Posted on 08/15/2014 11:59:26 AM PDT by aimhigh
As the European Dream continues its slow descent into dystopic nightmare, leaving millions of economically disenfranchised Europeans languishing in the gutter of misery, public anger is growing. Nowhere is this more evident than in austerity-ridden Spain, where political protests have been a constant thorn in the side of the country’s knee-jerk authoritarian government.
Yesterday that government hit back with a declaration that evoked chilling echoes of Spain’s not-so-distant past. In response to a query by a member of parliament, the Ministry of Interior announced that during a public demonstration the police can confiscate any filming device if officers have reason to believe that it could be used to “commit an illegal act.”
That illegal act, one assumes, is the filming of the police as they “execute” their duties. That’s right: Spain could soon become the first supposedly democratic nation to outlaw the filming of police officers. It is one of a raft of new offenses included in the decidedly Orwellian-termed “Citizens’ Security” law, more popularly known as the “Gag Law” (Ley Mordaza). The new law proposes fines of up to €30,000 for using slogans against the country, the King or State, and up to €600,000 for organizing unauthorized street protests.
(Excerpt) Read more at wolfstreet.com ...
I understand what you are describing; Spain was a haven for Jews during those times. Their economic decline afterwards resulted from the West ostracizing Franco. I read a speech from Franco (I believe it was in the 1950s), which he delivered to Americans when they approached him about putting US military bases there. He agreed, but chastised them for realizing so late what he had opposed 20 years earlier.
When the Civil War ended, he placed his sword on the altar in a cathedral in Spain vowing to never use force again unless it was to defend Spain. He kept his word, while we fought our wars in Korea, Vietnam, and various Caribbean adventures. We were in no position to judge him; we were allies of Joseph Stalin.
Franco had no problem alining himself with Hitler. Explain that.
Very easy of you to say. Did you live under Franco? Explain is alining himself with Hitler. Spin that one for me. Franco was a thug.
As to Franco's involvement with the Axis, he sent no troops or military assistance to the Axis, undermined to he extent possible the Holocaust and told Hitler that, unless Spanish diplomats were allowed access to the death camps and to accomplish the freedom of Spanish ancestry Jews under Spain's Law of Return, there would be American air bases in Spain to facilitate the Allied invasion of Occupied Europe.
Franco was a great man, the greatest Spaniard patriot of the last century. This is a CONSERVATIVE website. I would think you would feel a sense of shame in taking an essentially Stalinist line on Franco. Check out the American "Lincoln Brigades" of US communists who went to fight for the Spanish communist government against Franco. There is also a news story published yesterday about some idiot of Spanish citizenship who has a tattoo of Lenin on one side of his torso and of Stalin on the other side and who has shown up in Ukraine volunteering to fight alongside the "Russian" or communist forces seeking to dismember Ukraine. He says that he is volunteering to pay Russia back for its support in the Spanish Civil War.
r Did YOU live under Franco? I did not think so. You have merely been homogenized into the anti-Franco spin of the communists whom he militarily defeated. The lame stream media will be so proud of you!
As my dear late grandmother (and probably yours too) used to say: "Show me your friends and I'll tell you what you are." Would you rather live under Franco or Obozo? Why? AND, was Stalin a thug in your imagination? Why or why not? Also, how should Catholic Franco have reacted to the raping of nuns and the mass slaughter of nuns, priests and seminarians by the communist government troops of Spain? Maybe he should have called a new election and abided by the results? And if the carnage of the innocent continued, oh well..... Right?
In the Spanish Civil War as in all wars, the military kills people and breaks their stuff. Its the job of the military under the circumstances. Franco would have been morally justified in seeing to it that no quarter be given and that each and every Spanish or foreign communist, anarchist or "Republican" soldier be slaughtered to the man. He did not.
It is NOT the job of the military to attack peaceful civilians much less to rape and murder nuns and murder priests and seminarians merely for being vowed religious. And you have the nerve on a CONSERVATIVE website to call Franco a thug. You are, at best, a Know Nothing.
Franco sent “The Blue Division’’ to Russia to fight for Hitler. You left that out. Yours is the biggest pile of revisionist bull sh!t I’ve ever read. Obviously you didn’t live in Spain under Franco and you’re right—this is CONSERVATIVE website and you’re singing the praises of a Spanish Fascist.
