From The Editor
WEIGHING THE 'FACTS'
by Paul Stenhouse, M.S.C., Ph.D
Last month, Annals carried an article by Anthony Richardson on the forgotten centenary of the birth of General Francisco Franco Balarmonde, leader of the Nationalists in the civil war that ravaged Spain from 1936-1939.
The remote and proximate causes of the bloodbath that followed the election victory by the Popular Front in February 1936 remain matters of controversy. The war in the streets was paralleled by a propaganda war fought in newspapers and on radio. Much of the reporting was a mixture of lies, half-truths and ideological propaganda.
Nazis, Fascists and Communists throughout the world vied with each other for the sympathy of the ignorant masses.
We in 1993, despite the alleged immediacy and other advantages of hi-tech TV, print and radio 'reporting' via Satellite, are in no position to condemn our parents and grandparents for not being better informed about events taking place in Spain.
The truth about more recent so-called 'civil wars' in Vietnam, Korea, Lebanon and the former state of Yugoslavia, to say nothing of the Gulf War, and what is happening in Armenia and Georgia as we write, continues to elude us. Data banks and current affairs programmes notwithstanding we remain largely uninformed about contemporary events, and notoriously vulnerable to manipulation by interested parties.
Disentangling the knots of lies from the fragile thread of truth that went into the fabric of what we call the Spanish Civil War is almost as difficult today as it was in 1936. During the four years that it raged more than one million people were to die, often in cruel and unspeakable ways.
Between 1931 and the commencement of the civil war, more than one thousand Catholic Churches had been destroyed; numerous convents, hospitals, colleges, priceless works of art and historical monuments were torched and levelled and their inhabitants murdered. This destruction and carnage was but a foretaste of the horrors that lay in wait for the hapless Spanish people between 1936 and 1939.
Catholics in Spain and throughout the world are still sifting through the ruins of dashed dreams and crushed lives, for a way of judging claims and counter claims of atrocities committed by avowed enemies of the Church, and by her alleged supporters. What is clear is that in this, as in all human affairs, the final judgement has got to be left to God.
Rupert Lockwood has written a number of popular pieces for Annals. A former Communist, he covered the Spanish Civil War battlefronts for the Melbourne Herald newspaper group. In broadcasts over Radio Madrid in 1937 he warned that if the Republic (backed by the USSR and France, and more than 60,000 members of International Brigades) were to be defeated by the Nationalists and their German and Italian allies. World War II would come sooner, and the democracies would be at a disadvantage militarily.
On the other hand, a Republican victory would have left Spain economically and militarily exhausted, politically torn apart, and vulnerable to both Nazi and Soviet domination.
Lockwood now sees that in the aftermath of a Republican victory Hitler's formidable panzer and air forces could have swept across the Pyranees from France, and his U-boats and troopships to Gibraltar, North Africa and Suez.
Or alternatively, as Richardson pointed out, the Mediterranean would have been a Soviet lake, with disastrous consequences for Britain and her allies during the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
The history of World War II could have been very different for Britain and Australia. The Spanish Civil War was more portentious for Australia than Australians realised.
Rupert Lockwood was the only Australian to report directly from Spanish fronts to the Australian press. Other Australians there were employed by the British press. His work took him to Civil War zones in Aragon, Catalonia, Barcelona, the southern fronts up to Valencia, Albacete, Guadalajara and Madrid.
Paul Stenhouse, M.S.C.
Coming: "Another View of the Spanish Civil War," by Rupert Lockwood
From: “ANNALS Australia” October 1993
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