and heavy taxes, and also ineffective, as shown by the loss of the Spanish empire and struggle to keep control of Morocco between 1906-26. Knowing this, it can be understood why the civil war escalated in Spain, as it is unlikely that it would be able to keep control of its own population if it could not control Morocco’s, which has always been much smaller. In addition, the army was too big, with too many officers, and there was a desperate need for reform as with too many officers, it is difficult to keep order within the army. Similarly to the Church’s preference to the upper class, upper and middle class dominated officer corps and were generally conservative, so the lower class and those who were not conservative were completely excluded. To conclude, although it was technically the assassination of Jose Calvo Sotelo and other significant events shortly before that that caused the Spanish Civil War, one cannot forget the political, industrial, and economic issues that Spain had been struggling with long before such events, which may have not even happened if such problems had been resolved earlier. If such had been successful, Spain would most likely no longer have been polarised, meaning that no civil war would’ve ever broken out. For these reasons, whilst the short-term causes of the Spanish Civil War are obviously significant to the reasons as to why the war started, these would not have arisen without the long-term problems Spain had already been faced with.  Works Cited Untitled, https://nisis.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/2/9/10295486/causes_of_scw.pdf. Accessed 11 December 2022. Byrne, Justin. “Spanish Socialist Workers' Party.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Socialist_Workers%27_Party. Accessed 11 December 2022. “History- Spain Flashcards.” Quizlet, https://quizlet.com/54704251/history-spain-flash-cards/. Accessed 11 December 2022. “The Long Term and Short Term Causes of the Spanish Civil War.” Prezi, https://prezi.com/8cqpyl_llaf4/the-long-term-and-short-term-causes-of-the-spanish-civil-war/. Accessed 11 December 2022. “Spanish Civil War | Holocaust Encyclopedia.” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/spanish-civil-war. Accessed 11 December 2022. Woodcock, George. “Spanish Civil War | Definition, Causes, Summary, & Facts.” Encyclopedia Britannica, published 8 November 2022, https://www.britannica.com/event/Spanish-Civil-War. Accessed 11 December 2022.      

 Paper 2: Examine the long- and short-term causes of one 20th-century war. As a Spaniard, the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 is deeply ingrained into my history, as it played an instrumental role in forming the Spain that I know today. Due to the extent of foreign involvement and the supposed direct confrontation between communism and fascism, the Spanish Civil War, which saw a conservative, monarchist, Catholic Nationalist faction overthrow a Republic ruled by communists, socialists, and anarcho-syndicalists, is often touted as the "dress rehearsal for World War II", and, while this may or may not be true, its profound effect on Spain and the world is undeniable. However, in order to properly understand this complex and influential conflict, it is crucial to examine the causes of the Spanish Civil War, both in the long-term and the short-term. In this essay, I will argue that the long-term processes of the Spanish Empire's decline and the class struggle within Spain, combined with short-term causes including the Great Depression, the left-wing government's reforms, and the assassination of José Calvo Sotelo, led to the outbreak of civil war in Spain, and that fascism was not a key factor. In the long-term, the Spanish Civil War was caused by the gradual decline of the Spanish Empire and the subsequent surplus of military officers concentrated in the Army of Africa. Having been the first empire known as "the empire on which the sun never sets" and having brought Catholicism to the New World, the Spanish Empire's decline, initiated by the Spanish American wars of independence in the early 19th century, was particularly humiliating for Spain, a once proud and powerful nation that saw itself reduced to a rump state. The final blow was delivered by the Spanish–American War of 1898, which resulted in Spain's loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. This was a key turning point, as, after the Spanish–American War, the considerable number of military officers that had been necessary to control a colonial empire but were now superfluous returned to Spain, eventually becoming primarily concentrated in Spanish Morocco as part of the Army of Africa. Given that these military officers were, for the most part, conservative, monarchist, and devoutly Catholic, this concentration of military personnel in Spanish Morocco later served as a powerful basis for a Nationalist uprising against the Popular Front government, which many in the military saw as betraying everything Spain stood for, especially in terms of religion. On the other hand, with regards to the Republicans, it can be argued that the Second Spanish Republic's creation and controversial reforms, which were a short-term catalyst of the Spanish Civil War, were caused by the long-term process of the class struggle within Spain. For centuries, Spain had, much like most of its European contemporaries, been a deeply hierarchical society, with the lavish life of the aristocracy starkly contrasting the horrendous standards of living that the peasants were subjected to. In fact, Antony Beevor introduces his well-known book The Spanish Civil War by using an image of Alfonso XIII, King of Spain until 1931, being pushed forwards in his broken automobile by peasants, to illustrate the extent of the divide between social classes in Spain and the effect this had on the sentiment of the populace. This is a valid representation of Spanish society at the time, seeing as the income share of the top 0.01 percent of the population was around 1.5 percent in the early 1930s, compared to around 0.8 percent in 2005. By the 1930s, Spain's working class population had endured centuries of hardship while watching the monarchs indulge in luxuries – it is not surprising that they embraced the opportunity for change and  helped bring about the Second Spanish Republic. By doing so, they plunged Spain into the period of instability that would culminate in the Spanish Civil War. While the Spanish Empire's decline and the class struggle within Spain made civil war possible, it is vital to consider the short-term causes that triggered the Spanish Civil War. One of these was the Great Depression, which led the Spanish economy to drop 20 percent below its usual trend in gross domestic product (GDP) throughout the 1930s. When economic downturn first occurred in 1929 and the value of the Spanish peseta fell, the Spanish military's grievances with dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera grew, causing King Alfonso XIII to withdraw his support for Primo de Rivera, who resigned on January 28, 1930. This proved to be detrimental, as Primo de Rivera's successor, Dámaso Berenguer, was unable to consolidate power and, on April 14, 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed and Alfonso XIII left Spain as a result of the 1931 Spanish local elections, which were perceived as a plebiscite on the monarchy of Alfonso XIII. The Great Depression had ended a period of relative stability under Primo de Rivera and ushered in the Second Spanish Republic, which further divided Spain politically and whose radical reforms where another short-term cause of the Spanish Civil War. The reforms enacted by the left-wing government of Manuel Azaña, who became prime minister of Spain on October 14, 1931, included granting more autonomy to Catalonia and the Basque Country, separating the Church from the state, ending religious education in schools, compulsorily retiring many military officers, nationalizing large estates which were mostly owned by the Church, and attempting to increase the proletariat's wages. While these changes were welcomed by most city-dwelling young people and women, the Spanish land and business owners, as well as the military and the Church, were furious. The military was especially fearful, as it saw the government's crackdown on military officers as an existential threat. Although a right-wing government was able to take power in the 1933 elections, the Popular Front, a coalition of communists, socialists, and anarcho-syndicalists, among others, took power in 1936, at which point political division in Spain became even more evident. As stated by José María Gil Robles, leader of CEDA, a right-wing party, in a parliamentary session on June 17, 1936, the Republicans had, since February 1, 1936, destroyed 160 churches, murdered 296 people, and assaulted 83 newspapers. Acts like these are a perfect example as to why several high-ranking military officers led by General Emilio Mola had been plotting to overthrow the Republican government since April 1936. Those in the military who were still hesitant or thought a coup lacked justification were finally convinced on July 13, 1936, when José Calvo Sotelo, a prominent conservative, monarchist member of the Congress of Deputies (the lower house of Spanish parliament), was murdered by socialist militiamen. This assassination represented the final catalyst for a civil conflict in Spain that had been brewing for months, if not years, and it also confirmed the Nationalists' view that they were fighting a godless, terroristic regime. As is expressed in the Spanish saying; "nos acostamos en una monarquía y despertamos en una república" ("we went to bed in a monarchy and woke up in a republic"), Spain was not prepared for nor fully open to the far-reaching changes implemented by the left-wing government in such a short period of time – they were too sudden and too radical to ever be successful, instead becoming a trigger for internal conflict. It is important to note that it is still widely believed that the primary cause of the Spanish Civil War was fascism, following in the path of Germany and Italy. For example, Paul Preston, author  of some of the most critically acclaimed books on the Spanish Civil War, points to the rise of Spanish fascist movements such as the Falange as a key factor in the country's descent into conflict. However, this is easily disproven by the fact that the Falange only received 0.07 percent of the vote in the 1936 Spanish general election, demonstrating that the vast majority of the Nationalist faction did not align itself with fascism. It is also difficult to broadly categorize the Nationalists in Spain as fascists, seeing as they did not really have a "us and them" doctrine, were mainly a reactionary movement wishing to preserve the status quo, and were made up of many different groups with varying ideologies. While Preston may be right in saying that the Falange contributed to the Spanish Civil War, labeling the Falange a "key factor" is an exaggeration, which must be taken into account when examining the causes of the Spanish Civil War. In summation, it is clear that the long-term processes of the Spanish Empire's decline and the class struggle within Spain laid the foundations for the Spanish Civil War, which was triggered in the short-term by the Great Depression, the left-wing government's reforms, and the assassination of José Calvo Sotelo. The individual events contained in each of these causes may have, when viewed on their own, seemed unlikely to unleash a conflict that ended up killing around half a million people, which indicates the importance of fully considering all implications of historical events. Thus, after examining the long- and short-term causes, one can conclude that the Spanish Civil War, much like many other conflicts, began long before the first bullet was fired.

