Ghosts of the Spanish Civil War

Wednesday, 14th June 2006

Dan Hannan says that Zapatero’s divisive government is reviving memories of a conflict that most Spaniards would much rather forget

Few victims of the war died in battle. The front line was a ramshackle, Iberian affair, with ordnance being lobbed haphazardly back and forth. The inefficiency of the local soldiers was a matter of amusement to foreign volunteers on both sides. ‘This isn’t a Spanish war any more,’ a German liaison officer commented when the Soviet Union started backing the Republic. ‘It’s a real war.’ The true killing grounds were behind the lines, where execution squads drove through captured territory rounding up those who were suspected of having voted for the other side. No wonder their children wanted to forget the whole wretched episode.

One consequence of this amnesia was that, for a long time, the main histories of the period were in English. The Spanish-language version of Hugh Thomas’s magisterial chronicle, The Spanish Civil War, is regarded on the Peninsula as the authoritative text; likewise the translation of Paul Preston’s seminal biography of Franco. Over the past five years, however, a number of new Spanish histories have sold prodigiously. And one of the most successful of recent Spanish novels is Soldiers of Salamis by Alejandro’s cousin, Javier Cercas, whose theme is that the soldiers of the Republic were left unthanked and unacknowledged in order to secure a peaceful transition. Its popularity marked the end of the period of mutual reticence.

Zapatero has found a deep seam of grievance to mine. As Antony Beevor points out in a superb new edition of his book, The Spanish Civil War, this is one of the few conflicts whose history has been written by the losing side. Unless, of course, we place the fight in its European context. Nationalists and Republicans were conscious that theirs was the opening battle of a Continental war. One of the reasons that the Republic kept fighting when it was clear that it had lost was that its leaders hoped that their struggle would be subsumed into a wider conflict, in which the balance of power would be tilted. Which, in a sense, is what happened — albeit too late to save the Republic. And there is no doubt who won that European war: while the merest putative connection with the fascist regimes of Italy or Austria disqualifies a politician from office, communists are welcome as government ministers and European commissioners.

The alternatives in the Spanish Civil War were awful: authoritarian, anti-democratic and bloodthirsty. Most of us, I suspect, would have wanted to be somewhere in the middle, supporting personal liberty, the rule of law, property rights and free elections. But that option was closed. The few who tried to advocate it, like José María Aznar’s grandfather, found themselves condemned to death by both sides.

Spaniards had good reason to want to bury the whole foul business. If it is to be unearthed, it should be done in the manner of an archaeological dig: gently, reverentially, and with patient brushwork. To disinter a shroud and then brandish it as a political banner is disgusting.