The History Thread!

In this pic, which is that of Nationalist troops during the Spanish Civil War, are the helmets in that pic supposed to be Stahlhelms?

They likely are a version of German made helms. The Germans gave material aid to them rather directly.

I see. Speaking of the Spanish Civil War, how come no written material from the Nationalist side in English? I mean, there's George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia, which is from the Republican side. Was there no one from the Irish Brigade who wrote about it?

Probably because of political correctness and No Campaign for the Wicked. Writers and historians from outside of Spain were always more interested in the republican side.

Also, silly note, but the wikipedia page for the Irish brigade mentions they had problems "coping with oily food and the unaccustomed profusion of cheap wine."

The Spanish Civil War is still highly contentious in Spain. A lot of the archives are still not open for researchers to study. Which is amazing since USSR archives are open after it fell in early 90s.

It was part of the compromise at the re-founding of Spain when King Juan Carlos ordered all political prisoners released. Everyone had to shut up about what happened.

But of course the war is also seriously misrepresented outside of Spain. And propagandist hacks like Orwell are a good reason as to why that happens. It's mostly about trendy tourists and foreign volunteers. So that's why something as minor as POUM and their utterly stupid revolution which was counterproductive and marginal gets attention mostly for Orwell's and other Trotskyist butthurt.

If you want a good source in English, read up Paul Preston. But it's pretty depressing reading

Didn't the Republican side get taken over by the Communists half-way through so it essentially became Communists versus Fascists by the end?

No, that's the propaganda Orwell spread to justify his butthurt (which okay he got shot so it's justified but hey that's the principle of the stopped clock...).

The Spanish Civil War was between Republicans and Nationalists. The Soviet Union was on the side of the Spanish Republicans and Stalin was explicit in that he didn't want this to be a revolutionary thing. He merely wanted to help the Spanish government not out of the goodness of his non-existent heart but out of pragmatism....fascism had spread from Italy to Germany and he knew that eventually it would fall on the USSR to smack them down, so he wanted to contain it and he hoped that halting them in Spain might make Hitler and others back down a little.

The Republicans included communists but liberals and other factions and it was a Popular Front initiative against Franco's forces. But the problem was that USSR alone couldn't help and project its authority so far away from Spain and Stalin wanted UK, America and France to intervene. That was the main reason he clamped down on the mythologized anarcho-communist revolution that Orwell fanboyed over. That was a thoroughly impractical short-sighted and unpopular event, totally at odds with the war aims and even Leon Trotsky sniped at self-calling Trotskyists. So eventually the local Commies on the grounds purged them and crushed it. But that was a minor incident in the overall war but in the Anglophone world thanks to Orwell's celebrity, and the grudges and sentiment of leftist tourism among critics of that set who can't bother learning obscure Spanish names, they think that it collapsed because of inter-left squabbles.

Ultimately the Spanish Civil War led to Republican defeat because 1) Some crucial military leaders made by the leaders, and 2) UK and Other Nations refused to intervene because they saw the Republican side backed by Stalin who was going out of his way to insist this was a popular front intervention. In the end, Stalin threw the towel and cut his losses by hijacking the gold bullion of the Spanish Republic which was sent to Moscow by the Republicans before Franco arrived.

The Spanish Civil War is just a bleak depressing read. Read Paul Preston's Spanish Holocaust (which I disagree with the use of the word but fits in). I mean when I read about how Franco's forces would gang-rape Republican women and force communist women into prostitution to Stay Into The Kitchen because they chose to assert themselves...I kind of had to stop reading. Most of this stuff was forgotten when Franco died and there's little sense of restitution for all those victims. And one way to close debate on all that is to bring up the inter-left squabbles and blame the Republicans for their defeat, which needless to say doesn't bring attention to the real people hurt on the ground.

Seriously, what the hell's up with you and your personal vendetta against George Orwell?

Labeling someone a "propagandist hack" really sets alarms about how many pages you've edited and how many of them I've read and potentially have been influenced by.

