Men Who Fought Franco Fêted As Spain Finally Confronts Its Past (And doomed to repeat it.)

The Times (London) ^ | 7/15/2006 | Alan Hamilton

[BerlinStrausbaugh]

The men of the International Brigade failed in their mission, but they still bask in the memory of a just cause, writes our correspondent.

TOURISTS on the London Eye this morning may wonder why the rousing strains of the Internationale, the anthem of world socialism, are drifting skywards from the South Bank far below.

The date — the 70th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War — will probably escape them. But in the pantheon of the political Left it remains one of the highest causes for which they went to fight — and lost.

Around a memorial in Jubilee Gardens, beneath the Eye, a handful of frail survivors will gather to remember in particular the 2,400 Britons who volunteered to join the International Brigades in support of Spain’s democratically elected Republican Government against the rebel Fascist forces of General Francisco Franco.

There are 24 remaining and the youngest is 90. Between 1936 and 1938 they lost 526 comrades on the Iberian battlefields. To have been there is still a badge of honour among socialists, communists and trade unionists. For them it was when the working class took up arms in a noble cause: to stop the encroaching menace of Fascism and thereby prevent the looming Second World War. But idealism was not enough to halt Panzer tanks and the overweening ambitions of the Third Reich.

Through the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the survivors hold a small ceremony every year — and today for the first time an official representative of the Spanish Government will attend. Carlos Miranda, Madrid’s Ambassador to London, will lay a wreath.

There will be readings, a new book of brigaders’ poems, and an appearance by the best-known surviving brigader — Jack Jones, the former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, who is the trust’s president. Mr Jones, 93, was wounded in the shoulder in 1938 and sent home.

“I felt an obligation to fight for freedom and liberation,” he said. “The awful realisation that black Fascism was on the march right across Europe created a strong desire to act. The march had started with Mussolini, had gained terrible momentum with Hitler, and was being carried forward by Franco.”

Marlene Sidaway, secretary of the trust, which now has some 700 members including veterans, veterans’ families, friends and interested academics, said: “The Spanish Civil War has been largely forgotten. People felt then that if they stopped fascism in Spain, they would prevent the Second World War. But the last battle of the first war was more or less the first battle of the second.”

More than 35,000 volunteers from 50 countries flocked to Spain, including a galaxy of writers and intellectuals: Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Cecil Day-Lewis. There were aristocratic young adventurers such as Jessica Mitford, who eloped to Spain with her distant cousin Esmond Romilly, having asked him while he was on home leave to take her with him when he returned.

Also in Spain were young men later to make a mark in British politics: Clement Attlee, who visited Republican forces with fellow British Labour MPs; a young Edward Heath, part of a student delegation invited by the Republicans; and one Marxist member of the brigades, Alfred Sherman, who subsequently modified his views to the extent that he became a guru of Margaret Thatcher.

But most of the British volunteers were ordinary working men who left the factory or the dole queue in search of excitement as well as honour.

Many of the Irish volunteers were unwilling to take orders from former members of the British Army who provided some of the brigade officers: they went off and fought alongside the American volunteers.

Despite some military successes, the Republicans and their international supporters never really stood a chance. Franco’s forces were better trained and equipped: Mr Jones’s military experience had consisted of basic training with the Territorial Army. Germany flew tough units of the Spanish rebel army back from Morocco, and provided the bombers for the world’s first deliberate air raid on civilians at Guernica.

To this day brigaders blame the inaction of Stanley Baldwin and his successor at No 10, Neville Chamberlain, and that of other European leaders who turned a blind eye, refusing to supply the democratic government with arms lest it upset the Nazi regime in Berlin.

But there is another side to it all. Terry Charman, an historian and a specialist on the subject at the Imperial War Museum, said: “For all his very many faults, Franco kept Spain out of the Second World War. He took control of an exhausted country which had lost one million citizens, and was more than a match for Hitler who wanted Spain as an ally in the crusade to control Europe. Franco even had the bottle to keep Hitler waiting at a planned meeting, much to the Führer’s fury.”

