an essay on spanish civil war

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Looking Back on the Spanish War

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First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things.

It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front – the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those particular men because I remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who were mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that all of them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been about twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.

One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish Civil War. The Latin type of latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so often to recur; ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is about something, and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.’ Many other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.

The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.

Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now. Our memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of New Masses or the Daily Worker , and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the Lunns , Garvins et hoc genus ; they go without saying. But here were the very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the ‘glory’ of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted into the Daily Mail of 1918. If there was one thing that the British intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from ‘War is hell’ to ‘War is glorious’ not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions equally violent. There must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the intelligentsia, who approved the ‘King and Country’ declaration in 1935, shouted for a ‘firm line’ against Germany in 1937, supported the People’s Convention in 1940, and are demanding a Second Front now.

As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be ‘pro-war’ or ‘anti-war’, but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. When they enthused over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army the experience of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less, discipline was less irksome. You have only to glance at the New Statesman to see that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the Red Army at this moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is worth writing down shows what the years of rentier capitalism have done to us.

In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on atrocities.

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish Civil War. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.

In the present war we are in the curious situation that our ‘atrocity campaign’ was done largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously; partly also because official war propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-18 was the exaggerated pro-German reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won?’ even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them.

But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason for scepticism – that the same horror stories come up in war after war – merely makes it rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the ‘whites’ commit far more and worse atrocities than the ‘reds’. There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. The volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes from the German press and radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads – they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.

Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I think, giving one a certain insight into the atmosphere of a revolutionary period:

Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat beet-field with no cover except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still dark and return soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.

What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.

One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European make; one in particular – the arm outstretched, the palm vertical – was a gesture characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible – I mean the attempt to wipe out an injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could not be wiped out.

Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare, horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think, resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting men: ‘Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist!’ etc. etc. As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got!’ ( ¡ No hay cabo como el! ) Later on he applied for leave to exchange into my section.

Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself. The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a normal time. It was a time when generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters, the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarity’, pathetically repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No, you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.

The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda – that is to say, lies. The broad truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.

I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish Civil War. Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues – namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.

The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre ( vide the Catholic Herald or the Daily Mail – but these were child’s play compared with the continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point – the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention, at the same time as the Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their ‘legionaries’. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.

This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable – even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica , you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past . If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?

Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways – the breaking-up of families, for instance – the conditions are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don’t grasp its full implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a régime founded on slavery must collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus . Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom, ‘ Felix fecit ’. I have a vivid mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence.

The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working class, especially the urban trade union members. In the long run – it is important to remember that it is only in the long run – the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the working class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.

To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and their comrades abroad, linked to them in theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be, seemed less interesting and less important than yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreoever they can be bribed – for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war – and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings – there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.

The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been partly influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out in 1939 was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.

The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a clairvoyant to foresee that war between Britain and Germany was coming; one could even foretell within a year or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were, and yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to stand up to Germany. It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question. As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they, as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to prevent a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any rate, the Spanish Civil War demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to their Spanish Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having ‘gained what no republic missed’.

Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. I myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on the grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged, weaponless armies of the Republic held out for two and a half years, which was undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But whether that dislocated the Fascist timetable, or whether, on the other hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the Nazis extra time to get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.

I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my mind. One is of the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing some song with a refrain that ended:

‘Una resolucion, Luchar hast’ al fin!’

Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of the war the Republican armies must have been fighting almost without cigarettes, and with precious little food. Even when I left Spain in the middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce, tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost unobtainable.

The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the Spanish war, and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I remember – oh, how vividly! – his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man’s probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the G.P.U. But that does not affect the long-term issues. This man’s face, which I saw only for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Pétain , Montagu Norman , Pavelitch , William Randolph Hearst , Streicher , Buchman , Ezra Pound , Juan March , Cocteau , Thyssen , Father Coughlin , the Mufti of Jerusalem , Arnold Lunn , Antonescu , Spengler , Beverley Nichols , Lady Houston , and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the ‘changes of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. Pétain attributes the fall of France to the common people’s ‘love of pleasure’. One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant’s or working-man’s life would contain compared with Pétain’s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what not who lecture the working-class Socialist for his ‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life livable without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we are now fighting. I don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that wouldn’t solve anything in itself. It is merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible. All the considerations that are likely to make one falter – the siren voices of a Pétain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain, with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing politics – all this fades away and one sees only the struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later – some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the present war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.

I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these verses in his memory:

The Italian soldier shook my hand Beside the guard-room table; The strong hand and the subtle hand Whose palms are only able

To meet within the sound of guns, But oh! what peace I knew then In gazing on his battered face Purer than any woman’s!

For the flyblown words that make me spew Still in his ears were holy, And he was born knowing what I had learned Out of books and slowly.

The treacherous guns had told their tale And we both had bought it, But my gold brick was made of gold – Oh! who ever would have thought it?

Good luck go with you, Italian soldier! But luck is not for the brave; What would the world give back to you? Always less than you gave.

Between the shadow and the ghost, Between the white and the red, Between the bullet and the lie, Where would you hide your head?

For where is Manuel Gonzalez, And where is Pedro Aguilar, And where is Ramon Fenellosa? The earthworms know where they are.

Your name and your deeds were forgotten Before your bones were dry, And the lie that slew you is buried Under a deeper lie;

But the thing that I saw in your face No power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst Shatters the crystal spirit.

Written August 1942, Sections I, II, III, and VII printed in New Road , June 1943

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From Guernica to human rights : essays on the Spanish Civil War

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Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Spanish civil war periodical collection, 1923-2009.

Description by Sean Beebe, doctoral student in History and Archives & Special Collections assistant.

A large number of periodicals created during the Spanish Civil War were created by the fighting forces, many by particular units within those forces. These publications were intended to promote the image of those fighters and to help maintain unit morale and cohesion. The January 23, 1938 edition of Nuevo Ejercito (New Army), the newspaper of the 47th Division of the Republican army, contained a summary of the division’s recent combat activity; a Catalan-language page; and unit news, all interspersed with photographs of the division’s soldiers in winter action.

A similar approach is found in La Voz de la Sanidad, the newspaper of the international medical brigade attached to the 15th Division. Befitting the brigade’s multinational status, the paper was written in four languages: Spanish, French, English and German. La Voz de la Sanidad’s content consisted of a mixture of the same items reproduced—side-by-side or on succeeding pages—in each of the four languages, alongside items, both informative and comic, unique to each language.

A second type of periodical served to call for material support for the Republican side. In New York City, African-Americans combined this support with efforts to combat racism at home. The Negro Committee to Aid Spain, sponsored by such notables as Mary McLeod Bethune, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, and Richard Wright, published a pamphlet entitled “A Negro Nurse in Republican Spain,” which recounted the story of Salaria Kee, an African-American nurse from Harlem who joined the volunteer American Medical Unit in 1937.

Kee’s story was juxtaposed with a more general account of those of African-American men who had volunteered for the International Brigades, as racism at home “appeared to them as part of the picture of fascism,” which could be most directly confronted in Spain. The pamphlet chronicled Kee’s early life, decision to go to Spain and her service there, both in hospitals and directly behind the lines — until a shell wound made her unfit for further service. Kee returned to America, and joined the fundraising campaign for which the pamphlet was produced. The text concluded with a quotation from Kee: “Negro men have given up their lives there…as courageously as any heroes of any age. Surely Negro people will just as willingly give of their means to relieve the suffering of a people attacked by the enemy of all racial minorities — fascism — and its most aggressive exponents — Italy and Germany.”

One further form of publication, that of outright propaganda designed to influence hearts and minds, forms an extensive part of the collection. A 1937 edition of the British magazine Spain Illustrated featured photographs (including those of corpses) and articles portraying “a year’s fight for democracy,” and condemning the Nationalists and their fascist backers for the tremendous suffering inflicted upon the Spanish people. The non-interventionist policy of the Western democracies was vilified as an utter failure, with Parliament coming in for particular criticism for its “pro-fascist” stance. Most dramatically, the magazine contended that the defeat of the Republicans would be but the prelude “for attacking England and France…all hope of peace in Europe would be at an end.”

Finally, the example of quasi-neutral international media opens an interesting window on to how the conflict was perceived outside of Spain, outside of an obvious ideological lens. In August 1936, the famed French illustrated magazine, L’Illustration , published a special edition dedicated to the civil war. L’Illustration ’s version of the war was one of utter tragedy, in which “fratricidal” conflict split the nation apart; its editors “could only see in the two Spains in conflict a single country which we love and which suffers.” Consequently, the magazine presented images of the conflict’s devastation, whether the rather graphic images of corpses left in public places, those of defiled churches, or of cities after bombardments and shelling. These particularly dramatic choices appear to serve an almost fatalistic reading of the conflict, in which no action can be taken but to observe this tremendous amount of suffering.

May 2, 2015

Brandeis University's Archives & Special Collections holds a significant amount of material relating to the Spanish Civil War, including over 4,700 books, close to 400 periodicals and roughly 250 posters. In addition, the Charles Korvin photograph collection comprises 244 black and white images taken during the War. Follow the links below for further information about these holdings:

Spanish Civil War periodical collection, 1923-2009 (finding aid)

Charles Korvin photographs, circa 1937-1938 (finding aid)

Spanish Civil War posters, 1936-1938 on Brandeis University’s Institutional Repository

Spotlight on the Spanish Civil War posters

Spotlight on the SCW poster ¡Jovenes! (circa 1937)

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• Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War (1936 – 39) was the bloodiest conflict western Europe had experienced since the end of World War I in 1918.

It was the breeding ground for mass atrocities. About 200,000 people died as the result of systematic killings, mob violence, torture, or other brutalities.

The fighting displaced millions of Spaniards. Some 500,000 refugees fled in 1939 to France, where many of them would be interned in camps. 15,000 Spanish Republicans ended up in Nazi concentration camps after 1940.

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 the outbreak of the conflict.

The Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936, when generals Emilio Mola and Francisco Franco launched an uprising aimed at overthrowing the country's democratically elected republic. The Nationalist rebels' initial efforts to instigate military revolts throughout Spain only partially succeeded. In rural areas with a strong right-wing political presence, Franco's confederates generally won out. They quickly seized political power and instituted martial law. In other areas, particularly cities with strong leftist political traditions, the revolts met with stiff opposition and were often quelled. Some Spanish officers remained loyal to the Republic and refused to join the uprising. 

Outside Aid and Non-Intervention

Within days of the uprising, both the Republic and the Nationalists called for foreign military aid. Initially, France pledged to support the Spanish Republic, but soon reneged on its offer to pursue an official policy of non-intervention in the civil war. Great Britain immediately rejected the Republic's call for support.

Faced with potential defeat, Franco called upon Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy for aid. Thanks to their military assistance, he was able to airlift troops from Spanish Morocco across to the mainland to continue his assault on Madrid. Throughout the three years of the conflict, Hitler and Mussolini provided the Spanish Nationalist Army with crucial military support.

Some 5,000 German air force personnel served in the Condor Legion, which provided air support for coordinated ground attacks against Republican positions and carried out aerial bombings on Republican cities. The most notorious of these attacks came on April 26, 1937, when German and Italian aircraft leveled the Basque town of Gernike (Guernica in Spanish) in a three-hour campaign that killed 200 civilians or more. Fascist Italy supplied some 75,000 troops in addition to its pilots and planes. Spain became a military laboratory to test the latest weaponry under battlefield conditions.

The Spanish conflict quickly generated worldwide fears that it could explode into a full-fledged European war. In August 1936, more than two dozen nations, including France, Great Britain, Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, signed a Non-Intervention Agreement on Spain. The latter three signatories openly violated the policy. Italy and Germany continued to supply Franco's forces, while the Soviet Union provided military advisors, tanks, aircraft, and other war materiel to the Republic. Some scholars argue that the Non-Intervention Agreement benefited Franco, who could acquire armaments on credit from his allies, while the Republic had to pay hard currency to arms dealers to obtain often outdated weapons and find ways to transport these goods into the embargoed country.

In the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt 's administration chose not to intervene officially in the conflict, although the President sought to clandestinely provide some aid to the besieged Republic after 1937. The Spanish Civil War divided American public opinion between those who supported the Republic and those who condemned the Republican forces for carrying out attacks on the Catholic Church. Isolationism too proved to be an effective motivation for non-intervention. Fears of war and foreign entanglements helped to shape American politics in the 1930s.

For many liberals and leftists throughout the world, the Spanish Civil War represented a dress rehearsal for World War II , a pending conflict between the forces of democracy and fascism. By the mid-1930s, fascism and authoritarianism seemed to be on the rise in Europe. In 1936, when Franco launched his rebellion, right-wing regimes were in power in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Portugal, Finland, Austria, and Greece. And openly pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi political parties existed in many other countries, including France, Great Britain, and the United States.

Some 35,000 to 40,000 volunteers from more than 50 countries rushed to join the International Brigades to defend the Republic. A smaller number of foreign recruits joined Franco's forces.

Mass Violence

The Spanish Civil War engendered massive political violence, carried out by both sides on the battlefield and on city streets. The Nationalists included ultra-reactionary monarchists (Carlists), fascists (Falangists) as well as traditional conservatives, who viewed the Republic's supporters as “godless Bolsheviks” (Communists) who needed to be eradicated in order to create a new Spain. Franco's army also included Moorish troops from Morocco. The rebels portrayed the fighting as a “crusade,” a “holy war,” against a “Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevist” conspiracy. Antisemitic propaganda, including the notorious fictional work, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , circulated throughout the Nationalist-held territories. The Nationalists also tried to combat Basque and Catalan nationalism, which was perceived as a threat to national unity.