The alliance with Stalin was one of war time necessity. Franco allied himself with Hitler and allowed The Condor Legion(the nascent Luftwaffe) to bomb the basque town of Guernica.
“Franco allied himself with Hitler and allowed The Condor Legion(the nascent Luftwaffe) to bomb the basque town of Guernica.”
Franco accepted aid from Germany & Italy because nobody else would help him; the International Brgades (and Soviet pilots in Soviet planes) fought for the communists.
There is no dispute that when the Cold War started, the US went to Franco hat in hand and asked for an alliance; he was completely vindicated. Americans justified killing a lot more Japanese civilians to force the surrender in 1945; the bombing of Guernica helped deliver northern Spain to the Nationalists in 1937 (certainly speeding up the war, which at that point was contained in the east).
Franco was one of the last generals to join the military revolt; the original leader (Sanjurgo) died in a plane crash trying to fly from Portugal at the beginning, and General Goded was executed after the revolt failed in the east. The remaining general (Mola) was in control of Navarre but needed arms and reinforcements from Franco’s Army of Africa, who double-timed up the peninsula to provide both; he never contested Franco’s more powerful position.
You wouldn’t have wanted to live under Franco.
My in-laws lived under Franco for decades, and left for jobs (most of their younger siblings stayed) - they would visit every two years, and never complained about him. If they were Catalans or Basques seeking independence, maybe they would have disliked him; as Gallegos they were quite OK with him (Galicia had supported him from the start). Unlike our allies the Soviets, Franco was happy to let anyone who wanted to leave do so.
Read “The Last Crusade”, and you’ll get a thorough understanding of Franco himself. He knew democracy had elected the government that oversaw the murder of over 7,000 priests (and hundreds of nuns), and he also knew that the monarchy was flawed as well. He was apolitical, and pledged that he would live and die in a Catholic Spain.
He allowed Germans to kills Spaniards who had allowed Soviets to kill Spaniards. Most Spaniards who fled across the border into France returned while Franco was in power (the exception being those guilty of murders of civilians). Unlike the flight of the Whites after the Russian Civil War, there was no mass exodus from Spain after Franco’s victory; he was supported in much of the country outside of major eastern cities, and people proved much more willing to support him than the “loyalists”. Within a year of the start of the Civil War (the “May Days” of 1937), Soviet-led communists murdered the leadership of their anarchist comrades (who had led the resistance to the military coup in 1936), and the left lost heart. The remainder of the war, though it dragged on for two more years, saw a slow death spiral for a government that tried to rule by terror within its own territory while starving its citizens to death; it never regained the initiative, and could never recover lost territory.
In a parallel to our own situation today, leftist elites on the coasts mock the “flyover country” people who grow their food and fight their wars.
I had not heard of the Blue Division or Legion Azul but, since you bring them up, they were Spanish VOLUNTEERS whose participation in the war was strictly limited to attacking Stalinist USSR, They were absolutely required not to engage any other Allied troops or other military. They killed a lot of communists particularly at Leningrad. Got a problem with that? I don't. I have a MUCH bigger problem with FDR allying us with the USSR which no previous POTUS had even recognized. I also agree with Patton, MacArthur (as I understand it), the German and Japanese High Command who wanted to use the remaining German and Japanese troops to spearhead a proposed invasion of the USSR to end totalitarianism and future threats to Japan and Germany among other nations. Russia had been battered. Our troops were still available along with their equipment. It is a crime that Stalin and the USSR were allowed to survive and that we handed Stalin Eastern Europe and parts of Asia.
This is a CONSERVATIVE website and you have no problem coddling Stalin. Good luck with that. It is a good thing that Ronaldus Maximus was POTUS to arrange the collapse of the soviets rather than someone like you.
I did not live in Spain under Franco and neither did you. You but the standard issue propaganda. I don't. I did not live through the Bolshevik Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Thirty Years War, the American Revolution, the Roman Republic or the roman Empire. That does not mean I don't have strong opinions on each of them and many more. Just as you root for the reds in the 1930s and 1940s without being there.
I also have seen no apology from you for your love objects raping and murdering nuns and murdering priests and seminarians. Do you think that the Spanish reds were somehow entitled to do that without retaliation or that the Stalinists were entitled to, as moral monsters themselves, back the Spanish moral monsters who committed such infamous crimes? I will gladly support Falangists over communists any time. If you would not, what qualifies you as a conservative? Maybe you have been living under Obozo and the New Left for too long? Or did your great grandpa go to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln brigades?