Mr Charman added: “If the Republican side had won, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the Panzer divisions would have stopped at the Pyrenees.”

Some historians believe that the Spanish Civil War is too often seen through the romantic prism of Hemingway and his like, rather as Byron saw Greece set upon by Turkey.

“The Spanish Civil War was just that — a Spanish civil war between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction. It was the old Spain versus the new, and the old temporarily won,” Mr Charman said.

The most distinguished chronicler of international solidarity with Spain was Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938, when the Republicans looked like losing the fight, he wrote: “I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. They have a generosity, a species of nobility, that really do not belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs.”

Spain had to wait another 37 years before Franco died and democracy was restored, by King Juan Carlos, in 1975 — and was subsequently defended against an abortive coup. The men of the International Brigade failed in their mission, but they still bask in the memory of a just cause.

BATTLES FOUGHT AND LIVES LOST

13th July 1936: opposition leader Calvo Sotelo killed, providing a casus belli for rebellious generals.

50,000 killed in the opening days, from both sides of the conflict.

3 years of fighting ensue between left-wing Republicans and General Franco’s right-wing Nationalists.

60,000 Italian troops sent by Mussolini to aid Franco.

2,000 Russian soldiers deployed on the Republican side.

40,000 foreign volunteers fought in the International Brigades.

1/2 million or more people died, mostly in mass executions on both sides.

12 bishops, 283 nuns 2,365 monks and 4,184 priests were also killed.

1st April 1939: victory declared by the Nationalists, after Valencia falls

36 years of dictatorship follow until Franco’s death in 1975

500 bodies have so far been exhumed from 67 mass graves

[Eternal_Bear]

I agree that the commies had their own nefarious agenda but remember that Franco sent troops to fight in Russia and that we had to commit a full armored divsion to the border of Spanish Morocco cause we couldn't trust Franco. That armored divsion would have come in handy at Kasserine.

Franco almost allowed German troops to attack Gibraltar code named "Operation Felix". We considered invading Spain as a backdoor onto the continent. The strategic picture would have looked much better for the Allies had Spain been non fascist and never forget that nazi criminals used Spain as an asylum.

[AdvisorB]

"They were a bunch of Stalinist scum, but then the U.S. government in WW2 was riddled with Stalinists or Stalinophiles from FDR on down."

I think you nailed it! The Venona Tapes have proved that Stalin had penetrated the Roosevelt administration. I remember when Michael Straight, speechwriter for FDR, came out of the cold closet and admitted he had been a communist spy, and of course the liberal/leftist media chimed in that after all, Mike hadn't been that good of a spy. FDR's soviet stooges did everything they could to midwife a communist/RAT regime in Spain, and they failed, big time.

Interestingly enough, my grandfather was born and raised in A-Coruna in Galacia. Francisco Franco was born in El-Ferrol the town next to A-Coruna. They were both born in 1892. They were both, as it were, soldiers of Espana. My grandfather supported Franco and the Falange because of his fear of "Rue-Seeah." There was such a fear of Stalin that many Spainards when forced to have to choose, fell in with the Falange. They considered the duly elected government to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR.

[Steve_Seattle]

There was practically nothing in common between Franco and Hitler. The Spanish Civil war is arguably the most misrepresnted event of the 20th century. It was not a fight between "democracy" and "fascism," but between communism and authoritarian traditionalism.

[AdvisorB]

"I agree that the commies had their own nefarious agenda but...." is a lot better than "Sure, Russia sent aid"
but it still misses the point that Spain was in a titanic struggle with the Comintern, Stalin's communist international and the Trotskites of POUM, the Workers Party of Marxist Unity which had virtually taken over Catalonia.
You either threw your lot in with the nationalists or the reds under the guise of the "Republic." Thank God the nationalists won, otherwise there would have been another liberated communist vassal state in the velvet revolutions of 1989, a Spanish state.