What kind of colorful moniker do you give Ernest Hemingway?

edited 19th Dec '16 10:32:53 PM by FluffyMcChicken

First of all, it's Ernest Hemingway, and second, calm down. I'm sure you'll get a response soon.

Getting back on-topic, something that irks me about Spain before and when the 20th Century roled over: What was with the reception of the Catholic Church within Spain during that time period? I mean, prior to the Spanish American War, the Spanish government clamped down on Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo given that the two books had the Church not treated fairly, yet after Spain lost that aforementioned war, a fair number of people didn't like the fact the Church owned swaths of land.

I was criticizing how Orwell's reputation has misled a lot of people from understanding the Spanish Civil War. I think that qualifies as relevant to slag him.

If I must be honest with you, I used to respect and admire Orwell. My dislike for him comes from Broken Pedestal and Fan Disillusionment more or less. I thought Nineteen Eighty-Four was the most truthful and eloquent book ever and much in the way Ayn Rand is attractive for right-wingers, I used Orwell to increase my piety and schoolmarmish dislike for "both sides" and so on. Then gradually I started reading other stuff and my liking for Orwell kind of diminished and I saw that the guy was too judgmental and narrow-minded. Then I started reading up about him and I found out that Orwell was kind of a liar and propagandist of the very kind he hated. I mean he lied about going to a Boarding School of Horrors (since he was a prefect who ratted out suspected homosexuals...I think the real horror was himself). Then there's that famous essay about the Escaped Animal Rampage and elephant he shot to protect a town...in actual fact Orwell shot that elephant in captivity and peace, gratuitously. Either he did it by accident or incompetence, or on purpose, and he got Reassigned to Antarctica and then he fictionalized that to make himself a hero. And then there's the list he made for the British Government about people he suspected of being communists, the private diaries he kept more or less to vent out his anti-semitism. And the result is a guy who was falsely built into a great thinker and moral voice, positions he really did nothing to earn and which his own actions contradict.

It would upset me less if Orwell wasn't taken so seriously but unfortunately he is. Many people read Nineteen Eighty Four and they think is how totalitarian governments function. Mostly because Orwell's flat prose makes the book short and around 200 pages depending on the edition. It's not accurate as a satire on the USSR since we now have the archives that reveal that this was actually not a modern society of organized surveillance and cameras in every room but more or less Tsarist Russia under Hammer and Sickle with the same reliance on clans/patrons/clients and rumors and suspicions. Stalin's Cult of Personality was different from Hitler in that it was something that had traditional roots in the Russian Empire with how the Tsar and saints were venerated. I mean they didn't even have telephone lines in the Eastern part until World War II began. We know that Stalin's purge actually had huge popular support, and that many of the people who got shot were Corrupt Politician who the people denounced in letters to the party and so on. I mean there was no torture or Ministry of Love needed and the proles that 1984 glorifies are the ones who did it. I mean if 1984 were a little accurate, the last scene of the book would show Big Brother murder O'Brien and the rest of the ministry, stop all the surveillance, free Winston with a shrug, leave Julia in The Gulag (where she would be released eventually if she can survive World War II ration deprivations), give an awkward apology and that's it. That's how Stalin rolled.

I actually have a pet peeve towards writers and intellectuals who mislead our understanding of the past and history. Orwell is not alone. You also have Edmund Burke. A liberal who advocated reform in Ireland, supported the American Revolution and criticized the East India Company but his most influential pamphlet is Reflections on a Revolution in France, the founding document of modern conservatism and which is almost laughably misreading the real events in France, all for the sake of a partisan grudge Burke had. And yet that one pamphlet actually inspired many English accounts and you still see it in pop. history books on the French revolution. I see Orwell as more or less Edmund Burke's disciple, even if Orwell would have hated that. Both of them were liberals who became celebrated for turning on their own, and both of them were nasty anti-semites.

Paul Preston covers that in his book. The Catholic Church were heavy supporters of Franco, hand-in-glove with them.

