The 498 Beatified Martyrs Of The Spanish Civil War

And why not?

Not that the Church was "pro-Franco", as is often alleged. Several times, for example, Franco nearly banned Opus Dei, which was split straight down the middle between his supporters and his opponents, the latter considerably younger than the former. It has retained that sort of profile. Ruth Kelly is the most prominent Opus Dei politician in the world today. The President of the Socialist International, António Guterres, has a long history in Opus Dei. Its ranks also include Squire Lance, Antonio Fontán, Paola Binetti, Llúis Foix, Mario Maiolo and Xavi Casajuana (if we count Catalan nationalism as part of the Left; it is certainly a very long way from Franco), among others.

Most of the Chilean "Chicago Boys" were not members of Opus Dei. Pinochet himself never had any affiliation with it. Of six right-wing Opus Dei politicians listed on Wikipedia, four are dead (one since 1966), whereas the three broad left-wingers listed (including two women) are all still alive. So, insofar as it has a political orientation, Opus Dei’s would seem to be towards the Left, if anything. Much like the Catholic Church Herself, in fact. And not just now, but also then.

But there is the Left and there is the Left: there are social democrats (whether or not they use the term), often very heavily influenced by Catholic Social Teaching, and always wittingly or unwittingly close to it in many ways; and then there are Marxists. Likewise, there is today's real Left (often Catholic, always knowingly or unknowingly philo-Catholic in many ways), and then there are the Marxists of various stripes, including those Trotskyists and (more rarely) Stalinists who have come to express those positions in, through and as neoconservatism such as that of the Euston Manifesto.

We need to face the fact that we had no dog in the fight that was the Spanish Civil War, 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, to which I know that I keep promising to return in a future post. 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, 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.

When I last published something in this vein, I knew that the ageing polishers of rescued busts of Stalin thrown out in the Krushchev years would be on here and in my inbox as soon as I criticised the Spanish Republic. And I certainly was not disappointed...

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 Cabellero, 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.