[puroresu]

The article failed to note that Orwell lost his faith in the left during the Spanish Civil War. Hearing the double-talk of Communist leaders, who promised democracy to the people even as they were planning a dictatorship, clued Orwell in to their phoniness. He saw how they preached equality, but regarded themselves as superior ("more equal than others"). His experiences dealing with the left in Spain helped him to later write 1984 and ANIMAL FARM, two great anti-leftist novels.

[AdvisorB]

"...remember that Franco sent troops to fight in Russia and that we had to commit a full armored divsion to the border of Spanish Morocco cause we couldn't trust Franco. That armored divsion would have come in handy at Kasserine. Franco almost allowed German troops to attack Gibraltar code named "Operation Felix". We considered invading Spain as a backdoor onto the continent. The strategic picture would have looked much better for the Allies had Spain been non fascist and never forget that nazi criminals used Spain as an asylum."

Everything you say has a ring of truth. Franco sent the "Blue Division" to the eastern front, probably as much to placate hitler as to fight the dreaded bolsheviks, the red menace that had done so much to produce wanton misery on the Iberian Peninsula. While Franco was a tactical and strategic problem for the allies, the Francoist Party never declared war on the allies, and they were not a very good ally for the fascist powers. Hitlers famous diatribe about Franco was how difficult Franco was. Hitler exclaimed that he'd rather have "dental work" than have to negotiate with Franco.

Franco's strategic importance to the West was realized in the 1950's when Spain allowed American military bases in Spain. I think Spain's strategic location helped keep the bolshevik tanks out of Paris and Bonn.

[ZULU]

"There was such a fear of Stalin that many Spainards when forced to have to choose, fell in with the Falange."

Considering the alternatives, I would have done the same thing.

Franco was no Hitler, but he didn't put up with any crap from the leftists.

Ann Coulter brillantly exposes the communist presence in the FDR regime in her second book - I forget the title.

[AdvisorB]

National Review > July 23, 2001

Experiment in Terror. book review

David Pryce-Jones

Poor and backward, Spain in the early 20th century was a failed monarchy with a history of coups and ineffective parliamentary regimes. In the Thirties, the conservative Right faced a strangely assorted Left of Communists, socialists, and anarchists, generally categorized as Republicans, unable to agree among themselves but each promoting with rising intolerance their particular brand of revolution. Spain was the only country in the world with a mass movement of anarchists-the disciples of Bakunin, Marx's bitter enemy. Improbable as it was, the Left formed a coalition under Francisco Largo Caballero, a veteran socialist trade-union leader known as the Spanish Lenin. Early in 1936, the Popular Front came to power legitimately through elections. That summer, the murder of the conservative leader Jose Calvo Sotelo coincided with a military uprising of self-styled Nationalists under Francisco Franco, an obscure general in command of Spanish and Moroccan troops, the latter particularly ferocious. Atrocities committed by both sides inflamed passions to the point that there could be no compromise.

Reluctant to support either side, Britain and France did not intervene. This decision was right, but taken for the wrong reasons, as part of the wider policy of appeasing dictators that was already creating a political vacuum in Europe. Aware of their own weaknesses, both sides in Spain appealed to the dictators for help: the Republicans to Stalin, the Nationalists to Hitler and Mussolini. Responding favorably, the dictators were each probing in the political vacuum for influence and power. The civil war therefore assumed the international character of a struggle between rival ideologies.

The mustering of forces brought to a head the collective delusion of so many intellectuals of the Thirties, among whom Communism had taken hold with the fervor of messianic religion. All manner of celebrities, Nobel-prize scientists and writers and philosophers, united in praise of Stalin and his Soviet Union. Well-intentioned people were naturally prone to believe that so many prominent thinkers and artists must be right, and that Communism represented progress. Intellectuals flocked to Spain to usher in salvation by means of ecstatic eyewitness accounts and reports, news bulletins, novels, and films. The humbler sort drove ambulances and served as nurses. Some 50,000 men from a score of countries volunteered to fight in the International Brigade. Here was nothing less than a crusade.