The Republican forces (Loyalists) too included a broad spectrum of political positions from moderate democrats, liberals, and socialists to more radical Leftists, such as Communists (both of the Stalinist and Trotskyist varieties) and Anarchists. On occasions, this coalition broke down into internecine violence.

The Spanish Civil War proved to be a breeding ground for mass atrocities, carried out by belligerents eager to eradicate their ideological opponents. About 500,000 people lost their lives in the conflict. Of these, about 200,000 died as the result of systematic killings, mob violence, torture, or other brutalities. Anarchists and other radicals often took out their anger against the Catholic clergy, whom they saw as an obstacle to major reform. Almost 7,000 Catholic priests, monks, and nuns were killed, primarily in the first months of the revolt. By May 1937, most of the mass killings of priests by Leftist radicals subsided. Francoist forces too killed liberal-minded or Loyalist clergy.

The Nationalists waged a brutal war against the Republic's supporters. Republican women were raped or were publicly humiliated by having their heads shaved. By 1940, more than 500,000 individuals were rounded up and sent to about 60 concentration camps. Large numbers of prisoners were conscripted for forced labor or to fight in Franco's army or tried by military courts.

During the war itself, 100,000 persons were executed by the Nationalists; after the war ended in spring 1939, another 50,000 were put to death. Martial law remained in place in Franco's Spain until 1948, and former Republicans were subjected to various forms of discrimination and punishment.

Internal Displacement and Spanish Refugees

The fighting and persecution resulted in several million Spaniards being displaced. Many fled areas of violence for safe refuge elsewhere. Only a few countries, such as Mexico and the Dominican Republic, opened their doors to Spanish refugees. When the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, with Franco's victory, some 500,000 Spanish Republicans escaped to France, where many were placed in internment camps in the south, such as Gurs , St. Cyprien, and Les Milles. Following the German defeat of France in spring 1940, Nazi authorities conscripted Spanish Republicans for forced labor and deported more than 30,000 to Germany, where about half of them ended up in concentration camps . Some 7,000 of these became prisoners in Mauthausen ; more than half of them died in the camp.

Critical Thinking Questions

• What pressures and motivations influenced countries to resist involvement or to intervene?
• Agree or disagree, and explain: Was the Spanish Civil War a rehearsal for World War II?
• Investigate US citizens’ involvement in the conflict. Did other nationals join either cause? Should other nationals participate in civil wars?

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Why the Spanish Civil War Mattered to Writers on Distant Shores

Sarah watling looks at the role literature played in the fight against fascism.

The Spanish war began in July 1936 when a group of disaffected generals—including Francisco Franco, who would emerge as their leader— attempted to launch a coup against their country’s elected government. The reaction of foreign powers was significant from the start.

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany offered decisive material support to Franco’s side (the nationalists) while the Republican government received from its fellow democracies in France, the United States and Great Britain only a queasy refusal to intervene.

As the Republic battled to survive this well-resourced attack, relying on a tenacious popular resistance to the military takeover and on arms from Soviet Russia and Mexico, many observers understood the war as an opportunity to halt the global advance of fascism: one that their own governments seemed loath to take up.

Some months in, Nancy Cunard challenged her fellow writers to make public statements on the war in an urgent call that framed things like this:

It is clear to many of us throughout the whole world that now, as certainly never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do.

This was where the Spanish Civil War began to matter to me. It happened that, when I first found this eye-catching statement, I was living through an era of national and international upheaval that made Nancy’s 80-year-old challenge snatch up my attention.

It was possible, in her day, to see democracy as a teetering edifice, a system that had outlived, even failed, its potential. Alternatives vied for dominance. The Great Depression in America, that “citadel of capitalism,” had not only destabilized economies around the world but shaken faith in the capitalist system itself—proving, to some minds, the validity of the Marxist theory that had predicted its collapse.

The twenties and early thirties had seen military dictators or  non-democratic forms of government gain the upper hand in a raft of countries: Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Japan, Portugal, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece and, of course, even earlier, Russia. By 1936, Germany and Italy had been governed by fascists for years. Their regimes found plenty of sympathizers in countries shaken by the First World War and ensuing Depression.

The British Union of Fascists, for instance, was already almost four years old. Nor was fascist aggression on the international stage something new. Italy had invaded Ethiopia in 1935; Germany was openly remilitarizing—something forbidden by the terms of the peace imposed at the end of the First World War. For some, the great dichotomy of the 1930s was provided by fascism and communism. For many others (including those who weren’t convinced of a meaningful difference between the two), Spain was perhaps simpler still: fascism or opposition to fascism.

By my day it had become fairly common to hear people drawing dark parallels with the 1930s: that decade in which Mussolini and Hitler crushed opposition and raised their armies, and Franco took over Spain, and “Blackshirts” marched in the streets of London. We thought we knew these facts, but it seemed they were losing their power to terrify or forewarn; that acknowledging them belonged to an old tyranny of decency and truth that others were ready to throw off.

It’s an absurd kind of grandiosity, in a way, to relate the darkest past to your own moment and its preoccupations. Yet I felt many of the things I had taken for granted dropping away around the time I first started reading about Nancy Cunard. Democratic processes, mechanisms of justice, truth itself: all were under renewed threat.

My country seemed a less moderate, less peaceful place than I was used to, and newly emboldened extremists were taking eagerly to the public stage. Inequalities of wealth and opportunity were widening. The urgency of the climate crisis felt increasingly clamorous. It was difficult not to simply feel hopeless; pinioned into a narrow space of outraged despair.

And yet, it was quite convenient to have so much out in the open. It was something to respond to. It gave Nancy’s uncompromising position a certain appeal—even offered, perhaps, a kind of permission. I kept remembering a feminist demonstration I had taken part in years before, when I was 21. Meeting friends in a park afterwards, one of them had punctured our exultant mood: the turn-out I’d bragged of was more or less meaningless, he opined, an act of preaching to the choir. What was the point when everyone on the march was already persuaded?

By 2019—a year in which, though abortion rights had just been extended in Ireland, the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights could describe US policy on abortion as “gender-based violence against women, no question” and the anti-feminist, far-right Vox party made unprecedented gains in Spain, raising the uncomfortable specter of  Franco—the response I should have made was becoming clearer to me. My 21-year-old self had marched to give notice of her resistance. There was nothing to be gained by trying to understand the point of view we were protesting (that the way women dressed could provoke rape), but much to be risked from letting that idea exist in the world unchallenged.

Nancy’s “taking sides” has an air of immaturity about it, perhaps precisely because of the playground training most of us receive in it. So much prudence and fairness is signified by resisting these easy allegiances, by seeing “two sides to every story”—a terminology that tends to imply that truth or moral superiority can only ever exist in not choosing either one. And it was becoming clear that polarization serves the extremes best of all.

But something about Nancy’s construction spoke to me. It suggested that there is power in the act of taking a side; that there are moments on which history rests, when nuance or hesitation (perhaps or tomorrow) will prove fatal, when it is vital to  know—and to acknowledge—which side you are on.

The worst times can take on an appearance of simplicity and war is exactly the kind of aberration that removes options, leaving the single choice of one side or another in its place. Yet when Nancy and thousands of other foreigners to Spain acted voluntarily in support of the Spanish Republic, they made their beliefs public. Their actions proposed the worst times as periods of opportunity, too: invitations to reclaim principles from the privacy of our thoughts and conversations and ballot boxes, and make them decisive factors in the way we live and act.

This is why my book is not about the Spanish experience of the war, but rather about the people who had the option not to involve themselves and decided otherwise.

Writers are good for thinking through. I was interested in the question of critical  distance—whether it is always possible or even, as I’d instinctively assumed, always   desirable—and I could think of no better individual to shed light on this than a writer (or intellectual) in war-time.

But people from all walks of life understood the Spanish war as a question, a provocation that demanded an answer. Thousands from across the world volunteered on behalf of the Republic, going so far as to travel to the country as combatants and auxiliaries. Others declared themselves through campaigning and fundraising. Martha Gellhorn defined herself as “an onlooker”: I wanted to explore, too, the experience of people whose commitment drew them closer to the action.

Alongside her in this book are the British Communist Nan Green and her husband, George, who wrenched themselves from their children to volunteer with medical and military units in Republican Spain. There is a young African American nurse named Salaria Kea who saw her service there as a calling. There is one of the boldest photographers to contribute to the memory of the war: Gerda Taro, a refugee from Germany for whom the fight against fascism was personal.

They left their own accounts of the conflict, whether through images or text, and following their stories taught me much about how historical narratives are formed in the first place; why leaving a record can be one of the most instinctive, and contested, human impulses.

They went because, as Martha Gellhorn put it, “We knew, we just knew that Spain was the place to stop Fascism.”

When I went looking for Salaria Kea, the negotiations and challenges her story had undergone became as interesting to me as the missing pieces. A woman of color deemed a political radical, a nurse and not a writer: hers was a voice that rarely received a welcome hearing. My book voices many of my questions, but with Salaria so much was unclear that I realized I could only tell her story by narrating the pursuit and leaving the questions open.

“Rebels,” like Franco, turn military might against the government they’re meant to serve. But I found that all the people I chose to follow fulfilled the word’s other definition, of those who “resist authority, control, or convention.” I wanted to know why they believed that the moment had come, with Spain, for taking sides.

Or, rather, I wanted to know how they recognized the Spanish war as the moment for doing something about the way their present was heading, and what “taking sides” had meant in practice. I wanted to know whether Nancy really thought the mere act of declaring a side could make a difference, as she suggested when she put out that urgent call. I wanted to know why she had addressed it specifically to “Writers and Poets.”

The Spanish war is often remembered for, and through, its  writers—and notably writers from outside the country. Of all the defeats in history, perhaps only Troy has been as well served by literature as Republican Spain was during and after the ascension of Franco, who would eventually rule in Spain for almost forty years. Countless novels and memoirs, a handful of them the greatest books by the greatest writers of their generation; reams of poetry, both brilliant and pedestrian, have preserved the memory of its cause.

As I read, I began to think that their authors’ position had something to say about the nature of writing itself. It seemed significant that each of the writers in this book saw themselves, whether at home or abroad, as an outsider. If not belonging was a fundamental part of that identity, taking sides on Spain only crystallized a series of pressing questions about the purpose and privileges of writers.

The 1930s was a decade of art colliding with politics, of artists determining to marry the two. Presented with the trauma of the Great Depression, the unavoidable phenomenon of Soviet Russia and the spread of fascism, there were journalists and poets alike who sought new modes and new material. Writers questioned their obligations to society, asked what art could achieve; they interrogated the intellectual life to expose its value and its limitations.

The list of foreigners who spent time in Spain during the war reads like a roll call of the most celebrated voices of the era: think of the Spanish war and I imagine you think of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, perhaps Stephen Spender, John Dos Passos, W. H. Auden. Delve a little further and you will find a far greater array of authors, including writers who were female, writers of color, writers who did not write in English (though the wealth of Spanish-language literature falls beyond the scope of a book interested in the outsiderness of writers).

They went because, as Martha Gellhorn put it, “We knew, we just knew that Spain was the place to stop Fascism,” or because they believed in the liberal project of the Republic and wanted to raise awareness of its plight, or because they wanted to observe, or even participate in, the cause célèbre of the moment. They saw history coming and went out to meet it.

__________________________________

From Tomorrow Perhaps the Future by Sarah Watling. Copyright © 2023 by Sarah Watling. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 

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Spanish Civil War (1936-1939): Archives at Yale

• Finding Books
• Finding Articles
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Archives at Yale