Example III: Despite the complexities of the Spanish Civil War, its causes can be understood by simply examining Pablo Picasso’s famous painting: “Guernica”. In the painting, the deformed bull symbolizes Spain and its internal destruction as a result of growing ideological differences, whereas the physical devastation of the town highlights the impact of external factors in the war. Therefore, this essay will examine the role of ideological factors within Spain and socio-economic factors originating from foreign events and how they led to civil war. When looking at “Guernica”, it is clear that the distorted bull represents the way Spain was being torn apart by its internal ideological differences. In the short-term, this was caused by increasingly extremist ideas in both left- and right-wing parties, which led to growing civil unrest with the election of every government between the years of 1931 and 1936. This can be seen with the election of the Second Republic of 1931, which banned all support of the monarchy and began the nationalization of large estates, leading to an increasing number of strikes, protests and violence in the streets. Two years later, the right-wing coalition CEDA canceled most of these reforms, but labor strikes did not cease.1 This continuing civil unrest is evidence of Spaniards’ seemingly uncompromising stance regarding their ideological differences, and the unrelenting violence that resulted. This is clearly reflected in the words of French poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “A Civil War is not a war but a sickness. The enemy is within. One fights almost against oneself”.2 This internal conflict can largely be attributed to the spread of extreme left-wing ideologies, which resulted in growing political polarization that would eventually make war inevitable by 1936. One long-term cause of this was the Spanish-American War of 1898, which rid Spain of imperial ideals and shifted political focus towards the country itself.3 This resulted in an increasing need for modernization in politics, eventually leading to the rejection of the monarchy.4 This downfall of monarchist ideals can largely be credited for the political conflicts leading up to the war, as it resulted in the election of the Left Republic in 1931 and the introduction of its extremist reforms. However, the violence that emerged as a result of political conflict cannot entirely be blamed on internal ideological differences in Spain. Here, the Russian Revolution played a crucial role as a long-term cause of the war as it provided an example of a successful revolution for Spain, thus inspiring a long period of violence as a method for political change. The revolution also sparked the ‘trieno bolchevista’ or ‘three Bolshevik years’ in Spain, which saw extreme militancy in the Spanish labor movement.5 Therefore, the increasing demands of trade unions and growing frequency of labor strikes in the period of political polarization of 1931-1936 were not entirely due to ideological differences. Although the destruction of Guernica in Picasso’s painting was the result of foreign involvement during the Civil War, the effects of foreign events could be seen long before the start of the war with the build-up of socio-economic issues in Spain. Increasing poverty in the 1920s can be interpreted as the root of the social division that drove political conflicts throughout the 1930s as it caused a surge in migrations from rural areas to cities, thus accelerating social polarization between ‘la España profunda’ or ‘deep Spain’ and urban areas.6 The cause of this was the First World War and its aftermath, as Spain went from being a source of imports for the fighting countries to a nation facing severe inflation as a result of the recovery of European industry after the war.7 During WWI, the Spanish economy witnessed remarkable economic growth, however, this simply added to the growing division between northern and southern Spain due to their differing industries. This is because northern regions enjoyed substantial industrial expansion, whereas southern and central regions, as well as most of the Levante, underwent an agricultural crisis.8 Directly linked to this is the facilitated appeal of left-wing ideologies in struggling agricultural areas, thus driving the division between North, eventually Nationalist, and Central and Southern, eventually Republican, Spain.9 In the short term, this social polarization was exacerbated by the Great Depression,10 which caused an agricultural crisis due to soaring unemployment rates,11 thus driving landless laborers towards urban areas and increasing the prominence of social division. In conclusion, the Spanish Civil War was the result of growing ideological differences within Spanish politics and the population, as well as the socio-economic effects of external events - as depicted in Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”. In Picasso’s interpretation of the bombing of the rural town, as in the four decades prior to the Spanish Civil War, the source of destruction was not simply internal conflict but also international circumstances. Works Cited Beevor, Antony. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. Phoenix, 2007. Casanova, Julián. A Short History of the Spanish Civil War. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. “Cause of the Spanish Civil War and its consequences.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/summary/Spanish-Civil-War. Accessed 10 December 2022. de Ojeda, Jaime. “The Spanish-American War of 1898: a Spanish View - The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War (Hispanic Division.” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/ojeda.html. Accessed 10 December 2022.  Evans, Richard J. “The Spanish Civil War 1936-39.” Richard J Evans, https://www.richardjevans.com/lectures/spanish-civil-war-1936-39/. Accessed 10 December 2022. Ponce, Javier. “Spain | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1).” 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 20 March 2015, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/spain. Accessed 10 December 2022. Preston, Paul. “Spain’s October Revolution and the Rightist Grasp for Power.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 10, no. 4, 1975, pp. 555-578. JSTOR. Sánchez, Andrés, et al. “Wartime and Post-war Economies (Spain) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1).” Encyclopedia 1914-1918, 30 May 2017, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/wartime_and_post-war_economies_sp ain. Accessed 9 December 2022. “Spanish Civil War maps.” NZHistory, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/spanish-civil-war-map. Accessed 10 December 2022. Zoffmann Rodriguez, Arturo. “Lenin in Barcelona: the Russian Revolution and the Spanish trienio bolchevista, 1917–1920.” Slavic Review, vol. 76, no. 3, 2017, pp. 629-636. Cambridge University Press.  

 Examine the long- and short-term causes of one 20th-century war. The Spanish Civil War, spanning from 1936-1939, culminated the polarization of the life and politics in Spain, which arose thanks to a failing government and an economic crisis following the Great Depression. Such brought about much unrest among the Spanish people, leading to impulsive reelections and revolts, eventually bringing about the election of the left wing ‘Frente Popular’ (Popular Front) in February 1936. This was met with discontent by the Nationalist right, where the murder of their political leader, Calvo Sotelo, in July 1936 was the last straw regarding revolution, and soon after war. The following essay will argue that financial (long term) and political (short term) unrest were the predominant causes of the Spanish Civil War, and will further discuss the separation within Spain which amounted to such a War. The long term effects of the depression coupled with the ineffective economic policies in place throughout the early 1930s paved the path to Civil War. The first sign of financial struggle came at the end of Rivera’s reign (1923-1930). Rivera, who came to power as a military dictator in 1923, reformed Spain and rectified its financial struggles, by industrializing a backwards country. Rivera was able to implement many reforms, such as increasing foreign trade by 300%1, but his economical victories came to an end as the depression hit Spain hard in the early months of 1930. The peseta fell drastically against other currencies, and their bad harvest the previous year did not aid the cause whatsoever 2. Exports of iron and oil, which once were higher than ever, now exponentially declined, and working class unemployment was at an all-time high. Rivera found himself stuck in an economic slump, in which he found no escape. Once he lost the backing from the military, public unrest and pressure caused him to resign and hand the regime back to the Monarchy 3. This proved to be pointless, as King Alfonso was unable to do any better than, and was forced to abdicate only one year later. Spain had since become a republic, but governance came and went, as none was able to bounce back from the economic hardship in which the depression had placed them. The working class stared to condemn the republic, and found it no better than the monarchy or dictatorship, as their wages were incredibly low. The left wing government at the time acted quickly to squander any reason for a revolution by implementing a polices such as the  8-hour-day and the Law of Municipal Boundaries, which forbade hired workers who weren’t local to the owner's holdings1. This law caused unemployment to rise further, and brought about more social turmoil. In a desperate attempt to decrease unemployment, they started to regulate the use of machinery, which alienated the landowners, who now had neither people nor machinery to work their fields and factories. The Spanish governance changed constantly, where every new leader reversed changes made by the last, sending Spain into an economic dilemma. This cause great polarity among Spain, as each new government made reforms which aided different classes of people. Strikes and arson were an everyday occurrence, the largest being the Asturian miners revolt of 19341, the first major sign of an impending revolution. The polarity among the Spanish populace thanks to the long term effects of the depression and the failure of the republic to enact useful policies brought about the formation of two extremist parties; the Frente Popular, a group of socialists, anarchists, syndicalist and communists, and the Nationalists, which were made right wing groups such as the Falange. The mass unrest and financial crisis among the working class most definitely led to the regions filled with different social classes to side with different extremists sides. When the Frente Popular took control of the government in the 1936 rigged election, the working class whom which sided with the Nationalists started to revolt, while the middle class sided with the Frente Popular. This bringing about the Civil war in which the country was split between the density of the classes. With the ever-changing governments unable to make financial reforms to reverse the effects of the great depression, Spain spiraled into chaos and division, a breeding ground for Civil War. The short term effect of the constant political change and poor political decisions effectively led to the beginning of the Civil War. The constant changing of the government in the years following up to the war left Spain divided, as with every new regime came new policies, and abolishment of old ones. In 1932 the left wing government under the lead of Azana was in power, they placed law in place which they expected would aid the development of Spain. One of their laws was an attack on the Church, which separated the Church and state by cutting funding and expelling the Jesuits4. Since they were mainly the educators in Spain, they now had a huge crisis in terms of teachers and education, which made the middle class and lower classes very  uneasy. They also started nationalizing large estates, meaning that landowners were losing land which they rightfully owned to the state. Bringing about more unrest, and fueling protests and strikes. In 1933, the government set fire to houses in a village known as the Casas Viejas Incident, which lost them the support of the working class, causing the Right winged CEDA party to win the November 1933 general elections1. But, they were denied the house by the Left republicans, who tried to cancel the votes and instead brought the RRP to power.3 Such brought major unrest to the streets of Spain, as voters felt that their right was being taken away from them, and they such corruption should be punished. After almost a year of protests and violence in the streets, CEDA was given the seats in the Senate which they deserved in hopes that the revolutionary ideas would wash away. But then a revolt by the Asturian miners led to a fierce battle in which the Spanish military squandered the revolution, leading to hatred from the working class. The CEDA once in power, then reversed lots of Azana’s policies, canceling the reforms of the new Catalan government, and refusing the Basques their own government. The Basques, who had previously supported the right, now condemned them and switched to the left. By reversing the polices, CEDA effectively stabbed themselves in the back and lost the support of two major regions in Spain5. As the government returned the land to landowners, they became fiercely in favor of the right, and started to abuse the workers. They started firing leftist workers and taunting the workers by telling if they were hungry to “go eat the republic.”[4] In 1935 the RRP came back into power since the CEDA had lost much support with the lower class and the Basque and Catalan regions.1 The RRP experienced not much better, as they failed to appeal to the middle class and once again, an election was called and a new party rose, a culmination of left-wingers, the Frente Popular2. They were not welcomed since they had taken the streets on election day and rigged the ballots. After this, the country rapidly descended into anarchy, as the widely divided people and parties started to form coalitions to take control of Spain. The outright division between the people and the governments into the Nationalist (right wing) and Republicans (left wing) descending into civil war. The short term effect of the poor political decisions by the rapidly changing governments led to a clear segregation between classes, paving a path for coalitions to fight the Civil War.  Although some may argue that the sole reason for the Civil War was due to the short term effect of the murder of Right-wing political leader Jose Calvo Sotelo. After the Frente Popular came to power, their police sent squads to arrest certain political oppositions. When going to arrest Calvo Sotelo, they instead shoot him in the back of the neck1. Such a rash action on the side of the Republicans led to massive reprisals and reactions among other right winged groups. Such an event was a perfect catalyst for a publicly justified coup, and almost undoubtedly, according to Preston Paul, was the sole reason for the uprisings in Spanish held Morocco, marking the beginning of the Civil war6. Although Preston Paul did determine the event which justified the start of the Civil War, he didn’t consider the causes of the event, or any of the prior events which led to the separation of the people of Spain, allowing there to be a Civil War. Helen Graham argues that polarity within Spain was the sole cause of Civil war; and agrees with this essay that without financial and social turmoil, there would not be any reason for there to be “two Spains” as Helen states, which confront each other in 19363. The idea that the murder of Calvo Sotelo was what accelerated Spains Civil War is no stranger; but to say that the Spanish Civil War was improbable without the murder of Sotelo completely ignores the rising tension within the country thanks to the depression and constant change in the Spanish Governance and their policies. It is an undeniable fact that the reasons for which the Civil War had occurred were primarily due to the Political and Finical unrest. To return to the question, both the Long term effect of financial hardship on account of the depression, and the short term effects of the constant political unrest both contributed to the social polarity within Spain, hence bringing about “two Spains” and the contrasting idea in how their country should be ruled. Such forced the hand of political leaders to convene and revolt against the opposing parties, as the end of July 1936 marked the beginning of a 3-year long violent and bloody war preluding the second World War. RRP- Radical Repulican Party CEDA- Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas   CEDA English-Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights  References: 1.Wikipedia. “Spanish Civil War,” December 5, 2022. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War#cite_. 2.The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Spanish Civil War | Definition, Causes, Summary, & Facts.” In Encyclopædia Britannica, January 31, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/event/Spanish-Civil-War. 3. Graham, Helen. The Spanish Civil War : A Very Short Introduction. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 4.Mann, Michael. Fascists. Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 316 5.Wikipedia Contributors. “CEDA.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, December 17, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEDA. 6.Preston, Paul, and Paul 1946- Preston. The Spanish Civil War : Reaction, Revolution and Revenge. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2007.     

