Posted on 08/12/2007 9:29:40 PM PDT by neverdem
The Last Crusade: Spain 1936
By Warren Carroll
(Christendom Press/ISI Books, 240 pages, $15)
WHEN THE HEROICS of the Spanish Civil War come up -- Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway's fictions or the effusions of various poets -- there is a very large and usually unremarked elephant in the room: Orwell, who actually fought, and Hemingway who wrote about fighting, were on the wrong side.
The strategic point is simple: had the Stalinists won war, then during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact from 1939 to mid-1941, they would have allowed Hitler to cross Spain and seize Gibraltar. Had this happened, the British forces in the Mediterranean, including the British Empire's last remaining field army in action, would have been cut off. The British army and fleet could probably have been supplied through the Suez Canal, at least for a while, but their positions would have been immeasurably weakened, and the enemy's position immeasurably strengthened.
There would have been no Force H to sally forth from Gibraltar to stop the Bismarck massacring the Atlantic convoys, eventually the Middle-East oilfields and the Suez Canal would quite likely have fallen into Nazi hands, as would the Jewish population of what would become Israel. Fascism and Nazism would have ruled the Mediterranean and there would have been little to stop them reaching the shores of the Indian Ocean, and perhaps eventually joining up in India with the Japanese. The chances would have greatly increased that Hitler would have won the war, and even if America had come in before that, eventual victory for the allies would have been much more costly. As it was, Franco refused to allow Hitler to attack Gibraltar through Spain, though Hitler met him and harangued him for hours...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Orwell at least came clean and broke ranks with “liberal” socialists in the UK and US when they refuse to denounce the horrors of Stalinism.
His writings are in indictment of Stalinist Communism and the Red Dupes who close ranks to embrace Socialism at all costs refusing to admit the wrongs committed in the name of Socialism. Pretty much how the moderate muslims refuse to acknowledge the horrors of Islamic Supremacists are anything more than the excesses of “lone nuts” who don’t follow the “true” teachings.
It starts out plausible, but chaos theory says that anything could have happened eventually and with rapidly decreasing predictability.
“Had the Stalinists won the war”.... well, they didn’t.
Orwell and Hemingway opposed the fascists in Spain. That was wrong because of the author’s counterfactual “what if?” I think that the history of the 20th century indicates that neither camp of totalitarians were the morally superior, and this article is dumb and useless speculation.
According to Carroll, 6,832 Catholic priests and other religious, including 283 nuns, were murdered in the territory of the Spanish Republic during the war, most of whom, according to another scholar, Stanley Payne, were killed without even “the simulacrum of condemnation by revolutionary tribunals.” This was the greatest clerical blood-letting in the history of the Catholic Church. About 12% of the entire Catholic clergy of Spain and about a quarter of those caught in the Republican zone were murdered. Probably hundreds of thousands of lay people were killed for observing Christian worship or for trying to shelter priests and nuns. Many of the killings were accompanied with torture. In his autobiography Approach March, British politician Julian Amery, of Jewish background, recalls visiting territory captured from the Republican forces and the evidence of their literally Satanic, death-obsessed, nihilism. The extent to which Christianity was targeted is also indicated by the fact that nearly half of Spain’s 40,000 churches were destroyed, this in a European country in the 20th Century which a deep Catholic heritage. For Professor Carroll to have titled this book The Last Crusade is no misnomer.
It is sad that even today in much of european thought, the world is divided with only communism or fascism as existing choices.
They will, seemingly forever, wobble from one toward the other and back again.
ping
Doubtful. Stalin didn't want Hitler to get too strong.
orwell did not fight with the stalinists. he fought with an independant militia made up of socialist workers that was purged when the Soviets took over the republican effort. he was almost killed by the stalinists and had to flee Spain
the “socialist” side was the side of the democratic elected spanish government. it was fascists that used a mercenary army from morrocco to invade spain and overthrow an elected government that had begun to abolish the feudal system that had previously existed.
the stalinists took over slowly, and then destroyed the anti-fascist resistance by purging all of the non-stalinist groups fighting Franco’s armies.
his theory about the possible outcome of the war is patently ridiculous, because if anything, Franco only won the war because of extensive Nazi and Italian intervention on his side. If anyone was inclined to aid the Nazis, it was Franco. Stalin would have never let Hitler mass armies on what he considered the “soviet sphere” of influence.
That’s quite a bit of speculation. Why would a communist Spain closely allied with Stalin blithely allow Hitler to march through their territory and attack Gibraltar? It was very much in the communists’ interest for the Western powers to waste resources in a futile stalemate. Therefore, it is hard to imagine Stalin providing Hitler with an advantage.
Furthermore, Hitler wasn’t interested in a southern strategy or in conquering British territory in the Mediterranean. Before the invasion of Russia, Hitler believed he could work a political solution with the British. Had Hitler wanted Gibraltar he might have put more pressure on Franco to open the Spanish boarder or tried an amphibious and airborne invasion such as the Germans did in Crete. Granted, this would have been risky (especially since it would have hinged on Italian naval support) but he might have tried it had he fully understood British resolve to stay in the war and the devastating affect a German occupied Gibraltar would have had on British navel transport.
well put, Churtle. Orwell signed up with the POUM, who were anarcho-syndicalists — and the first people the stalinists hunted down. I doubt if Freepers would much in common with the POUM, but they sure weren’t Moscow’s lickspittles.
