‘Viva la muerte!’ | The Spectator
▻https://www.spectator.co.uk/2012/03/viva-la-muerte
The rebel leaders sanctioned and even incited such behaviour in their orders and radio broadcasts. So did priests, who led by example, one of them boasting of killing more than 100 leftists, the sort of score one normally associates with a top Mafia hitman at the end of his career.
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There were of course many frightful atrocities in those areas the rebels did not capture at the start of the uprising. Victims of the Republicans included several thousand monks and priests, large numbers of army officers and civil guards, and landowners, businessmen and members of right-wing parties. Yet as Preston observes, there are a number of moral differences between the repressive actions of the two sides. Many of the secular dead in the Republican zones were in fact rebels prevented from joining Franco only because the uprising had been defeated in their areas (principally Madrid, Catalonia, New Castile, Asturias and the Basque provinces). Most of them in any case were shot in reprisal for rebel atrocities or bombing raids that had killed dozens of civilians: the infamous massacres at Paracuellos were a consequence of the rebels’ advance to the outskirts of Madrid and General Mola’s boast that a ‘fifth column’ was waiting inside the capital ready to help overthrow the Republic.
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Franco’s death in 1975 prompted a remarkable reconciliation in Spain. A transition directed by the moderate right and accepted by a very restrained left resulted in a political system that neither ETA nor the army (part of which attempted a half-baked coup in 1981) could destabilise. Both sides of the Civil War had agreed tacitly to ‘draw a line’, to ignore the atrocities and in the interests of harmony to allow many prosperous murderers to remain at large.
This was a mature decision taken by an immature democracy. Now the situation is altogether different. Secure in their constitutional system, Spaniards want to find out what took place, what happened to that father or grandfather snatched away when they were infants and never seen again. Since historians should not be the servants of politics — even benign politics — Paul Preston was justified in embarking on a study that was obviously very painful for him to write. But those who love Spain should be warned before they read it.
The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain Paul Preston ISBN: 039306476X,9780393064766