• Digital Primary Source Archives & Websites
• Dissertations
• Plagiarism, Research and Writing
• Spanish Civil War Collection This collection documents society and events during the Spanish Civil War. Formats include magazines, comic books, handbills, pamphlets, broadsides, manuscripts, diaries, and toys.
• André Landín Correspondence 136 letters between Spanish Nationalist André Landín and his family members, 1936-1946. Letters document Landín's service in the Spanish Civil War, his time in the Spanish army, his service in Russia with the Azul Division, and his assignment to the Army Ministry after the war. The bulk of the correspondence is between Landín and his wife, Marichrista Landín.
• Argimiro Bosch Letters Thirty-one letters written by Argimiro Bosch, a Republican soldier in the Spanish Civil War, to his wife, Angelita Talens Bo, and his family. The letters document Bosch's time as a prisoner in Valencia.
• Chiaromonte (Nicola) Papers The Nicola Chiaromonte Papers consist of correspondence, manuscripts, clippings and notebooks documenting the professional life of Chiaromonte. Prominent correspondents include Lionel Abel, Andrea Caffi, Albert Camus, Mary McCarthy, Dwight MacDonald, Gaetano Salvemini, and Ignzaio Silone. Series II contains typescripts, notes and clippings of many articles by Chiaromonte, including several concerning the Spanish Civil War.
• Claude McKay Collection Contains a file folder labels "Spain and the Spanish Civil War", 1935-1938.
• Edwin Borchard Papers Yale Law School professor and specialist in international law. Contain correspondence with American Friends of Spanish Democracy, 1937-1940, article and speech both entitled "The Spanish Civil War and Its Implications. There may be related materials in his general correspondence.
• Ernst Toller papers A small amount of correspondence (1933-1939) is largely concerned with his Spanish Relief Project, devoted to raising funds to alleviate the consequences of the Civil War in Spain.
• Felipe Lorenzo Famoso Diary Diary covering the career of Felipe Lorenzo Famoso, a Spanish soldier in Morocco and Spain, from 1923-1949.
• Fenton (Charles Andres Papers) The papers consist almost entirely of bibliographical material, newspaper magazine articles, excerpts from books and news dispatches collected for his proposed work on American literary approaches to the Spanish Civil War. There is also a small amount of correspondence (1954-1960).
• Harry Weinberger Papers Includes correspondence from Emma Goldman to Weinberger, her lawyer, regarding her post-deportation travels and activities in the Spanish Civil War before her death in 1940.
• Historical picture collection Contains one folder with photos of the Spanish Civil War.
• Jaime Arando Correspondence Seventy-two letters from Jaime Arando to his father, Francisco Arando, dating from 1937-1940. Jaime Arando was active on the Ebro Front, spent time in a concentration camp, and later joined the National Army.
• Joan Alzina Papers Papers of Joan Alzina, Catalan soldier in the Spanish Civil War’s Republican Army, 24th Army Group, Group Logistics, 3rd Section. Includes seven notebooks documenting Alzina’s service in the army, his time as a prisoner at Navalpino, and his tenure as a prison guard for a mental hospital at Alcalá de Henares, Madrid for other Republican prisoners. Alzina’s notebooks written during the war include uncensored drafts of letters to family members. Also included is a drawing by Alzina of Mickey Mouse as a soldier and notes by Alzina on how to dig and fortify trenches.
• Joaquim Sancho Papers Papers of Joaquim Sancho, a Spanish Civil War soldier fighting for the Republican cause. The bulk of the collection comprises Sancho's correspondence, spanning from the period of his military service in the Regular Spanish Army, No. 55, VIII Grupo and the 4th Company, 103rd Mixed Brigade, through his time as a prisoner in a Nationalist concentration camp. Before Sancho’s capture, he typically wrote in Catalan, and during his capture he wrote in Spanish. In addition to correspondence, the collection includes a 1938 manuscript map with notes of the trench works of the 103rd Mixed Brigade; lists of phone calls and correspondences Sancho sent and received; a likeness of Gandhi drawn on the back of Sancho’s registration for the Republican Independent Party of Catalunya; a likeness of Franco drawn on an envelope; and manuscript and printed fragments of material pertaining to the war.
• Langston Hughes Papers Contains well-documented photos of Hughes' trip to Spain during the Civil War (Series XII) and a group of correspondence cards from the Spanish Civil War (Series XXII.) In his professional correspondence there is a folder of "Spanish Letters" with dates in the late 1930s (Series II); Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee correspondence dating from 1944-1953 in Box 245; Abraham Lincoln Brigade correspondence dated 1938-1966 and Veterans of the American Lincoln Brigade correspondence dated 1944-1949.
• Lluís Baró Segimón Correspondence Forty-eight letters between Lluís Baró Segimón and his wife, Pilar Val de Baró. Lluís Baró Segimón fought with the Republican 27th Division during the Spanish Civil War, and postmarks indicate that Lluís wrote from the front lines of the war to Pilar in Morell, Tarragona.
• Louise Crane and Victoria Kent papers Victoria Kent's correspondence and subject files are a window into the activities of the expatriate Spanish community in the United States following the Spanish Civil War. The papers also relate to Crane and Kent's work to publish the Spanish-language magazine Ibérica as well as their personal relationship.
• Louise Morgan and Otto Theis papers Contains the Nancy Cunard papers. Cunard was an "ardent anti-Fascist and put her press and energy to work supporting the Communists." Includes materials on "Spanish Civil War/Fascism." There may be potentially relative material in her correspondence.
• Lucy Kramer Cohen Papers The papers of Felix S. Cohen include research material, clippings, and correspondence relating to Puerto Rico and the Spanish Civil War.
• María Pilar Fort Trigo diary Diary of María Pilar Fort Trigo, a woman from Valencia, Spain, covering 1936 October through 1938 January, and lacking 1937 December. The diary describes the everyday life of a Spanish woman during the Spanish Civil War and discusses gender relations in Spain and Fort Trigo's engagement to a lawyer, Enrique Jorro Vives. Also includes Fort Trigo's obituary.
• Mas Yebra Family Correspondence Correspondence of the Mas Yerba family, a prominent political family in Barcelona. The correspondence includes one hundred thirty-three letters exchanged among the family members and their associates during the Spanish Civil War. Also includes a small amount of the family's legal and financial papers.
• Photographs of James Weldon Johnson Box 16 contains photographs taken by Johnson relating to the Spanish Civil War.
• Puertes family Correspondence on the Spanish Civil War The collection consists of correspondence from Republican soldiers during the Spanish Civil War. Most were written by Isidoro Puertes, a soldier who served with the 4th Company, of the 4th Battalion of the 225 "Brigada Mixta." Antonio Puertes, probably Isidoro's cousin, served with him. Letters, sometimes written by both men jointly, were sent to their family members.
• Ralph Bates Papers Contains a few photographs and documents concerning his International Brigade service during the Spanish Civil War.
• Ramon Llado correspondence Eleven letters between Ramon Llado, a Republican soldier in the Spanish Civil War, and his family. Seven letters are from Ramon to his wife, Concepcion. Three letters are from Concepcion to Ramon, and one letter is to Ramon from his sister, Dionisia, and his brother-in-law.
• Russian state military archives collection, 1919-1941 The collection consists of photocopies of documents in the Russian State Military Archive (Rossiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voennyi Arkhiv) in Moscow. The documents relate to German-Soviet military and economic relations between 1918 and 1941, and the use of Soviet tanks in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.
• Spanish and Portuguese Architecture Photograph Collection Some material documents bomb damage during the Spanish Civil War.
• War Poster Collection Large collection of posters and handbills from the Spanish Civil War.

The Spanish Civil War: Battleground for Idealists - Documentary

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Historical Magazines

• Vértice Heavily illustrated women's magazine published by the Falange española tradicionalista y de las J.O.N.S. Includes literary supplements
• Flechas y Pelayos Flechas y pelayos was a periodical for children and youth linked to the Falange. Comic book with stories.
• Almanaque de Flechas y Pelayos.
• El mono azul Magazine of the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas
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An interview with Noam Chomsky on the Spanish revolution - Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo (2009)

In this 2009 interview originally published in Spanish, Noam Chomsky answers questions about military options and international factors in the Spanish Civil War, the role of the Stalinists in suppressing the revolution in Spain, the attitudes of intellectuals with regard to the revolution and their historical role more generally, and the chances for another libertarian revolution.

An Interview with Noam Chomsky on the Spanish Revolution – Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo (2009)

The Spanish Revolution: How It Is Perceived and Depicted in Intellectual Circles

First of all, I would like to express my gratitude for the opportunity to speak with you.

No problem.

The main theme of this interview will be the Spanish Revolution. As we know, the CNT-FAI 1 was one of the most powerful trade unions in Spain when the Spanish workers rose up in arms against the fascist rebellion of general Francisco Franco on July 19, 1936. On the very next day the president of [the Generalitat], Lluis Companys, met with García Oliver and Buenaventura Durruti 2 in order to tell them that Catalonia was under the control of the workers and if they wanted he would resign and become just another worker in the struggle. After a long debate, the CNT and the FAI decided to allow the government to continue to exist in order to avoid a revolutionary dictatorship. Do you think that this was the best choice for the revolution? Also, what course do you think the revolution would have taken if the government had been dissolved at the very beginning?

Well, they had a very limited range of choices. You have to remember that the anarchist revolution was opposed by every one of the world powers. It was obviously opposed by the fascist powers. It was also opposed by the communist and western powers; standing up to this was no easy task. That is why there were various compromises along the way because keeping these countries at bay made for major difficulties. That is, the western nations more or less supported Franco although not as much as they would have liked. To the best of my knowledge, there was only one serious proposal about how to win the revolutionary war and that was made by Berneri, a prominent Italian anarchist who had emigrated to Spain and was assassinated by the communists during the “May Days”. 3 He proposed, first of all, that they should not fight a conventional war because they could not win such a war. Instead, they should wage a guerrilla war in Spain, combined with support for a military uprising in North Africa. At the time, there was a nationalist revolution underway in North Africa against the French and the Spanish; and it was in North Africa that Franco’s army was based. Although it was not a radical revolution, being mostly a nationalist uprising for agrarian reforms and so on, Berneri’s suggestion was that by supporting it they could undermine the base of Franco’s army since it was basically composed of Moorish troops. I don’t know if this would have worked but it was the only chance for victory. On the other hand, the Republic never would have considered this and the reason for this was in order to maintain relations with France, England and the United States. Such a thing would have caused hysteria within the western community, it would not have been tolerated. It would have implied a dispute with the western powers while fighting against the communists and the [fascists]but at least there was a chance for victory.

At that time the capabilities of guerrilla warfare in achieving any objectives was still unknown. Today it is much more obvious after the experiences of the last seventy years so. I think that Berneri’s strategy was the only one that had any chance of success.

What do you think of Buenaventura Durruti and his role in the Spanish Revolution?

He was not an intellectual but he was a very effective military leader and he was committed to the anarchist cause. I don’t know how much he understood about anarchism but he was committed to it.

James Joll claimed that, “just like the funeral procession of Kropotkin in Russia, Durruti’s funeral was the final public expression of the power of the Spanish anarchist movement”. 4 Do you think this is a valid argument, considering the fact that the CNT resisted the dictatorship and is still active today, although on a lesser scale in comparison, influencing a large number of organizations and individuals around the world?

It has had a great deal of influence and not on such a small scale. Sure, now it is smaller but, for example, I was in Madrid in 1986 and it just happened to be on “May Day”, 5 and there were demonstrations by the CNT all over Madrid. I think they missed their chance but when the Franco dictatorship came to an end, they began to emerge. It wasn’t easy and they made mistakes but they began to germinate. In fact, I think that now, in December, 6 they will commemorate the centenary of the founding of the CNT so I think that they still exist but of course, it was not easy, especially after the “May Days” when there was a violent attack that destroyed most of the collectives in Aragon and Catalonia. The communists were in command, that is, the Communist Party and its police, and they definitely did not tolerate an anarchist revolution.

Stalin’s support for the Republic was totally cynical. He only wanted, or merely hoped, to make some kind of deal with the West. When it became clear, especially after Munich, that the West wanted to divert Hitler eastward, Stalin offered his support, stealing the Spanish treasury without any kind of interest in supporting the Republic which ended up being crushed.

The Western powers, including the United States, supported the fascists. So let’s just take the example of the United States which was technically neutral. First of all it imposed an embargo that prevented the shipment of arms to the Republic but the fascists did not need these arms from the United States since they obtained theirs from Italy and Germany by way of France. The other aspect of the embargo was worse since the one thing the fascist countries could not provide to Franco was oil. The United States imposed an oil embargo, on paper. Meanwhile, the “Texaco Oil Company”, whose history is familiar to you, was under the management of a self-declared Nazi, who diverted the oil destined for the Republic to Franco instead. I remember reading about this when I was a child. I read it in the left-wing press while the Department of State denied any knowledge about this. Of course, everyone knows about the contributions made by Roosevelt to fascism in Spain. While Roosevelt appeared very angry in public because a U.S. businessman was discovered selling a pistol to the Republic or something, it was pure hypocrisy. We also have to add that France and England did not want the Republic to survive.

This was all part of the general attitude and people tend to forget it but the West favored fascism. In fact, Mussolini was very much admired.

In your essay, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”, you argue that the republican forces thought they could get help from the western democracies. Where did this idea of western support come from?

Well, that was a common illusion. For example, the Vietnamese, that is, Ho Chi Minh, thought that they could get the support of the United States. It was partly hope and partly illusion. The West has a monstrous propaganda system. Take the ceremony for the Nobel Prize yesterday, 7 for example. The only positive thing you can say in defense of the Nobel Prize committee is that they gave the prize to someone for doing nothing. He is a person with a higher moral level than most of the people who have won the prize but they were speaking of his aspirations and they took them seriously. That is, Europe is fascinated by his personality but if they pay any attention to his actions, they look the other way immediately. The propaganda is extremely effective because it is self-imposed and the persons who accept it internalize this mentality. It is worse when people accept it.

The Spanish Republic did not have many options. It was basically supported by Stalin, but only as long as it benefited him, and the West would not support it because it did not really have much of an objection to fascism.

Some authors like Eric Hobsbawm, for example, disparage the popular factor of the Revolution and argue that only the Spanish Communist Party could have led it because of its high level of organization. What do you think about this position?

Well, he is no friend of mine and we have debated this in the past. He does not like the anarchists and in his opinion they were a regression to primitive times. In fact, he calls them “primitive rebels” and I think that he is wrong about this. He was a member of the Communist Party and was loyal to the leadership of that party in Russia. The Communist Party was a right-wing organization. That is, it was a party of the police and the bourgeois regime. Why should they lead a revolution? Because it would have benefited Stalin. They were in charge of the government. What happened was that Stalin pulled the rug out from under their feet as soon as they ceased to serve his purposes. What else would you expect?

I think that Hobsbawm simply did not understand what the communist parties were all about. Sure, they did some good things. Let’s take the United States, for example. Everyone in my family was a member of the Communist Party in the thirties but for them it had nothing to do with Russia. It was about labor, civil rights and union organizing. The Communist Party was at the forefront of the most decent reformist programs. So if you wanted to work in common for the working people, it was just natural to support it.

