Sunday, March 21, 2010

What the Spanish Civil War Was Really About

Most histories of The Spanish Civil War portray that struggle from a decidedly leftwing point of view . Wikepedia describes it as a “working-class” revolution for the establishment of a democratic “Republican government,” “brutally put down” by a fascist Spanish military regime. Here

Another such piece concludes that the Spanish Civil War “was the culmination of a prolonged period of national political unrest—unrest in a country that was increasingly polarized and repeatedly unable to ameliorate the conditions of terrible poverty in which millions of its citizens lived.” Here

Still another history records the tragic military overthrow by General Fracisco Franco of a popularly elected Republican government, orchestrated by By the leftist Popular Front Party – (Read ‘Stalin-supported Communist Party’) Here

We discover here that the church, “age-old enemy of all working class radicalism and indeed, openly pro-fascist, was dismantled (by the revolution), and its property confiscated; established political institutions disintegrated or were taken over by workers' committees. (Read ‘Communists’)

The Columbia Encyclopedia tell us: This new Republican government “began a broad-ranging attack on the traditional, privileged structure of Spanish society: Some large estates were redistributed; church and state were separated; and an antiwar, antimilitarist policy was proclaimed. Here

We learn from most popular histories of the civil war that the tillers of the soil, and the majority of the “impoverished” Spanish working class in both the cities and rural countryside, were the real heroes in the struggle, and that the ruling Spanish aristocracy, a corrupt "fascist" dictatorship, together with a "fascist" Spanish military and the Catholic Church, (especially the Church), were the bad guys. These characterizations, in brief, comprise almost universally the historical recounting of the Spanish Civil War.

But, let's take another look.
The following ten minute pictorial
video show us, in essence,
what that War
was really all about


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