the spanish civil war essay

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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

It's Not Your Fault - Katie Sherley
Research! A Resource by Sujana Crawford
On Keeping a Time Capsule - Jennifer Yang

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

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From Guernica to Human Rights: Essays on the Spanish Civil War by Peter N. Carroll

Forthcoming review for H-Humanities (H-War)

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Politics, Religion & Ideology

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This is the frst scholarly volume to ofer an insight into the less-known stories of women, children, and international volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Special attention is given to volunteers of diferent historical experiences, especially Jews, and voices from less-researched countries in the context of the Spanish war, such as Palestine and Turkey. Of an interdisciplinary nature, this volume brings together historians and literary scholars from diferent countries. Their research is based on newly found primary sources in both national and private archives, as well as on post-essentialist methodological insights for women's history, Jewish history, and studies on belonging. By bringing together a group of emerging and senior scholars from diferent countries, we highlight the polyphony of voices of diverse individuals drawn into the Spanish Civil War. Contributors to this volume have explored new or little-researched primary sources found in archives and documentary centers, including papers held by relatives of the people we study. This volume is aimed at both scholarly and non-scholarly public, including any readers interested in the Spanish Civil War, twentieth-century European history, Jewish studies, women's history, or anti-fascism. This volume can be used both in undergraduate college courses and in postgraduate university seminars.

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This chapter provides a broad introduction to the subject of anarchism in Spain and the Spanish Civil War, noting the key developments, historiography and debates in this area.

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4 The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

Published: September 2018
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This chapter analyzes foreign combat participation in the Spanish Civil War. Fought from 1936 to 1939, the war hosted covert interventions by Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. The chapter leverages variation in intervention form among those three states, as well as variation over time in the Italian intervention, to assess the role of escalation concerns and limited war in the use of secrecy. Adolf Hitler's German intervention provides especially interesting support for a theory on escalation control. An unusually candid view of Berlin's thinking suggests that Germany managed the visibility of its covert “Condor Legion” with an eye toward the relative power of domestic hawkish voices in France and Great Britain. The chapter also shows the unique role of direct communication and international organizations. The Non-Intervention Committee, an ad hoc organization that allowed private discussions of foreign involvement in Spain, helped the three interveners and Britain and France keep the war limited in ways that echo key claims of the theory.

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Unburying Franco and the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War

For six decades, spain told a dictator’s story. for the past 22 years, citizens have been creating a new memory landscape.

Built by political prisoners, the Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen, is a contested site of memory in Spain. Historian Tyler Goldberger writes about recent efforts by citizens to dispel collective amnesia around dictator Francisco Franco’s regime and demand accountability for his forgotten victims. Courtesy of AP Newsroom .

by Tyler Goldberger | January 9, 2023

Provocatively deemed “The Spanish Holocaust” by historian Paul Preston, the Spanish Civil War—a conflict, extending from 1936 to 1939 that resulted in the repression, torture, and death of hundreds of thousands of people—weighs heavily in Spain’s collective memory. The traditional narrative of the war, asserted by the victorious dictator Francisco Franco, held that Franco and his Nationalist forces defeated an oppositional leftist coalition, the Republicans, to restore Spain to its past greatness. This interpretation of events remained essentially unchallenged in Spanish popular memory for decades, aided by censorship and repression during Franco’s own rule from 1939 to 1975, and by informal and institutionalized practices of later governments.

The Nationalist narrative persisted because Spanish authorities stifled any and all opposing memories of the war, silencing the stories of the hundreds of thousands of Republicans killed and exiled during and after the war, as well as those of the estimated 114,000 Republican victims whose fates remain unknown today. That is, until these narratives re-emerged at the turn of the 21st century, brought to light by Emilio Silva, a journalist and human rights activist whose grandfather, who identified as a Republican, was murdered in 1936 by Nationalist forces and tossed in a ditch.

Silva’s search for his grandfather both literally and figuratively unearthed long-silenced stories of the war’s brutality and revealed the myriad of tensions related to Spanish memory. His efforts, along with countless others demanding Spain and those who perpetrated Spain’s bloody past to confront this violence, have opened up avenues to negotiate more equitable and democratic memories today.

There is arguably no better example to illustrate the triumphs and challenges of Silva’s and others’ labor than the evolution of the Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen (referred to here as the Valley), a contested site of memory in a mountainous region overlooking Madrid, the capital city and a strategic battleground during the Spanish Civil War.

Franco decreed the erection of the Valley on April 1, 1940, the one-year anniversary of the Nationalist victory over the Republicans. Hoping to honor his notion of the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and “to further the memory of the fallen in our glorious Crusade” for “a better Spain,” he ordered the construction of a basilica, a cemetery, and a cross extending 150 meters high and 47 meters wide in the Cuelgamuros Valley. Nearby stands El Escorial, a UNESCO site that houses the remains of Spanish kings dating back to the 16 th century, speaking to a sense of royalty that Franco ascribed to this memorial.

Upon the opening of the Valley on April 1, 1959, Franco relocated the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a fascist leader killed during the Spanish Civil War, to the center of the basilica, honoring him with the only engraved tombstone at that time. When Franco died of natural causes in 1975, he, too, received a ceremonial burial with tens of thousands of people mourning at the Valley, as he was lowered into his dignified resting ground.

The almost 20-year construction of this monument to Nationalist glory and Republican defeat relied heavily on the labor of Republican political prisoners. They had to work above and around the bodies of deceased fellow Republicans—an estimated 33,000. Franco had ordered these victims’ remains to be exhumed from elsewhere and dumped under the spot where he built the new memorial. The Valley is a mass cemetery, yet without any signage or interpretation acknowledging these victims, the site continually reinforces amnesia of Republican memories.

In the generation following Franco’s death, the Spanish government preserved this intentional silencing of Republican narratives, institutionalizing forgetting through efforts like the 1977 Amnesty Law, which barred Spanish Civil War perpetrators from domestic prosecution. Yet while Spain refused to judicially confront its own violent past, its courts served as a global leader of universal jurisdiction. In 1998, former Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón issued an international warrant for former Chilean right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, illustrating transnational penal accountability. Ironically, when Garzón sought, ten years later, to bring charges of crimes against humanity committed during the Franco dictatorship, he was promptly convicted of a heinous crime and disbarred from his judgeship, a conviction that still holds today.

Emboldened by Garzón’s stance, non-state actors in Spain increasingly spoke out about reconciling past human rights violations in their own nation. As individuals and through organizations, hoping to create a more just society, Spanish citizens began to act.