But on an international level this makes no sense at all. You could argue about the details but from my point of view Lenin and Trotsky were the biggest opponents of socialism in Russia from the beginning. On the basis of what they considered to be solid Marxist principles, Russia was a backward peasant society and was not ready for revolution so it would have to be guided towards the revolution by way of forced industrialization, history’s iron curtain and all the rest. This was not Marx’s vision. Marx was very interested in the possibilities of a peasant revolution in Russia. During the last years of his life he studied Russia intensively, using the data compiled by the Narodniks, 8 who were researching the peasant society in which they were very interested but all of this was suppressed by the European Marxists. The social democrats did not like them and the Bolsheviks did not like them; they were more oriented towards the city so they despised the rural peasantry.

So you will notice that after 1917 the peasant organizations were destroyed by Lenin and Trotsky. They did not want the social revolutionaries, the left social revolutionaries, Makhno’s army 9 and so on, so they got rid of them. I think that Hobsbawm’s view was that there has to be a disciplined vanguard party that can carry out this project. I did not call this a revolution because it would not be a revolutionary project, it would basically be a process of forced industrialization.

There is another theory, supported by most of the sympathizers of the Communist Party, in which they argue that the anarchists were incapable of leading the revolution because they lacked what Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals”, intellectuals within the working class who could organize the revolution. What do you think about this argument?

There is something to it, anarchism is not attractive to the intellectuals because it does not offer them power. Bakunin wrote about this in one of the most perceptive predictions of modern time. He called attention to, and observed, the rise of what he called a new class of scientific intelligentsia, modern intellectuals with an alleged technical knowledge of rule. This knowledge is a farce but this alleged technician of the organizational knowledge of rule is Gramsci’s intellectual. Bakunin predicted that they would take one of two directions.

Some would try to seize power themselves in the wake of a popular revolution and then create a “Red Bureaucracy”, which would be the most oppressive tyranny and system that the world has ever known. The others would recognize that they could not seize power themselves so they would become the servants of those who do hold power in the democracies of state capitalism and they will be the ones who manage them, technocrats and so on. You could say that both of them beat the people with the people’s stick. They will claim that they are representing the people when in reality they are hitting them with their own stick. This is the best prediction concerning what actually happened.

The Bolsheviks took the first path and the intellectuals in the West took the second, and were quite proud of themselves. The latter call themselves technocrats and pragmatic intellectuals. In fact, I once compared texts by Robert McNamara with texts by Lenin and they were almost identical. The only difference was that McNamara talks about God while Lenin does not, but basically they have the same idea: “We must manage and control society with an iron hand if necessary, for the well being of the people.” This is the dominant idea among the liberal intellectuals like Lippmann, Galvani and the rest, and it is totally reasonable. It is a way to obtain power and they see it as a form of altruism, just like the fascists.

Personalities aside, the political and social analysis of Bakunin was correct. That is, there are intellectuals who do not follow this current but they are dismissed and set aside; they are kept marginalized. This type of intellectual existed among the anarchists, like Camillo Berneri, for example. But he is not considered to be an intellectual because he did not serve power. The term intellectual is very funny, it has nothing to do with intellectual ability or intellectual dedication like creativity or something like that. The term, intellectual, is basically reserved for those who serve power or in the case of enemies we use the term dissidents. In our country we call those who serve power intellectuals, and we call the others lunatics, madmen or something.

This goes far back in our history. Take the Bible and its legends, for example. In the Bible we can find people whom we may call intellectuals and the term that the Bible gives them is prophets, which is a bad translation of a little-known Hebrew word. But let’s think about what these prophets did. They were providing political analyses, they were criticizing the king, they pleaded for mercy for the orphans of the villages, and so on. These people were what we would call dissident intellectuals and they were treated horribly. There were intellectuals that were treated very well and these were the Pharisees, but centuries later, as in the New Testament, they were called false prophets, but as I mentioned, this was much later. Meanwhile, the dissident intellectuals were treated miserably while the Pharisees were treated very well and this is our history up until the present with very few exceptions. So I do not take Gramsci very seriously.

It is obvious why the media would provide a distorted account of what really happened in Spain because it was a process that demonstrated the ability and the power of the people once they are organized and struggle together for a common goal. What impresses me above all are the omissions, or misconceptions, within the Academy, or academic circles, and even within leftist or more progressive circles.

They are the same. That is, I have done a lot of critical work on the media but my point of view has always basically been the same and it applies to the academy and other intellectuals as well. The reason for the focus on the media is to display its anatomy because it is very influential. Besides, it is easy to study and if you want to do comparative work you can do it with the media. If you try to do the same thing from an academic or specialist position, it is much more difficult. In fact, the article that you mentioned is mostly about intellectuals rather than the media. And it is about liberal intellectuals. Let’s take the liberal left-wing intellectuals, they will write their version of the Spanish Revolution and about the Bolshevik Party, which was composed for the most part of intellectuals.

But there is very little difference in their approach. If you are part of the academic world you do not have the direct pressure on you that you have working for the media. If you work for the media you are basically working for the state or some corporation. In the academic world there is little interaction with these forces so there is some room for flexibility and dissident intellectuals. For example, I have survived in the academic world but I could not have survived in the “New York Times”. In fact, to take a somewhat dramatic illustration, I regularly write op-eds that are distributed via the New York Times Syndicate but are never published in the United States. They are distributed in places like Mexico and Greece but this is completely understandable. The academic world leaves room or a chance for flexibility. In MIT I have survived because it is a university based on mathematics and science and it doesn’t really care what I do in my free time. It is not an ideological center like Harvard. Take Hobsbawm, he survived in the academic world and certainly never would have survived in the media.

We know there was a whole range of factors at the economic, historical and social levels, in addition to what has been called a “preparatory process”, which made the Revolution possible.

Then do you think that there is a possibility for another libertarian revolution?

I think so. But you know that it took about 50 years of preparation and various attempts so that the revolution was in the minds of the people and when the opportunity arose they only did what was already in their minds. That is, it is something like the reconstruction of capitalism in Europe after the Second World War. Germany was devastated but its reconstruction did not take long because they knew what they were doing. Germany was objectively in the same situation as Central Africa but its different level of consciousness and understanding about what had to be done made it a great power, like Japan.

It was the same in Spain. The poor peasants, concerning whom various works have been written and they are very moving, knew exactly what to do. We can see it concretely when, right now for example, part of the state capitalist project is to finance the economy. They reinforce the financial institutions in order to undermine other institutions. So General Motors is dismantling its factories while it receives tax breaks that make it richer than ever. This is the nature of today’s capitalist state. It is the dismantling of these factories that is destroying the labor force of the communities like Detroit, at the same time that other industrial cities are also collapsing. Meanwhile, Obama’s Secretary of Transportation is in Spain using the money from the federal stimulus package, designed to stimulate the economy of the United States, to sign contracts in Spain for the construction of high velocity trains which the United States needs so badly. However, those factories that are being dismantled could build these trains. They could rebuild the rail system while giving employment to trained workers and so on. But since there is nothing in it for the banks, they go to Spain to do this. But what about the labor force itself? That is, if they become conscious of themselves and obtain support, they could simply seize the factories and begin to produce what they need. They may encounter some opposition at first but if they obtain popular support, it could happen. What is needed is consciousness raising and organization, and this is what they lack. But I do not think that this is something remote, it is right under the surface and could be developed. So, yes, there could be another libertarian revolution.

“This interview was conducted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Jorell A. Meléndez, graduate student in History.”

Translated from the Spanish in November 2013.

Source: http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=108942

• 1 The National Confederation of Labor and the Iberian Anarchist Federation. The CNT was a trade union organization while the FAI was a militant anarchist group within the trade union. Both are still active today but they are not affiliated.
• 2 It should also be pointed out that other people, including the Argentine intellectual Diego Abad de Santillán, also attended this meeting.
• 3 The first week of May 1937 is often referred to as the “May Days”, when the Communist Party and the Unified Socialist Party staged an offensive against the workers of the CNT and UGT who controlled the central offices of the telephone company in order to impose total control over the republican camp. During the May Days, hundreds of people were killed and thousands were wounded.
• 4 The interviewer appears to be referring to James Joll’s book, The Anarchists , Chapter IX, in which Joll states, “The death of Durruti deprived the anarchists of one of their most famous and most ruthless legendary heroes, and his funeral in Barcelona provided that city with the last of its great demonstrations of anarchist power, with 200,000 supporters in the streets - an occasion perhaps reminiscent of that in Moscow twenty-four years before, when Kropotkin's funeral had given the Russian anarchists a last opportunity of parading their strength before the communists finally closed in on them.” [American Translator’s note.]
• 5 May Day commemorates the deaths of the Chicago martyrs and is celebrated by the working class throughout the world.
• 6 This interview was conducted in October 2009. The centenary of the CNT will be celebrated on November 1, 2010, not in December 2009.
• 7 The reference is to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama.
• 8 Members of the Russian middle class in the second half of the 19th century who developed theories of a populist type.
• 9 One of the leaders of the Dyelo Truda group and of the revolutionaries of the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution who were violently suppressed by Leon Trotsky and the Red Army.
• Noam Chomsky
• Spanish civil war
• Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT)
• Communist Party
• intellectuals
• Camillo Berneri
• Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo

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The anarchists in government in spain: open letter to comrade federica montseny - camillo berneri, guillen, manuel lozano, 1904-1945.

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How Did the Spanish Civil War End? … Not So Well

Sandie Holguín is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. A cultural and intellectual historian of modern Europe and modern Spain, she is the author of Creating Spaniards: Culture and National Identity in Republican Spain (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). She previously wrote an article for the AHR on battlefield tourism during the Spanish Civil War (December 2005). She is currently writing The Soul of Spain? Flamenco and the Construction of National Identity , 1800–1975 , which explores how regional nationalists, Spaniards, and foreigners grappled with flamenco culture as a symbol of Spanish national identity.

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Sandie Holguín, How Did the Spanish Civil War End? … Not So Well, The American Historical Review , Volume 120, Issue 5, December 2015, Pages 1767–1783, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.5.1767

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I n trying to understand N ietzsche’s concept of eternal return, the novelist Milan Kundera contrasts the weight of singular historical events with their transformation into something ephemerally light as they move away from us in time and distance: “If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussion, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one.” 1 Similarly, in grappling with how civil wars end, it becomes too easy for historians, especially those concerned with historical memory or usable pasts, to trivialize through abstract analysis the real trauma inflicted on human beings over the course of a war by substituting historical memory for the visceral experience of violence that comes during wartime. But if historians take a more rigidly defined perspective to define how civil wars end, then we miss all of the subtle ways in which the conflict rages on even after the war has presumably ended. 2

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) is a good case in point. General consensus points to April 1, 1939, as the end date, with the Republicans’ unconditional surrender to the Nationalists. The Nationalists won—no doubt about it. Pockets of armed resistance continued until the early 1950s, but Francisco Franco’s sovereignty remained unquestioned. These facts, however, tell us little about the violence and trauma that the Franco regime inflicted on Spain’s populace long after the war officially ended. How do we fathom the thousands of babies stolen from women between 1939 and 1950 and the continuation of that practice against “social undesirables” until fifteen years after Franco’s death? And what about the forced starvation, the concentration camps, the long-term imprisonment, the economic privation, and the denial of burials and public mourning for the fallen on the Republican side? Some might simply say that these practices fall under the category of terror. But then that begs the question, what is the relationship between civil war and terror? In Spain, I think, it is nearly impossible to separate the two. If, as Carl von Clausewitz said, “War is the continuation of political activity by other means,” then it seems that terror is war’s corollary, the continuation of war by other means. 3

Roy Licklider has contemplated how difficult it is “to visualize how civil wars can end … in civil wars the members of the two sides must live side by side and work together in a common government to make the country work.” 4 But in Spain’s case, this whole premise is false. Franco never intended to cooperate with his opponents in the postwar period, and the war did not really end with the Republicans’ unconditional surrender. 5 Instead, the Nationalists transformed the civil war into a decades-long war of violent occupation against those who had actively or passively allied themselves with the losing side.

Traditionally, scholars and lawmakers avoid the term “occupation” in the context of civil wars and employ it to describe circumstances arising from international warfare, such as the Allied occupation of Germany after the Second World War, and yet we also know the difficulty of defining its exact nature. 6 We already know from earlier civil conflicts that both the victors and the vanquished often perceived military forces on the defeated side’s land as occupying troops. 7 Additionally, a military occupation’s purpose is “not just to ensure the security of the victor states, but to supervise and aid reconstruction and to regenerate the wicked .” 8 Finally, military force is not always necessary to maintain an occupation, but the threat of force can do so. 9

Using the guidelines above, we can certainly view the Franco regime’s treatment of the war’s losers as a form of military occupation. In Spain’s case, the Franco regime found numerous ways to construct the followers of Republican Spain as foreign and “anti-Spain,” and therefore sought to inoculate itself against the foreign virus. 10 The architects of the National Catholic state that emerged after 1939 certainly envisioned themselves as guardians of national security and upholders of moral rectitude, and they enforced their counterrevolutionary agenda through terror and propaganda. Although the regime may have stopped actual military occupation of Republican strongholds after the 1940s, its treatment of “enemies of the state” resembled most closely the Soviet Union’s actions against its neighboring client states: power relations on the surface may have appeared calm, but leaders tamped down apostasy through the unspoken threat of military violence. 11

Terror became the immediate means to enforce the occupation, to express the regime’s legitimacy, and to consolidate its program of counterrevolutionary measures. 12 By waging a campaign of physical and psychological terror and long-term social and economic repression, by suppressing public mourning for Republican victims of the war, and by enforcing a collective public memory that included only Nationalist war sacrifices, the Franco regime prolonged its civil war. The scale of violence did diminish considerably from the 1950s onward, aided by at least four important factors that, because of space limitations, cannot be addressed here: in-migration from the countryside to the city, out-migration to northern Europe, the phenomenal influx of foreign tourists, and the rise of a consumer society fueled in part by these three forms of migration. 13 Despite the softening of the regime’s brutality in its latter decades, the population’s memories of civil war violence and immediate postwar terror induced a collective shell shock that would end only after the dictator’s death in 1975. 14 Because the majority of the protagonists are now dead, the pain inflicted by this war has eased, although it has not wholly disappeared. The war continues to be replayed in the public sphere by those who claim to be the guardians of its memory.