Good review, thanks for posting the link.
I was a long time subscriber to the Am. Spectator back in the days when it was a newspaper, never really liked the transition to a magazine format.
I’d be interested in reading more on Spanish history in the 19th century. A chapter in a book I recently read on European politics in the 20th century , mentioned the relative radicalism of the Spanish armed forces in the 19th century compared to their 20th century record. Could you reccomend anything?
So let me get this straight — they fought against the Nazis, thus aiding the Nazis?
Tidy piece of pretzel logic there.
I can't help you. I'm just a student of military and political history. I thought the author started with a pretty provocative scenario about the Republicans winning would have helped the Nazis in their North African Campaign because of the Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the USSR. When I find stuff about the Spanish Civil War, it's usually because I've stumbled across it.
I wasn't aware until recently how the Republicans treated the Catholic Church. When I was a medical student, I did a pre-op history and physical for a veteran of the of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. IIRC, he had some type of skin cancer. It was at Saint Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx. I wish I knew then what I new now.
Tidy piece of pretzel logic there.
Not when you consider Stalin's treachery.
You should read the review a little more closely. The reviewer points out that both sides were coalitions, Franco’s side was not monolithically Fascist. Franco himself was a Nationalist and a Spanish patriot.
The label fascist has been used as a smear by the radical left for 70+ years now, against any conservative, traditionalist or nationalist they happen to disagree with.
The targets have been as varied as European monarchists, Ronald Reagan or Nelson Rockefeller after Attica.
Politicians and leaders have to operate in the real world and use the tools at hand in times of crisis.
George Washington needed Charles Henry Lee and Horatio Gates and had to tolerate their pretensions, Lincoln placated radicals in his government that despised him and Churchill answered critics of cooperation with Stalin by remarking that if Hitler invaded Hell he would endeavour to say something nice in the House about Satan.
I don’t think Franco was a fascist, as I said he was a nationalist and a patriot. He kept his country out of a war she didn’t need and allowed the Spanish Blue Division to be recruited and to serve in Russia with the Germans, placating Hitler in some measure and providing a pressure relief valve to rid his country of fascist true believers.
Of course he accepted arms, troops and aid from the Fascist powers, it was war to the knife.
The Founders, republicans, took aid from France and Spain; our Catholic, imperialst, autocratic, ancestral enemies up to that time.
You may disagree with the thesis but I think you may be painting with too broad a brush.
Only if you sume that Stalin would have held effectively complete control over Spain. And even then, even during the years of the non-aggression pact, are there any other examples of Stalin allowing German troops to occupy territory under his control? The notion that he would have allowed the use of Spain as a staging ground against Gibraltar is a flight of fancy.
The loyalists in Spain were fighting against the Nazis in the most literal sense — the planes that destroyed Guernica were not Spanish and were not flown by Spaniards. The Republican movement in Spain was not essentially communist, any more that resistance to Hitler in general was; the Spanish cause came to be dominated by communists because the West was not inclined to stand up against Hitler.
... who established an authoritarian regime that lasted another four decades.
It is a valid point that fascists were not inherently murderously anti-semitic -- that was Hitler's psychosis, not Franco's, Mussolini's, or even Tojo's (though the Japanese certainly committed horrific acts of racism against other Asians, the Chinese in particular).
Franco had the sense to keep Spain out of the war, and as you rightly point out, made only limited concessions to Hitler; but i still think it takes a mighty stretch to speculate that a communist Spain would have been more accommodating.
Germany and Russia had a non-aggression pact -- just that, not an alliance, though they did have an agreement to carve up Poland into their respective spheres of influence. I would be more open to the hypothesis that Stalin would have let Hitler roll through Spain to attack Gibraltar if there were a pattern of Stalin letting Hitler use his territory as a staging ground, but I am not aware of any cases where that happened.
The notion that Stalin would have executed so many of his generals before Operation Barbarosa seems to be an equal flight of fancy. But that happened while the Soviets were worried about Germany and Japan.
No, it seems to be documented fact. "Did" is not an equivalent argument to "would have."
Stalin, like mast tyrants, was wildly paranoid -- and like many rulers of that stripe, he was more attuned to imagined threats from within than real looming threats from without. A tyrant has to fear anyone smarter, more skilled, more popular or more worldly than he is -- the very people a leader needs, in times of crisis most of all.
The claim in the article is that Stalin would have allowed Hitler to use territory under his control as a staging ground against the Allies, specifically the British outpost on Gibraltar.
Leaving aside whether Stalin could have controlled Spain completely enough to make that call, there is no evidence that Stalin would ever have considered allowing German troops and tanks to roll through his territory on the way to the dance. I know of no instance where he did so, and no one has yet offered one.
The US has long-standing, very close and very warm relations with Canada, several orders of magnitude closer than Stalin and Hitler ever did. But can you imagine, for one second, that if they got into a beef with Mexico, we'd be okay with Canadian tanks rolling down our Interstates?
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