One of the most extraordinary pieces appeared on Conservative Home at the weekend and I don’t think that it should be allowed to pass without comment.
The piece by ‘Arty McBain’ reads like a piece of Francoist propaganda or an editorial from some of the worst of the hard wight wing appeasing press of the 1930s.
The piece was also hugely historically ignorant and the author really has to be taken to task for blithely ignoring the horrible brutality of Franco’s regime.
The piece rips into The Times for so-called “Communist propaganda. That is probably one of the most hysterical statements that Con Home has ever made (and there is quite some competition for that honour). It attacks The Times for saluting the bravery of the British men who volunteered for the International Brigades. I am very much with The Times on this one. The article is based on an entirely misplaced analogy with Britain in the 1980s (as well as some petulant pouting about the fact that Franco was called a Fascist when he was actually an extreme nationalist authoritarian…), whilst ignoring almost every fundamental point about the Spanish Civil War.
It manages to gloss over the fact that the Popular Front had actually won the election in 1936, rather than merely “taking over” as the author of the piece suggests. He completely ignores the fact that the Communist Party of Spain was actually tiny at the time of the 1936 elections. Forgetfully, McBain glosses over the coup against a democratically elected Government launched by Franco, his Generals and the assorted thugs he surrounded himself with. Nor does he mention the fact that the Republican forces included believers in liberal democracy, anarchists, social democrats and socialists, rather than being purely a Communist brigade as the author tries to make out.
The Francoist forces were heavily armed by Nazis in Germany and Fascists in Italy while, at the same time, the western powers imposed an arms embargo meaning that weapons could not reach Republican forces. Then, and only then, did Stalin take advantage of the first stage of the West’s policy of appeasing extreme nationalists and Fascists by arming the Republican forces. This was a genuine moral failure on behalf of Britain and France. The first of many terrible moral failures that littered our foreign policy in the mid 1930s.
Above all, it makes absolutely no mention of the horrible brutality of Francoist Spain in the aftermath of the Civil War. Franco was responsible for the politically inspired deaths of hundreds of thousands of Spaniards; the imprisonment of many times this number; the removal of the freedom of any other political parties and trade unions; and the subjugation and persecution of the traditional cultures of the regions of Spain that did not subscribe do his clichéd, traditionalist viewpoint.
Such a piece surely has no place in a blog dedicated to modern Conservative politics. It is a gift to our political rivals and is morally questionable for ignoring the horrible, repressive nature of Franco’s regime.
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I am the author of the ConHome piece in question and I’d be grateful if you would allow me to reply to the inaccurate and unfair allegations that you have made against it.
Firstly, the piece does not support Franco or his regime. These allegations are unwarranted and hysterical and not born out by anything in the text. I am a British libertarian Conservative and I well remember demonstrating againt Franco as a Young Conservatives in the 1970s. I reject your implicit assertion that events surrounding the Spanish Civil War must be seen with the cartoonish simplicity of the Daily Worker.
What it does do, I hope, is two things:
First, challenge the revolting beatification of the communist thugs and killers of the International Brigades. The idea they were fighting for anything we as Conservatives would regard as good or honourable is sickening. Remember George Orwell, who fought with the POUM (less leninist marxists than the Communist Party) went to Barcelona with a view to joining the IB but never did because the IB took part in a treacherous attack the Communists made upon the POUM while he was there. They were simply communist enforcers. I knew a IB guy when I was growing up and he had been an unapologetic Communist all his life.
Second, it was to explain why Spanish rightists and Conservtives of the time may have welcomed the insurrection. That is actually surprisingly easy to understand, given the way the second republic’s ‘democracy’ did not allow Conservatives to win elections (e.g. 1933 election) and the assassination of Conservative leader Calvo Sotelo. If Spain was a democracy in 1936 then Zimbabwe is a democracy now.
How Franco’s regime turned out was not knowable at the time of the coup (Franco was not even in charge of the Nationalists at that point). However the murderousness of the Popular Front Government was there for all to see. The the leader of the opposition could be murdered in a police car then people may have been justified in feeling that nobody was safe. Not only had the Popular Front been put together by the Communists, not only was it a standard Comintern tactic, but even the main non-communist leaders and groups were blolodthirsty revolutionaries like Largo Caballero.
It is perfectly possible to take a detached view of these events, recognise than both sides had faults and try to understand why people acted as they did, without becoming wrapped up in the propaganda of either side. Of course Franco’s regime was bad by liberal democratic standards. What is masked by the overbearing propaganda narrative the Left insist upon about the Civil War is that fact that the republican regime was so bad and violent many people were prepared to acquiesce in or even contribute to its end. That ought to tell you something that cuts through all the propaganda.