T he S panish C ivil W ar was not meant to be a war at all. The Nationalist generals who staged a military rebellion followed a path common to the Spanish military since the early decades of the nineteenth century: whenever leaders of the Spanish state seemed incapable of handling the process of governing, the military stepped in to “restore order,” imposing new leaders and, sometimes, new forms of government. 15 In this case, the rebellious generals, responding to what they perceived as the complete breakdown of public order and the Republic’s imposition of policies that were deemed anti-Spain, rose against the Spanish Republic on July 17–18, 1936. The insurgents hoped to convince the remainder of the military to join their cause and jolt Spain back onto its proper path. About half the civilian and military populations resisted, and the Nationalists’ initial failure prompted them to seek German and Italian military aid. Thus a simple rebellion transformed into a protracted civil war.

The civil war itself, as many scholars have attested, was a grab bag of several wars: wars of class, religion, nationalism, and political ideology. The class wars emerged out of a combination of Spain’s uneven economic development and the landed and industrial elites’ reluctance to share their substantial power with the increasingly restive rural and urban proletariat. Religious conflict also predominated. Legislation enacted during the Republic to secularize the state alienated many in the Catholic clergy and laity, who perceived these laws as brutishly anticlerical. They mobilized politically to discredit the Republic’s legitimacy. Matters were not helped much when, at the very beginning of the war, leftists torched religious buildings and killed priests, monks, and nuns with impunity, ensuring that the Catholic hierarchy would ally itself unabashedly with the Nationalist cause. The dynamics of clericalism/anticlericalism found rhetorical expression in the Nationalists’ labeling of the war as a crusade. 16 Competing versions of nationalism also played an important role in the war. Regional national groups, especially the Catalans and Basques, achieved autonomous status during the Republic and early civil war. Nationalists viewed these as attempts to calve off from Spain, and therefore as treasonous and inimical to Spain’s historic identity as a powerful empire with a civilizing mission. 17

Finally, one cannot understand this war without contending with political ideology, both domestic and foreign. A quick survey illustrates the range of political and social affiliations that each side tried to contain. Anarchists, communists, anti-Stalinist communists, socialists, liberals (republicans of varying stripes), and regional nationalists constituted the Republican side; the Nationalists incorporated members of the radical right, conservative right, and revolutionary right, aiming to unify traditional Catholics, two monarchist groups, fascists, large and small landowners, industrialists, and parts of the army. 18 Because the Republic and the civil war played out against the backdrop of Continental Europe’s increasing ideological polarization, it became too easy to portray the war as a Manichean struggle between fascism and communism (despite the paucity of members in either group at the beginning of the war), obscuring the combatants’ resplendent spectrum of political affiliations and internal divisions, especially on the Republican side. The Spanish Civil War became internationalized when the Italians and the Germans entered the conflict on the Nationalist side; the Soviets allied with the Republicans, sending international brigades from fifty-three nations to fight in Spain; and the other Western powers chose the path of non-intervention. This combination of asymmetrical foreign military aid and dogged neutrality on the part of the remaining Western powers tipped the balance of power in favor of a Nationalist victory. 19 Conflicting aims on the Republican side created dissension and fractured an already shaky alliance, one that clashed over carrying on a social revolution and a war simultaneously, or concentrating on defeating the Nationalists on the battlefield and saving the social revolution for later. Additionally, the Republicans’ inability to consistently feed their troops or the civilians behind their lines enables us to see, at least in hindsight, that the Republicans were going to lose this war. 20

But losing a war (or ending it) can mean different things, depending on the victors’ aims. As others have written, war settlements can be negotiated, can be made unconditional, or can combine military supremacy and negotiation, depending on how the victors and the vanquished perceive the stakes of surrender. 21 Before the “May Days” of 1937, President Manuel Azaña, with the help of Britain’s Anthony Eden and the tacit approval of the Vatican, tried to initiate a negotiated settlement that would have included creating an internationally monitored plebiscite to determine what kind of government Spaniards wanted for themselves. 22 Franco would have no part of such a negotiation. Later, two other attempts to negotiate a humane settlement for the Republicans in March 1939 met with equally firm rejection. 23 Franco required unconditional surrender, and he finally got it on April 1. But the war did not really end. Not for the losers.

Gaining power does not necessarily imply that one will maintain it. Just as revolutions often produce an outcome completely different from the one originally imagined (see France, Russia, and Iran, for example), civil wars and national reconstructions are also subject to the colliding forces of planning and contingency. 24 In Spain’s case, when the Nationalists won the war, eradicating all of Spain’s “Red” influences seemed possible, although not guaranteed. The Second World War had not yet begun, but Europeans knew that it loomed ahead. When war finally broke out across the continent, Spain was sitting pretty, a passive ally of the seemingly invincible Axis powers. With Europeans’ attention focused elsewhere, the Franco regime waged a fierce campaign of terror against its real and perceived enemies. 25 But even though the Axis powers eventually lost, the Franco regime remained unscathed. A combination of Spain’s wartime isolation and postwar international apathy enabled the regime to enact measures of repression and terror so extreme that even Heinrich Himmler was startled by the ferocity of it all. 26

To escape the Nationalists’ retribution, around 500,000 Spaniards left Spain at the close of the civil war and in the following decade. About half eventually returned. Many who had fled to France were placed in refugee camps, and later, after the Germans occupied France, some 15,000 Republican refugees were deported to the Nazis’ Mauthausen Concentration Camp, where it is estimated that less than half survived. 27

For those who stayed in Spain, the foreseeable future remained bleak. Until the summer of 1939, Republican POWs were held in temporary concentration camps that served as clearinghouses for identifying enemies of the state. Some 700,000 prisoners were processed through about fifty camps, where they faced starvation, beatings, torture, or even execution. Guards often raped female prisoners. 28 Eventually the regime shut the camps down and transferred people to overcrowded prisons throughout the state. By the end of 1940, at least 280,000 people had been imprisoned. All in all, it is estimated that the Nationalists executed about 100,000 people toward the end of the war, and around 50,000 died soon thereafter, either by execution or from the cumulative and debilitating beatings, starvation, and disease that were ubiquitous in prison. 29

The ideological and legal framework for postwar repression had begun early in the war and became strictly codified by its end. Almost all of these measures served to define, or in many cases redefine, criminality as those acts that the Nationalists deemed anti-national or anti-Spanish. A mere two weeks after the beginning of the war, the Nationalists’ Junta de Defensa Nacional (National Defense Council) declared martial law throughout Spain and vowed to use military tribunals to punish anybody who demonstrated any opposition to the Nationalists or the Franco regime. 30 This meant, for example, that officers who remained loyal to the Republic at the start of the Nationalist rebellion could be tried and immediately killed for military treason by these tribunals. To rationalize the legality of the Nationalist uprising, the Nationalists resorted to verbal gymnastics by redefining the terms “legitimate” and “illegitimate.” The conservatives who created what became known as the Bellón Commission report characterized the military rising not as a rebellion but as a necessary act to restore a legitimate government to Spain. From this idea sprang the logic that “Republican and Popular Front organizations were essentially ‘criminal’ and ‘anti-national.’” 31 Therefore, by reconfiguring the Republic and its defenders as illegitimate and the Nationalists as the keepers of the true Spanish flame, the Nationalists could justify a series of laws that Franco’s brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Súñer would in his later years characterize as “upside-down justice.” 32

Three laws served to delineate the “criminals” from the “true Spaniards” and to punish those who acted against the interests of the nation: Redemption through Work, the Law of Political Responsibilities, and the Law of Repression of Freemasonry and Communism. 33 Redemption through Work, which echoed the language of Catholic redemption and the perverse slogan Arbeit macht Frei found at the entrance of Nazi concentration camps, allowed convicted prisoners on the Republican side to redeem their anti-Spanish sins through forced labor in reconstruction projects and by building monuments to the Nationalist dead. The Law of Political Responsibilities required those found guilty of crimes against Nationalist Spain to pay some kind of economic sanction, usually in the form of fines and the expropriation of property. 34 They could also be stripped of the ability to find work that could pay a living wage. This law primarily affected the laboring classes. 35 The Law of Repression of Freemasonry and Communism helped purge, through imprisonment or exile, the two groups whose ideologies were deemed most dangerous to Franco’s vision of Spain. 36 These laws and a host of other decrees, enforced by agents of the state, the Catholic clergy, and vindictive citizens, became the foundation of and justification for widespread violence and terror against perceived enemies of the state. 37 And although the intensity of the violence diminished considerably after the 1940s, political executions occurred in Spain until 1963. 38

Less violent means of repression continued throughout the Franco regime to remind the war’s losers that their values were antithetical to Spain. They were now reduced to ghostly presences in two significant ways: as shadow people who could never participate as full citizens in Spain’s reconstruction, and as specters trotted out to haunt those who might try to deviate from the regime’s policies. Repression took such forms as ritual humiliation and economic privation. The cumulative effects of this “long uncivil peace” served to keep people scared, silent, and compliant. 39

Public shaming became part of the victors’ arsenal. Immediately after the war, women targeted by the regime were forced to march through their villages, their hair shorn, holding signs describing their crimes. Some were fed castor oil so that they would inevitably defecate themselves while on public display. 40 Men and women paraded as penitents—a ritual the Catholic hierarchy strictly enforced—while their reputations were publicly pilloried. Children would be reminded of their parents’ “crimes,” while townspeople, even those who might have had Republican sympathies, shunned those the regime targeted. In public, Catalans and Basques were forced to use Castilian instead of their native language.

Although petty and grand humiliations may have damaged the defeated population, these actions probably scarred them less than the economic destitution they faced in the subsequent years, especially in the “hungry forties.” The war’s victors created and enforced a system of economic injustice that rewarded their own followers with jobs and encouraged them to profit from the subjugated populace’s misery, while condemning the vanquished economically by cutting off most means of economic survival and punishing them with jail time if they attempted to feed themselves by circumventing the laws. Starvation, or its threat, became the greatest cudgel in crushing whatever postwar resistance might remain. The regime’s deliberate policy of economic autarky, combined with a corrupt food-rationing system, a burgeoning black market, and the exclusion of the defeated from viable work, created a devastating famine in the 1940s. 41 Although definitive statistics do not exist, it is estimated that some 200,000 people died of starvation between 1939 and 1945. 42 Poverty did not cease after the 1940s, but by the late 1950s and 1960s, many Spaniards were allowed and encouraged to work in other European countries. Other Spaniards migrated from the countryside to the industrial centers of Madrid and Barcelona to improve their economic fortunes. 43

W hile terror subdued the vanquished population, and the more obvious forms of oppression subsided by the early 1950s, other, less physically violent techniques eroded resistance to the regime and provided the framework for what some term “memoricide,” the erasure of a conquered people’s memories of and perspectives on historical events. In their stead, the regime, in collaboration with the Church, constructed and maintained an almost monolithic public narrative: the Nationalists had rescued Spain from undesirable foreign elements, and through their tireless efforts had managed to maintain peace in Spain for decades. 44 By flooding the people in all corners of Spain with an endless deluge of propaganda and by eliminating competing narratives, the Nationalists excluded the war’s losers from the body politic, and more importantly from the national fold. 45 This effacement of the subjugated population’s traumatic experiences and memories led to a collective repression of those memories, but, some argue, it also may have paved the way for the eventual transition to democracy in the late 1970s.

It is not as if the war had been forgotten, of course. In fact, Spaniards were reminded of the war continuously, but only insofar as it had affected the Nationalists. How close the “Reds” had come to destroying the essence of Spanish unity and its moral fiber was beaten into public consciousness through a barrage of propaganda in newspapers, films, radio broadcasts, sermons, and school lessons. 46 Public recognition of and mourning for the war’s Nationalist victims were on display in churches, which exhibited plaques at their entrances listing those who had “fallen for God and Country.” Monuments such as the famously behemoth mausoleum Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) dotted the country, glorifying the Nationalist war dead while negating the existence of Republican dead.