Emilio Silva led the way. A trained journalist, Silva sought to write about his family history as he learned about the repressed Republican memories held on to by those who have suffered decades without answers to the whereabouts of their loved ones. Speaking to community members and discovering scant archival records, Silva came to learn that his grandfather might be buried in León. When Silva wrote an article for a local newspaper in 2000 entitled, “ My Grandfather Was a Disappeared, Too ,” it broke the decades-long silence about Republican loss. Immediately, the article connected Silva’s story to those of thousands of other families in Spain searching for loved ones disappeared, forgotten, and silenced during and following the Spanish Civil War. Volunteer archaeologists and anthropologists came to assist Silva, eventually finding an unmarked mass gravesite and exhuming Silva’s grandfather and 12 other previously disappeared victims of Franco’s forces.

In the 22 years since, Silva’s triumph has spurred hundreds of exhumations, many of which have been spearheaded by the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH) , or Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. ARMH, founded and led by Silva, advocates for the state to dedicate more labor and resources towards righting the wrongs of Spain’s past and prioritizing the victims of Franco’s terror and repression over the hagiographic memory of Franco himself.

Since its genesis, ARMH has fueled a new Spanish memory landscape rooted in civil society activism—the efforts of people on the ground rather than edicts from their iron-fisted leaders—that combats the political polarization that has mired Spanish memory activism. ARMH holds elected officials accountable to do more to actively confront and reckon with Spain’s bloody past. It works directly with local social networks to finance and resource reconciliation and exhumation processes, collecting testimonies from around the world to pinpoint loved ones’ last known whereabouts and resting grounds, and serving as a nexus for volunteers specializing in anthropology, history, digital media, and other disciplines to provide additional documentation of life for disappeared persons. ARMH’s grassroots actors have circulated petitions to the Spanish government to condemn Franco’s regime and to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to insert Spain into global human rights dialogue; have created community empowerment outreach programs to raise awareness about the past while bringing suffering families together; and have supported exhumations of forgotten victims of the war throughout the nation, driving Spain to rewrite and rebalance its memories of the past.

Individuals and organizations who contest monolithic state-created and state-sustained narratives create broader, more inclusive tellings of complex pasts. By amplifying voices previously silenced, they prioritize human rights and help societies reckon with and learn from past atrocities. They legitimize the identities, legacies, and memories of all people in society—not just those with the power to dictate how the past has been remembered and forgotten.

This is apparent at the Valley of the Fallen. ARMH’s front-line activism has been integral to reinterpreting the site to work toward memorializing both sides of the war. In 2007, ARMH’s demands to resignify the Valley manifested in the Historical Memory Law that specifically bans any shows of support for Franco and his fascist ideologies within this site of memory. ARMH continued to fight so that, in 2018, this law expanded to limit the burials of the Valley to those who died during the Spanish Civil War, calling for Franco’s exhumation. The leader’s body was exhumed and reinterred at El Pardo-Mingorrubio cemetery in October 2019, now resting next to his wife, his regime officials, and former Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Most recently, ARMH has spoken out about the passing of the Democratic Memory Law, legislation that holds the state fiscally responsible for searching for and identifying victims from the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. While this law makes huge strides in condemning Franco’s regime, ARMH “ criticizes ” this law for not going far enough, denouncing the legislation for failing to eliminate the 1977 Amnesty Law, failing to support or compensate families of the disappeared, and failing to pursue justice against Nationalist perpetrators. ARMH remains committed to fighting for national reconciliation that asserts the state as culpable and responsible for locating, exhuming, and reburying Republican victims and prosecuting those who perpetrated crimes.

Today, the Valley represents a more democratic site of memory as the battle to exhume and return unidentified victims from this space continues. While thousands remain buried underneath the basilica, their stories and memories are slowly becoming unburied.

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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.

Jan. 23, 1938 edition of Nuevo Ejercito, newspaper of the 47ty Division of the Republican army.

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.

"Die erste Schlact" with cover showing a line drawing of a soldier superimposed over a section of a map labeled casa delcamp.

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.”

"Spain Illustrated" with picture of smiling soldier and text that reads "A year's fight for democracy. New Articles. New Pictures. New Facts."

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.”

Cover of the Apr.26, 1939 edition of German magazine "Die Woche" with photo of Spanish commander Franco saluting.

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.

Cover of French illustrated magainze "L'Illustration" showing soldiers in the streets.

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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From the Brandeis Archives

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 Essay

Introduction, background of the civil war, spanish civil war, works cited.

Coup d’état is a terminology used to explain the overthrowing of a government usually by a military force. The reason is to replace the incapable part of the government with another civil leadership or military leadership. Coup d’état became the major reason of the Spanish civil war. This civil war started from July 17, 1936 and lasted till April 1, 1939. This war started when the army of Spain overthrew the Second Spanish Republic’s government.

The war ended when the National General Francisco Franco became the dictator. The people who supported this rebellion were supported by Italy and Germany, whereas the Republicans were supported by the Soviet Union and Mexico. The people who supported this rebellion were known as the nacionales. Though it is believed that the US remained neutral but they sold planes to the Republics. Moreover, it has also been found that they sold gasoline to the rebels also. The Germans used this rebellion as a rehearsing era for the World War II. This war was a prelude of the Second World War.

There had been quite a number of civil wars in Spain. The main reasons were the reformist and the conservatives. Both of them had their own point of view about running the country. The conservative thought that the present type of monarchy was absolutely right for running the country. Many political leaders had the same view. In case of the reformist, they wanted to get rid of the monarchy and start a new way of government.

This conflict between the two groups of people had already leaded to a civil war. The reformist wanted to make Spanish Republic state, and have a proper form of government which leads the country. The other party wanted Catholicism or we can say they were against a liberal Spain. Though it was one of the reasons of the war, but there were many other reasons which lead to war. Most of these had been building up during the years. There had been many different types of governments in Spain since the 19 th century (Brenan, n.p). From 1887 to 1931, there was monarchy. This was under Alfonso XIII. Later on, this was replaced by dictatorship.

Primo de Rivera was the military dictator. In 1930 his dictatorship was overthrown. In 1931, the second republic came in to picture. Much of this was lead by the centre and left unions (Preston, n.p). Many reforms passed in this era. Much of these were controversial like the Agrarian Law of 1932 (Graham, n.p).. As many Spanish people were very poor, so in reform land was distributed among these poor. This became very controversial and had a very strong opposition (Spartacus Educational, n.p).

The political situation of the country was turbulent for many years. The Spanish elections were held in 1933 (Spartacus Educational, n.p). In this election the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas won the most seats in the Cortes. This was the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right. The CEDA did not win enough seats to form a majority. Niceto Alcalá Zamora was the president a t that time.

