Friday 20 May 2011

Spanish Practices

I do wish that Stuart Reid's superb Catholic Herald column were still online. This week, he writes:

But it is not as easy today to admire Franco today as it was, say, 50 years ago, when the Communist menace still seemed, and perhaps was, real, and memories of the Second World War were a lot fresher than they are now. If Franco and his Nationalists had not rebelled against the Republic, Spain might have gone Communist, which would have made life difficult for us in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin were allies. As it was, Franco had the wit, or the good fortune, to stay out of the War.

Precisely so. If the Republicans, who explicitly defined themselves against the British Labour Party, had prevailed, then Spain would have followed the Soviet Union in beginning the War as for all practical purposes a member of the Axis.

It is also an excellent column is several other ways, including on the exaggeration of the number of priests killed by the Republicans, and especially on the sacrilege, pointed out by Jacques Maritain, alike of massacring even Fascist priests, since they are still the ministers of Christ, and of massacring even the Communist poor, since they are still the people of Christ. Do obtain a copy.

5 comments:

  1. Reid's column reminds us that being on the Right did not used to mean always supporting unrestricted capitalism, or always supporting American intervention and British tagging along, or always supporting Israel, or sharing the most hysterical Cold Warrior presuppositions. The belief that it did is another of the fallcies about the 1980s, something you have written about many times.

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  2. There are also traces of it in Andrew Alexander's Daily Mail column, although he is very much a Thatcherite despite also being an ardent Eurosceptic, unlike Reid, whose position is a reminder that that, too, was not always a prerequisite for admission to the Tory Right. Very far from it, in fact.

    Reid follows Auberon Waugh in supporting a certain idea of Europe. Whatever else that idea might be, it is not on offer in practice and it never will be.

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  3. I disagree with the counterfactual on several grounds.

    First, while the Republic was increasingly dominated by Stalinist Communists, this was mainly due to the Soviet Union being the only country to provide them with military assistance. The dominance was not as strong in 1936-7.

    Second, historically, the only times Communist countries became part of the Soviet bloc was when the Communist governments were installed by Russian armies (Cuba is a very arguable exception). Even a Communist Spain would probably have turned out more like Communist Yugoslavia or Communist China.

    Third, a "better" Republican performance in the Spanish Civil War would have meant the war still going on in 1940, with unpredictable consequences, instead of a Republican victory. Under normal circumstances, the 1937 coup would have succeeded and there would have been no civil war at all.

    Fourth, the alternative history Soviet bloc government of Spain would have remained neutral throughout the war for the same reason Franco did, Spain was too poor and too vulnerable to Allied airpower and seapower. Though arguably the Axis benefited from Spanish neutrality for this reason they they would have if Spain had been an Axis ally, same as with Italy.

    These points are irrelevant to the main controversy in that at the time, many people saw Stalin and his regime as a greater threat to the western democracies than Hitler and his regime. This seems to be still the case.

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  4. "It's a pity that only one of them can lose," said Henry Kissenger of the Iran-Iraq War. The same was and is true of many wars, probably most. Those in Yugoslavia in the 1990s (though not more recently), for example. Or Rwanda. Or Sri Lanka. And, of course, the Spanish Civil War. We need to face the fact that we had no dog in that fight, a war between those who entirely predictably went on to back the Axis while officially neutral, and those who wanted to turn Spain into a satellite of, initially, a de facto member of the Axis, as Spain would also have been if the Republicans had won.

    Indeed, she would have been so even more than she was under Franco, since the Soviet Army actually fought alongside that of Nazi Germany, notably staging a joint victory parade through the streets of Brest-Litovsk. If Hitler had also had such a relationship with a Soviet-dominated Spain, then he would probably never have reneged on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and therefore might very well have won the War.

    The Spanish Civil War has always split Old Labour into its constituent subcultures. It did at the time. The Hard Left is as ardently pro-Republican as ever, because of its myopia (even now) about Stalinism, because of its anti-Catholicism, and because of the overrating of George Orwell. Meanwhile, Catholics, at least if pushed or if they know anything at all about it (as almost no younger Spaniards do, either), will still back the Falangists (whose ostensible Catholicism was a perversion defined by its reaction against other things, although there have been worse such before, at the same time, and since), at least on balance. No one else will have much, if any, view on the matter.

    But we need to get real. Even if Franco was no Hitler, neither side deserves our historical sympathy. Franco, as much as anything else, maintained, and occasionally tried to press, a territorial claim to (staunchly British, staunchly Catholic) Gibraltar.

    And since Soviet archives were opened up, all sorts of information has come to light. The entire Republican cause was Comintern-directed, and the Soviet intervention was in no sense parasitic as has traditionally been supposed or asserted. For example, far from being commanded by a Canadian volunteer, the International Brigade was in fact commanded by Manfred Stern, a Soviet Commissar.

    But then, there never was an anti-Soviet Left in Spain in the Thirties; that myth has been astonishingly long-lasting considering its compete and utter baselessness. Take, for example, Francisco Largo Caballero, Socialist Party Leader and Popular Front Prime Minister. Entirely typically of his party, he defined it as a revolutionary force wholly distinct from British Labour or the French Socialists, and differing "only in words" from the Communists.

    The Socialist Party's 10-point programme of 1934 was wholly Leninist in form and substance, calling, among other things, for the replacement of the Army and the Civil Guard with a workers' militia, and for the dissolution of the religious orders and the expropriation of their property.

    And so one could go on, and on, and on.

    Stalin only loosened his grip once the Civil War was clearly lost, long after the Republicans themselves had given up what little commitment to democracy that they might ever have had. So the best that can be said about the Spanish Civil War is that the not-quite-so-bad bad guys won.

    Had the even-worse bad guys (the Republicans) won, then Spain would actually have fought with the Axis just as the Soviet Union did, the Nazi-Soviet Pact would probably never have collapsed, and Hitler might therefore very well have won the War.

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  5. He has got that from you. It is like that time in Prospect or the Speccie or something, when Phillip Blond, whom you also know, repeated word for word your point about how a generation ago a single manual wage provided what only two professional salaries can today. You are far too willing to put up with this sort of thing.

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