The purposeful public forgetting of Republican casualties, survivors, and those whose family members had connections to the war certainly added to the shock that the defeated had already experienced. Their trauma intensified because of their inability to mourn in the usual ways. Republicans risked physical and economic punishment if they tried to mourn publicly for family members who had died in battle or who had been executed. Republican veterans were denied pensions, and wounded veterans could not collect disability payments, thus losing their ability to support themselves or their families; war widows and orphans could not obtain their husbands’ or fathers’ death benefits. 47 Because the deaths of numerous soldiers and civilians remained unrecorded well into the 1970s, women, especially, were unable to remarry or receive other benefits because death certificates for their late husbands did not exist. 48

It was not enough to wage war on those on the wrong side of the internecine struggle. Their descendants required purification also. Not only did the victors wrest small children from female prisoners for religious training and what was termed “de-Marxification,” but it has also recently come to light that doctors, nuns, and government officials conspired to steal babies from those deemed socially undesirable. Beginning in 1939 and possibly continuing until as recently as 1990, stolen babies were given or sold to “worthier” guardians who would raise the children as patriotic Spaniards, free of the taint of Marxism, atheism, and regional nationalisms. These accomplices in baby trafficking informed women who had just given birth that their children had died. False graves were created to carry on the illusion. Members of the ruling classes raised the children, who never knew they were adopted. There are estimates that 30,000 babies were stolen between 1939 and 1950, and totals may have reached as high as 300,000 by 1990. 49

Why did so few successfully resist this multi-pronged repression between 1939 and 1975? Within Spain, the reasons for failure ought to be obvious by now. 50 Outside of Spain, the answer is much less satisfying. After 1939, exiled Republicans and Republicans-in-hiding tried to topple the recently ensconced Nationalists by employing a combination of back-door diplomacy and guerrilla and proxy warfare. And once World War II began, vanquished Spaniards saw the possibility that an Allied victory could result in a much better peace settlement for Spain. After the war ended, the Allies paid lip service to punishing the Franco regime for its fascistic tendencies and its support for the Axis powers, but in the end they did little to chasten Spain beyond treating it (briefly) as a pariah state. That outcome dashed Republican hopes for a new government and a humane amnesty. The Cold War paradigm that dogged the United States and Western Europe soon after 1945 helped Franco elude the punishment imposed on the official Axis powers. Franco could claim that the Nationalists had always opposed the communists, that they had fought the civil war expressly to prevent the Red tide. In 1953, the U.S. established economic and political relations with the Franco regime, thereby propping up the Spanish economy and ensuring Franco’s survival. 51 Seemingly, then, the only response to these collective horrors was silence and waiting.

F ranco finally died in 1975. T he possibility that the war of occupation could publicly end appeared near. During Spain’s transition to democracy, political elites from a variety of parties, including opposition parties outlawed under Franco, created among themselves what has subsequently been called “the Pact of Forgetting.” As traditionally told, political elites and Spanish citizens who had lived through the war or who had suffered under the repression feared a return to the fractiousness of the Republic and civil war. Under this agreement, they would avoid more fratricide. The traditional Francoist parties would move toward a process of democratization and the creation of a constitution; more importantly, no one would be prosecuted for war and political crimes committed between 1936 and 1977. Under the 1977 Amnesty Law, there would be no military tribunals, no truth and reconciliation processes, and no purges of the sort the world has been accustomed to seeing under other military dictatorships and wars since the 1980s. 52 The years immediately following Franco’s death witnessed the kinds of political violence and social turmoil reminiscent of the pre–civil war years. The threat of more political violence loomed on the eve of the transition. 53 So it is no wonder that 61 percent of the Spanish population approved of such a comprehensive amnesty immediately after Franco’s death, making the Pact of Forgetting workable. 54 The pact held for almost three decades, paving the way for a relatively peaceful transition to democracy, but this did not mean that people forgot the trauma of the war and the protracted repression. As historian Santos Juliá argues, people often confuse amnesty with amnesia. 55 Reams of paper have been filled with tales of wartime and postwar atrocities. Nobody has forgotten, but the crimes have been forgiven … publicly.

And herein lies the tension. Publicly, bygones have been considered bygones, as long as democratic institutions flourished and the economy soared. Old enemies were incorporated into the nation once more. But privately, memories of the war and its aftermath continued to fester. Private citizens could not attain justice for their loved ones, and as generations from that war began to die off, the absence of justice for the Republican war victims and their relatives felt to them much like forgetfulness. 56

Only in the 1990s did private citizens (mostly from the left) take it upon themselves to work through their private memories in a more public forum. 57 What began in the 1990s as a trickle of interest in trying to find and exhume the bodies of relatives in unmarked mass graves for burial in family plots became a flood of indignation as more and more people demanded justice for their relatives’ wrongful deaths. In 2000, Emilio Silva founded the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), a non-profit organization that employs scientists, archaeologists, and historians to locate and exhume the remains of Republican victims killed and buried in mass graves. ARMH aimed to bring justice to the war’s victims and closure to the dead’s relatives. 58 ARMH and other historical memory associations began to ask for state aid to finance these exhumations, but leaders of the Popular Party such as José María Aznar accused the left of conjuring up the civil war’s ghosts and creating much unnecessary discord. 59 Tempers flared so much that by 2006, in what became known as “the War of the Death Notices,” relatives of those killed on both sides began competing for newspaper space to take out long-delayed obituaries describing how and when the victims died, thus moving the war to a more symbolic space. Next, in what many attacked as yet another game of politics to stir up long-buried resentments, the socialists, under the leadership of José Luis Zapatero, passed the Law of Historical Memory in 2007. 60 This law included such measures as employing the Ministry of Justice to collect evidence about wartime atrocities, financing the “exhumation and reburial” of people currently in unmarked graves, and creating a Documentary Center for Historical Memory. At the same time, the one-sided memorial program of the Franco regime was attenuated by eliminating plaques and statues “that exalt one of the warring bands.” 61 Finally, the civil war wounds bled onto the world’s stage again in October 2008, when the Spanish jurist, Baltasar Garzón, broke with the 1977 Amnesty Law by seeking the location of some 130,000 people still unaccounted for from the war and postwar dictatorship and by pursuing those responsible for crimes committed during this same period. 62 This action proved too much for the far right, who took him to court and managed to get him disbarred for eleven years, rendering him legally impotent. 63

So what accounts for this memory explosion nearly thirty years after Franco’s death, especially when a majority of Spaniards opted for amnesty as a way to smooth the transition to a democratic state and to heal the wounds of the long civil war? Some say that the election of Aznar’s government in 1996 and the further rightward turn after the 2000 elections, when the Popular Party began to amplify a “neo-Francoist nationalism,” opened up old wounds that had begun healing. 64 Perhaps the most compelling argument for the return of Spain’s “lost” memory comes from trauma centered in another place, as Omar G. Encarnación argues, namely, in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. 65 In 1996, Garzón opened up a case against Pinochet for the deaths of fifty Spanish citizens living in Chile during the coup. In 1998, Pinochet was arrested in London, and Garzón requested his extradition to Spain in order to stand trial for crimes against humanity. 66 This act galvanized Spanish and Chilean citizens to reflect on their respective traumas and memories. Many Chileans resented the Spanish interference and wondered why Spaniards should decide the punishment for Chile’s criminal when they had not even punished their own. For Spanish citizens, but not Spanish politicians, Pinochet’s arrest and potential extradition became a proxy trial for Franco’s crimes, and it was this fervor for proxy justice that fanned the flames of civil war remembrance among private citizens again. 67

Obviously, how the civil war should be remembered has not been settled. 68 Meanwhile, mourning and remembrance of the war now remain in the hands of victims’ relatives from both sides of the conflict, and politicians continue to use the memory of the civil war to distract the population from the very real but different economic problems that Spain faces today. Spain’s contemporary economic woes have opened up some of the war’s old wounds, at least rhetorically. 69

The conditions that provided the catalyst for civil war have mostly disappeared, and the war’s protagonists are almost all dead, so I think we can safely say that the Spanish Civil War ended by the time of Franco’s death. But it took much more than an unconditional surrender to terminate the violence and settle the disagreements that began the war. The Spanish Civil War demonstrates that although a war might be officially over, the violent purging designed to maintain the victors’ power and legitimacy can prolong a civil war for decades and transform it into another kind of warfare altogether. If we look at the Franco dictatorship as a war of occupation, then the scale of terror makes more sense: it is much easier to persecute a population if you perceive them as both foreign and inimical to your way of life than if you view your enemies as fellow citizens who happen to have ideological differences with you but who share the same communal or national bonds. Under Franco, the vanquished remained existential threats. Therefore, it took his death to begin the process of psychological recovery from the war’s atrocities.

The violence is over, and now only competing memories remain. 70 Saul Friedlander has said, “at the individual level, a redemptive closure … desirable as it would be, seems largely impossible … [I]f we make allowance for some sort of ritualized form of commemoration, already in place, we may foresee, in the public domain, a tendency towards closure without resolution, but closure nonetheless.” 71 Although Friedlander wrote about working through the Holocaust, citizens of Spain might also heed this advice. If Spain can authentically work through its civil war past and recognize the trauma inflicted on all people by employing grave exhumations, DNA matching, historical education, and monuments dedicated to real reconciliation, then perhaps time will not render the horrors of this civil war lighter than air.

I would like to recognize the many people who helped me craft this article. Thanks to Fay Yarbrough, who offered me insights into the American Civil War during our long walks together. Jennifer Davis aided me in considering relationships between terror in the French Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. David Chappell provided food for thought about the theoretical underpinnings of civil wars. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for the AHR , whose critiques helped to strengthen my final draft, and Rob Schneider, the “article whisperer,” who shepherded me through the writing process. Finally, I owe a great deal to Melissa Stockdale and Bob Rundstrom, who did their usual yeoman’s labor: Melissa sacrificed much time talking to me about wars of occupation and the Russian Revolution and Civil War, and she read and criticized the original draft of this article; Bob spent hours helping me formulate my arguments, reading my first draft, picking apart my writing, and offering me encouragement when necessary.

1 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being , trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York, 1984), 4.

2 For example, Roy Licklider argues that civil wars end when “multiple sovereignty” and “physical violence to people” (which he defines as “1,000 battle deaths or more per year” and “effective resistance”) end. Licklider, “How Civil Wars End: Questions and Methods,” in Licklider, ed., Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End (New York, 1995), 3–19, here 9–10. His figure of “1,000 battle deaths or more per year” comes from the Correlates of War project. Some of this data can be found in Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980 , 2nd ed. (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1982), 214–215.

3 Carl von Clausewitz, On War , ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J., 1976; original German ed. 1832), 87.

4 Licklider, “How Civil Wars End,” 4.

5 Spain shares this in common with Greece after its civil war. For comparisons of the Greek and Spanish civil wars, see John O. Iatrides, “The Doomed Revolution: Communist Insurgency in Postwar Greece,” in Licklider, Stopping the Killing , 205–232; Julián Casanova, “Civil Wars, Revolutions and Counterrevolutions in Finland, Spain, and Greece (1918–1949): A Comparative Analysis,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 13, no. 3 (2000): 515–537; Philip B. Minehan, Civil War and World War in Europe: Spain, Yugoslavia, and Greece, 1936–1949 (New York, 2009).

6 According to international relations scholar Adam Roberts, neither the Hague Regulations of 1899 and 1907, the Geneva Regulations of 1949, nor the Geneva Protocol of 1977 included civil wars in their definition of military occupation: “The 1907 Hague Regulations, like those of 1899, appear to be based on an assumption that a military occupation occurs in the context of a war, and consists of direct control of one hostile State’s territory by a rival hostile State’s armed forces.” Roberts, “What Is a Military Occupation?,” British Yearbook of International Law 55, no. 1 (1984): 249–305, here 251.

7 As scholar Peter Kenez has put it, “What is an occupied territory in civil war? When one side succeeded in taking a town, one part of the population considered it liberation while the other regarded it as occupation.” Kenez, “Whites and Reds in South Russia, 1917–20,” in Roy A. Prete and A. Hamish Ion, eds., Armies of Occupation (Waterloo, Ont., 1984), 77–96, here 81. For the case of the American Civil War and Reconstruction as occupation, see Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (New York, 1990); Edward L. Ayers, “The First Occupation,” in Michael Perman and Amy Murrell Taylor, eds., Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction: Documents and Essays , 3rd ed. (Boston, 2010), 24–28; LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, La., 2009); Peter Maslowski, Treason Must Be Made Odious: Military Occupation and Wartime Reconstruction in Nashville, Tennessee, 1862–65 (Millwood, N.Y., 1978).

8 Hugh Seton-Watson, “Military Occupations: Some Reflections from Recent and More Distant History,” in Prete and Ion, Armies of Occupation , 1–15, here 5, emphasis added.

9 Ibid., 11.

10 The concept of Republican Spain as foreign and “anti-Spain” will be discussed later in this essay, but it is worth noting Michael Richards’s comment: “It is not surprising that many Spanish children grew up believing that ‘la guerra de España’ was fought by Spaniards against foreigners.” Richards, “From War Culture to Civil Society: Francoism, Social Change and Memories of the Spanish Civil War,” History & Memory 14, no. 1–2 (2002): 93–120, here 98.

11 Hugh Seton-Watson’s discussion of how the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Bloc states is analogous to what happened earlier in Spain, and thus germane to my argument in this essay: Eastern Bloc countries were organized under single-party dictatorships; in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, “the leading non-communist parties were either arrested by Soviet military police or compelled to escape abroad,” and “the actions of arrest, intimidation, and appointment of governments subservient to Moscow were carried out in the name of the Soviet commanders in chief, but the key Soviet personalities on the spot were usually civilians.” “The cultural apparatus—schools, universities, press, literature, the arts”—served to highlight the achievements of Soviet leaders and Soviet culture. Writing toward the end of the Cold War, Seton-Watson concluded: “The truth is that the political and social systems existing today in the six countries [Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany] were imposed and consolidated by Soviet military power, and they are kept in being by either the presence of Soviet forces … or the knowledge that they can be brought to bear in a very short time. Thus, in a sense, military occupation has existed in these countries for nearly thirty-eight years and it continues.” Seton-Watson, “Military Occupation,” 8, 8–9, 10, 11. So in the case of Spain, occupation, as defined above, still existed in milder forms until Franco’s death, despite the official end of martial law in 1948.