Though José María Gil-Robles could form a government at that time, the president instead asked Alejandro Lerroux. He was the leader of the Republican Party and was a centrist. Later on, Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, also supported this party. On October 1, 1934, three ministerial positions were given to the CEDA. The CEDA along with Alejandro Lerroux, tried to terminate many legislations passed by the last government. These acts lead to strikes all over the country. These rebellions were brought to a halt later on. Many people got arrested and many went on trial (Si Spain, n.p).

Due to this brutal action of the government, they were very much disliked throughout the country. When the elections were again held in 1936, this government had very small number of people who supported them. During the elections, there were a lot of strikes. The Popular Front had won. They had the most seats in the parliament. This was lead by CEDA and got almost 33.2% of the total votes. The CEDA promised the members of CNT to get pardoned from the jail.

In response the CNT gave all its votes to the CEDA. The CNT was present in many elections before also. As Largo Caballero came down, people were expecting riots. Many people wanted a revolution and were working hard to have one, but others were against it and condemned it. The main aim of the left and right were to make a democratic government. Comintern’s agreed. Manuel Azaña was the prime minister at that time. Though he was in favor of a democratic government, but without the support from socialists he could not do anything. In April, the same year Manuel Azaña was replaced. Though Azaña came that year, people still did not like him.

They remembered the brutal act of his government during the previous street riots. He was called “the repulsive caterpillar of red Spain” (Preston, 17-23). Yet another reson of disliking him was the cut down in the budget of army when he was in power. He had also shut down the military academy.

This was the year of violence. Everybody was fighting and the streets became a place of crime. Almost 330 people were assassinated. This political violence lead to injury of almost 1,511 people and 113 strikes. Almost 160 religious buildings were burned. José Castillo tried to deal with this violence, but was murdered later in July. It was found out that the group from the left had killed him. José Calvo Sotelo, was also killed the next day.

He was the leader of the opposition. It was found that Luis Cuenca had killed him. He wanted to take revenge as Luis Cuenca, was a socialist leader. The parliament got very suspicious as Calvo Sotelo was a very prominent person. He had been protesting against the anti religious terror and other agricultural reforms. He rather wanted a corporative state. Moreover, he said that it would be foolish of the Spanish soldiers not to rise against this revolution. It is said that after this speech the nationalist leader said that they will make sure Calvo Sotelo is not able to give anymore speeches after this. The national generals at this stage had planned the revolution (Thomas, 8).

A lot of people feared that a revolution will begin, and they were right. In mid f July 1936 the rebellion began. The radio of Spain announced the start of the rebellion. General Manuel Goded Llopis and General Francisco Franco were sent to Balearic Islands. They were sent by Casares Quiroga, as he knew there was something going on. Later Major Hugh Pollard came to Spain also (Michael, n.p).

This rebellion was what we called in the begging a coup d’état action. Major part of the country was still in the hands of the government. The people rebelling had only a very small part of the country. The rebels were confined in the Barracks in Madrid, which were taken down the very next day. In Barcelona also, the rebels could not do much. A general, who came in Barcelona, was soon caught. He was later terminated. The panic that was created by the rebellions in Barcelona and its surrounding areas soon broke the government. Almost all of the eastern coast and central area was under the republicans. Northern and western Spain was taken by the nationals.

The Americans fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The Soviet Union and Mexico helped the Spanish loyalists by giving them weapons and other things. The republicans contained peasants also (Beevor, 30-33).

The Nacionales leaders, however, were wealthy and instead of being peasants owned the land. These people wanted the centralization of the power. Germnay, Italy and Roman Cathlics supported the Nacionales. Portugal’s Estado Novo, provided support to them.

Almost everybody supported either the republicans or the Nacionales. Each and every political party was involved. People supporting monarchy and Carlists supported Nacionales. Catholics and Falange were also on their side; whereas, the Catalan nationalists, socialists, communists, and anarchists were on Republicans side.

The rebellion started under General Jose Sanjurjo. Emilio Mola was the chief planner. Though in the beginning of spring all preparations of the preparations of the rebellion had been done, but General Franco wanted to wait till July. As Franco had prior experience in 1934, where he suppressed the socialist uprising, he was considered as the main person this time. Though people had all intentions of capturing Franco, Franco took another route to Morocco (Preston, 4-10). After the death of Sanjurjo, Franco was chosen as the commander. Though, Mola was also considered on of the candidate for this post, Franco got chosen due to his better past results.

The Roman Catholic Church had been the target of many attacks. The Nacionales’s were trying to help the church. They thought due to these attacks, the country was in such turmoil. Even before the attacks on the church, many other religious buildings were burned down. The republicans also made the catholic clergy the target. Many Catholics were mostly the republicans and they thought the church had not played a very good role during the revolution.

Though the Pope Paul II had beatified the people who died, he particularly accounted the priests and nuns. Almost 6000 people died in this revolution. Many people joined the International Brigades. These people thought that the republicans were against fascism and considered it a battle between “tyranny and democracy”. However, people who supported Franco thought it was a battle of the red hordes of communism. They considered that anarchism was on one hand and the Christian people on the other. Franco’s people thought that they were the ones bringing peace to the otherwise restless society (Beevor, 30-33).

Though it is known as the Spanish Civil war, there had been a lot of foreign people involved in this revolution. The foreign government helped the parties they supported by contributing weapons and military assistance. Though the republicans got little support yet they had a lot of problems due to England’s declaration of restriction on weapons. Italy and Germany were very much involved and sent a lot of weaponary and militiray help. It is said that almost 50,000 men came from Italy. The Germans sent a total of 31,000 personnel. Only 700 men were sent by the Soviet Union, but these were a great help as they were the operating the aircrafts and tanks.

They had to buy this support from the Soviet Union giving away almost US$500 million. This reserve was more than half the reserve of Spain. Almost 53 nations participated. Ireland had more people in the favor of Franco. Ireland later declared that it was on nobody’s side and will not take part in the war. As there were children also present in the war, an arrangement had to be made in order to evacuate them. The children in Spain were sent through ships.

They were sent to Britain, Belgium, the Soviet Union, and Mexico. Many other European countries were also included. Many children came back after the war, but many of them also stayed. The children who stayed were mostly sent to Soviet Union and these children suffered through the Second World War also. The Nationalists and the republicans’ both, evacuated children, women and old people to other countries.

Almost 50,000 people died in this Spanish civil war (Telegraph UK, n.p). According to Julia Ruiz, there were almost 37,843 dead in the war (Ruiz, 97). Vidal came to a conclusion that the total number of people executed in Spain could have reached up to almost 110,965 (Montaner, n.p).

