In 1936, as Spain’s brutal civil war was raging, Republican-leftist forces were besieging Toledo’s fortress, the Alcazar. They took hostage the 16-year old son Luis of the citadel’s commander, Col. Moscardo.
`Surrender the Alcazar or we will shoot him,’ threatened the leftists. Moscardo replied, ‘put him on the phone.’ When his terrified son came on, Col. Moscardo told him, ‘son, stand to attention, cry out Viva Espana, and die like a man.’
Spain’s Valley of the Fallen is a grim spooky place. A gigantic mausoleum carved into a rocky hill outside Madrid, the monument houses the remains of tens of thousands killed in Spain’s brutal civil war, 1936-1939.
I visited this vast necropolis soon after it was opened as a national war monument. In 1975, General Francisco Franco, Spain’s post-war strongman, died and was entombed on this windswept plateau. After Spain’s cruel civil war, the Francoist fascist regime in Madrid gave way to a constitutional monarchy that had been planned by Gen. Franco.
Under the guidance of King Juan Carlos, Spain became a thriving democracy and economic success. It went from being Europe’s most reactionary society to one of its most liberal. The restrictive influences of both the Catholic Church and militant left were swept away. Spain became Europe’s party central and a truly free nation.
But ever since 1975, Spain’s left has been agitating to remove Franco’s body from the Valley of the Fallen. This year, Spain’s Socialist government finally gave the order to exhume Franco’s remains and have them re-buried in a Madrid cemetery next to Madame Franco.
Spain’s left is cock-a-hoop over this revenge on their nemesis. But many thoughtful Spaniards are concerned that the exhumation of Franco will open poorly-healed wounds from the long ago civil war, and cries for revenge. This is now happening.
We are also greeted by a rush of Franco-demonizing speeches and articles in Spain and in the world’s liberal-left media who have never forgiven the general for winning the civil war and crushing the Marxist regime in Madrid. Those who supported Franco are newly demonized while his opponents are again lauded as democrats and patriots.
An entire generation of idealistic western writers, notably Orwell and Hemingway, contributed to whitewashing Spain’s ‘republicans’ as noble warriors against fascism and dictatorship. The Spanish civil war became the holy grail of the liberal left, and so it remains today.
Forgotten or ignored was the vicious struggle in Spain between Stalin’s minions and those of Hitler and Mussolini. The so-called Spanish republicans were largely directed and armed by the Soviet Union which had just killed at least 30 million people.
In Spain, Stalin’s secret police murdered large numbers of ‘unreliable’ socialists, unmanageable Communists, and renegade Trotskyites. Spain’s Catholic clergy became a particular target of murder and torture by Spain’s Communists. This was the reason that the Vatican quietly favored Nazi Germany in the early 1940’s.
Today, Franco’s exhumation has become Spain’s political football. Everyone in this nation of passionate people seems to be arguing about Franco while they are facing the menacing problems of secession in Catalonia and a struggling economy. All the old arguments and debates over the Francoist era have little to do with today. But the Spanish Socialists cannot resist making hay out of old General Franco.
Unfortunately, much of the western liberal media will continue to perpetuate the myth of wicked Franco versus the saintly republicans. Few will ever tell us that Franco kept Spain out of World War II and paved the way to its vibrant democracy. Ironically, Spain’s noisy Socialists would not be in power today were it not for Franco.
Exhuming Franco’s body and rekindling all the Civil War bitterness and hatred was a very big mistake. The majority of Spaniards today were not even alive during the civil war. The conflict should have been consigned to the history books. As Americans are finding, demonizing statues of civil war generals only opens new, pointless arguments.
Source: the author’s blog
“When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,”
In this piece, we learn nothing new about the history of Spain from 1936 to 1939. Margoli’s article is not but a piece of revisionist format of Spain’s civil war(1936-1939) and of course anti-communist and anti-marxist propaganda fed permanently, 24 Hours per day, by subservient and controlled mass media by big corporation whose main purpose is to root in the cortex of the masses the masses in the United States and in Europe, Pavlovian’s reflex identifying instantly and mechanically Communism=Soviet Union= Stalin=Goulag=millions of dead. Unfortunately Margoli fails in this ideological and political trap and he didn’t escape anticommunist and Soviet propaganda
In order to re establish historical truth, we can say without being contradicted, that while Stalin and the Soviet Union, in the name of internationalism and mutual cooperation among oppressing peoples by western imperialism and colonialism in Europe, in Asia and Africa, were helping democratically elected government in Spain seeking the redistribution of the land monopolized by wealthy latifundia, among impoverish and exploited Spanish peasants, Hitler, Mussolini, British and Blum’s socialist government were providing arms, fighters, ammunition and troupes Fascist Franco who came from Morocco as a savior not only to save the Spanish bourgeoisie but also European ruling class as a whole which were threading by the mounting and sweeping uprising of the working class in Europe.
By helping oppressing peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Stalin and the Soviet Union had changed the face the world during the 20th century.
Franco did send a division, the Spanish Blue Division, to fight on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union.
It is difficult to reconcile this laudatory article about good ol Franco with the atrocities of the German Condor Division, e.g. Guernica.
And I am not a leftist but this article really belongs in the trash dump for its many, many factual errors.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/26/the-eu-is-rewriting-wwii-history-to-demonize-russia/
This article is a pure bullshit.