Revolution, and its images of waving flags and disheveled men brandishing weapons in the back of trucks, seemed to radiate invisible powers. The battles of Madrid and Brunete and Teruel, the fall of Malaga, appeared as stations of a via dolorosa. Legendary icons included Picasso's Guernica, the century's most celebrated painting, and Robert Capa's photograph (the authenticity of which has been called seriously into question) of a soldier in the very moment of falling for the cause, arms extended as in crucifixion.

One of the most furious and effective pamphlets ever published was "Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War," in which 127 leading intellectuals declared themselves pro-Communist. Sixteen were neutral (including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H. G. Wells), while only five dissented (one of them Evelyn Waugh). In one of the century's most celebrated poems, W. H. Auden wrote, "Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but today the struggle." In another stanza of that poem, the line, "The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder," perfectly illustrates the moral sink into which delusion about Communism could lead an otherwise gifted man. George Orwell was to retort that it could only have been written by someone who was elsewhere when the trigger was pulled.

By 1936, in somber fact, Stalin was presiding over a campaign of mass murder. Hitler was evidently another dangerous and ambitious criminal. The supposition that Communism alone could successfully confront Nazism was central to the simplification of the Spanish Civil War as an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. But the equation was false. Far from being at opposite poles of the political spectrum, the dictators were two of a kind, equal in inhumanity.

Professional historians by and large used to maintain that Stalin was sincerely anti-Fascist, but cautiously engaged in a balancing act, sending enough aid to the Popular Front to ensure that it would not lose, but not so much that it would win and thereby provoke Hitler into an all-out confrontation. Destroying this benign theory, recent historians have shown that, all the while, Stalin was secretly sounding out Hitler, with a view to agreeing on spheres of influence between them, as was shortly achieved in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. It has further emerged that Stalin took the Spanish government's gold reserve for safekeeping, but helped himself to it in payment for the arms he supplied. By imposing an exchange value more than twice the official rate, he swindled his supposed allies and clients out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Comintern at first employed an Argentinian Communist named Vittorio Codovilla as its leading representative in Spain. In mid 1937, he was replaced by Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist Party secretary, whose reports are particularly subtle. Another Comintern representative with special responsibility for the International Brigade was the Frenchman Andre Marty, known as "the butcher of Albacete" and commemorated by Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls for his indiscriminate use of terror against friend and foe alike. Also reporting to the Comintern was a range of Soviet ambassadors and consuls, commissars, and military experts, all of whom had to operate within the context of Stalin's Great Terror. Many were recalled to Moscow and summarily shot.

One of the most fascinating documents in the collection is a report dated December 1937. It is over seventy pages long and written by Manfred Stern, a capable and loyal brigade commander who was well known by the pseudonym General Emilio Kleber. Indeed, he was idolized. Stern/Kleber depicts uninterrupted bickering, intrigues, and jealousies among his Soviet colleagues, the Spanish Communist forces, and the International Brigades, which doomed their performance in the field. Trying to justify himself in elaborate and sometimes fictitious detail, he was in fact pleading for his life. Shortly denounced by one of his seniors as an enemy of the people, Stern too then vanished.

These men were for the most part highly qualified, and some had real political talents. They seem to have understood quite early on that the Communists were unlikely to win, but they had to dress up such a message to Stalin in guarded and suitably Marxist language. To eavesdrop now on their private traffic is to be overwhelmed by the servility with which they presented or twisted the facts so that Stalin would learn what he wanted to learn, and by the incredible discrepancy between what Stalin was actually doing and what the pro-Communist crusaders imagined.

Stalin soon realized that Largo Caballero was no Spanish Lenin. A stubborn and obstructive man, Caballero would have to go. It was bad enough that he proved an ineffective war leader, but worse that he could not control the anarchists. Their objective was revolution, which they held to be the indispensable condition for winning the war. But anarchist revolution risked openly embroiling Stalin with Hitler. Stalin needed a pretext to suppress them, and in documents included here dating from the first part of 1937, his advisers duly furnished one. To be a Trotskyite, as Trotsky and Stalin's other rivals had already learned, was a guaranteed death sentence. The advisers trumped up the absurd charge that anarchists and Trotskyites were one and the same.