In the beginning of the war, almost 50,000 people were caught. These people were executed. This number accounts for the killings on both the sides. The person who died, was left were he was killed. Most of the times, before anybody was killed they were made to dig their own graves. People started to settle their long time disputes. People thought that the war might end quickly, but on the fifth day of the rebellion, Nacionales captured Spain.

Everything got charged up again and the enemies started looking for Franco. Franco won in the South, in September. His troops later reached in Madrid in November and started an attack. Due to all these things, Franco was later recognized by governments like Germany. They later sent him help. In January Franco made another try in order to get Madrid, but he did not succeed (Rosemont, n.p).

As there were a lot of foreign help coming in, the non-intervention committee banned all of them. Franco later invaded Argon. He also took the city of Santander. The Nacionales and the republicans faced each other in the battle of Teruel. The Nacionales lost the city and this battle. Franco’s trrops entered the Mediterranean Sea and got a portion of Spain. At this point the Republicans wanted peace and were ready to reconcile.

However, Franco did not stop. The war went on as it was with both of them fighting (Weisboard, n.p). In 1939, Franco declared the war over. Though it was officially over, many small rebels were still carried out. People in small troops still fought Franco’s army. In next two moths Franco also got Catalonia. Madrid and a few others were under the republicans. Later Madrid went to Nacionales. One after another and on April one all the Nacionales surrendered (Wolff, n.p).

When the war ended, almost 30,000 people were executed (Tremlett, n.p). People who were enemies of Francos were punished severely (Varia, n.p). It has been calculated that this numbers goes as high as 50,000 to 200,000. People who were not executed were forced to do labor (Geiser, n.p). Almost 500,000 republicans went to France (Caistor, n.p). Refugees were sent to camps with filthy conditions. Almost 12,000 republican soldiers, plus some other civilians were sent to these camps (Cohen, n.p).

After the official announcement about the end of the war, another war started. This guerrilla war went on till the 1950.

Alpert, Michael (2002).BBC History Magazine.

Beevor, Antony. (2006). The Battle for Spain; The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Penguin.

Brenan, Gerald. (n.d). The Spanish Labyrinth. Cambridge University Press.

Caistor, Nick. (2003). Spanish Civil War fighters look back . Web.

Cohen, Monique and Lise-Malo (n.d). Les camps in the south-west of France 1939-1944. Web.

Geiser, Carl. (n.d). Prisoners of the Good Fight.Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Company.

Graham, Helen. (2005). The Spanish Civil War. A very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, USA

Montaner, Carlos Alberto. (2003). International justice begins at home. Web.

Preston, Paul. (n.d) Franco; A Biography. Fontana Press.

Preston, Paul (n.d). From rebel to Caudillo: Franco’s path to power, History Today Volume: 33 Issue: 11.

Preston, Paul. (n.d). The Coming of the Spanish Civil War. Routledge.

Ruiz, Julius (2007). Defending the Republic: The García Atadell Brigade in Madrid, 1936. Journal of Contemporary History. Web.

Rosemont, Franklin. Spanish Revolution of 1936. Web.

Spartacus Educational (n.d). Background to war. Web.

Spartacus Educational, (n.d). Chronology of the Spanish Civil war. Web.

Si Spain. (n.d). Spanish Civil War. Web.

Thomas, Hugh. (2003). The Spanish Civil War. Penguin Books Ltd

Telegraph. (2006). A revelatory account of the Spanish civil war. Web.

Tremlett, Giles (2003). Spain torn on tribute to victims of Franco . Web.

Varia. (2005). SPAIN: Repression under Franco after the Civil War. Web.

Wolff, Milton. (n.d). Another Hill: An Autobiographical Novel about the Spanish Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Weisboard, Albert. (n.d). The Spanish Revolution. Web.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, September 1). The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-spanish-civil-war-of-1936-1939/

"The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939." IvyPanda , 1 Sept. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/the-spanish-civil-war-of-1936-1939/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939'. 1 September.

IvyPanda . 2021. "The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939." September 1, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-spanish-civil-war-of-1936-1939/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939." September 1, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-spanish-civil-war-of-1936-1939/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939." September 1, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-spanish-civil-war-of-1936-1939/.

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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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The art that outlives the war: How the Spanish civil war gave rise to a new visual language

A research volume by Dr. Eugenia Afinoguénova and collaborators illuminates the lasting cultural meaning of art created during the Spanish Civil War.

By Tree Meinch
May 8, 2024
4 min. read

In 1937, one year after the Spanish Civil War began, Pablo Picasso presented to the world what would become one of his most famous and recognizable paintings. Named after a northern Spanish village bombed mercilessly by Hitler’s air force in support of one side of the fractured country, “Guernica” has appeared in countless classroom lectures, art books and social movements — not to mention continued critiques among experts debating the painter’s original meaning some 80 years ago.

The iconic painting of black-and-white disembodied human figures alongside a bull and a horse resonates deeply with generations of international viewers. “As we speak, there are references to “Guernica” being used to fight climate change, oppose gender violence … to support the ceasefire in Gaza,” says Dr. Eugenia Afinoguénova, chair and professor of Spanish.

Beyond artist intent, Afinoguénova wants people to consider how visual work can generate meaning and culture for viewers around the world. “Guernica” is one of many such images that were created during the Spanish Civil War and sparked unshakable, lasting impressions in the public eye. Other examples include propaganda posters and anarchist films. These works and their collective influence are the focus of Afinoguénova’s latest ambitious research undertaking, “The Edinburgh Companion to the Spanish Civil War and Visual Culture,” which she is coediting with Dr. Silvina Schammah-Gesser of The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr. Robert Lubar Messeri at New York University).

“The Edinburgh Companion” illuminates how the cryptic, open-ended nature of images allows them to take on a different life than spoken or written messaging. The idea is that visual art lands and lingers in the brain differently than the experience of reading a political declaration in a newspaper or, these days, on X, the social media platform.

Last fall the project received nearly $125,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Just over a year earlier, Afinoguénova also won the Lawrence G. Haggerty Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Marquette’s highest research honor, for her scholarship exploring urgent political and environmental concerns in tourism, visual culture and food studies.

2JBN6WY Guernica, artwork by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 1937

Historically speaking, the three-year period of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, carries significant weight given the rise of fascism in multiple nations at the time. In the case of Spain, what started as a coup against the Spanish government evolved into a brutal revolutionary precursor to World War II. “Our project is speaking about the difference between image and word,” Afinoguénova says, “on both sides of the conflict.”

The volume also elevates lesser-known works and creators, such as photography by Kati Horna. The Hungarian-born photojournalist arrived in Spain in 1937 to support the propaganda efforts of the Republic against General Francisco Franco’s militant Nationalist faction. Many of Horna’s striking images, such as “Subida a la Catedral, Barcelona” (Staircase to the Cathedral) published in the anarchist-leaning press, convey through surrealism the struggles of civilians surviving a war-torn Spain. Although Horna’s work from this era has had some influence, Afinoguénova’s book could help earn it some more, deservedly so, she adds.

