Posted on 09/18/2012 3:14:29 PM PDT by iowamark
Santiago Carrillo, the veteran Communist leader who was Spain's last surviving public figure to have taken an active part in the civil war, has died aged 97, family sources have said...
In 1936 he joined the army to defend the Republic from a military revolt which turned into a bloody civil war lasting almost three years and ended up installing Franco as dictator.
Carrillo, by now a Communist, was named a public order official in a defence committee set up in Madrid in November that year just as rebel troops were approaching the capital and the Republican government had fled to safety in Valencia...
[Anti-communists] were evacuated from a city jail to Paracuellos, on the outskirts of Madrid, to prevent them from joining Franco's forces which came close to taking the capital, but were then killed en masse rather than incarcerated...
British historian and Civil War specialist Paul Preston spent a year researching Paracuellos for his 2011 book "The Spanish Holocaust" and concluded that while the massacre itself was most likely the work of anarchists and soldiers assessed by Soviet military advisers, Carrillo did help organise the evacuation.
"Carrillo was an important part in the second phase (organisation), and his many statements that he knew nothing and it was all the anarchists' fault are not truthful," he said.
"This does not mean that Paracuellos is his work alone. He was one, and a very important one of many who did this terrible collective deed."...
Carrillo had to wait until after Franco's death in 1975 to return to Spain. In 1977 he became a member of parliament in the first elections held in Spain since 1936, but the PCE did poorly and he was expelled from the party in 1982.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Communists spent most of their efforts shooting one another.
And I should give a rat's elbow because...?
Every time a Commie dies an angel gets its’ wings.
Would that they were better marksmen with more ammo.
Thanks for posting these links.
The communists in Spain were truly horrific. I don’t think many people have any idea just how bad they were.
The whole run-up to the civil war and the war itelf was just a big pigpile of one flavor of socialist killing another.
Rot in Hell, comrade.
Hard to get people informed when so many teachers, historians and media types are so enamored of monsters and this totalitarian leftist evil.
Especially your second link is a good read. Allow me to quote from it:
“More than 6,800 Catholic clergy were slaughtered, including 13 bishops, more than 2,360 monks and friars, 4,172 diocesan priests and seminarians, as well as 283 nuns. Thousands of churches were destroyed... Most of the intense killing occurred in the first six months of the conflict, but by the end of the war about 20% of the nation’s Catholic clergy was dead.
...“The Republicans [the communists] were just utterly unrestrained. Whole convents were killed. Whole orders. It was very nasty,” said Royal. “The Vatican tried to defend people as well as they could, but there was little they could do against increasingly radical forces controlling the government...”
...He described how thousands of people — mostly military personnel and Catholic priests, but also doctors, lawyers, professors and writers — were taken from Madrid by bus to fields near Paracuellos del Jarama, where they were systematically executed for three straight days, and their bodies were dumped in mass graves in November 1936...
ping
That's when I say, "oh, they were commies, eh?"
The Spanish Civil War was supposed to be a great moment in communist history. Actually, the Republican Army and its efforts were pretty much a big farce.
bfl
He’s now in a place where the truth will come out.
Oretam, tell your relatives to look up the “Republican” (aka, Marxist) massacre at Paracuellos.
From your 2nd link I got this;
“Some people might know that the “idealists” were actually a fiercely anti-religious alliance of socialists, communists and anarchists.”
Change “idealists” to “Progressives” and you have our leftists today and they called themselves ‘Repubilcans’.
I guess the flag goes to half staff again.
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