He allowed Germans to kill Spanish communists, anarchists and the like who were themselves involved in infamous murders and in no position to call foul. Good for Franco and those Spanish and German who carried out that noble work of disposing en masse of the leftist murderers of Spanish innocents.
Professor Warren Carroll wrote The Last Crusade which has already been recommended to you. Read it and buy a clue. The Germans in question did good in Spain. The Spaniards in the Legion Azul did good in Russia. The result was dead reds. Don't agree that killing reds was good? What makes YOU a conservative?
Let me translate your post. What you MEANT to say was that Franco's critics were only willing to engage in character assassination when Franco was safely dead and unable to defend himself. By then, the spineless king who owed his monarchy to Franco had largely ruined Spain by bringing Marxists to power with his blessing. Only since Franco's death does Spain suffer the abortion holocaust and government cheerleading of sexual perversion. Satisfied?
And, it is strange that you want to believe that dissenters were unable to act against Franco's government. One favored form of such protests, popular among the Basque Separatists, was placing bombs under the automobiles carrying Franco's government ministers. Those who did the bombing had no compunction about claiming "credit" for those bombings which would seem to be a statement of opposition to Franco.
#32 Paragraph 4 Sentence 2: You BUY the standard issue propaganda.
Socialists. They want to take away your guns, take away your liberties, make you live the way they want you to live. Just shut up and do what they say.
Because they are so much smarter than we are, and they have this vision of a perfect world if everyone would just behave. Orwell understood their mentality very well.
More rank propaganda. National Review in Bill Buckley's later years did an extensive article proving that Guernica's damage resulted from explosives planted on the ground and in the walls of buildings there and NOT from air raids by anyone. Then the Spanish communist artist Pablo Picasso piled on with his painting "Guernica" to assist the propaganda.
Do you also believe that the Romanovs were criminals for hanging Lenin's brother for his part in the assassination of the tsar who was Nicholas II? Dichotomy: Stalin or Trotsky and why?
Alliance with Stalin a war time necessity??? Bushwah! Stalin did nothing on the Pacific front other than to try to grab part of Japan at the end about three days before the armistice with Hirohito. Against the Germans, Stalin's soviet union absorbed a terrific beating at various locations. Hitler's stupidity and obsession with sending in the SS and killing Jews and some political prisoners cost the Germans the goodwill shown to the SA by the people in Western areas of the USSR. FDR gave Stalin Eastern Europe. Eisenhower as commander of SHAEF gave the Russians East Germany. How many people in the East suffered how much for decades because of this phony "necessity?" Give Patton and others like him the gasoline for the tanks and all of Germany would have been free under Adenauer.
In Europe in the period 1935-1945, you were either aligned with Hitler or with Stalin, and Franco had no interest in going Communist.
How much material support did Franco give Hitler during the war?
Franco COST Hitler the war, over Franco's refusal to allow the German army passage through Spain to take Gibraltar from the Brits. If Hitler had possessed Gibraltar, he would have controlled the entrance to the Mediterranean. The Allied North Africa campaign could not have happened, the invasion of Italy could not have happened. Hitler would have won.
Franco allowed volunteers to join the Blue Division to fight against Stalin, a subtle but important distinction:
Although Spanish dictator Field Marshal (Generalísimo) Francisco Franco did not enter World war II on the side of Nazi Germany, he permitted volunteers to join the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) on the clear and guaranteed condition they would fight exclusively against Bolshevism (Soviet Communism) on the Eastern Front, and not against the Western Allies or any Western European occupied populations. In this manner, he could keep Spain at peace with the Western Allies whilst simultaneously repaying Adolf Hitler for his support during the Spanish Civil War (see Condor Legion). Spanish foreign minister Ramón Serrano Súñer made the suggestion to raise a volunteer corps, and at the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, Franco sent an official offer of help to Berlin.In so doing, he got a lot of the pro-Nazi Spaniards out of Spain during the war, they west to the Eastern Front, and they DIED there, thus ridding Spain of what would otherwise have been a pro-Hitler Fifth Column.
I thought it was a brilliant move.
Left-wingers would not. People who just wanted to earn a living and raise their families and did not wave a red flag probably lived very peaceful lives.
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