These documents also show how deftly Comintern agents manipulated Largo Caballero out of office in May 1937, to replace him with Juan Negrin, a dim professor of physiology, and an outright Stalinist stooge. The most horrible sequence of events in the civil war could then occur, starting that very May in Barcelona, where the Communists turned on the anarchists and bloodily suppressed them. The Communists have always blamed the anarchists for this, but the documents of that month, above all Document 44, a report from the front by an agent named Goratsy states that the Communists "had terrible hatred towards the anarchists- greater than towards the fascists" and favored "a final reckoning" with them. The editors give this document great importance.

The anarchist leader Andres Nin was murdered, and the crime made to look like the deed of German agents. Andre Marty kept the firing squads busy and members of the International Brigade were among his victims. George Orwell had served in the front line with anarchists, where he received a Nationalist bullet through the throat. Recuperating in Barcelona, he escaped the Communist massacre by sheer luck, and in Homage to Catalonia he described how Communism had here shown itself the same in practice as Nazism. As a result, he almost failed to find a publisher, and in literary circles became an unperson-a word he invented for any free spirit who told the truth. After the Barcelona bloodshed, Negrin and the Soviets ran a police state along KGB lines, complete with denunciation, torture, and more bullets in the neck for all who stepped out of line.

Betraying the Left and putting down the anarchists, Stalin frustrated revolution in Spain. In that paradoxical sense, the Communists had a conservative effect. No less paradoxical, Franco's victory may well have saved Britain in 1940. After the fall of France, Hitler planned to send troops to seize Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. Denied Middle Eastern oil, Britain could not have held out. As it was, Franco refused to grant passage to the German army, and Hitler could do nothing about it. But he need have had no scruples about launching a blitzkrieg against a Communist Spain, especially at a time when he had tied Stalin's hands with a pact.

For the Soviets, Spain was a laboratory in which to experiment with the imperialism they were later to refine in eastern Europe, and afterwards as far afield as Chile, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia. In terms of strategy, they learned that the presence of the Red Army was the decisive factor in taking over countries against their will. In terms of tactics, they learned to exile or kill opponents rapidly, and then to co-opt into a temporary coalition leftists of the stamp of Negrin, pliable or corrupt nonentities who afforded a facade of democratic legitimacy. Spain was the prototype for a "people's democracy," as installed in satellites throughout the post-1945 Soviet empire.

Franco remained a political pariah to the end of his life. His regime, unpleasant but rather mild by the standard of authoritarian regimes, was considered on a par with Hitler's. Happy to visit Moscow, liberals made a point of boycotting Spain. Perpetuating the myth of Communism derived from the Spanish Civil War, they extended it to other countries and other times. Whenever Soviet or local Communists took over somewhere new, there were invariably throngs of intellectuals to approve, continuing to assert that assault and murder were actually progressive. Flattered by the abiding vision of themselves as salvationist crusaders, these people were their own willing dupes, and the status of intellectuals as a whole has still not recovered. The phenomenon is hallucinating.

Spain Betrayed adds greatly to the body of knowledge about contemporary history. Its information will penetrate slowly but surely, straightening the record and helping to restore respect for intellect and truth. It ought to be impossible for anyone again to argue that Communism in Spain was a noble cause, but that may be too much to expect.

[Barset]

George Orwell wrote in "Homage to Catalonia" of Moscow's penetration of all levels of the newly elected Republican government in Spain, and the Red Army officers who led the suppression, i.e., slaughter, of groups in Spain --P.O.U.M --Party of Marxist Unification, the Anarchists, etc., that were judged by the Communists to be not "pure" Marxist.

Many of the Republican leaders had been trained in Moscow and returned to Spain to insure Spain's absorption into Moscow's orbit. A glance at the map of the region shows the immense importance such a prize would be to Moscow - warm water ports, a strategic position from which to overwhelm Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and control of shipping lanes in the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic.