 Long Term and Short Term Causes of The Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War between the years 1936 and 1939 was one of the most brutal civil wars in history, between the Nationalists, the army and the upper-classes, and Republicans, the lower and middle-classes, with a number of approximately 500,000 lives lost. People wondered what could have led to such a brutal civil war, whether it was the occurrence of specific events such as “The Popular Front” or if there were other long term causes as well that made the war inevitable by the time it happened. In his book “The Battle for Spain'', Antony Beevor raised the question “Was there ever a people whose leaders were as truly their enemies as this one?” coming up with the conclusion that it was the leaders of Spain that allowed such destruction to be brought upon their own country. In this essay, I will support Antony Beevor’s argument by investigating the long and short term causes of The Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War was the result of many long term causes leading the country into division and chaos. Throughout the 19th century until the civil war, Spain dealt with poverty due to an agriculturally based economy supported by Goerge Orwell’s description, “The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money — tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.”. More than half of the population being peasants and uneducated created an enormous gap between the upper and lower classes. This extreme lack of economical balance within Spain sparked hatred between the two classes as the division it caused left no possibility for mutual empathy or respect that the two sides should have treated each other with. This supports the idea that the Nationalists were too satisfied with their positions of power and wealth that they were selfish enough to disregard the poverty the rest of the country was drowning in. They found it unacceptable to replace conservative elements of the government because it wasn’t going to benefit them like it would the Republicans. Thus with clearly being more powerful than the Republicans, the 1930’s Depression the economic imbalance made way to, became a huge threat to The Republic as they faced losing the support of the working class, motivating the Nationalists to rebel against The Republic as it showed signs of instability. Referring back to Antony Beevor’s argument, the leaders of Spain had differing views on what action to take even though they were responsible for the economic collapse of the country after the failed attempt for the Industrial Revolution. Beevor further argues that “The Spanish Civil War has so often been portrayed as a clash between left and right, but this is a misleading simplification. Two other axes of conflict emerged: state centralism against regional independence and authoritarianism against the freedom of the individual.” This argument was valid and supported as the role that regions played in the causes of The Spanish Civil War was too large to disregard. There was great tension between the centralist state and Catalonia and the Basque regions with both provinces searching for independence and decentralization, having their own languages, economies, cultures and churches. When Primo de Rivera took back the self-governing rights of Catalonia, separatist forces began supporting the Republican movement that replaced Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain, in 1931. Their support  upset the Nationalists because Alfonso was closely associated with the military, occasionally introducing himself as the ‘soldier-king’. This became a motive for the Nationalists to rebel against the Republic and punish the Catalans which they did achieve after Franco gained control over Spain. However, these reasons are too simplistic to unleash the country into such bloody chaos. There were two other long term causes that led to the war; The army and The Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, due to its wealth, was able to gain influence over the population and therefore became a major power that allied with the Nationalists. Due to their control over the education and other public life elements, Republicans had already begun disliking The Catholic Church and had made attempts at removing their influence that injected opposing views towards modernization and libreal forces. Additionally, the upper-classes funded The Church so that they could continue to spread religious beliefs that restricted the people’s freedom of choice over their own lives in a means of securing their positions of power and thus having easy access to reaching their goal of overthrowing the Republic with the use of manipulation. The Catholic Church, therefore, allied itself with the Nationalists due to the endless support they received from aristocrats and the Nationalists began taking advantage of the widespread influence their new allies had in order to gain more allies. When it became clear that The Church was supporting the upper-classes, lower-classes’ resentment increased. It led to protests that caused more hostility between the two groups. The Spanish Army, on the other hand, was politically powerful due to their association with Alfonso XIII, although proved themselves ineffective on the battlefield with the Loss of the Spanish Empire in the 19th century. This was an ironic situation as it was proved in many instances, for example the Ottoman Army’s involvement with the Empire’s politics leading to the 31 March Incident in April 1909, a political crisis that became one of the reasons for the Empire’s downfall, that an army’s involvement with politics always resulted in negative outcomes. The Republic, due to this very reason, were bothered by their involvement and wanted to remove The Spanish Army from politics. This aggravated the army who already had a reputation for being cruel and savage, and because they were traditional and possessed conservative beliefs due to their faith towards the Catholic Church, they found it beneficial to take a stand with the Nationalists. The size of the army was a huge advantage that the Nationalists had gained through this alliance, a large number of people joining Franco. The Catholic Church and the Spanish Army both led to the formation of the two groups, once again supporting Beevor’s argument with the Church being Spain’s religious leaders and the army’s association with the King of Spain, Alfonso. Although, the real trigger that set the civil war into motion was one of the short term causes, political polarization. Between the years 1931 and 1936, the population was divided due to the long term issues. Extremists admitted that they believed that war was the only solution to solve Spain’s problems. Thus this foreshadowed the brutal civil war as there was now a portion of the Spanish people with an undeniable thirst for bloodshed. After Alfonso’s resignation, The Left Republic came to power in April 1931 until November 1933. They shared the views of the Republicans and made an attempt at modernizing Spain. Manuel Azana became president and took action to fix the long term issues that had been causing issues within the country such as restricting the Church’s power and taking an anti-army approach by closing down military  academies. Every choice that the Left Republic made was viewed as an attack towards the Right Wing even though it can be deduced that they did not intentionally attack the Nationalists but were making a genuine effort to support the lower-class people of Spain to rescue the country from its initial state at the time. From 1933 to 1936, however, the Right Republic took over and led the country in an exactly opposite direction than the way that the Left Republic had begun taking it. The hostility of Right Republicans and the violence behind the decisions they took was revealed quickly when the largest party CEDA turned into ‘a group of war ministers’. These two years were branded as the ‘black years’ due to the systematic reversal that occurred, the Church once again gaining authority over the country, and Catalonia being stripped away from its independence despite how much they tried to resist. This was a backwards step for the modernization of Spain, however it ensured the satisfaction of the upper-class Nationalists. But, in 1936, one of the main triggers for the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front emerged, a party including a large number of Republicans. The Popular Front was also viewed as the ‘last stand to achieve peace’ within the country or ‘extreme communism’ by following the footsteps of Stalin’s policy in 1935. This angered the Nationalists and the army immediately began planning a coup. This clearly led the country to disaster as the only way the Republicans and the Nationalists interacted with each other was through violent attacks. With all the leaders of each party failing to create a stable government, their actions caused the people to believe that war was the only option they were left with in order to achieve what they wanted. In conclusion, Beevor makes a valid argument by blaming the leaders of Spain for the causes of the Spanish Civil War. The economic crisis in Spain during the 19th century and the role of regions creating a base for the civil war and later on the increase in tension with the army and the Catholic Church’s made the war inevitable and even motivated the Nationalists to the extent that they did not just think it necessary to rebel against the Republic but also desired the violence it brought forth. The use of manipulation by powerful allies such as the Church and the tension between the two parties indeed carved a path that led to a civil war that was unavoidable.

 Examine the long- and short-term causes of one 20th-century war - Spanish Civil War “Spaniards! To all of you who feel holy love for Spain, to all of you who in the ranks of the army and the navy have sworn to serve the fatherland, to those of you who swore to defend it from its enemies with your lives, the nation calls you to defend it.” These powerful words spoken by Francisco Franco, leader of the nationalist forces, demonstrate the passion and intensity only a civil war can inspire in its people. In essence, the Spanish Civil war was a culmination of a multitude of social and political factors that led to the culmination of conflict between factions of the nationalist and republican forces. Various short and long term factors escalated to the point of a bloody and gruesome struggle for power. In this essay, I will discuss three key factors that led to the outbreak of civil war: economically divided classes, the changing position of the Catholic Church and colossal political instability.

Antony Beever himself chose to begin his book (one that encompassed the causes, events and aftermath of the entire war) by accentuating the class differences present in Spain before the conflict began. A harrowing picture is painted as Beever describes how the car of King Alfonso XIII is being pushed by tanned and poorly dressed men, while in the background men in suits merely observe. “Few images better represented the extremes of the social and economic contrasts of Spain in the early part of the 20th century”. This class divide is significant as uprisings and revolutions are often led by the working class - and this one was no different. As Spain was a mainly agrarian society, a large amount of the lower classes were made up of farmers as well as other industry workers, who felt as though they deserved better treatment. In the aftermath of WW1, inflation hit these workers particularly hard as salaries increased by a mere 25% while prices doubled between 1913 and 1918. This was a factor that led to the mass joining of leftist union groups such as the UGT and CNT, whose members were to partake in acts of violence leading up to, and during, the civil war. Furthermore, the events in Spain may have been partly attributed to what happened in the Russian revolution little over a decade earlier. Russia abolished its monarchy, just as Spain will, and the working class was at the forefront of this revolution as well. The period of 1913 became known as the ‘three years of bolshevism’ and included uprisings in Andalucia and unrest in Barcelona. The formation of the Spanish Communist party followed in 1921, with continued demonstrations in Andalusia and beyond. Communism was also seen in various other parties in Spain, including in the Marxist POUM founded in 1935, as well as various socialist youth groups brought together under communist rule towards the beginning of the civil war. The creation of these various groups, both communist and union centered, created a stronger desire for social change as well as a large group of men that would form part of the fighting base during the three years of war. Economic class divide created strain throughout Spain, whose effects were significant in both the long and short term, and increased the time it took for the nation to progress into civil war.  

Another notable cause, both long and short term, of the civil war was the changing role and power of the Roman Catholic Church. The church had been a formidable influence throughout Spanish history, and formed much of the population’s thought and purpose in unity with the state as early as 1479. With the concordat of 1851, Catholicism became Spain’s ‘only’ religion and had large power in education and the press, as well as extended influence due to high illiteracy rates. However, its great power led to a more prominent abuse of power, and the lower classes specifically had complications due to the ties the church had with the aristocracy because they defended the rights of the higher classes as they provided a significant amount of funding. Resentment towards the church was seen as early as 1909 in the “Semana  Trágica”, which was one of the nation’s first uprisings. Though it was caused by an anti-militaristic mood stirred up by the need for an army in Morocco, the church was a chief target, with 80 of the 112 buildings set fire to being church owned or affiliated. In Beever’s words: “Such symbolic violence was the reaction of a people traumatized by intense superstition”. However, despite the important role of the church being a long-term cause of general resentment and change for the people, its effects have been exaggerated in the short term. Collectively, the right wing nationalists (who emerged victorious in 1939) used public support for the church and the past system to gain followers, which did work for the aristocracy. In fact, the creation of the Catholic party CEDA in 1933 reinforced the fact that there was some lingering belief in this old system. However, the church’s power was declining towards the 1930’s as religious attendance was the lowest of any Christian country - in 1934, less than 20% of Spain’s population was going to mass. Other groups and causes (such as various labor unions and political organizations) attracted the masses on a more significant scale than the church did. While the role of the Catholic church was a significant long term cause of bitterness for the working class, its magnitude in escalating violence in the short term is generally overemphasized.