The writers track the influence of imagery across Europe in the 1930s and beyond into the modern day. “We now hear a lot about fascism and anti-fascism right here in the United States and Europe as well. This language dates back to the 1930s,” Afinoguénova says.

Kati Horna was a Hungarian-born photographer who in 1937 arrived to Spain to support the propaganda efforts of the fighting Republic. Instead of going to the battlefields like her other (mostly male) colleagues, however, she focused on the lives of civilians in the rearguard. Her antifascist worldview brought her to the anarchist movements in Aragón and Catalonia at a time when the central government of the Republic took a course of prioritizing the war effort over the goals of a social revolution that occupied the anarchists. Horna published her work in the anarchist-leaning press. This image, for instance, was published in 2 such journals: Libre Studio and Umbral. Several things are interesting here: a) the usage of "double exposure" that was popular in the avant-garde cinema and photography; b) similarity with the shifting scales (smaller building, larger face) and the play of inside/outside that surrealist artists were also using; c) the propagandistic charge of the message: before the Revolution (which was already transformed into a war when the image was published), the life of a Spanish woman was like a prison, and the cause of women’s liberation should not be lost; d) the recognizable location: the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona.

The team of contributors to “The Edinburgh Companion” illuminate how the cryptic, open-ended nature of images allows them to take on a different life than spoken or written messaging. The idea is that visual art lands and lingers in the brain differently than the experience of reading a political declaration in a newspaper or, these days, on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “What the images do, they give you pause, both figuratively and literally — because sometimes you have to think carefully about what they mean,” she says.

Thinking intricately about what things mean — beyond their face value — has been a hallmark of Afinoguénova’s exceptional career in scholarship. In 2008, she co-edited the volume ”Spain Is (Still) Different: Tourism and Discourse in Spanish Identity.” That book “…is now considered a foundational work on the cultural impact of tourism in Spain,” wrote the late Dr. Anne M. Pasero, a language professor at Marquette who nominated Afinoguénova in 2022 for the Haggerty Faculty Award.

Another published work in 2018,”The Prado: Spanish Culture and Leisure (1819-1939),” also helped prepare Afinoguénova for “The Edinburgh Companion” project. That monograph won the 2019 Eleanor Tufts Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies.

“Regardless of her teaching load, she has been ahead of her peers,” Pasero wrote in nominating Afinoguénova.

Afinoguénova also coedited the new book “Digestible Governance: Gastrocracy and Spanish Foodways,” which will be available August 2024. “The Edinburgh Companion” is under contract and set for submission to its publisher this year, with anticipated publication in 2025 or early 2026.

Campus Life

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El Salvador: a Brief Look at its Storied Past

This essay about El Salvador’s history paints a vivid picture of a nation shaped by its indigenous roots and colonial past. It traces the evolution from the ancient civilizations of the Pipil and Lenca through the Spanish conquest, which introduced significant economic changes with indigo and coffee plantations. These developments entrenched social inequalities that sparked centuries of struggle, culminating in the brutal Civil War from 1980 to 1992. Post-war efforts to rebuild the nation are also discussed, alongside the enduring cultural impacts seen in traditions like the pupusa. The narrative emphasizes the resilience and ongoing challenges faced by Salvadorans as they navigate their complex history towards a hopeful future.

How it works

In El Salvador, history isn’t just a set of dates and events—it’s a living part of everyday life, woven into the fabric of society through stories, ruins, and ongoing struggles. This small nation, nestled along the Pacific coast of Central America, has a tale to tell that’s as dynamic and layered as any you’ll find around the globe.

The saga begins with the indigenous Pipil and Lenca, original stewards of the land whose legacies linger in today’s culture.

Noteworthy among the remnants of ancient times are the ruins at Tazumal and the village of Joya de Cerén, buried by volcanic ash and preserved in a way that offers an authentic peek into the everyday lives of the Mayan people. These sites remind us of the rich civilization that thrived long before European boots ever touched these lands.

The Spanish conquest in the 16th century flipped the script for El Salvador. The introduction of indigo and later coffee plantations transformed the economy but also entrenched deep social divides. The wealth from these crops lined the pockets of a few, leaving most Salvadorans to grapple with inequality—a theme that has recurred throughout the nation’s history.

Fast forward to the 20th century, a period marked by a dizzying cycle of authoritarian rule and fleeting democratic hopes. The most brutal chapter in recent history, the Salvadoran Civil War from 1980 to 1992, reshaped the country. This conflict, fueled by deep-seated grievances and external Cold War politics, led to heartbreaking human rights abuses and massive displacement. The peace accords in 1992, which ended the war, were supposed to turn a new page for the country by ushering in reforms and a democratic framework.

Since then, El Salvador has been working hard to stitch itself back together, striving to modernize and address long-standing issues like public safety and corruption. Yet, the legacy of the past looms large, and progress is often met with setbacks tied to deep-rooted challenges like gang violence and political instability.

But it’s not all grim. The culture of El Salvador, with its delightful blend of indigenous and Spanish influences, offers a vibrant counterpoint to its tumultuous history. Take, for example, the pupusa: simple, delicious, and universally loved, these stuffed corn cakes are a testament to Salvadoran ingenuity and tradition.

Looking at El Salvador today is like reading a book where each chapter reveals new complexities. The nation’s history teaches us about resilience in the face of adversity—a community’s ability to endure, rebuild, and hope for a better future despite past traumas. This ongoing story of El Salvador isn’t just about where it’s been. It’s a continuous dialogue about where it’s headed and how the enduring spirit of its people shapes its path forward.

So, the next time you hear about El Salvador, remember that behind the headlines are centuries of rich history and a nation of people who are as resilient as they are welcoming. This country’s story is far from over, and its lessons are invaluable for anyone interested in the enduring human quest for justice and peace.

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The Morning

An overlooked war.

In Myanmar, poets, doctors and lawyers have traded life in the cities for jungle warfare.

Two fighters in fatigues sitting in the back of a truck.

By Hannah Beech

I’m a roving Asia correspondent based in Bangkok.

A people take to arms and fight for democracy. A military terrorizes civilians with airstrikes and land mines. Tens of thousands are killed. Millions are displaced.

Yet it is all happening almost completely out of view.

Recently, I spent a week on the front lines of a forgotten war in the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar. Since a military junta overthrew a civilian administration there three years ago, a head-spinning array of pro-democracy forces and ethnic militias have united to fight the generals. The resistance includes poets, doctors and lawyers who traded life in the cities for jungle warfare. It also includes veteran combatants who have known no occupation but soldier.