The Church was vociferously anti-Republican and anti-Communist and had been so for ages. They were strongly monarchical. And the Republicans wanted to redistribute Church land. I mean that has been the counter-revolutionary policy of the Church since 1789.

There were some priests who supported the Republicans but most opposed them actively.

But was that scene from Ken Loach's Land and Freedom, where Juan Vidal's POUM unit executed that priest all because the priest ratted out some Republican sympathizers to the occupying Nationalist troops, accurate?

I haven't seen that Loach film, but from what you describe...i.e some priests ratted out Republicans to the Nationalists, and some priests were executed...yeah, that more or less did happen. Ken Loach's film is more or less under the Orwell school as per Paul Preston's review of it, in that it makes the Spanish Civil War about inter-left squabbles and blames Stalin for purging POUM while glorifying and whitewashing the latter.

Anti-clerical violence is a big part of revolution and there were massacres and executions of priests and nuns, some of them were Franco collaborators and partisans but there were also a few who were really innocent, but that kind of stuff happens in that Civil War.

Literally thousands of priests were murdered during the war, and many churches burnt. Militias like the POUM and far left groups were guilty in many cases, since most of the members of the church supported the nationalists, but there were also priests of leftist ideology that were killed by the nationalist side.

As much as I could agree with your point, I think you're being a bit lenient in regards to the anti-clerical/anti-religious Republican folks.

You can't just use a highly charged narrative (true and historically verified narrative, sure, but still...) regarding gang rape by the nationalist side, and then shrug off the 'oh, but killing priests and nuns is merely a product of the civil war'. Especially when gang rape doesn't make the nationalist side any more evil than thousands of other kingdoms and civilizations that have also used rape as a war and soldier morale tactic (I do wonder if some of the Republicans have also engaged in the same type of behaviour - there probably were folks who raped nuns, judging by the history of civil wars and conflicts in the Iberian peninsula).

Of course, you could, in your defense, use Mark Twain's thoughts on the French Revolution to apply to the Spanish Civil War, but let's not pretend the Republicans were saints either (or a light grey side, for that matter). In a civil war, you get either a Grey-and-Gray Morality type of conflict or, at best (and even then it's a risky judgement, since it could suffer from presentism and ideological slants), a Black-and-Grey Morality type.

So, it's probably best to shrug at both sides when analyzing the conflict and give no particular preference to these sides that we're talking about. Just my 2 cents, don't take it the hard way.

edited 20th Dec '16 6:05:43 AM by Quag15

What did Mark Twain say about the French Revolution?

It was about the Reign of Terror (some of the victims included priests and nuns, after all) and its comparison with the Ancien Régime (as well as the whole history of the kingdom of France). Although his intentions were more for the Revolution, nowadays the quote can be read as a sort of comparison between the two reigns (at least that is my interpretation, for what it's worth). It's from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:

edited 20th Dec '16 7:50:22 AM by Quag15

I think Francis Fanon said something similar about colonial revolts like the war in Algeria or Vietnam. I tend to be suspicious of anything that lets ones side off for any violence. Also, at least in Vietnam, the revolutionaries killed far more of their own people, including civilians and peasants, than they did French and Americans. I assume a similar situation held true in Algeria.

In most cases the anti-clerical violence wasn't ordered or co-ordinated from top. It happened spontaneously and in reaction, leading to Disproportionate Retribution. The fact is the atrocities of the Republican side are a drop in the water compared to what Franco did.

Franco's groups used rape as a deliberate war tactic, they did that to humiliate women far better than them. It wasn't rape in the heat of battle or in response to siege. It was more or less a terrorist tactic.

Yes I can because the former is far worse than the latter, as any true Christian would, and should, admit. And ultimately, there's also the long view. Christianity and Catholic Christianity is on the wane, in Europe and in Spain also. So that meant that the choice made the priests in supporting Franco's evil was ultimately pointless.