Lastly, political instability caused in particular by the lasting effects of the monarchy contributed greatly to confusion and polarization that eventually led to the civil war. The monarchy had been in place from the times of King Ferdinand and Isabella, and was dissolved suddenly in 1931 with the creation of the Spanish republic. Despite issues associated with it, namely its close ties with the church, the nationalist party supported and used it as a beacon of familiarity for its members. The Carlist group was centered around the idea of reestablishing the Bourbon dynasty, and the “Renovación Española” or the Spanish renovation movement, was also centered around bringing back monarchic principles - both of which establish a clear presence of support for monarchy. Furthermore, the army, which was conservative in nature, also had close ties with the monarchy and this was one of the reasons for the compulsory retirement of many of its members, causing anger and resentment. Moreover, following a line of unsuccessful coup’s the politically charged assassination of monarchist Calvo Sotelo was a monumental short term cause of the civil war. The lack of response from the leading party of the time, the left’s Popular Front, caused public outrage, also caused by the fact that he was a highly influential leader of the right. The event also played a large role as a catalyst to the unsuccessful coup d’etat of July 1936, which was the beginning of the civil war itself. The monarchy played a significant role in the long and short term causes of the civil war. In all, the significance of the changing role and power of the Catholic church and the monarchy are instrumental to understanding the deep rooted causes of the civil war. Articulately summed up by Antony Beever: ”the trinity of army, monarchy and church, which had originally made the empire, was also to preside over its final collapse”. Both of these factors in combination with the vast class divide in Spanish society created a multitude of short and long term causes of the war - ranging from the social alignment to various political groups to the escalation of violence and assassination of people in power. An understanding of these three instrumental factors allows for a glimpse into the complexity of the causes of the Spanish civil war.

 Examine the long- and short-term causes of one 20th-century war. In 1936, after a series of aggression by the majority communist, socialist and anarchist Republicans under Azana against the conservative, monarchist and fascist Nationalists, CEDA member Sotelo was assassinated on July 12th by the PSOE-controlled Assault Guards which triggered the Nationalists to stage a military coup a couple of days later, triggering the Spanish Civil War. During this Spain, an impoverished terra incognita became an ideological battleground of ‘Fascism against Communism’ for which thousands of foreign young men gave their lives in a combat a mort. This essay will argue that the causes of the Spanish Civil War included the short-term events of the assassination of Sotelo, a prominent socialist member of the Spanish parliament, as well as Azana’s violent crackdown on the Nationalist faction, along with the long-term causes of the internal class-struggle and ideological tensions, and to a lesser extent the early foreign intervention of Germany, Italy, and the USSR. In order to truly make sense of the multi-faceted conflict, one cannot only consider the events of 1936, because these short-term causes were deeply rooted in long-term socio-political issues which had been simmering since the beginning of the hierarchical system way back in the Roman Empire, creating and slowly exacerbating political tensions between the Republicans and Nationalists, causing a growth in popularity and passionate intensity for both, thereby leading to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. By the beginning of the 20th century, the once deeply religious Spanish populace turned their back on the Catholic Church, as the farmers viewed the church as a perpetrator of the monarchy, which oppressed them. The landless poor were effectively treated as slaves at the whim of their landowners, who also effectively owned the militarised Guardia Civil, and would go as far as to shoot unemployed workers scavenging for acorns and wood. In Castiblanco desperate men were arrested for gathering acorns, and near Ciudad Real famished peasants fed on grass. It was also common for labourers to earn 2 pesetas a day and forcibly spend a third of their year in enforced idleness, living less well than their master’s donkeys, as approximately 10,000 families of the 21 million population owned half the country’s cultivable land in the 1910s. This widespread inequality and poverty were key in causing a rapid rise in the popularity of left-wing ideologies, such as the PSOE, whose trade union grew from 8,000 members in 1908 to 200,000 in 1920. This was a clear sign of frustration, as revolutionary thoughts were brewing within the increasingly political impoverished population, some of them became anarchists, this meant that frequent strikes, robbed banks, bombs and political assassinations ensued. As we can clearly see, the proletariat was forced into severe apathy for the system, violent revolutionary thoughts were boiling, and the once clueless population shifted into a period of political disillusionment, where they would ache for an opportunity such as the de Riviera’s death to forcibly reform the nation out of mass poverty. Thus, the antagonism of the proletariat towards the conservative minority and those associated with them soon created a radical polarization in Spain, which finally erupted into open conflict in 1936. Furthermore, it is also crucial to keep in mind the long-term decline of Spanish influence and economy which triggered the rise of conservatism, and led to a climate of fear and repression in Spain when they were in power. Spain was once a great power whose king, Charles V used to say “I speak French to women, Italian to my soldiers, German to my horse and Spanish to God", he also left Spain to his firstborn and  Germany to his half-brother. This was the reason why it was especially humiliating for the conservative population of Spain to witness the once powerful Spain’s loss of all its colonies in the Americas, Carribean, and the Pacific, only being left with its African possessions. This caused immense frustration within the monarchist Spanish military, who is now impotent, without any other colony to conquer or control, making them stuck in, and extremely concentrated in Morrocco. This frustration was almost brought to its limit when the devastating blow of the depression of 1929 caused Spain’s GPP to decline by 30%, almost an imitation of Hitler’s rise to power in Weimar the Weimar Republic, public dissidence of de Rivera significantly increased, so that when he died, his intended successor, Derenque was not able to gain power, and the popular front overthrew the dictatorship, whose policies were anti-clerical, anti-military, anti-oligarchy and anti-education, everything that the Nationalists stood against. They also forced the king, Alfonso XII, to abdicate the throne, never to return. The contribution of these factors to the preexisting political instability was extremely crucial, as it made the military officers resentful towards the Republicans, exacerbating tensions between the two. While the decline of the Spanish Empire and its, it is also crucial to consider the short-term causes of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s which were the clashes between the Nationalists and Republicans, as well as the assassination of Sotelo. As the Nationalists implemented their vision when they got in power in 1933, they cracked down on opposition groups and individuals using violence and intimidation, as well as the imprisonment and execution of political dissidents, the Republicans did the same in 1931, and 1936. The rise in tensions and left-wing support allowed the republicans to overthrow the monarchy and the military dictatorship of de Riviera in January 1931, this catalysed violent rivalries between the Nationalist factions and Republicans, during the October revolution of 34’ caused by protests against electoral fraud by the socialists, both sides killed 1,500 men, women and children, and burned down 112 religious buildings. This example clearly shows how ideological tensions between the Nationalist factions and Republicans and the polarization of Spain up to 1935 instigated detrimental effects on the population, which over time built up an unbearable amount of hostility, hatred, and contempt between those who took sides, one side wishing to completely crush and eradicate the other. This divide turned Spain from a monarchial, organised nation, to a deeply divided one with both extremes. Knowing what we know now, it is clear that the detrimental conflicts, strikes, and innocent deaths exacerbated the passion of the two sides, increased popularity within their supporters, and aggravated the opposition, increasing hostility and desire to fight and kill marched the deeply divided country into a civil war. Additionally, up to 1936, the Republican military significantly overpowered the Nationalists in manpower, Franco needed to also win the support of as many Civil Guards as possible, as he couldn’t count on the Regulares consisting of inexperienced Moroccans and a mere 8,000 troops of the Legion Espanola to beat the 750,000 manned Ejército Popular de la República. Thankfully, the Popular Front’s abuse of power towards the Nationalists and their assassination of Sotelo 2 days before the coup was his go-head. After the Popular Front coalition’s win in the 1936 general elections, Azana resumed his Premiership amidst socio-economical convulsions between FAI and CEDA. After failing to reconcile and moderate the situation, Azana, in hopes of consolidating his power, attacked the Republicans’ most powerful rival, de Riviera, and forcibly dissolved the Falange, among many other provocative actions. This backfired, as the Falange's membership rose rapidly from 1,000 to 100,000 in July, this pattern repeated itself for the Monarchists and others.  Azana’s open antagonism and the Falange’s desperate actions clearly frustrated the Nationalist factions, causing more and more to become open to the idea of a revolution, and those who have already accepted it, to become more vocal. One of these men was Robles. In July, he gave the Cortes a list of violence that was caused by the popular front, including 269 political murders, 1.200 wounded, 160 churches gutted, and 10 newspaper offices destroyed; Sotelo, an important member of the Renovacion Espanola then followed with a bitter diatribe, passionately and openly threatening a military revolt. A couple of days later, he was shot dead by Assault Guards controlled by the PSOE on July 12th. During Sotelo’s funeral, Renovacion Espanola leader Goicochea promised to “imitate your example, to avenge your death and to save Spain”. This wish manifested 5 days later, when the military rebellion began in Morrocco, marking the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and a staggering 47% of the Guardia Civil turned to the Nationalist side, giving Franco his last push. As we can see, even though a plan for a coup was already in place ever since the Republicans’ win in January of 1936, the assassination of Calvo Sotelo, the last of its kind before the war, as well as Azana’s open antagony and hostility towards the Nationalists clearly provoked the last indecisive military soldiers to support the Nationalists’ rebellion and was Franco’s last impetus to reclaiming Spain from the hands of Azana. Additionally, the widely believed misconception that foreign intervention in the global war of ‘Fascism against Communism’ caused the Spanish Civil War was largely untrue. Nevertheless, the Spanish Republican army had 750,000 soldiers, 1500 pieces of artillery, 800 tanks and armoured vehicles. El Caudillo wouldn’t have dared to bring his 30,000-manned Army of Africa into Spain simply because of his strong beliefs unless he could muster up a significant backing from foreign powers, more significant than that received by Azana. Luckily for Franco, as early as one month before the coup, Franco went to Hitler for his help, after which 20 cargo planes were immediately flown to Morrocco to the Army of Africa to the mainland. Therefore it was clear to Franco that he would receive the support of the Germans. Additionally, it was also known even before the war started that the Soviet’s Heinkels were no match for the German Messerschmitts as German military technology was far more advanced and cutting-edge. These facts suggest that it was the upcoming severe military edge and initial support that instilled a sense of confidence within Franco and his generals. However, although the nationalists would receive 10,000 troops, 800 aircraft, and 200 tanks from Germany and 70,000–75,000 troops, 750 planes, and 150 tanks from Italy and Germany, as a history student evaluating the causes of an event, one must limit oneself to the perspective of a person experiencing such an event before it happens, put away the power of hindsight. Although knowing what we know now, one would think that if the Nationalists knew the support they would have received, foreign intervention would be the biggest factor influencing their decision to stage a coup. However, the Nationalists knew no such things. Therefore to say that foreign intervention was one of the causes of the Spanish Civil war is an inherently weak argument. One, these impressive provisions were made after the coup on July 15th, meaning Franco couldn’t have been certain that he would have received them. Secondly, although it is also undeniable that Mussolini definitely helped Franco, these provisions wouldn’t arrive until his first bombing of Madrid in September 3rd, and even though Mussolini started planning the coup along with Sanjurjo, who was supposed to be the new Caudillo of Spain since January, his sudden death in July and the lack of communication of Mussolini and Franco up until then meant that il Duce didn’t trust  Franco. He didn’t even fully decide to support Franco until the French and British mistakenly signed the non-intervention agreement, which he and Hitler were more than willing to break, guaranteeing the victory of the Nationalists, as the Republicans would then receive minimal support. While Germany’s initial support and their technological advancement helped provide some confidence to the Nationalists, it is clear that foreign support, in fact, didn’t make the great impact that it is widely acknowledged to have in terms of causing the Spanish Civil War, as it was still unclear whether or not Franco would receive the full support of Hitler, or even Mussolini at all. The long-term ideological tensions in Spain since 1876, as well as the short-term factors of an imbalance of foreign support, and the Republican’s public antagonism and abuse of power towards the Nationalists all contributed to the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish population’s long-term ideological tensions caused a polarisation of Spain. They exacerbated tensions between the Republicans and Nationalists, setting the stage for a civil war. At the same time, the short-term antagonism of the Republicans towards the Nationalists and their assassination of Azana was the most important factor in triggering the coup d’etat. To a lesser extent, Germany’s minimal support at the beginning of the coup and its technological superiority to the USSR also influenced the coup, however far less than it was imagined to be. Although this makes us wonder, which of these factors was responsible for turning the coup into a devastating 3-year-long civil war.