Now, for the first time, the rebels claim control of more than half of Myanmar’s territory. In recent weeks they have overrun dozens of towns and Myanmar military bases.

Today’s newsletter will explain how civil war has engulfed Myanmar — and why the world has ignored a country that less than a decade ago was lauded as a democratic success story.

A coup defied

In February 2021, a military junta, led by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, arrested the nation’s civilian leaders and returned the country to full dictatorship. If the generals expected the populace to cower in response to their coup, they were wrong. With military snipers shooting unarmed protesters and bystanders, including dozens of children, an armed resistance coalesced. Tens of thousands of professionals and members of Gen Z decamped to the jungle . Rappers, Buddhist monks and politicians, among others, learned how to shoot guns and arm drones. Their hands grew callused.

This unlikely resistance has repelled the junta’s forces from wide swaths of the country, including most of Myanmar’s borderlands. (Here are several useful charts that explain how the civil war is unfolding.)

Areas of control in Myanmar

Largely military junta control

Largely resistance control

Bay of Bengal

A lady tarnished

If there is one name from Myanmar that people in the West might recognize it’s that of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the long-imprisoned democracy advocate who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent resistance. (Her name is pronounced Daw Ong Sahn Soo Chee.)

In 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party routed the military’s candidates in nationwide elections. With her civilian government sharing power with the army, Myanmar seemed like a rare counterpoint to the Arab Spring and other foiled democracy movements. President Obama visited twice.

Yet within a year, the military, which still controlled the most important levers of power, had intensified its persecution of Rohingya Muslims, culminating in 2017 with the expulsion of three-quarters of a million people within a few weeks. The United States designated the campaign a genocide. Rather than condemn the violence, however, Aung San Suu Kyi went to The Hague and defended the military in an international court. Her refusal to stand up for a persecuted minority knocked off her halo. The United States and other Western governments distanced themselves from her.

The tarnishing of this simple morality tale — the lady versus the generals, democracy versus dictatorship — helps answer a question I was asked dozens of times during my week of reporting in Myanmar: Why doesn’t the world care about us? Allies in the West feel betrayed by a politician who, it turned out, would not meet her own high moral standard. (Aung San Suu Kyi is again imprisoned by the military.)

A fractured reality

Even without foreign intervention, or much Western aid at all, the Myanmar resistance has pushed back the junta. Rebels are now within 150 miles of the capital, Naypyidaw.

But that may have been the easy part. The resistance is — perhaps hopelessly — splintered. More than a dozen major armed ethnic groups are vying for control over land and valuable natural resources.

Ethnic groups in Myanmar

Ta’ang

Bamar (majority)

For now, they’re fighting a common enemy. But some of these militias are just as likely to battle each other. Last month, the rebels captured a key border town, only to relinquish it after one armed group withdrew its full support.

Already, much of Myanmar is fractured between different groups, all heavily armed. In other parts of the country, no one is fully in charge. Crime is flourishing. The country is now the world’s biggest producer of opium. Jungle factories churn out meth and other synthetic drugs that have found their way to Australia. Cybercriminals have proliferated, targeting Americans, Asians and Europeans with scams.

Myanmar’s civil war may be overshadowed by other global conflicts. But to the Burmese who live with uncertainty and chaos, the war has never been more urgent or real.

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-hamas negotiations.

Delegations from Israel and Hamas arrived in Cairo to resume talks about a possible cease-fire. Read about the gaps between them in the negotiations.

A Hamas representative said the group’s red lines included a “withdrawal from all areas of Gaza and the unconditional return of the displaced.”

Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed Hamas’s latest proposal as a move to stop Israeli troops from entering Rafah, a city that Israel has called the last bastion of Hamas control and where more than a million Gazans have taken refuge.

Rafah Incursion

A doctor at a Rafah medical center said 27 bodies had been brought there since the start of Israel’s incursion in the city. The Israeli military said it had killed about 20 Hamas fighters in Rafah.

Satellite photos showed fewer aid trucks on both sides of Gaza’s border with Egypt on Monday than on Sunday, after Israel ordered an evacuation of areas near the Rafah crossing.

Israel reopened the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza, a critical entry point for aid that it had closed after a Hamas rocket attack on Sunday.

The Israelis told the U.S. that the operation in Rafah was limited and “designed to cut off Hamas’s ability to smuggle weapons into Gaza.”

President Biden paused an arms shipment to Israel last week to prevent U.S. weapons being used in a major assault on Rafah.

Netanyahu is trying to reassure his domestic and diplomatic critics. Steven Erlanger explores the Israeli prime minister’s competing pressures .

Campus Protests

University of Chicago police officers removed a pro-Palestinian protest encampment before dawn on Tuesday.

Biden decried rising antisemitism in the U.S. and said that too many people had forgotten “that Hamas unleashed this terror” by attacking Israel.

The White House press secretary criticized white counterprotesters at the University of Mississippi who taunted a Black pro-Palestinian protester .

A consulting firm will investigate why the police allowed an attack on pro-Palestinian demonstrators at U.C.L.A. to continue for hours.

More International News

Emmanuel Macron took Xi Jinping to his childhood haunts in the Pyrenees . Officials said the French and Chinese leaders have forged a close relationship over the years.

Canada re-criminalized public drug use in British Columbia after a backlash.

Ukraine said that it had foiled a Russian plot to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky and other leaders.

Trump on Trial

Stormy Daniels testified at Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial, describing a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump and the hush-money payment she received during the 2016 election.

Daniels spoke quickly, saying the encounter traumatized her, and derisively recalled conversations with Trump. Trump, who has long denied her account, shook his head and mouthed an expletive.

Trump’s lawyers repeatedly objected and moved for a mistrial , accusing prosecutors of trying to embarrass him. The judge declined but scolded Daniels, calling some of her testimony “better left unsaid.”

Trump’s lawyer questioned Daniels’s credibility and motives. Daniels denied trying to extort Trump but said yes when asked if she hated him.

Trump posted, then deleted, an angry message about Daniels’s testimony that could have violated his gag order.

The late night hosts joked about Daniels’s testimony .

More on Politics

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has faced previously undisclosed health issues including hepatitis C, mercury poisoning and a dead worm in his brain.

The judge in Trump’s classified documents case postponed the trial indefinitely . She cited the large number of unresolved legal issues, which she has allowed to pile up.

A pro-Trump nonprofit has paid more than $3 million to corporations linked to its leaders or their relatives, raising concerns about self-dealing .

House Republicans will hold a hearing today on antisemitism in K-12 schools .

