¿Una, Grande y Libre?

Yes, the Republic was awful as well. The ILP Contingent fell at the hands of those for whom the International Brigades were fighting. Since Soviet archives were opened up, all sorts of information has come to light. It is invaluably set out in Professor Stanley G. Payne's The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 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.

Francisco Largo Cabellero, the Socialist Party Leader and Popular Front Prime Minister, defined his party 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. One could go on, and on, and on. Stalin loosened his grip only 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.

But over one thousand Spanish Republicans went on to fight the Second World War in the British Army, whereas 2133 Falangist volunteers remained in the German Army after 1943 as the Blue Legion that swelled to more than 3000 and ended up among the last defenders of Hitler's bunker. No one prevented those additional men from leaving Spain to join that Legion, all survivors of which the Soviet Union repatriated in 1954, long after the end of the War but still long before the death of General Franco, whom they had ostensibly disobeyed.

And those of you still raising a glass of Carlos I Solera Gran Reserva to each and all of the Carlist claimants for yesterday's fiftieth anniversary of Franco's death, consider that at that time, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Ted Short, had been decorated by him. Likewise, those of you who are misty-eyed about Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, consider that Wilson's last Deputy Leader and Callaghan's first had been decorated by Franco, although it was Lord Shepherd that Wilson sent to join Imelda Marcos, Hugo Banzer and Augusto Pinochet among the few foreign dignitaries at the funeral of a man who had laid claim to the British territory at the mouth of the Mediterranean.

For 13 years, from six years before Franco's death to seven years after it, Spain pressed that claim by blockading Gibraltar, which, in all fairness, Winston Churchill had promised Franco once the War was won after he had refused to let Hitler use Spain to invade it and thus seize control of the Strait. A year after Franco's funeral, Callaghan's Government adopted Pinochet's monetarism. Think on.

Peter Hitchens made the conservative case against Franco in 2019, and his argument stands. Here on the other side of the Tiber from Hitchens, National Catholicism is an old and egregious error. The belief in some right to an autonomous "Catholic" church, baptising the morality of the politically dominant class and effectively subject to the State, has arisen in eleventh-century Byzantium, in sixteenth-century England, in seventeenth-century France and the Netherlands, in eighteenth-century Austria, in nineteenth-century Germany and Switzerland, among the Croats at least since the early 1990s, and in today's China, as well as defining both the liberal and the conservative wings of the Catholic Church in the contemporary United States. As in Franco's Spain, none of those histories is a happy one.