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Spanish Civil War (1936-1939): Archives at Yale

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Archives at Yale

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• Spanish Civil War Collection This collection documents society and events during the Spanish Civil War. Formats include magazines, comic books, handbills, pamphlets, broadsides, manuscripts, diaries, and toys.
• André Landín Correspondence 136 letters between Spanish Nationalist André Landín and his family members, 1936-1946. Letters document Landín's service in the Spanish Civil War, his time in the Spanish army, his service in Russia with the Azul Division, and his assignment to the Army Ministry after the war. The bulk of the correspondence is between Landín and his wife, Marichrista Landín.
• Argimiro Bosch Letters Thirty-one letters written by Argimiro Bosch, a Republican soldier in the Spanish Civil War, to his wife, Angelita Talens Bo, and his family. The letters document Bosch's time as a prisoner in Valencia.
• Chiaromonte (Nicola) Papers The Nicola Chiaromonte Papers consist of correspondence, manuscripts, clippings and notebooks documenting the professional life of Chiaromonte. Prominent correspondents include Lionel Abel, Andrea Caffi, Albert Camus, Mary McCarthy, Dwight MacDonald, Gaetano Salvemini, and Ignzaio Silone. Series II contains typescripts, notes and clippings of many articles by Chiaromonte, including several concerning the Spanish Civil War.
• Claude McKay Collection Contains a file folder labels "Spain and the Spanish Civil War", 1935-1938.
• Edwin Borchard Papers Yale Law School professor and specialist in international law. Contain correspondence with American Friends of Spanish Democracy, 1937-1940, article and speech both entitled "The Spanish Civil War and Its Implications. There may be related materials in his general correspondence.
• Ernst Toller papers A small amount of correspondence (1933-1939) is largely concerned with his Spanish Relief Project, devoted to raising funds to alleviate the consequences of the Civil War in Spain.
• Felipe Lorenzo Famoso Diary Diary covering the career of Felipe Lorenzo Famoso, a Spanish soldier in Morocco and Spain, from 1923-1949.
• Fenton (Charles Andres Papers) The papers consist almost entirely of bibliographical material, newspaper magazine articles, excerpts from books and news dispatches collected for his proposed work on American literary approaches to the Spanish Civil War. There is also a small amount of correspondence (1954-1960).
• Harry Weinberger Papers Includes correspondence from Emma Goldman to Weinberger, her lawyer, regarding her post-deportation travels and activities in the Spanish Civil War before her death in 1940.
• Historical picture collection Contains one folder with photos of the Spanish Civil War.
• Jaime Arando Correspondence Seventy-two letters from Jaime Arando to his father, Francisco Arando, dating from 1937-1940. Jaime Arando was active on the Ebro Front, spent time in a concentration camp, and later joined the National Army.
• Joan Alzina Papers Papers of Joan Alzina, Catalan soldier in the Spanish Civil War’s Republican Army, 24th Army Group, Group Logistics, 3rd Section. Includes seven notebooks documenting Alzina’s service in the army, his time as a prisoner at Navalpino, and his tenure as a prison guard for a mental hospital at Alcalá de Henares, Madrid for other Republican prisoners. Alzina’s notebooks written during the war include uncensored drafts of letters to family members. Also included is a drawing by Alzina of Mickey Mouse as a soldier and notes by Alzina on how to dig and fortify trenches.
• Joaquim Sancho Papers Papers of Joaquim Sancho, a Spanish Civil War soldier fighting for the Republican cause. The bulk of the collection comprises Sancho's correspondence, spanning from the period of his military service in the Regular Spanish Army, No. 55, VIII Grupo and the 4th Company, 103rd Mixed Brigade, through his time as a prisoner in a Nationalist concentration camp. Before Sancho’s capture, he typically wrote in Catalan, and during his capture he wrote in Spanish. In addition to correspondence, the collection includes a 1938 manuscript map with notes of the trench works of the 103rd Mixed Brigade; lists of phone calls and correspondences Sancho sent and received; a likeness of Gandhi drawn on the back of Sancho’s registration for the Republican Independent Party of Catalunya; a likeness of Franco drawn on an envelope; and manuscript and printed fragments of material pertaining to the war.
• Langston Hughes Papers Contains well-documented photos of Hughes' trip to Spain during the Civil War (Series XII) and a group of correspondence cards from the Spanish Civil War (Series XXII.) In his professional correspondence there is a folder of "Spanish Letters" with dates in the late 1930s (Series II); Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee correspondence dating from 1944-1953 in Box 245; Abraham Lincoln Brigade correspondence dated 1938-1966 and Veterans of the American Lincoln Brigade correspondence dated 1944-1949.
• Lluís Baró Segimón Correspondence Forty-eight letters between Lluís Baró Segimón and his wife, Pilar Val de Baró. Lluís Baró Segimón fought with the Republican 27th Division during the Spanish Civil War, and postmarks indicate that Lluís wrote from the front lines of the war to Pilar in Morell, Tarragona.
• Louise Crane and Victoria Kent papers Victoria Kent's correspondence and subject files are a window into the activities of the expatriate Spanish community in the United States following the Spanish Civil War. The papers also relate to Crane and Kent's work to publish the Spanish-language magazine Ibérica as well as their personal relationship.
• Louise Morgan and Otto Theis papers Contains the Nancy Cunard papers. Cunard was an "ardent anti-Fascist and put her press and energy to work supporting the Communists." Includes materials on "Spanish Civil War/Fascism." There may be potentially relative material in her correspondence.
• Lucy Kramer Cohen Papers The papers of Felix S. Cohen include research material, clippings, and correspondence relating to Puerto Rico and the Spanish Civil War.
• María Pilar Fort Trigo diary Diary of María Pilar Fort Trigo, a woman from Valencia, Spain, covering 1936 October through 1938 January, and lacking 1937 December. The diary describes the everyday life of a Spanish woman during the Spanish Civil War and discusses gender relations in Spain and Fort Trigo's engagement to a lawyer, Enrique Jorro Vives. Also includes Fort Trigo's obituary.
• Mas Yebra Family Correspondence Correspondence of the Mas Yerba family, a prominent political family in Barcelona. The correspondence includes one hundred thirty-three letters exchanged among the family members and their associates during the Spanish Civil War. Also includes a small amount of the family's legal and financial papers.
• Photographs of James Weldon Johnson Box 16 contains photographs taken by Johnson relating to the Spanish Civil War.
• Puertes family Correspondence on the Spanish Civil War The collection consists of correspondence from Republican soldiers during the Spanish Civil War. Most were written by Isidoro Puertes, a soldier who served with the 4th Company, of the 4th Battalion of the 225 "Brigada Mixta." Antonio Puertes, probably Isidoro's cousin, served with him. Letters, sometimes written by both men jointly, were sent to their family members.
• Ralph Bates Papers Contains a few photographs and documents concerning his International Brigade service during the Spanish Civil War.
• Ramon Llado correspondence Eleven letters between Ramon Llado, a Republican soldier in the Spanish Civil War, and his family. Seven letters are from Ramon to his wife, Concepcion. Three letters are from Concepcion to Ramon, and one letter is to Ramon from his sister, Dionisia, and his brother-in-law.
• Russian state military archives collection, 1919-1941 The collection consists of photocopies of documents in the Russian State Military Archive (Rossiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voennyi Arkhiv) in Moscow. The documents relate to German-Soviet military and economic relations between 1918 and 1941, and the use of Soviet tanks in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.
• Spanish and Portuguese Architecture Photograph Collection Some material documents bomb damage during the Spanish Civil War.
• War Poster Collection Large collection of posters and handbills from the Spanish Civil War.

The Spanish Civil War: Battleground for Idealists - Documentary

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• Vértice Heavily illustrated women's magazine published by the Falange española tradicionalista y de las J.O.N.S. Includes literary supplements
• Flechas y Pelayos Flechas y pelayos was a periodical for children and youth linked to the Falange. Comic book with stories.
• Almanaque de Flechas y Pelayos.
• El mono azul Magazine of the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas
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An interview with Noam Chomsky on the Spanish revolution - Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo (2009)

In this 2009 interview originally published in Spanish, Noam Chomsky answers questions about military options and international factors in the Spanish Civil War, the role of the Stalinists in suppressing the revolution in Spain, the attitudes of intellectuals with regard to the revolution and their historical role more generally, and the chances for another libertarian revolution.

An Interview with Noam Chomsky on the Spanish Revolution – Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo (2009)

The Spanish Revolution: How It Is Perceived and Depicted in Intellectual Circles

First of all, I would like to express my gratitude for the opportunity to speak with you.

No problem.

