As an honest man, I have to state that I haven’t read Robert Preston’s book The Spanish Holocaust. As someone who has read his other works on the subject, I promise I won’t read it in the future either. That is, I would be prepared to read it if the author had revised his ideology, which generously colours and grossly distorts every word he writes. But, judging by Dominic Sandbrook’s review in The Times, he hasn’t. So I won’t.
The review itself is a remarkable piece of work — seldom does one get to read such unabashedly biased and ignorant views committed to paper. The 1,000-word article dutifully catalogues the atrocities committed by the Nationalists during, and immediately after, the Civil War of 1936-1939. Shootings, rapes, tortures and other such niceties committed by Franco’s troops fill the space to the brim, and Preston is praised for his courage in revealing them to the hitherto unaware public. (Considering that this kind of attitude is prevalent in academic circles, I’m not sure where courage comes in, but we’ll let it pass.)
Of course, this being a Western paper and not the Pravda of that bygone time, some sense of balance had to be introduced: ‘Of course such atrocities had their counterpart on the Republican side…’ That’s it: 11 words out of 1,000. A bit light for balance.
This piece of shoddy journalism wouldn’t be worth commenting on if Preston, Sandbrook and their ilk hadn’t been so shrill — and, alas, successful — in imposing their interpretation of the Spanish Civil War on an unsuspecting public. What passes for their thinking has been widely accepted by the smart set.
Let’s set the record straight. No, I’m not going to deny the harrowing facts that turn Sandbrook on so much. Yes, the Nationalists did commit their fair share of atrocities: show me a civil war where this wasn’t the case. When brother turns against brother, Cain against Abel, only one of them will be left standing. England in the 17th century, France in the 18th, the USA in the 19th, Russia in the 20th were all soaked in blood. In fact, America suffered greater casualties in the Civil War than in all her other wars combined. The Russians killed a better part of 15 million in theirs. The French, a million. And so forth.
Nor was the civilian population exempt in any of those, perhaps with the possible exception of the English Civil War. In fact, most of the Russians killed in 1918-1921 weren’t in uniform. And I hope you don’t think that Sherman’s ‘scorched earth’ march through the South didn’t leave thousands dead in its wake.
And yes, Franco’s atrocities ‘had their counterpart on the Republican side’. To be more precise, the cruelty (and the body count) of the Republicans — and not just ‘the far-left anarchist gangs in the first months of the war’ — easily matched that of the Nationalists. If I wished to stoop to the same dishonest (or ignorant) stratagem used by Sandbrook, I could knock off not 1,000 but 10,000 words describing in stomach-turning detail the torture and murder of priests, the rape and evisceration of nuns (not always in that order), the mass murder of the ‘rich’, the almost total elimination of the traditional ruling classes, the looting and destruction of property. And then I could add towards the end a short paragraph to the effect that the Nationalists were quite nasty too. Job done — I bet you wouldn’t even notice the disclaimer.
The last I looked at his photographs, Franco didn’t have wings on his back. He wasn’t an angel, far from it. It would have been so much better if the man picking up the banner of anti-communism had been an amalgam of Mother Teresa and Winston Churchill. One suspects, however, that he wouldn’t have succeeded.
Nor was that option on offer. The choice wasn’t between St Paul and St Peter. It was between Franco and Stalin. Given that option, I’d take Franco any day and twice on Sundays: history shows that wherever the communists took over, they invariably wiped out about 10 percent of the population, to begin with. No doubt the trendy lefties like Preston and Sandbrook would still prefer Stalin — even though the review (one hopes not the book) doesn’t mention that name once.
How it’s possible to write even 100, never mind 1,000, words about the Spanish Civil War without mentioning that the Republican side was financed, armed, trained and in many instances led by the Soviets is beyond me. Soviet pilots were flying their Soviet I-16 fighter planes over Madrid (one of them managed to execute an emergency landing on Castellana, Madrid’s major thoroughfare); Soviet tank crews were driving the BTs into battle; the Soviet NKVD was butchering other leftist groups, including the POUM anarchists; Soviet ‘advisers’ (each with a Spanish code name) were leading divisions and armies; the International Brigades, the best troops on either side, were the army of the Komintern, Stalin’s mercenaries.
Had Franco not stepped in, Spain today would be like Rumania, and many Spaniards realise this. Franco’s tomb in the Valley of the Dead remains a national shrine, and thousands of Spaniards come every day to pay their respects. Are they all lovers of tyranny? Some no doubt are. But a majority have a firmer grasp of history than Sandbrook — or even Preston, who proves that an ideology, especially a wrong one, can never allow a compendium of facts to become valid history.
The type of absolutist quasi-thinking evinced by our glorious duo has become typical in the West. It often lies at the foundation of foreign policy. In the assumption that any regime not closely resembling American-syle democracy is as rotten as any other, our states unseat one tyrant after another — only to discover that every subsequent tyrant is worse: for example, the Shah Pahlevi, Mubarak, Batista and even Saddam were better than their alternatives. So was Francisco Franco.