12 Julián Casanova argues that all civil wars end with terror, but the Spanish Civil War is unique in the duration of its terror. Scholars of the Soviet Union and Communist China might disagree with this assessment, however. Casanova, “Una dictadura de cuarenta años,” in Julián Casanova (coord.), Francisco Espinosa Maestre, Conxita Mir, and Francisco Moreno Gómez, Morir, matar, sobrevivir: La violencia en la dictadura de Franco (Barcelona, 2002), 3–50, here 5. For a more conservative approach to the duration of the terror, see Julius Ruiz, Franco’s Justice: Repression in Madrid after the Spanish Civil War (Oxford, 2005). Although this essay deals with Nationalist atrocities, Republicans also committed numerous atrocities during the war. But because the Nationalists were able to consolidate their gains and engage in terror and repression for decades after 1939, this essay is focused almost solely on their methods of terror. For more information about atrocities on the Republican side, see Julius Ruiz, The “Red Terror” and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, 2015); the essays in Santos Juliá, ed., Víctimas de la Guerra Civil (Madrid, 1999); José Luis Ledesma, “Total War behind the Frontlines? An Inquiry Into the Violence on the Republican Side in the Spanish Civil War,” in Martin Baumeister and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, eds., “If You Tolerate This …”: The Spanish Civil War in the Age of Total War (Frankfurt, 2008), 154–170. For a discussion of “atrocity memory battles,” see Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, “Revisiting the Legacy of the Spanish Civil War,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 21, no. 3 (2008): 231–246.

13 Two recent books in English have done a good job of exploring the implications of migration for the great social and economic changes during the last two decades of the Franco regime. They also help to explain why Spanish citizens seemed apolitical and even satisfied with life under Franco from the 1950s onward: Michael Richards, After the Civil War: Making Memory and Re-making Spain since 1936 (Cambridge, 2013); Antonio Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975 (Chichester, 2009). To understand the dynamic relationship between tourism and the Franco regime and the regime’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances, see Sasha D. Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe’s Peaceful Invasion of Franco’s Spain (Basingstoke, 2006). A more general discussion of the evolution of the Franco regime from 1959 on can be found in Nigel Townson, ed., Spain Transformed: The Franco Dictatorship, 1959–1975 (New York, 2010).

14 Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, 2007) informs much of my analysis in this essay. Although her book deals specifically with neoliberals’ attempts to remake the world according to their versions of free-market capitalism, it is her analysis of how neoliberals have exploited various forms of “shock”—economic and natural disasters, terror, torture, etc.—that shaped my thinking about the Franco regime’s use of terror early on and the changes his regime was able to impose in the following decades, even when the threat of terror had lessened. According to Klein, once citizens are shocked to the point where they are merely trying to survive, leaders can transform their countries without meeting much resistance.

15 These coups d’état were known as pronunciamientos .

16 Nuns were killed at a less significant rate than their male counterparts, however. Mary Vincent, “The Spanish Civil War as a War of Religion,” in Baumeister and Schüler-Springorum, “If You Tolerate This … ,” 74–89, here 79. For a small selection of other works dealing with the civil war as a religious war, see Julio de la Cueva Merino, “El anticlericalismo en la Segunda República y la Guerra Civil,” in Emilio La Parra López and Manuel Suárez Cortina, eds., El anticlericalismo español contemporáneo (Madrid, 1998), 211–301; Vicente Cárcel Ortí, La persecución religiosa en España durante la Segunda República, 1931–1939 (Madrid, 1990).

17 Parts of the Basque Country gained limited autonomy during the civil war. Needless to say, their autonomy was stripped after the Nationalist victory.

18 Monarchists included those who followed Alfonso XIII, the exiled king of Spain, and those who remained loyal to the Pretender line descended from Carlos, Fernando VII’s brother (1784–1833). The Carlists, critics of liberalism, fought three civil wars in the nineteenth century and reprised their role as defenders of the values of the radical right in the early 1930s. The revolutionary right was best represented by the Falange, the Spanish fascists. According to Stanley Payne, the fascists, unlike the radical right, really hoped to revolutionize social and economic relations. For a more detailed description of his right-wing typographies, see Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison, Wis., 1980).

19 One of the greatest historiographical debates of the Spanish Civil War centers on what factor contributed most to the Republic’s downfall. Since there are thousands of books covering this topic, I am mentioning only a few, and only in the English language. Some, like the now-classic analysis by Burnett Bolloten and the more recent archival discoveries compiled by Ronald Radosh, argue that it was Soviet interference in the day-to-day operations of the Republican military that eventually crushed the anarchists and POUM (non-Stalinist communists), thereby destroying morale and creating extreme animosity among the various powers of the left. Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991); Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, Conn., 2000). A more nuanced discussion of Soviet intervention can be found in Daniel Kowalsky, Stalin and the Spanish Civil War (New York, 2004). Other historians view Soviet intervention as less decisive than the non-intervention policies practiced by Britain, France, and the United States, which had the effect of transforming the balance of power, since the Germans and Italians were freely arming the Nationalists. Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge, 2003); Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge , revised and expanded ed. (New York, 2007); Francisco J. Romero Salvadó, The Spanish Civil War: Origins, Course, and Outcomes (New York, 2005).

20 For a detailed analysis of how the Nationalists were better able to feed their troops and civilians, see Michael Seidman, The Victorious Counterrevolution: The Nationalist Effort in the Spanish Civil War (Madison, Wis., 2011).

21 Licklider, “How Civil Wars End,” 12. Holger Afflerbach and Hew Strachan, How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender (Oxford, 2012); Heinrich-W. Krumwiede and Peter Waldmann, eds., Civil Wars: Consequences and Possibilities for Regulation (Baden-Baden, 2000); Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, 2006).

22 The “May Days” of 1937 refer to the Republican civil war within a civil war on the streets of Barcelona, captured so vividly, though insufficiently, in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (New York, 1952).

23 Both Republican general Segismundo Casado, now in open revolt against Prime Minister Juan Negrín’s government, and Negrín tried to negotiate reasonable settlements. Santos Juliá also discusses other attempts to gain amnesty for Republicans in the years 1944, 1948, 1956, and 1962, all to no avail. See Santos Juliá, “De ‘guerra contra el invasor’ a ‘guerra fratricida,’” in Juliá, Víctimas de la Guerra Civil , 11–54, here 31–32, 49.

24 For example, would Reconstruction in the American Civil War have taken a more promising turn if Abraham Lincoln had not been assassinated so soon after the war ended?

25 Although Spain was not a formal ally of the Axis powers, the Franco regime did send the Blue Division to fight with the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.

26 Julius Ruiz, “A Spanish Genocide? Reflections on the Francoist Repression after the Spanish Civil War,” Contemporary European History 14, no. 2 (2005): 171–191; Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (New York, 2012), 495. There is a growing historiographical debate over the nature of the Francoist terror, whether it was premeditated or a functional response to post–civil war conditions, and whether or not it was genocidal. Given the scope of this roundtable, I do not want to wade into those murky waters. For a select understanding of the premeditation argument, see Francisco Espinosa Maestre, “Julio de 1936: Golpe militar y plan de exterminio,” in Casanova, Maestre, Mir, and Moreno Gómez, Morir, matar, sobrevivir , 51–119; Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge, 1998); Alberto Reig Tapia, Franco “Caudillo”: Mito y realidad (Madrid, 1996). For a more cautious and functionalist reading of the war and postwar terror, see Stanley Payne, The Franco Regime, 1936–1975 (Madison, Wis., 1987). Ruiz, Franco’s Justice . In his shorter piece, Ruiz argues that “local research indicates a correlation between the institutionalisation of the Francoist ‘New State’ and a decline in the number of executions; the bureaucratisation of the killing process produced fewer victims”; “A Spanish Genocide?,” 176.

27 Francisco Moreno, “La represión en la posguerra,” in Juliá, Víctimas de la Guerra Civil , 277–406, here 282–285. The original camps in southern France and North Africa were called refugee camps, but some Spanish historians refer to them as concentration camps because of their appalling conditions. For Spanish prisoners of Mauthausen, see David Wingeate Pike, Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the Horror on the Danube (London, 2000). For concentration camps in Spain, see Javier Rodrigo, Cautivos: Campos de concentración en la España franquista, 1936–1947 (Barcelona, 2005). For Spanish exiles, see Alicia Alted, La voz de los vencidos: El exilio republicano de 1939 (Madrid, 2005).

28 Female prisoners’ children were also taken from them after the age of three or four and sent to social services and/or religious schools, where serious religious education might cleanse the children of their Marxism. Casanova, “Una dictadura de cuarenta años,” 26. According to Preston, some twelve thousand children were taken away from their prisoner parents at the end of the war. Preston, The Spanish Holocaust , 511–513. For a detailed discussion of children of POWs, see Ricard Vinyes, Montse Armengou, and Ricard Belis, Los niños perdidos del franquismo (Barcelona, 2003).

29 Casanova, “Una dictadura de cuarenta años,” 8. For comprehensive discussions of the varieties of repression after 1939, see Moreno, “La represión en la posguerra”; Javier Rodrigo, Hasta la raíz: Violencia durante la Guerra Civil y la dictadura franquista (Madrid, 2008); Rodrigo, “‘Our Fatherland Was Full of Weeds’: Violence during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship,” in Baumeister and Schüler-Springorum, “If You Tolerate This … ,” 135–153; and Preston, The Spanish Holocaust .

30 Ruiz, “A Spanish Genocide?,” 172. Martial law was not lifted until 1948.

31 Ibid., 173.

32 The term in Spanish is justicia al revés . Ramón Serrano Súñer, Entre el silencio y la propaganda, la historia como fue: Memorias (Barcelona, 1977), 245.

33 Known respectively in Spanish as Redención de penas por trabajo (January 1, 1939), Ley de responsabilidades políticas (February 1939), and Ley de represión de Masonería y el Comunismo (March 1, 1940). For an in-depth discussion of these various laws, see Moreno, “La represión en la posguerra,” and Ruiz, Franco’s Justice .

34 Sometimes even a suspect’s relatives’ assets were seized in order to find a suspect who might have eluded the regime’s net. Ruiz, Franco’s Justice , 134. This practice could have devastating effects, for example when officials, in the name of expiating Republican sins, seized sewing machines from Republican war widows who might need to sew piecework in order to help their families survive. Richards, A Time of Silence , 52.

35 Most of those charged under this law had their cases dismissed, but some 300,000 people had files kept on them, and two-thirds of those files belonged to people from the working classes, thus making their ability to earn a living much more precarious and ensuring their silence in the face of repression. Moreno, “La represión en la posguerra,” 346–348.

36 Ruiz, Franco’s Justice , chap. 6. In his newest work, After the Civil War , Michael Richards posits that much of the internal migration from the countryside to the cities in the 1950s onward occurred because villagers persecuted by their neighbors for the crimes of republicanism sought to live in large urban areas in order to maintain a semblance of anonymity, to protect their families from even more reprisals, and to erase the memories of the war and immediate postwar terror.

37 According to Francisco Moreno, violence was a structural element of Francoism. Julián Casanova and Javier Rodrigo, among others, make a similar point. Moreno, “La represión en la posguerra,” 277; Julián Casanova, “Presentación,” in Casanova, Maestre, Mir, and Moreno Gómez, Morir, matar , sobrevivir , ix–xi, here ix; Rodrigo, Hasta la raíz , 27.

38 Communist leader Julián Grimau was the last to be executed after being sentenced under a military tribunal. He was charged with the old postwar standby, “crimes of blood.” Ruiz, Franco’s Justice , 224.

39 This apt term comes from Casanova, “Presentación,” x.

40 Preston, The Spanish Holocaust , xix; Richards, A Time of Silence .

41 It is still pretty easy when traveling around Spain to determine by sight which generation of Spaniards suffered during the “hungry forties.” They are significantly shorter than the general population.

42 Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and Progress , 60. Michael Richards views the Francoist policy of autarky as a deliberate strategy to isolate, quarantine, and purify the Spanish nation. Accordingly, it served to eliminate the “disease” of Marxism and its related illnesses that had “infected” Spain from the outside. Additionally, he claims, “Scarcity was used to control the population. At least twice the quantity of essential food was sold on the black market as was issued officially. Significantly, this black market … was popularly considered as a central part of the Francoist terror.” He also says, “Self-sufficiency, in the sense of a denial of any political, cultural or economic dialogue about the future, was an essential part of Francoist reconstruction.” Richards, A Time of Silence , 135, 174. While Richards seems to indicate that the Franco regime deliberately created the conditions to starve his enemies, others believe that although autarky was intentional, the devastating economic effects of this policy were not. Instead, they reflected a combination of institutional corruption and a complete incomprehension of economic theory. See, for example, Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and Progress , 60–61. Food rationing did not end until 1952; Conxita Mir, “El sino de los vencidos: La represión franquista en la Cataluña rural de posguerra,” in Casanova, Maestre, Mir, and Moreno Gómez, Morir, matar, sobrevivir , 121–193, here 123.

43 Internal migrations peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, with the majority of people heading to Madrid and Barcelona. The second tier of migration occurred in Valencia and the Basque provinces of Guipuzcoa, Biscay, and Alava. By 1975, “one out of four Spaniards was living in a municipality different from that of his or her birth.” Spaniards went to other European countries as migrant workers. From 1961 to 1970, approximately 84,000 migrants went to places such as Switzerland, France, and Germany annually. Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and Progress , 95–96, 108.