TikTok sued the U.S. over a law that would ban the app unless it is sold to another company. TikTok says the law violates users’ First Amendment rights.

Panera Bread will stop selling its highly caffeinated lemonades , which were the subject of two wrongful-death lawsuits.

Customers of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX are poised to recover all of the money they lost when the firm collapsed in 2022, plus interest.

MORNING READS

Spectaculars: They put a 65-foot hot dog in Times Square . Then the wrestling started.

Real estate: Houseboats used to be an affordable way to live in London. Not anymore .

Mocktails: Fancy nonalcoholic beverages have attracted a new kind of customer: the (way) under-21 set .

Lives Lived: The psychologist Lesley Hazleton was a secular Jew, but her curiosity about faith and religion led her to write biographies of Muhammad, Mary and Jezebel. Hazleton died at 78 .

N.B.A.: The Oklahoma City Thunder remained undefeated in the playoffs, taking a 1-0 series advantage with a 117-95 rout of the Dallas Mavericks.

Upgrade: W.N.B.A. teams, after years of mostly flying commercial, will travel on charter planes this season.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Over the next six weeks, trillions of cicadas will emerge in the Midwest and the Southeast. Joseph Yoon, a chef and edible bug enthusiast, plans to make the most of it. “The romance! The kismet! The synchronicity that this is all occurring in my lifetime!” Yoon told the Times food critic Tejal Rao .

Yoon puts the insects in kimchi, fries them to make tempura and folds them into Spanish tortillas alongside potato and onion. “I like to think of cicadas as just another ingredient,” he said. “Like lobster or shrimp.”

More on culture

After the Met Gala, Usher, Jeff Bezos and others kept the celebrations going. See images from the after-parties .

A security guard was shot outside Drake’s Toronto home . The shooting followed a weekend of personal diss tracks between Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Make hearty, flavorful huevos rancheros .

Upgrade your kitchen .

Take advantage of these Mother’s Day deals .

Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangram was floorboard .

And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku , Connections and Strands .

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this newsletter misstated when rebels captured and relinquished a Myanmar border town. It was last month, not this month.

How we handle corrections

Hannah Beech is a Times reporter based in Bangkok who has been covering Asia for more than 25 years. She focuses on in-depth and investigative stories. More about Hannah Beech

The 20 biggest new films to see in spring 2024

Io capitano.

A gripping, gently magic-realist odyssey from Italy’s Matteo Garrone, in which two Senegalese teens make a perilous cross-Sahara trek to Europe. Read the full review . Cinemas, April 5

Behind the worst PR move of the century – Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell) agreeing to his grilling by Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson). An astute script by Peter Moffat teaches The Crown who’s boss. Netflix, April 5

The Teachers’ Lounge

The fallout from a staff room pickpocketing incident threatens to tear an entire school apart in this nerve-snapping German Oscar nominee. Read the full review . Cinemas, April 12

Close Your Eyes

83-year-old Spanish legend Victor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive) has fashioned a late masterpiece: an essay on cinema and memory, about the unsolved disappearance of an actor in the 1990s. Cinemas, April 12

Back to Black

We’ve had Freddie Mercury, Whitney Houston and Bob Marley: now it’s the turn of Amy Winehouse, as played by Industry’s Marisa Abela, to get her very own rise-and-fall biopic, with Sam Taylor-Johnson calling the shots. Cinemas, April 23

Alex Garland brings us a mid-budget dystopian action flick, with Kirsten Dunst heading a team of journalists who must document the ravages of a guns-blazing meltdown across America. Cinemas, April 12

Challengers

Anyone for mixed doubles? Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist both vie for centre court supremacy – and shared lover Zendaya – in this heady romantic thriller set in the world of professional tennis. Cinemas, April 26

The Fall Guy

Paired amusingly on Oscar night, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt have this pell-mell comedy on the way, about the action choreographer and director of a high-octane caper who must track down its missing star. Cinemas, May 2

Love Lies Bleeding

Four years after Saint Maud, Rose Glass returns with an outrageous 1980s scuzzball noir set on the US amateur bodybuilding circuit. Kristen Stewart and The Mandalorian’s Katy O’Brian star. Read the full review . Cinemas, May 3

The spirit of Nic Roeg crackles through Luna Carmoon’s sparklingly odd debut, in which a schoolgirl raised by a compulsive hoarder falls for a wrong ‘un, and finds weird buried impulses unleashed. Read the full review . Cinemas, May 10

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Fourth in the rebooted series, this is set 300 years after the last one ended. A young chimp called Noa (Owen Teague) is the hero, paired with a feral human (Freya Allan) on a search for civilisation. Cinemas, May 10

John Krasinski writes and directs a blend of live action and animation, about a young girl called Bea who, like her upstairs neighbour (Ryan Reynolds), has the power to see people’s abandoned imaginary friends. Cinemas, May 17

The Garfield Movie

Bill Murray out, Chris Pratt in: the famous malingering, Monday-phobic moggy has a new celebrity voice in this fully animated take on Jim Davis’s durable cartoon strip. Cinemas, May 24

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Nine years after the hellzapoppin’ spree of Max Mad: Fury Road, George Miller returns with a prequel about the fall of the world, and the snatching of Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) by the crew of an evil warlord. Cinemas, May 24

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay star in this Lynchian head-spinner from Bertrand Bonello, about a young woman who encounters versions of the same strange man in the present, future and past. Read the full review . Cinemas, May 31

Young Woman and the Sea

Daisy Ridley stars in this Jerry-Bruckheimer-produced biopic as the American Olympic swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. Cinemas, May 31

Bad Boys Ride or Die

Despite both Boys now approaching pensionable age, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence have cranked out a fourth of these buddy cop capers, with the same creative team as the surprisingly watchable third. Cinemas, June 7

Inside Out 2

Yes, the untouchable 2015 Pixar one-off is getting a sequel: we’re nervous too, though teenage Riley’s new batch of live-in emotions (Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy and Ennui) sound a comedically promising crop. Cinemas, June 14

The Bikeriders

The spirit of vintage Scorsese crackles through Jeff Nichols’s rollicking crime thriller, about the rise and fall of a 1960s Chicago biker gang. With Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy. Cinemas, June 21

A Quiet Place: Day One

“Hear how it all began”: the apocalypse that’s ancient history in the previous horror thrillers is explored in the present tense, with Michael (Pig) Sarnoski directing, and Lupita Nyong’o as our protagonist. Cinemas, June 28

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Fast and furious: a scene from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - Warner Bros. Pictures

IMAGES

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(DOC) The Spanish Civil War
≫ Spanish Civil War Free Essay Sample on Samploon.com
Analyse the Pricipal Causes of the Spanish Civil War
The Theater of the Spanish Civil War Free Essay Example
7 Things You May Not Know About the Spanish Civil War