The main theme of this interview will be the Spanish Revolution. As we know, the CNT-FAI 1 was one of the most powerful trade unions in Spain when the Spanish workers rose up in arms against the fascist rebellion of general Francisco Franco on July 19, 1936. On the very next day the president of [the Generalitat], Lluis Companys, met with García Oliver and Buenaventura Durruti 2 in order to tell them that Catalonia was under the control of the workers and if they wanted he would resign and become just another worker in the struggle. After a long debate, the CNT and the FAI decided to allow the government to continue to exist in order to avoid a revolutionary dictatorship. Do you think that this was the best choice for the revolution? Also, what course do you think the revolution would have taken if the government had been dissolved at the very beginning?

Well, they had a very limited range of choices. You have to remember that the anarchist revolution was opposed by every one of the world powers. It was obviously opposed by the fascist powers. It was also opposed by the communist and western powers; standing up to this was no easy task. That is why there were various compromises along the way because keeping these countries at bay made for major difficulties. That is, the western nations more or less supported Franco although not as much as they would have liked. To the best of my knowledge, there was only one serious proposal about how to win the revolutionary war and that was made by Berneri, a prominent Italian anarchist who had emigrated to Spain and was assassinated by the communists during the “May Days”. 3 He proposed, first of all, that they should not fight a conventional war because they could not win such a war. Instead, they should wage a guerrilla war in Spain, combined with support for a military uprising in North Africa. At the time, there was a nationalist revolution underway in North Africa against the French and the Spanish; and it was in North Africa that Franco’s army was based. Although it was not a radical revolution, being mostly a nationalist uprising for agrarian reforms and so on, Berneri’s suggestion was that by supporting it they could undermine the base of Franco’s army since it was basically composed of Moorish troops. I don’t know if this would have worked but it was the only chance for victory. On the other hand, the Republic never would have considered this and the reason for this was in order to maintain relations with France, England and the United States. Such a thing would have caused hysteria within the western community, it would not have been tolerated. It would have implied a dispute with the western powers while fighting against the communists and the [fascists]but at least there was a chance for victory.

At that time the capabilities of guerrilla warfare in achieving any objectives was still unknown. Today it is much more obvious after the experiences of the last seventy years so. I think that Berneri’s strategy was the only one that had any chance of success.

What do you think of Buenaventura Durruti and his role in the Spanish Revolution?

He was not an intellectual but he was a very effective military leader and he was committed to the anarchist cause. I don’t know how much he understood about anarchism but he was committed to it.

James Joll claimed that, “just like the funeral procession of Kropotkin in Russia, Durruti’s funeral was the final public expression of the power of the Spanish anarchist movement”. 4 Do you think this is a valid argument, considering the fact that the CNT resisted the dictatorship and is still active today, although on a lesser scale in comparison, influencing a large number of organizations and individuals around the world?

It has had a great deal of influence and not on such a small scale. Sure, now it is smaller but, for example, I was in Madrid in 1986 and it just happened to be on “May Day”, 5 and there were demonstrations by the CNT all over Madrid. I think they missed their chance but when the Franco dictatorship came to an end, they began to emerge. It wasn’t easy and they made mistakes but they began to germinate. In fact, I think that now, in December, 6 they will commemorate the centenary of the founding of the CNT so I think that they still exist but of course, it was not easy, especially after the “May Days” when there was a violent attack that destroyed most of the collectives in Aragon and Catalonia. The communists were in command, that is, the Communist Party and its police, and they definitely did not tolerate an anarchist revolution.

Stalin’s support for the Republic was totally cynical. He only wanted, or merely hoped, to make some kind of deal with the West. When it became clear, especially after Munich, that the West wanted to divert Hitler eastward, Stalin offered his support, stealing the Spanish treasury without any kind of interest in supporting the Republic which ended up being crushed.

The Western powers, including the United States, supported the fascists. So let’s just take the example of the United States which was technically neutral. First of all it imposed an embargo that prevented the shipment of arms to the Republic but the fascists did not need these arms from the United States since they obtained theirs from Italy and Germany by way of France. The other aspect of the embargo was worse since the one thing the fascist countries could not provide to Franco was oil. The United States imposed an oil embargo, on paper. Meanwhile, the “Texaco Oil Company”, whose history is familiar to you, was under the management of a self-declared Nazi, who diverted the oil destined for the Republic to Franco instead. I remember reading about this when I was a child. I read it in the left-wing press while the Department of State denied any knowledge about this. Of course, everyone knows about the contributions made by Roosevelt to fascism in Spain. While Roosevelt appeared very angry in public because a U.S. businessman was discovered selling a pistol to the Republic or something, it was pure hypocrisy. We also have to add that France and England did not want the Republic to survive.

This was all part of the general attitude and people tend to forget it but the West favored fascism. In fact, Mussolini was very much admired.

In your essay, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”, you argue that the republican forces thought they could get help from the western democracies. Where did this idea of western support come from?

Well, that was a common illusion. For example, the Vietnamese, that is, Ho Chi Minh, thought that they could get the support of the United States. It was partly hope and partly illusion. The West has a monstrous propaganda system. Take the ceremony for the Nobel Prize yesterday, 7 for example. The only positive thing you can say in defense of the Nobel Prize committee is that they gave the prize to someone for doing nothing. He is a person with a higher moral level than most of the people who have won the prize but they were speaking of his aspirations and they took them seriously. That is, Europe is fascinated by his personality but if they pay any attention to his actions, they look the other way immediately. The propaganda is extremely effective because it is self-imposed and the persons who accept it internalize this mentality. It is worse when people accept it.

The Spanish Republic did not have many options. It was basically supported by Stalin, but only as long as it benefited him, and the West would not support it because it did not really have much of an objection to fascism.

Some authors like Eric Hobsbawm, for example, disparage the popular factor of the Revolution and argue that only the Spanish Communist Party could have led it because of its high level of organization. What do you think about this position?

Well, he is no friend of mine and we have debated this in the past. He does not like the anarchists and in his opinion they were a regression to primitive times. In fact, he calls them “primitive rebels” and I think that he is wrong about this. He was a member of the Communist Party and was loyal to the leadership of that party in Russia. The Communist Party was a right-wing organization. That is, it was a party of the police and the bourgeois regime. Why should they lead a revolution? Because it would have benefited Stalin. They were in charge of the government. What happened was that Stalin pulled the rug out from under their feet as soon as they ceased to serve his purposes. What else would you expect?

I think that Hobsbawm simply did not understand what the communist parties were all about. Sure, they did some good things. Let’s take the United States, for example. Everyone in my family was a member of the Communist Party in the thirties but for them it had nothing to do with Russia. It was about labor, civil rights and union organizing. The Communist Party was at the forefront of the most decent reformist programs. So if you wanted to work in common for the working people, it was just natural to support it.

But on an international level this makes no sense at all. You could argue about the details but from my point of view Lenin and Trotsky were the biggest opponents of socialism in Russia from the beginning. On the basis of what they considered to be solid Marxist principles, Russia was a backward peasant society and was not ready for revolution so it would have to be guided towards the revolution by way of forced industrialization, history’s iron curtain and all the rest. This was not Marx’s vision. Marx was very interested in the possibilities of a peasant revolution in Russia. During the last years of his life he studied Russia intensively, using the data compiled by the Narodniks, 8 who were researching the peasant society in which they were very interested but all of this was suppressed by the European Marxists. The social democrats did not like them and the Bolsheviks did not like them; they were more oriented towards the city so they despised the rural peasantry.

So you will notice that after 1917 the peasant organizations were destroyed by Lenin and Trotsky. They did not want the social revolutionaries, the left social revolutionaries, Makhno’s army 9 and so on, so they got rid of them. I think that Hobsbawm’s view was that there has to be a disciplined vanguard party that can carry out this project. I did not call this a revolution because it would not be a revolutionary project, it would basically be a process of forced industrialization.

There is another theory, supported by most of the sympathizers of the Communist Party, in which they argue that the anarchists were incapable of leading the revolution because they lacked what Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals”, intellectuals within the working class who could organize the revolution. What do you think about this argument?

There is something to it, anarchism is not attractive to the intellectuals because it does not offer them power. Bakunin wrote about this in one of the most perceptive predictions of modern time. He called attention to, and observed, the rise of what he called a new class of scientific intelligentsia, modern intellectuals with an alleged technical knowledge of rule. This knowledge is a farce but this alleged technician of the organizational knowledge of rule is Gramsci’s intellectual. Bakunin predicted that they would take one of two directions.

Some would try to seize power themselves in the wake of a popular revolution and then create a “Red Bureaucracy”, which would be the most oppressive tyranny and system that the world has ever known. The others would recognize that they could not seize power themselves so they would become the servants of those who do hold power in the democracies of state capitalism and they will be the ones who manage them, technocrats and so on. You could say that both of them beat the people with the people’s stick. They will claim that they are representing the people when in reality they are hitting them with their own stick. This is the best prediction concerning what actually happened.

The Bolsheviks took the first path and the intellectuals in the West took the second, and were quite proud of themselves. The latter call themselves technocrats and pragmatic intellectuals. In fact, I once compared texts by Robert McNamara with texts by Lenin and they were almost identical. The only difference was that McNamara talks about God while Lenin does not, but basically they have the same idea: “We must manage and control society with an iron hand if necessary, for the well being of the people.” This is the dominant idea among the liberal intellectuals like Lippmann, Galvani and the rest, and it is totally reasonable. It is a way to obtain power and they see it as a form of altruism, just like the fascists.

Personalities aside, the political and social analysis of Bakunin was correct. That is, there are intellectuals who do not follow this current but they are dismissed and set aside; they are kept marginalized. This type of intellectual existed among the anarchists, like Camillo Berneri, for example. But he is not considered to be an intellectual because he did not serve power. The term intellectual is very funny, it has nothing to do with intellectual ability or intellectual dedication like creativity or something like that. The term, intellectual, is basically reserved for those who serve power or in the case of enemies we use the term dissidents. In our country we call those who serve power intellectuals, and we call the others lunatics, madmen or something.

This goes far back in our history. Take the Bible and its legends, for example. In the Bible we can find people whom we may call intellectuals and the term that the Bible gives them is prophets, which is a bad translation of a little-known Hebrew word. But let’s think about what these prophets did. They were providing political analyses, they were criticizing the king, they pleaded for mercy for the orphans of the villages, and so on. These people were what we would call dissident intellectuals and they were treated horribly. There were intellectuals that were treated very well and these were the Pharisees, but centuries later, as in the New Testament, they were called false prophets, but as I mentioned, this was much later. Meanwhile, the dissident intellectuals were treated miserably while the Pharisees were treated very well and this is our history up until the present with very few exceptions. So I do not take Gramsci very seriously.

It is obvious why the media would provide a distorted account of what really happened in Spain because it was a process that demonstrated the ability and the power of the people once they are organized and struggle together for a common goal. What impresses me above all are the omissions, or misconceptions, within the Academy, or academic circles, and even within leftist or more progressive circles.