"Homage..." was not welcomed by Orwell's left wing publisher, nor was it given attention by the Left Wing Book Club. It sold only a few copies in England and was not published in the States, until 1952.

Orwell did the unthinkable in "Homage..." he criticized Moscow, and he paid for speaking the truth. The intellectuals, writers, publishers and academics who made up the Left tried to destroy Orwell, by refusing to publish, review or promote his books and by shutting off the usual outlets, newspapers and periodicals, for his writings.

From Lionel Trilling's Introduction to the 1952 American edition of "Homage to Catalonia,"

"But Orwell's disaffection from the Communist Party was not the result of a difference of opinion... It was the result of his discovery that the Communist Party's real intention was to prevent the revolution from ever being instituted at all. --- 'The thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure it never happened.'"

Far from being a supportive ally of the Republic, Moscow demanded and got all of the gold reserves from the Republican government in exchange for military "advisers" and arms which were distributed to Republican troops loyal to Moscow. It would be interersting to compare the numbers of Republican troops killed by Republican troops to those killed by Franco's.

After his hospitalization for the near-fatal wound to his throat, Orwell returned to Barcelona. Trilling describes what Orwell found there.

"He returned to find the city, [still in Republican control] in process of being purged. The P.O.U.M. and the Anarchists had been suppressed; the power of the workers was broken and the police hunt was on. The jails were already full and daily becoming fuller---the most devoted fighters for Spanish freedom, men who had given up everything for the cause, were being imprisoned under the most dreadful conditions, often held incommunicado, often to be never heard of again.

Orwell himself was suspect and in danger because he had belonged to a P.O.U.M. regiment, and he stayed in hiding until, with the help of the British consul, he was able to escape to France.

But if one searches the liberal periodicals, which have made the cause of civil liberties their own, one can find no mention of this terror. They were committed not to the fact but to the abstraction." Lionel Trilling 1952

Orwell might be amused at the Lying Left's resurrection of his name as a Lefty hero of the Spanish Civil War, since the Left furiously worked to keep Orwell's name permanently buried in the Memory Hole because he spoke the truth about that war.

But as Trilling wrote of Orwell, "Through the greater part of his literary career his criticism [of intellectuality] was simpler and less extreme. It was as simple as this: that intellectuals did not think, and that they did not really love the truth."

[norton]

Thanks, (I needed that)
But I'll stand by the balance of my post.

And, note that your reply does not address orwell's position, or that of others in his sphere, prior to that time: and I'm not savy enough to say yea or nay.

On your side: Aminal Fram was not apparently written with capitalists or with hitler in mind.

[Barset]

You were quite right. Orwell did not see the contradictions in socialism, and did not abandon it.

In the thirties Marxist/socialism was the religion of the "intelligentia" and Stalin was god. To suggest that this religion was not all good was to commit heresy, and Orwell's writing about the Communist betrayal of the Spanish Republic was seen by Socialists as well as Communists as just that.

Orwell did not have it in him to deny the truth so he really did not make a very good Socialist. I sometimes wonder if he had lived longer would he have seen that his political philosphy was the enemy of the ordinary, the apolitical people who just wanted to live their ordinary lives, the sort of people Winston sees going about their ordinary lives when he looks out the window of the room where he meets his lover, in "1984."

Yes, goofy Leftists or just idiots who like to play at being revolutionaries while they squat, safe and well-fed in the countries of the Western Democracies howling about being "oppressed," love the images of the Spanish Civil War, and know nothing about it. Like the clueless dopes in their Che Guevara t-shirts.

There was a novel "The Cypresses Believew in God" published in the fifties in Spain and translated into English. The Left went nuts, because it was a novel and the author wrote of ordinary families on both sides caught up in the gruesome realities of the Spanish Civil War. It did not follow the Left's interpretation. It's really funny to read old reviews and see how barking mad the Left got at any writer who deviated from the Party line.

They still do that. I think you have to be afflicted with some kind of brain lesion to be able to read and write the long, convoluted reviews and articles of the Left as they twist and writhe in a swamp of lies, "necessary"lies to conceal the horror of the "necessary" state enforced famines, and "necessary" mass murders that keep the gangsters in power over ordinary human beings.