44 In 1964, the Franco regime spent much of the year commemorating the Nationalist victory in 1939 with an extensive propaganda campaign to remind all Spaniards how the Nationalists were able to keep the peace. The commemorative campaign was called “25 Years of Peace.” For details of the celebrations, see Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy , trans. Mark Oakley (New York, 2002), 112–128.

45 Michael Richards demonstrates that there were political elites and members of the Church allied with the Franco regime who tried in the 1960s to change the crusade narrative to one of fraternal struggle, whereby both sides needed to take blame for the war, and more importantly, that there should be a reconciliation among these “brothers.” The hardliners in the administration and in the Church refused to let go of the crusade and sacrificial bloodletting narrative. Instead, they overlaid this sacrificial narrative with the “25 Years of Peace” one in order to convince a much-cowed population that the Franco regime had protected them from further bloodshed. See Richards, After the Civil War , chaps. 7–9. See also Juliá, “De ‘guerra contra el invasor’ a ‘guerra fratricida.’” Antonio Cazorla Sánchez also highlights the changing dynamics of the Church and its attempts to reform from within, at least at the parish level, after Vatican II; Fear and Progress , chap. 4.

46 See, for example, Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia ; Carolyn P. Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain, 1875–1975 (Princeton, N.J., 1997), chaps. 8–9.

47 For a discussion of Spain’s treatment of Republican veterans during the Franco regime, as well as the Republican veterans’ working through of traumatic memories both inside and outside of Spain, see Paloma Aguilar, “Agents of Memory: Spanish Civil War Veterans and Disabled Soldiers,” in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1999), 84–103.

48 For example, in Asturias, “more than fifty per cent of the victims were recorded in the civil registers after 1975.” Richards, A Time of Silence , 31.

49 Raphael Minder, “Spain Confronts Decades of Pain over Lost Babies,” New York Times , July 7, 2011, A1; Sylvia Poggioli, “Families of Spain's ‘Stolen Babies’ Seek Answers—and Reunions,” NPR, December 14, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/12/14/167053609/families-of-spains-stolen-babies-seek-answers-and-reunions ; Mario Vallejo, “El robo de niños del franquismo fue peor que el de Argentina, según Garzón,” RTVE, November 19, 2008, http://www.rtve.es/noticias/20081119/robo-ninos-del-franquismo-fue-peor-argentina-segun-garzon/196073.shtml ; José Yoldi, “Garzón insta a siete juzgados a investigar los ‘niños robados’ del franquismo,” El País , January 8, 2009, http://elpais.com/diario/2009/01/08/espana/1231369204_850215.html ; Vinyes, Armengou, and Belis, Los niños perdidos del franquismo . Eugenics-inspired psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera, who saw in Republican POWs the chance to study the psychological makeup of Marxists, believed that children of Reds had the seeds of Marxism within them, but that removal from their parents and into the homes of respectable Nationalists might prevent the Marxist seed from growing. For further details on Vallejo Nágera’s ideas and practices during the post-1939 era, see Richards, A Time of Silence , 56–66; and Vinyes, Armengou, and Belis, Los niños perdidos del franquismo , 31–54. A DNA bank has now been set up to help children and their biological relatives find each other.

50 I have argued throughout this essay that the shock of the initial war and terror laid the foundation for compliance among the general population over the entire span of the Franco years. Certainly there was opposition to the Franco regime during these decades, as chronicled in the works of Javier Tusell, La oposición democrática al franquismo (Barcelona, 2012); Javier Tusell, Alicia Alted, and Abdón Mateos, eds., La oposición al régimen de franco: Estado de la cuestión y metodología de la investigación (Madrid, 1990), among many others, and sometimes it burst out during the 1960s and 1970s, especially as worldwide activist movements also exploded onto the world stage. But the resistance was ineffective during the years of the dictatorship. I also do not mean to imply that everybody feared the regime and the institutional henchmen of the military and the Church. Recent historiography attempts to account for what some have seen as the population’s satisfaction with the regime. For the idea that the Franco regime’s longevity arose from its adaptability from the 1950s on, see Townson, Spain Transformed , especially the chapter by Edward Malefakis, “The Franco Dictatorship: A Bifurcated Regime?,” 248–254. Cazorla Sánchez argues that the regime’s “repressive” institutions created a population that was “pessimistic in social and collective matters,” contributing to an apathy in politics and a certain belief that “life had actually improved under Franco.” “The social and economic changes that took place in the latter years of the dictatorship have led many people … to believe that Francoism was the basis for the country’s successful transition into a modern nation … [But] exactly the opposite is true … Franco’s apologists also forget that the ‘economic miracle’ was made possible only by the extraordinary exploitation and sacrifice of ordinary Spaniards.” Fear and Progress , 4, 18, 14–15.

51 This was known as the Pact of Madrid.

52 Paloma Aguilar was one of the first people to explore the implications of the Amnesty Law and the Pact of Forgetting within the context of memory studies in Spain. Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia . An explosion of other works, mostly essays, about memory and the Spanish Civil War have surfaced in the last decade or so. I will list just a sampling here: Cazorla-Sánchez, “Revisiting the Legacy of the Spanish Civil War”; Madeleine Davis, “Is Spain Recovering Its Memory? Breaking the Pacto del Olvido ,” Human Rights Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2005): 858–880; Chris Ealham, “‘Myths’ and the Spanish Civil War: Some Old, Some Exploded, Some Clearly Borrowed and Some Almost ‘Blue,’” Review Article, Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 2 (2007): 365–376; Omar G. Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization: Coping with the Past in Spain,” Political Science Quarterly 123, no. 3 (2008): 435–459; Encarnación, “Pinochet’s Revenge: Spain Revisits Its Civil War,” World Policy Journal 24, no. 4 (2007/2008): 39–50, here 39; Helen Graham, “The Spanish Civil War, 1936–2003: The Return of Republican Memory,” Science & Society 68, no. 3 (2004): 313–328; Judith Keene, “Turning Memories into History in the Spanish Year of Historical Memory,” Review Article, Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 4 (2007): 661–671; Jo Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War,” Poetics Today 28, no. 1 (2007): 89–116; Richards, “From War Culture to Civil Society”; Julius Ruiz, “Seventy Years On: Historians and Repression During and After the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of Contemporary History 44, no. 3 (2009): 449–472. See also the attacks and counter-attacks by historians Francisco Espinosa and Santos Juliá in the Dossier section of Generaciones y memoria de la represión franquista: Un balance de los movimientos por la memoria , Special Issue, Hispania Nova 7 (2007), http://hispanianova.rediris.es/7/dossier.htm .

53 Encarnación writes: “Fueling fears and uncertainty about the future was the very violent context in which democratization unfolded in Spain, which belies the country’s reputation as a case study of moderation during the transition to democracy. In fact, violence was more pervasive in post-Franco Spain than in revolutionary Portugal, where the transition to democracy … witnessed workers’ rebellions and land seizures not seen in Western Europe since the Spanish Civil War.” Moreover, “Between 1975 and 1980, more than 460 violent deaths for political purposes were registered and about 400 people died in right-wing and left-wing terrorist acts.” Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 440.

54 José Ignacio Wert Ortega, “The Transition from Below: Public Opinion among the Spanish Population from 1977–1979,” in Howard R. Penniman and Eusebio M. Mujal-León, eds., Spain at the Polls, 1977, 1979, and 1982: A Study of the National Elections (Durham, N.C., 1985), 73–87, here 74–75. Cited in Encarnación, “Reconciliation after Democratization,” 442. Let us also not forget the real terror the nation felt during Antonio Tejero’s attempted coup on February 23, 1981. Fears of another military dictatorship gripped the population, but King Juan Carlos commanded the military to stand down, and the crisis was averted.

55 Juliá, “De ‘guerra contra el invasor’ a ‘guerra Fratricida,’” 49–50.

56 The jury is still out on whether such things as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions actually work to heal the traumatic wounds that come from wars and dictatorships. See, for example, Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York, 2011); David Mendeloff, “Trauma and Vengeance: Assessing the Psychological and Emotional Effects of Post-Conflict Justice,” Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2009): 592–623.

57 Applying concepts derived from Sigmund Freud, Dominick LaCapra makes a distinction between acting out and working through historical traumas: “Acting-out is related to repetition, and even the repetition-compulsion—the tendency to repeat something compulsively. This is very clear in the case of people who undergo a trauma. They have a tendency to relive the past, to exist in the present as if they were still fully in the past, with no distance from it.” Working through implies that “the person tries to gain critical distance on a problem, to be able to distinguish between past, present and future. For the victim, this means his ability to say to himself, ‘Yes, that happened to me back then. It was distressing, overwhelming, perhaps I can’t entirely disengage myself from it, but I’m existing here and now, and this is different from back then.’” “‘Acting-Out’ and ‘Working-Through’ Trauma,” excerpt from interview with LaCapra by Amos Goldberg, Jerusalem, June 9, 1998, http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Micro soft%20Word%20-%203646.pdf . See also Saul Friedlander, “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah ,” History and Memory 4, no. 1 (1992): 39–59; and Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (1999): 696–727.

58 ARMH’s website is http://memoriahistorica.org.es . To understand some of the issues at stake once mass graves were exhumed, see Layla Renshaw, Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War (Walnut Creek, Calif., 2011).

59 On the other hand, Aznar had no problem paying millions of euros to Russia “to exhume and repatriate from Russia the corpses of several Spanish volunteers from the Blue Division, the battalion sent by Franco to buttress Nazi troops during World War II in support of Adolf Hitler.” Encarnación, “Pinochet’s Revenge,” 42.

60 Interestingly enough, days after this law passed, the Vatican beatified 498 Roman Catholics who had been killed by Republicans. Ibid., 47.

62 The assumption is that only Nationalist crimes would be investigated. Cazorla-Sánchez, “Revisiting the Legacy of the Spanish Civil War,” 239–240.

63 A group calling itself Manos Limpias, along with members of the Falange, took him to court. He was charged with three crimes, including abuse of power for investigating the crimes of the Franco era. He was convicted of illegal wiretapping but was acquitted on the abuse of power charge. He is still appealing this conviction. Manuel Altozano, “Garzón tacha la querella de Manos Limpias de ‘burda represalia,’” El País , June 1, 2009, http://elpais.com/elpais/2009/06/01/actualidad/1243844220_850215.html ; Giles Tremlett, “Baltasar Garzón Cleared over His Franco-Era Crimes Inquiry,” The Guardian , February 27, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/27/baltasar-garzon-cleared-franco-crimes .

64 Cazorla-Sánchez, “Revisiting the Legacy of the Spanish Civil War,” 237–238.

65 Pinochet was the only head of state to appear at Franco’s funeral and one of his most fervent admirers. Pinochet supposedly modeled his terror state on Franco’s. Encarnación, “Pinochet’s Revenge,” 42.

66 His call for Pinochet’s extradition was probably aided by the emergence and growth of the International Human Rights movement from the 1980s on.

67 Prime Minister Aznar, whose father and grandfather served in the government of the Franco regime, certainly did not want Pinochet extradited or to have the crimes of the Franco regime reexamined, but neither did the former socialist prime minister, Felipe González. Encarnación, “Pinochet’s Revenge,” 41.

68 Adding to the squabbles within Spain are international demands for justice by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, who would like to see Spain’s Amnesty Law repealed. “Spain: End Amnesty for Franco Era Atrocities,” Human Rights Watch, March 19, 2010, http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/03/19/spain-end-amnesty-franco-era-atrocities ; “UN Human Rights Experts Voice Concern about Suspension of Spanish Judge,” UN News Centre, May 25, 2010, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=34809#.Vgiep_SgR-8 .

69 For example, Catalan nationalism has grown stronger in light of the economic crisis that began in 2008, and some members of the military have begun to use threatening language reminiscent of the Franco years in response to some Catalans’ calls for independence from Spain. “Un coronel del Ejército: ‘¿La independencia de Catalunya? Por encima de mi cadaver,’” La Vanguardia , August 31, 2012, http://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20120831/54344065618/coronel-ejercito-independencia-catalunya-cadaver.html ; Luis Emanuel, “In Catalonia, as in Scotland, a Referendum on Independence Is the Best Course for Unionists,” Independent , October 22, 2012, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/in-catalonia-as-in-scotland-a-referendum-on-independence-is-the-best-course-for-unionists-8221701.html .

70 Memories seem to be one of the few things accessible right now. Recently there have been protests by Spanish historians over the fact that the minister of defense tried in 2010 to prevent the declassification of some 10,000 military documents related to diplomacy and foreign affairs. After people lodged complaints in major newspapers, the documents in question were moved with some secrecy from the foreign affairs archive (Archivo de Asuntos Exteriores) in Madrid to the archives dealing with general administration in Alcalá de Henares (Archivo General de la Administración [AGA]). The AGA contains materials pertaining to government administration, mostly from 1939 on, and there are too many materials there for the skeletal staff to handle and classify. Therefore, these materials will essentially be lost in the giant black hole of paper that is the AGA. Historians have begun mounting protests against this recent action. Eduardo del Campo, “El búnker de la historia de España,” El Mundo , May 6, 2013, http://www.elmundo.es/accesible/elmundo/2013/05/06/cultura/1367824921.html ; Carlos Sanz Díaz, “Documentación histórica,” El País , May 15, 2013, http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/05/14/opinion/1368553901_384039.html .

71 Friedlander, “Trauma, Transference and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah ,” 54.

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