Blood Madness

From Learning From The Spanish Civil War by Rod Dreher.

Over the past few days, I watched a 1983 British television documentary about the Spanish Civil War. It’s six hours long, but you can watch it all on YouTube, starting here. I think it was Uncle Chuckie who recommended it — and boy oh boy, was that ever a solid call. Last week I posted here that I knew almost nothing about the Spanish Civil War, but now I can’t say that. The passion, the pain, and the terrible tragedy of that three-year conflict (1936-39) came vividly alive in the series, which was impressively balanced. I expected it to be heavily tilted toward the Republican (leftist) side, but the UK producers allowed both left and right to tell their stories. One advantage the filmmakers had is that they made it in the early 1980s, when many of those who lived through and even fought in the conflict were still alive to offer their testimony.

What follows are some scattered impressions.

Maybe it’s an American thing, but it’s hard to look at a conflict like this without imposing a simple moralistic narrative on it, between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. Certainly the received history of the conflict frames it as an unambiguous fight between democracy and fascism — and the evil fascists won. The truth is far more complicated.

Indeed. Fascinated as I am by history and growing up in Europe where the Spanish Civil War always loomed in the background of recent tragedies, I have never really engaged with the history of the Spanish Civil War. I read a few books during college but it was clear to me then that there was no clean morality play. You could both sympathize with aspects of most of the protagonists as well as, in equal terms, despise them. There was some good, some evil, much foolishness and everyone seemed to seek points of division rather than any commonality, everyone sought to cleanse away all opponents. It was the West at its worst.

Even way back then, it felt like a tragedy founded on division and specious particularism of identity combined with a profound disrespect on all parties' part of human rights, universalism, age of enlightenment reason, etc. All solutions were to had through the barrel of a gun and by slaughter.

Those early readings made me feel like the Spanish Civil War was simply a reprise of the French Revolution some 150 years earlier, with superior technology of destruction and the greater moral certainty of Marxism in the mix. I also felt like I needed far more background on Spanish history to really understand what had been going on and that any lessons to be learned might be incredibly circumscribed.

In fact, the filmmakers make a point of saying that ideologues and others who project certain narratives onto the conflict do so by ignoring aspects of it that were particularly Spanish. That is to say, though the civil war did become a conflict between fascism and communism (and therefore a proxy war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union), that’s not the whole story. Its roots have a lot to do with the structure and history of Spain itself.

The first episode covers the years 1931-35, which covers the background to the war. In 1930, the military dictatorship was overthrown, and municipal elections across the country the next year led to a big win for combined parties of left and right who favored a democratic republic. (N.B., not all leftists and rightists wanted a republic!) After the vote, the king abdicated, and the Republic was declared. Later that spring, leftist mobs burned convents and churches in various cities, while Republican police stood by doing nothing. This sent a deep shock wave through Spanish Catholicism.

The Republic, in typical European fashion, was strongly anticlerical. It quickly passed laws stripping the Catholic Church of property and the right to educate young people. There were other anticlerical measures taken. Anti-Christian laws, and violent mob action, were present at the beginning of the Republic. Prior to watching this documentary, I assumed they happened as part of the civil war itself. Imagine what it was like to see a new constitutional order (the Republic) come into being, and suddenly you can’t give your children a religious education, and your churches and convents are being torched. How confident would you be in the new order?

According to the film, Spain was still in the 19th century, in terms of economics. It was largely agrarian, with a massive peasantry that was underfed, and tended to be religious and traditional. On the other hand, they were dependent on large landowners who favored the semi-feudal conditions. These landowners were extremely conservative. Their interests clashed, obviously, and became violent when the land reform promised by the liberal Republicans did not materialize fast enough for the peasantry. Mind you, the Republic was declared in the middle of the global Great Depression, with all the political and economic turmoil that came with it.

The urban working class was organized along Marxist lines, though the left was badly fractured, and unstable. There were democratic socialists, but also communists who hewed closely to the Stalinist line. Plus, anarchists were a really significant force in Spain, something unique in Europe at the time. They competed politically, and usually aligned with the left in fighting the right. But they refused to compromise their principles by taking formal power, even when the defense of the Republic required it.

Dreher goes on some extended history as well as speculations about parallels with modern times.

I am leery of those who see an incipient civil war, and end-times conflict based on polarization. My suspicion is that Americans are significantly more mature and settled than the Mandarin Class. The Mandarin Class feel existentially threatened by resurgent American norms of freedom and responsibility and competition and rule of law and consent of the governed, etc. The polarization is among the Mandarins, not among Americans.

Be that as it may, the Spanish Civil War remains an object lesson of tragic outcomes that should be avoided. But how and by what means remains as almost obscure as in the late 1930s when blood madness seems to have infected everyone.