VIDEO

Spanish civil war (1936-1939): Every day
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SPANISH CIVIL WAR #culture #edit #shorts
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COMMENTS

Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War, (1936-39), military revolt against the Republican government of Spain, supported by conservative elements within the country. When an initial military coup failed to win control of the entire country, a bloody civil war ensued, fought with great ferocity on both sides. The Nationalists, as the rebels were called, received aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Looking Back on the Spanish War
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.
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War (Spanish: Guerra Civil Española) was a military conflict fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the left -leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic , and consisted of various socialist , communist , separatist , anarchist , and republican ...
The Good Fight and Good History: the Spanish Civil War
The history of the Spanish Civil War, defying the adage that history is dictated by winners, was written by sympathizers with the losers. 'Spain', the alleged dress-rehearsal for the Second World War, was a cause, a microcosm of all the grand narratives of mid-century ideological struggle. It was Picasso's 'Guernica', it was where ...
From Guernica to human rights : essays on the Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War, a military rebellion supported by Hitler and Mussolini, attracted the greatest writers of the age. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Andre Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Langston Hughes, and Martha Gellhorn. They returned to their homelands to warn the world about a war of fascist aggression looming on the horizon.
George Orwell and Arthur Koestler Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War was fought between the Republicans, who were loyal to the Spanish Republic, and the Nationalists, a rebel group led by General Francisco Franco from 17th July 1936 to 1st April 1939. ... In his 1942 essay on the Spanish War he brings a story, which he considers moving, of him not shooting at a Nationalist soldier who was ...
(PDF) From Guernica to Human Rights: Essays on the Spanish Civil War by
From Guernica to Human Rights: Essays on the Spanish Civil War. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2015. 216 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-60635-238-. Reviewed by Brian R. Price (Hawaii Paciic University) Published on H-War (June, 2016) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey he Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 was fought between a coalition of fascists ...
The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction
Abstract. The Spanish Civil War: Very Short Introduction offers an explanation of the war's origins and course, explores its impact on a personal and international scale, and provides an ethical reflection on the war. How has the war inspired some of the greatest writers of our time? In what ways does it continue to resonate today in Britain, continental Europe, and beyond?
The Spanish Civil War Revisited
Thomas, Hugh, THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, New York: Harper &. Row, 1977, 1115 pp., $27.50. Twenty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, in the 1950s, a new generation of scholars began to approach what surely was the premier event of the inter-war period. Even then the area was a conten-tious one, an ideological battleground where, after two ...
The Causes Of The Spanish Civil War History Essay
Due to all this circumstances the socio-economic situation could be highlighted as one of the main factors that contribute for beginning of the Spanish civil war, the lack of jobs, the poverty, the political regime and the government's abuse of power let the people more susceptive to create a revolt. Religious situation.
4 The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)
The Spanish Civil War, fought from 1936 to 1939, featured a clash of ideologies in fascism and communism that gave it global relevance. The war for control of the Spanish state was waged by the incumbent Popular Front government (referred to as the Republicans) and a coalition of rebelling groups led by Spanish military officers (referred to as ...
Unburying Franco and the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War
Upon the opening of the Valley on April 1, 1959, Franco relocated the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a fascist leader killed during the Spanish Civil War, to the center of the basilica, honoring him with the only engraved tombstone at that time. When Franco died of natural causes in 1975, he, too, received a ceremonial burial with ...
Spanish Civil War Periodical Collection, 1923-2009
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.
Spanish Civil War Essay Topics
The following essay topics are designed to help your students think deeply and critically about the people, places, events, and outcomes related to the Spanish Civil War. Compare & Contrast Essay ...
The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939
This civil war started from July 17, 1936 and lasted till April 1, 1939. This war started when the army of Spain overthrew the Second Spanish Republic's government. We will write a custom essay on your topic. The war ended when the National General Francisco Franco became the dictator.
PDF The International Context of the Spanish Civil War
civil war that had external participants? Part of the answer to these questions lies first in the era in which the war was fought and, second, the geographical region of the conflict. The Spanish Civil War, like its American predecessor in the 1860s, was what could be termed an industrial war. Indeed, in many respects the American Civil War was ...
Spanish Civil War Essay
The Spanish Civil War, lasting from July 17, 1936 to April 1, 1939, was comprised of several events such as frequent rebel uprisings and territory gain by the Nationalists. The Nationalists made several progressions early on in the war due to their advantages in military supplies and a bigger army compared to the Republicans.
Essays on the Spanish Civil War
Visit the Albert and Vera Weisbord Archives at www.weisbord.org for more information about them and to read more of their writing. If you have any comments or suggestions please email at: [email protected] The Albert and Vera Weisbord Foundation. Essays on the Spanish Civil War by Albert Weisbord, written when he was in Spain during the Civil ...
Why the Spanish Civil War Mattered to Writers on Distant Shores
By Sarah Watling. May 15, 2023. 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 ...
The art that outlives the war: How the Spanish civil war gave rise to a
Historically speaking, the three-year period of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, carries significant weight given the rise of fascism in multiple nations at the time. In the case of Spain, what started as a coup led by Gen. Francisco Franco against the Spanish government evolved into a brutal revolutionary precursor to World War II.
DP History: Case Study: Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War: Causes (ATL) After over a century of social, economic and political division, the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936 when an attempted military coup failed and the country descended into internal conflict. 2. Spanish Civil War: Practices (ATL) The Spanish Civil War was fought between the Republicans and The Nationalists.
An interview with Noam Chomsky on the Spanish revolution
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.
Spanish Civil War Posters
Spanish Civil War Posters - Image Gallery Essay. Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Five Wisconsin men who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. From left to right standing are: Fred Palmer, Harry Lichter, and Ray Disch; and sitting are: John Cockson and Clarence Kailin. View the original source document: WHI 3985.
El Salvador: a Brief Look at its Storied Past
The Spanish conquest in the 16th century flipped the script for El Salvador. The introduction of indigo and later coffee plantations transformed the economy but also entrenched deep social divides. The wealth from these crops lined the pockets of a few, leaving most Salvadorans to grapple with inequality—a theme that has recurred throughout ...
An Overlooked War
Adam Ferguson for The New York Times. May 8, 2024. By Hannah Beech. I'm a roving Asia correspondent based in Bangkok. A people take to arms and fight for democracy. A military terrorizes ...
The 20 biggest new films to see in spring 2024
Cinemas, May 24. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Nine years after the hellzapoppin' spree of Max Mad: Fury Road, George Miller returns with a prequel about the fall of the world, and the snatching of ...