Spanish CIvil War Revisited

In Paul Preston’s history of the Spanish Civil War, the atrocities under Franco mirror those in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

They may "mirror" them but they don't approach the scale of atrocities in Russia and Eastern Europe, Germany and Poland, etc.

The review and book focus on the madness that results in such murderous rage in a small nation during a civil war -- a rage incidentally "mirrored" in our own civil war.  But we don't hear any insights into the nature of that homicidal outburst, just a tally of the atrocities on all sides.

In Spain there had been centuries of oppression of the vast majority of the people by a grotesquely priveleged few, and the clergy had the bad luck and judgement to side with the landed aristrocracy when push came to shoot.

What most people don't know or haven't heard, is that the Spanish Civil War was a revolt by the right wing militarists, royalists, and authoritarian church.  Usually its the other way around.  It was odd to start with, since the first thirty years of the twentieth century shows a sophisticated, literate and engaged nation surfacing toward a kind of western democracy that we think is the ideal for the world.  When the ultra conservative military units in Morocco fomented a revolt against the elected republican government, it was the dead hand of the middle ages choking off modern Spanish society with a vengeance.

But the question remains, even given the inequity and hatred below the surface in Spain, why the catastrophic bloodshed?  Why the homicidal vengeance that seemed more fitting to an entire nation gone psychopath?  I have some vague idea that Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini threw kerosine on the local campfire, and added technology and agendas that blew it up into a forest fire of global proportions.  But when you read the detailed episodes of this war, it is still stunning that all sides seemed suddenly to take death for granted, to embrace it with a kind of lust.

Somewhere in the records, the films, the memories of a few living survivors, there must be a clue as to why this particular civil war seems to contain, in a blood-soaked microcosm, the main outlines of the most murderous century in human history.

In 1936 Unamuno had a public quarrel with the Nationalist general Millán Astray at the University in which he denounced both Astray—with whom he had had verbal battles in the 1920's—and elements of the rebel movement. He called the battle cry of the elite armed forces group named La Legión—"Long live death!"—repellent and suggested Astray wanted to see Spain crippled.