And you know about this anti-clerical violence inflicted on the Church...we know thanks to the child abuse scandals that the Church has this system of moving around priests who get hands-y. And Pope John Paul II once said that the USSR used pedophilia accussations to persecute the Catholic Church in Poland...easy to dismiss as propaganda then but not so easy now. It's likely that a lot of this anti-clerical violence inflicted on the Church came because of revenge and hatred for abuse on crimes like that which thanks to the society at the time couldn't be admitted to by either victim or perpetrator. It's more than likely that the pedophilia goes back centuries.

One of those sides was fascists. Franco asked the Nazis and Fascists to bomb his own people. That he got away with it and succeeded it doesn't change that vital and crucial fact and its depressing that today's Germany has abjured its past by stripping away medals and honors from those pilots who bombed Guernica but people in Spain don't want to face up to Franco.

I will not pretend that both sides are equivalent. Because 1) That's not historically true, 2) It's Golden Mean Fallacy. It's true that Franco did win and he oversaw the Franco era in Spain which means that his regime has to be studied dispassionately since it was an actual era, but that doesn't change the conflict of the Civil War one jot.

You are confusing two things. Jean-Paul Sartre's introduction to Fanon's book and the book iself.

That's not what he said at all. Frantz Fanon was a psychologist after all and his research focused a lot on the impact of colonialism and racism. And one of the things he discussed was the role violence played in this conflict. He was discussing what happened when the oppressed retaliate and attack their oppressors. He was doing that dispassionately.

Now Sartre, being a Frenchman who despised his countrymen for their colonialist past and their support of Vichy France, was writing that introduction for a Western audience and he was being far more provocative and polemical. So he said stuff that Frenchmen deserve to be killed in these revolts. But Sartre's view is not Fanon's

Yes assume that situation and don't bother doing any research whatsoever and study facts on the ground, that's the historical way. Fact of the matter is that, most revolts and rebellions involve violence of some sort. And it can be led by the best men but you will still have violence. During The American Civil War, Union men would rape slaved women they liberated from plantations...that doesn't mean that what they did is in anyway equal to the Confederacy's numerous crimes like murdering African-American union soldiers, or selling them (even the ones who were never slaves) into slavery.

edited 20th Dec '16 8:20:21 AM by JulianLapostat

That is true, in hindsight, yes.

There are far more noteworthy reasons than pedophilia (which was something that quite simply wasn't talked about, except perhaps in hushed tones) for the anti-clerical violence, though. Not to say that didn't also caused a problem (the psychological damage is still huge, and it's obvious that the Church's reputation will never recover, even if the pedophile priests were all defrocked and castrated, and all priests voluntarily flailed and tortured themselves for the general public ^note the public would not be satisfied, of course in a sort of collective repenting), but the political, social and economic privileges it had were far more noticeable and important reasons.

Oddly enough, I have the opposite view. That one can dispassionately study the Civil War (at least, as long as one is not Spanish), but that it's a lot more difficult to do so (if not outright impossible) to study the whole regime post-Civil War (since its late period is still fairly recent, historical and legacy-wise). And that, when the ideology becomes part of the major political power (internally or externally), it should be thoroughly criticized (regardless of which side it sits on the political spectrum), especially in regards to its political application.

Also, I don't think I'm engaging in that kind of fallacy, considering that fallacy often says or implies that both sides have good bits in their ideas. I was talking about actions and their consequences, not the ideas or ideologies that fed them. Until Franco gained a clear foothold in the Civil War and his win became evident, the conflict was more blurry. That's the phase I'm talking about (though, admittedly, it's hard to extricate the Nazi and WW 2 connections from it, and their ideologies).

You don't have to pretend. What I suggested was to not let presentism and ideological slants get in the way of historical analysis of said sides (which I'm sure you can do, considering your criticism of Orwell).

edited 20th Dec '16 9:27:41 AM by Quag15

I actually concur with that. When I say study dispassionately, I mean that you have to criticize the regime and everything it does, the same way that Stalin's regime should be criticized but you also have to take care not to let your biases and hatred for the guy interfere. I prefer Trotsky as an individual to Stalin, but I have to accept that the former was not politically up to the task and the latter was not without qualities, or at least qualities his colleagues favored and recognized.