They are the same. That is, I have done a lot of critical work on the media but my point of view has always basically been the same and it applies to the academy and other intellectuals as well. The reason for the focus on the media is to display its anatomy because it is very influential. Besides, it is easy to study and if you want to do comparative work you can do it with the media. If you try to do the same thing from an academic or specialist position, it is much more difficult. In fact, the article that you mentioned is mostly about intellectuals rather than the media. And it is about liberal intellectuals. Let’s take the liberal left-wing intellectuals, they will write their version of the Spanish Revolution and about the Bolshevik Party, which was composed for the most part of intellectuals.

But there is very little difference in their approach. If you are part of the academic world you do not have the direct pressure on you that you have working for the media. If you work for the media you are basically working for the state or some corporation. In the academic world there is little interaction with these forces so there is some room for flexibility and dissident intellectuals. For example, I have survived in the academic world but I could not have survived in the “New York Times”. In fact, to take a somewhat dramatic illustration, I regularly write op-eds that are distributed via the New York Times Syndicate but are never published in the United States. They are distributed in places like Mexico and Greece but this is completely understandable. The academic world leaves room or a chance for flexibility. In MIT I have survived because it is a university based on mathematics and science and it doesn’t really care what I do in my free time. It is not an ideological center like Harvard. Take Hobsbawm, he survived in the academic world and certainly never would have survived in the media.

We know there was a whole range of factors at the economic, historical and social levels, in addition to what has been called a “preparatory process”, which made the Revolution possible.

Then do you think that there is a possibility for another libertarian revolution?

I think so. But you know that it took about 50 years of preparation and various attempts so that the revolution was in the minds of the people and when the opportunity arose they only did what was already in their minds. That is, it is something like the reconstruction of capitalism in Europe after the Second World War. Germany was devastated but its reconstruction did not take long because they knew what they were doing. Germany was objectively in the same situation as Central Africa but its different level of consciousness and understanding about what had to be done made it a great power, like Japan.

It was the same in Spain. The poor peasants, concerning whom various works have been written and they are very moving, knew exactly what to do. We can see it concretely when, right now for example, part of the state capitalist project is to finance the economy. They reinforce the financial institutions in order to undermine other institutions. So General Motors is dismantling its factories while it receives tax breaks that make it richer than ever. This is the nature of today’s capitalist state. It is the dismantling of these factories that is destroying the labor force of the communities like Detroit, at the same time that other industrial cities are also collapsing. Meanwhile, Obama’s Secretary of Transportation is in Spain using the money from the federal stimulus package, designed to stimulate the economy of the United States, to sign contracts in Spain for the construction of high velocity trains which the United States needs so badly. However, those factories that are being dismantled could build these trains. They could rebuild the rail system while giving employment to trained workers and so on. But since there is nothing in it for the banks, they go to Spain to do this. But what about the labor force itself? That is, if they become conscious of themselves and obtain support, they could simply seize the factories and begin to produce what they need. They may encounter some opposition at first but if they obtain popular support, it could happen. What is needed is consciousness raising and organization, and this is what they lack. But I do not think that this is something remote, it is right under the surface and could be developed. So, yes, there could be another libertarian revolution.

“This interview was conducted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Jorell A. Meléndez, graduate student in History.”

Translated from the Spanish in November 2013.

Source: http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=108942

• 1 The National Confederation of Labor and the Iberian Anarchist Federation. The CNT was a trade union organization while the FAI was a militant anarchist group within the trade union. Both are still active today but they are not affiliated.
• 2 It should also be pointed out that other people, including the Argentine intellectual Diego Abad de Santillán, also attended this meeting.
• 3 The first week of May 1937 is often referred to as the “May Days”, when the Communist Party and the Unified Socialist Party staged an offensive against the workers of the CNT and UGT who controlled the central offices of the telephone company in order to impose total control over the republican camp. During the May Days, hundreds of people were killed and thousands were wounded.
• 4 The interviewer appears to be referring to James Joll’s book, The Anarchists , Chapter IX, in which Joll states, “The death of Durruti deprived the anarchists of one of their most famous and most ruthless legendary heroes, and his funeral in Barcelona provided that city with the last of its great demonstrations of anarchist power, with 200,000 supporters in the streets - an occasion perhaps reminiscent of that in Moscow twenty-four years before, when Kropotkin's funeral had given the Russian anarchists a last opportunity of parading their strength before the communists finally closed in on them.” [American Translator’s note.]
• 5 May Day commemorates the deaths of the Chicago martyrs and is celebrated by the working class throughout the world.
• 6 This interview was conducted in October 2009. The centenary of the CNT will be celebrated on November 1, 2010, not in December 2009.
• 7 The reference is to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama.
• 8 Members of the Russian middle class in the second half of the 19th century who developed theories of a populist type.
• 9 One of the leaders of the Dyelo Truda group and of the revolutionaries of the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution who were violently suppressed by Leon Trotsky and the Red Army.
• Noam Chomsky
• Spanish civil war
• Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT)
• Communist Party
• intellectuals
• Camillo Berneri
• Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo

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Role of the Woman During the Spanish Civil War Synthesis Essay

Introduction, women served as nurses, roles of spanish women in the industries, roles of spanish women in battlefields during spanish civil war, reference list.

In many wars, women have played hidden roles. They have not engaged in wars directly. Therefore, engagement through direct confrontation in the battlefield has always been preconceived as an affair of men since time immemorial. However, this notion was not the case for the Spanish war.

During the Spanish war that happened from 1936 to 1939, Mujeres Libre’s leadership influenced women. Consequently, they put effort to establish a myriad of programs to help the entire nation.

Women were charged with the roles of setting dining halls from where men who were part of the militia could eat. They also provided health care to the injured persons (Hugh, 2003, p.98).

This assertion suggests that women were best suited to take roles involving the provision of first aid and other related nursing work for the casualties coupled with feeding the men who were taking part in the war. As this paper argues, this was not the case for Spanish civil war.

Women rose from one rank of the military to another. In the new ranks, they were engaged in classes that offered lessons on the proper use of firearms coupled with a good targeting practice.

Given that the war destabilised most of the institutions in Spain, women also played pivotal roles in ensuring that the services offered at various institutions such as health care were offered continuously.

For example, a class of influential women emerged concentrated on teaching other women about sexuality, ways of birth control, and general health. These women also put up hospitals, which principally focused on prenatal care.

Women were also instrumental in reclaiming the rights of workers in Spain during the civil war. With these arguments in mind, this paper analyses these roles as played by women in the Spanish civil war.

Following the outbreak of the civil war in Spain in 1936, the Spanish people were subdivided into various politically motivated groups. Such groups included republican’s anarchists, socialists, communists, and the nationalists.

The war made it impossible for the economy to function effectively. Workers assumed the noble roles of ensuring that the nation continued to be stable. In this effort, “worker committees collectivised factories and agrarian areas into libertarian communes” (Hugh, 2003, p.23).

Indeed, workers’ organizations such as IAF (Iberian Anarchist Federation) and NCF (national federation of labour) among others formed powerful elements of control of workforce coupled with their committees.

As this took place, various groups of women assembled to strive for liberation of women from various revolutionary practices instigated by the civil war.

The above quest leads to the establishment of Mujeres Libres as an organisation, which endeavoured to fight hard for the rights of Spanish women.

According to Hugh (2003), throughout Spain, women focused on engaging in war with the hope of helping workers reclaim their rights (p.40). During the Spanish war, women played pivotal roles through the Mujeres Libre in the reclaiming of their female gender rights.

For instance, before the civil war, women who participated in nursing only did so in the capacity of the nuns.

War created an immense shortage of health care service providers to the extent that Spain relied on the importation of competent nurses from other parts of the world and on competent health care service volunteers to offer health care services (Hugh, 2003).

Nevertheless, as the war intensified, with more people being wounded, the traditional customs changed so that even women who did not serve as nuns though of the Spanish origin were recruited to serve as nurses.

Apart from working as nurses, such women also prepared foods, which they served to the soldiers before leaving for the battlefields.

It is important to state that the fact that many women during the Spanish war found themselves working as nurses does not mean that nursing is a feminine profession.

The argument is that, during the Spanish war, women were able to execute tasks they found important and supportive to the society. Participation in nursing tasks was a magnificent achievement of the Spanish women.

In 1930s, they were exempted to participate in the profession unless they were nuns. Admin (2012) supports this argument by arguing that nursing was a reserve of nuns in the history of Spain (Para.3). Unfortunately, the implications of the Spanish war made this custom unfeasible.

This means that women from other fields were required to fill the service gaps created by incidences of increased war casualties.

In this regard, the Spanish civil war was a great revelation and a mechanism of calling to an end the discrimination of certain women in certain professions such as nursing.

This impact of the Spanish war is even clearer by consideration of the fact that the war had the implications of making women take up the jobs that originally belonged to men in the industries while men engaged in the battle.

This role was not an option but a necessity to keep the Spanish economy moving forward.

In the zone of republicans, industries are one of the most significant occupational areas that women excelled.

Admin (2012) supports this assertion when he informs, “As a precursor to British women’s involvement in the war effort during World War II, Spanish women frequently took the jobs of their husbands as they joined militias and the popular army “(Para.4).

In fact, the ruling of the Spanish regime in 1936 evidences that, once men became part of the band of soldiers, they were highly advised to ensure that their positions were taken up by close members of their homes.

This case was necessarily to ensure that, although men would principally be anticipated to fully engage in war, the persons taking up their industrial jobs would ensure that the families of such men acquired basic necessities just as it could have been the case should the men have continued to work in the industries.

Many of the men left their jobs to their wives. This way, it was possible to keep the war industry of Spain moving.

Apart from the republican side, the role of women in the industries during the Spanish war was also well established among the Francoist.

From this paradigm, Gina (2006) reckons, “despite the conservative nature of Fascism, women were still heavily involved in the war, as it can be seen in their active involvement by working in the emergency food facilities established for nationalist troops” (p.21).

During the first year into the Spanish war, republicans who supported anarchism encountered an immense revolutionary change. The result was the emergence of myriad of collectives.

This emergence was an effort to create a new form of agrarian society in which land was collectivized in favour of pueblo.

Land was also taken away from the private owners. Due to the ideologies of equality possessed by anarchists, collectivist women acquired responsibility tantamount to that given to men. The community therefore anticipated them to work equally like men.

This situation meant that agricultural chores were to be shared equally between men and women.

Admin (2012) further emphasises this role of women in the agricultural industrial sector by asserting that people who were members of the collective were to be assigned roles without considering their gender (Para. 5).

Apart from being engaged in productive labour in the industrial sector, during the Spanish civil war, women were also engaged directly in the battlefields with their male counterparts.

However, much of the literature on these noble roles of women during the war fails to address these concerns exhaustively.

Malicianas played critical roles during the Spanish civil war. While appreciation of their roles in the efforts of war for the republicans is important, the literature of the roles of women in Spanish civil has been surrounded by various misconceptions.

