Spain

Britain and the Spanish Civil War

Introduction

In understanding how the Spanish Civil War impinged on British attitudes to the threats to their peace and stability, it is useful to consider some parallels in the immediate historical background from the early 1930s, when, according to Paul Preston, civil war in Spain had already been declared[1]. Firstly, as we have seen, a degree of class warfare existed in Britain, with denigration of the working class, the poor and those dependent on the state. This hostility was even more extreme in Spanish society, where landowners and other employers used organs of the state to repress workers, and ‘rebel leaders regarded the proletariat … as an inferior race’. During the right-wing repression of democratic rights 1934-36 miners in Asturias were described as ‘putrefaction, scum, the dregs of humanity’. Secondly, in both societies left-wing political groups were well developed in defence of workers’ rights, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist in rhetoric. Again, in Spain these had become more extreme and uncompromising in the form of anarchist and Trotskyist revolutionary and internationalist organisations. Thirdly, while British fascists called for cleansing and purification, Spanish Falangists called for extermination, especially of leftists and liberals, who were regarded as non-Spanish and barely human. From its inception, the Right was intent on eradicating the Republic: ‘[the Right] hated the Republic for being democratic long before it was able to denounce it for being anti-clerical’.[2] …

[1] Anthony Beevor in The Battle for Spain, 2006 suggests: ‘Any possibility of compromise had been destroyed by the revolutionary uprising of the left and its cruel repression by the army and Civil Guard. The depth of feeling was too strong on either side to allow democracy to work’. p. 38.

[2] Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, (London: Harper Press, 2012), pp. xii, 90, 9, 14.
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