In the case of Franco he was horrible but most of that violence was the Civil War years and he did keep Spain out of WWII and let runaway Jews hide out in Spain (and Salazar did the same in Portugal). Even Luis Buñuel anti-Franco Marxist (who served as a diplomat for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War) admitted that Franco did help Spain's economy, and that guy lost his friends and family to the Civil War...

Spain still has issues, like a judge who tried to prosecute war crime charges ended up in the docket instead.

I guess it's like the Lost Cause of the Confederacy for them, only difference is that the Confederacy won in Spain while the South lost in the US.

Your right, I did get them mixed up. My apologies. And it's not about the violence, but the fact that the violence was deliberately directed at the civilian population they aimed to aid by the commanders. I never said French Colonial rule was just, it was not. Nor do I think we should engage in Grey and Grey morality in the case of all civl wars, in Spain one side were literal fascists, and the Confederacy wanted to keep slavery. I'm just skeptical of a philosophy that excuses such acts so cavalierly. Violence may be necessary, but I don't think it should just be written off by people like Sarte, or Bush's whole "collateral damage spiel."

edited 20th Dec '16 9:40:03 AM by JackOLantern1337

Well Sartre wasn't doing that precisely in that introduction. His point was nuanced and subtle. It's also harder to appreciate today precisely because of our presentism.

You see in The '50s through The '70s, terrorism was seen as a legitimate political protest. I am not making this up, people actually did see things that way and that included a consensus on the political spectrum, who agreed that violence in the sake of anti-colonialism was, if not justified, then legitimate if no other options were available. At the time terrorism wasn't religious, it was political and there wasn't suicide bombings yet (That came in Sri Lanka). When planes got hijacked or they staged their actions, terrorists were negotiated with and so on. Terrorism was even seen romantically like in West Germany you had the Red Army Fraktion, a bunch of Western Terrorists who assassinated and targeted ex-Nazis and who were seen very sympathetically in that time. And their deaths is still supremely controversial today since it's very likely they were quietly whacked in prison but it was made to look like some suicide.

In the case of the Algerian War, you had the French who refused FDR's advise to begin decolonization and screwed over Indo China and Algeria. A protest for Algerian independence was massacred on the same day De Gaulle liberated France, and it was a case that some of the resistance heroes went to Algeria and tortured Algerians in a manner similar to how they were tortured by Nazis. After France lost to Vietnam at Dien Ben Phu, they actually increased the repression in Algeria and that made things violent. So it was in that context, that Sartre was explaining the use of violence. The fact that Algerian rebels committed terrorist actions. One famous incident was Djamilla Bouhired. She was a terrorist and yet around the world everyone from Nehru to others backed her release on grounds of French repression.

Sartre's attitude at the time was more or less, you cry over these French victims killed by these Algerians but don't give a damn about the numberless people killed by the French (which is the Mark Twain Reign of Terror defense). And Sartre more or less said that French People created their villains. His attitude was Christopher Marlowe:

Barabas: Why, I esteem the injury far less,\ To take the lives of miserable men\ Than be the causers of their misery.\\ You have my wealth, the labour of my life,\ The comfort of mine age, my children's hope;\ And therefore ne'er distinguish of the wrong.

Now of course today that attitude is different because we see terrorism as a great evil...and nothing the Algerians or FLN did compared to the deviousness that was 9/11. At that time the threat was political and directed against former colonies and specific abuses, today terrorism is mass media and international, and geographically capable of projecting itself outward across the world, from Indonesia to New York. I have no idea if Sartre would take that view today.

Lol, it's weird, I'm Spanish and I know very little about the war, while you guys can discuss this topic for an entire day.

Anyway, for a slight change of topic... do you know of any decent Spanish civil war videogames? I'm currently playing a mod for Call of Duty 2 that is kinda alright, but I never found any more games about it. I remember playing some years ago a terrible RTS but that's about it.

edited 20th Dec '16 12:36:47 PM by pepimanoli