Authors such as Lines (2009) cite one of these misconceptions as that women never engaged equally in the war with men (p.169). Some critics also argue that women did not engage in roles that were complicated especially in the combats.

Others argue that women only played roles in the Spanish civil war that did not threaten their lives (Lines, 2009). The degree of accurateness of these assertions is dependent on evaluation of the roles that were played by Spanish women in the war combat fields.

Amid the underlying misconceptions cited above, evidence shows that women engaged equally in the Spanish civil war as their male counterparts.

For instance, according to Marín, many Milicianas in anarchists coupled with communists and women who served in the units of the republican army engaged in actual combat much similar to men (1996).

This was a hefty burden to them since traditionally seated perceptions of gender roles in Spain were still intact. Apart from engagements in combats, women were also anticipated to conduct domestic chores such as cleaning, laundry work, and cooking among other tasks.

In an interview with women combats in the Spanish war, Lines (2009) cites a particular case of a woman, Dolors Marín, who recounts her roles and the roles of the other women who served in the anarchists Miliciana s during the Spanish civil war between 1936 and 1939.

Dolors Marín argues that, upon analysing the contributions of men in the civil war, women did the same. She retaliates that, although they had to do extra roles such as cooking, they were also well endowed with the capacity to stage a strong guard tantamount to their male counterparts.

For instance, during the Belchite attacks, women accompanied men to retaliate against the attacks (Lines (2009).

Marín (1996) further supports this evidence by claiming that women did what they were able to do in the battlefields not in the capacity of being women but in the capacity of being human beings who are able to stage a defence (p.356).

According to Marín (1996), some women were stronger relative to men. This argument is paramount since it implies that women felt that the Milicianas had strong perceptions that their contribution in the war measured up to the contribution given by men.

Consequently, it implies that the traditional perceptions of conservative Spain that some roles and jobs were better suited to men as opposed to women were opened to criticism and invalidations.

During the POUM period, which was headed by Mika Etchebéhère, the role of the females in the battle was much similar to that played by their male counterparts.

Lines (2009) supports this argument by further stating that all tasks undertaken during the column whether supportive or even combats were shared equally without consideration of gender divisions (p.179).

Evidence makes it clear that women roles in the Spanish civil war were not limited to nursing activities and domestic chores.

For instance, Lines (2009) claims, “Captain Fernando Saavedra of the Sargento Vázquez Battalion reported on the military activity of three female combatants in his unit, Ángeles, Nati, and Paca” (p.171).

During a 1939 interview with Cronica newspaper, the captain was quoted saying that female comrades with rifles had joined him in the war missions. The captain admired the women claiming some were even braver relative to men.

The women could get into trenches, launch guards, and fight in the manner that men fought (Lines, 2009).

The experiences of women in the Spanish civil war did not depend on the political group to which they were affiliated. Unaffiliated Milicianas, communists, socialists, and even anarchists all took central and complicated roles during the civil war (Marín, 1996).

In the attempt to provide evidence for his arguments, Marín (1996) recounts the experiences of women in the Spanish civil war through the discussion of Lina Odena who was a famous Miliciana whose demise was encountered during a combat in the Spanish civil war.

She was one of the members of the JSU (United Socialist Youth). Lina Odena headed antifascist resistance. During the war in July 1936, Lina Odena organised a militia group at Almeria, which is located in the south of Spain. Here, she operated as a front liner combatant.

On leaving Almeria, she proceeded to Guandix where again she fought as front liner and as a leader of her militia group. She also travelled over various sectors of Granada front where she was in charge of commanding her militia unit (Marín, 1996).

Playing these roles in the Spanish civil war earned her the post of commandant, which in the Spanish military was principally a reserve for men.

The bad fate for Lina Odena engulfed her on 13 th of September 1936 when she and her comrades were on a night war mission. When they got lost, the nationalists discovered her and her comrades. They (nationalist) furiously short unto them.

Lina Odena and her comrades also responded with fire although the nationalists were too many for them to handle with success. In the fear that she could run out of ammunition, Lina Odena only found it wise to spare the last bullet for taking her own life (Marín, 1996).

Her decisions to commit suicide was not by chance since, tantamount to what her male counterparts went through upon being detained by the enemies, she was well alert of the disgust of defacement.

Being a woman, the situation was even worse, as the captured women combatants often under went through horrifying experiences of rape in the hands of enemies before they were eventually killed (Gina, 2006).

Although Lina Odena did not live up to see her success in an attack that she had engineered, her unit later succeeded in the attacks against the nationalists. In fact, Lina Odena’s suicide was considered a noble act and was immensely aired on sovereign, collectivists, and Marxist presses.

This earned her the tag of being a legend of the republican Spanish civil war. Form the discussion of the Lina Odena experiences in the Spanish civil war; it is evident that women took active roles in combat.

Therefore, they also earned form their respective political groups of affiliation the crown of braveness and heroine for Spanish civil war.

During the Spanish civil war, many women fought as militia. Nevertheless, some of them joined the republican army. Esperanza Rodríguez is one of such women who are discussed by Lines (2009) with regard to their life experiences in the Spanish civil from 1936 to 1939.

Esperanza fought in the company of men against fascists. In the execution of this role, her captain described her as one the bravest battalion (Lines, 2009, p.178).

Lines (2009) further reports her as one of the best warriors as she was not only the first one to shoot at the enemies, but also hardly missed her target.

She could work tirelessly to ensure success of the missions of her battalion members. Jackson (1999) supports this assertion by arguing that, in one of the militia confrontations, she spent more than eleven hours standing on foot while shooting (p. 87).

Many of the milicianas that participated in the Spanish civil war were composed of mixed genders. However, a women-only-battalion took its place in the war in Madrid (Jackson, 1999).

Evidence of existence of this battalion disapproves the argument that women only took roles in the Spanish civil war that did not pose any serious threats to their lives.

Testimonies given by foreign observers on the involvement of women in the Spanish civil war claim that some women showcased more courage, braveness, and even valour in comparison to their men counterparts.

Consequently, the Spanish civil war altered the positions of the Spanish women in the society in the extent that, in all roles played by men in the society, it became evident that women could also perform exemplarily.

During the war in 1930s and 1940s, it was common for women to be left behind by men taking care of children and doing other household chores. In some situations, women would offer nursing services to persons injured in military confrontations.

Such roles applied to Spanish women during the Spanish civil war in 1936 to 1939. However, in addition, women were also engaged in military confrontations in the battlefields where they participated in war as members of militia groups.

The paper argued that these roles of women in the battlefields are among the issues that are not sufficiently addressed in many of the literatures on women studies because of the misconception that women do not play active roles in the battlefields.

The paper holds that the case of Spanish women experiences in the Spanish civil war overrules this assertion. In Spain, women even served as commanders of battalions and as planners of attacks. Many of these attacks yielded fruits.

Admin, S. (2012). More than Just Nurses: Women in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 . Web.

Gina, H. (2006). Voices of the Vanquished: Leftist women and the Spanish Civil War. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 4 (1), 18-32.

Hugh, T. (2003). The Spanish Civil War . London: Penguin.

Jackson, G. (1999). A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War . London: Thames and Hudson.

Lines, L. (2009). Female Combatants in the Spanish Civil War: Milicianas on the Front Lines and in the Rearguard. Journal of International Women Studies, 10 (3), 168-187.

Marín, D. (1996). Las Libertarias. In Ingrid Strobl, Partisanas: La mujer en la resistencia armada contra el fascismo y la ocupación alemana (1936-1945) . Barcelona: Virus.

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IvyPanda. (2024, February 23). Role of the Woman During the Spanish Civil War. https://ivypanda.com/essays/role-of-the-woman-during-the-spanish-civil-war/

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1. IvyPanda . "Role of the Woman During the Spanish Civil War." February 23, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/role-of-the-woman-during-the-spanish-civil-war/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Role of the Woman During the Spanish Civil War." February 23, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/role-of-the-woman-during-the-spanish-civil-war/.

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Spanish Civil War

We found 6 free papers on Spanish Civil War

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Essay: The Spanish Civil War (1936)

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• Published: 21 January 2020*
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The Spanish Civil War started on July 17, 1936 and lasted until April 1, 1939. This orinal conflict began in 1931 when King Alfonso XIII agreed to have elections to choose what the government of Spain shall be. The voters decided to get rid of the monarchy and with the dictatorship the King went too. This new government was initially ruled by the middle class. With the church, aristocrats and military soldiers not liking the new government and liberal reforms that had been happening, another election was in progress. In 1933 a more traditional group, the Second Spanish Republic won the election; which caused an outburst from the socialites, and sparked revolutions everywhere. In 1936 the last set of elections that happened before the war occurred. The Popular Front, a communist, radical, socialite group jumped into power. Afraid there was going to be a revolution, army leaders such as General Franco, wanted to seize the power. In July of 1936, General Francisco Franco revolted against the government. The goal of this rebellion was the destruction of all left-wing organizations. In this war there were two sides, The Republicans and the Nationalists. The Republicans, or The Loyalist was the group that favored the Second Spanish Republic. These people were mostly middle class workers and farmers, and supported the government. The Republicans’ symbol was the color red. The red side was backed by the Soviet Union and Mexico. The opposing team was the Nationalists. The National party or The Rebels was made up of Falangists, Carlist, Soldiers, Catholics, and Aristocrats. This party was colored blue, and did not like or agree with the government. The Nationalist were backed by Germany and Italy. The bombing of Guernica happened in the town of Guernica, Spain during the war in April of 1937. This attack was significant because the German military air force bombed the uninvolved civilians of Guernica. The Germans bombed Guerncia because Hitler and other Nazis supported and wanted to help the Nationalists. The German Nazis bombed this town because Hitler wanted see if his trained soldiers were ready for combat. This bombing lead to the destruction of the town and the lost of approximately1,650 innocent lives. Pablo Picasso who was a spanish painter and created a work of art named Guernica. This work of art was thought to be one of his best pieces. This painting was an immediate reaction to the bombing. American author Ernest Hemingway wrote a book called For Whom the Bell Tolls which is based on this particular war. Published in 1940, it tells the story of Robert Jordan. Robert was a young American who was connected to a Republican war unit during the Spanish Civil War. Federico García Lorca was a Spanish theater director. Federico also helped produce the second golden age of theater in Spain. He was believed to be a Republican, and in the first few months of the war was executed by a Nationalist firing squad. After a long battle, on March 28, 1939, the Republicans ultimately surrendered in Madrid which finally ended the war. General Franco served as as the dictator of Spain until he died in 1975. The United States remained neutral during this war, and told US citizens to refrain from selling arms to Nationalists and Republicans. In total, it is estimated that between 200,000 and 500,000 people died, which made this war the bloodiest conflict western Europe had experienced since the end of World War I. After the war ended the citizens of the Republican side fled to other countries to live a different life, because General Franco and the other Nationalist entered Madrid after the win.

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