There were a lot of good posts on this thread. I forgot to write down the names of the posters so I could thank them for sharing their knowledge. I'll have to make another post.

Thank you for your posts; I agree with you. I probably wasn't too clear because I really dislike thinking about these people. It is really boring, if you think about it. Liars are always boring even when they appear glamorous and appealing to the uninformed and just plain silly.

[norton]

"Thanks, I needed that - two"
(See number 29)

This has turned into a really instructive discussion
(too often a rare event thesedays on FR)

I'm pretty aware of the Civil War in Spain, socialism between the wars, and the fervent adoration of the left in western elites prior to the unfortunate events leading up to recognition of a cold war.
(How do you forget quotes such as "I like old Joe" or the concession of spheres of influence over liberated europe?)

But, the lives of famous authors has not been a strong suit,
thanks for the clarification (part two)... and it seems we still live in intersting times.

[BarbaricGrandeur]

We considered invading Spain as a backdoor onto the continent. The strategic picture would have looked much better for the Allies had Spain been non fascist and never forget that nazi criminals used Spain as an asylum.

It wouldn't really have looked good if they were commies though. It would have looked best if they had maintained a strong monarchy, but that wasn't in the cards, certainly not after the anti-monarchical crusade that WW1 became. WW1 ended what the French revolutionaries began, and WW2 was just a battle to see which of the ideologies which had grown out of the new political paradigm would be the common currency of Europe. The Spanish civil war could be said to have been the first battle of that war. The leftist socialism may have lost in Spain but technically won the larger war. And one way or another, leftist socialism has dominated. It's better than if the national socialists, with their bourgeoisie militarism, had won, but only by comparison.

[kms61]

Spain needs Franco now, before it's too late to save the country. Open immigration and liberalism is the death knell of Western countries.

-------

So, by extension, do you think the United States needs a Franco?

[Cincinna]

Thanks for posting this book and the review.

Radosh, like David Horowitz, is one of those far left extremists from the 60s who had a Road to Damascus experience that transformed their lives.

Pity the others left to wallow in myths and falshoods.

[kms61]

The world is not always a zero-sum game, and just because one side is bad doesn't automatically make the other side good. That's a concept that some on this thread seem unable or unwilling to grasp.

[FreedomPoster]

On that note, this thread is yet another good opportunity to point out the third quote on my profile page, the two-paragraph one by Hayek.

[BerlinStrausbaugh]

Makes one wonder how many would have come from those graves had the Communists prevailed in 1939.

The "Republican" forces were directed by the commissars sent by Stalin and the evil caused by these Soviet forces and the commissars has filled (surprise!) very few books in the West.

Of couse that is due to the fact that the publishers, by and large, are liberals (leftists) who only want the brave selfless deeds of the valiant Abraham Lincoln brigade expanded upon.

Fortunately, I have a small library of books about the Spanish Civil War and what actually happened flies in the face of Ernest Hummingbird.

He'll never get the credit due him, but Francisco Franco saved Europe in more ways than one, only to have the Big Three powers cheerfully hand over Eastern Europe to the scheming USSR's "Uncle Joe" Stalin.

[BerlinStrausbaugh]

Spain needs Franco now, before it's too late to save the country.

Unfortunately, the Spaniards allowed themselves to be frightened (after the train bombing) to vote the commies back in. The penalty they will pay for this will be great.

[BerlinStrausbaugh]

...and never forget that nazi criminals used Spain as an asylum.

I'll never forget, because I can't remember that Franco's Spain was a haven for war criminals. Do you have a source to cite for this statement? Perhaps some leftist truth bender may have published such tripe.

I do know that Spain was a haven for Jews fleeing Nazis and Franco aided and abetted their entry into Spain.

Franco continued to play Germany like a harp before and during WWII. Hitler and his lieutenants didn't have the stomach to march across Spain enroute to Gibraltar because they would have been decimated in the attempt.