This is Democracy – Episode 48: Spanish Civil War: History and Legacies

Jeremi Suri 0:02
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Zachary Suri 0:06
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Jeremi Suri 0:10
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Zachary Suri 0:23
Hello and welcome to this new episode of This is Democracy today and this is enchanting city of Barcelona. We are discussing George Orwell’s 1938 memoir, homage to Catalonia, and its account of the Spanish Civil War, in particular from the city. I’m Zachary Suri, I’m sitting here now with Professor Jeremy sorry. So Jeremy, you and I both recently read homage to Catalonia and it’s account of the Civil War here in Spain. Could you describe for our listeners a what the Spanish to the war was really about and the major events of the time?

Jeremi Suri 0:56
Yes. Thank you, Zachary George Orwell’s 1938. nonfiction account of his own participation in the Spanish Civil War is one of the most read works in the world today. It’s been read for more than 70 years since he published it. And what Orwell recounts in this work of nonfiction is the battle between fascist forces of General Franco in Spain, and a collection of what were called republican forces at the time, these republican forces included communists, socialists, anarchists, labor unionists, Liberal Democrats, and many others. Orwell was one of many, many figures, including Ernest Hemingway from United States, Gertrude Stein, and many others, many other figures who came to Spain to fight on the side of what they thought was a republican a left leaning a socialist alternative to the rising tide of fascism that they had witnessed in Germany and Italy and elsewhere. And the Spanish Civil War for Orwell was a great bitter missed opportunity. That’s what he described in the homage to Catalonia. The opportunity for these left forces to turn back fascism, as he says, at one point, a chance to win a victory after so many fascist victories. But yet the forces on the left that Orwell describes were unable to organize themselves, they were unable to attract enough international support, particularly from the United States. And they were sold out by the Soviet Union and other forces that did not want to see non communist groups come to power in Spain. In the end, as Orwell bitterly describes the forces of Franco that fascist forces were able to take control of Spain. And in taking control of Spain. They really made one more step toward toward what we all recognize as the beginning of World War Two the efforts by fascist forces to control all of Europe.

Zachary Suri 2:57
So Jeremy, could you describe for us, maybe the more detail how these events played out in particular here in Barcelona, and and how they were really important for the Civil War as a whole.

Jeremi Suri 3:08
Yes, Barcelona was one of many key battlefield sites during the Spanish Civil War. The city of Zaragosa about two hours by car today outside of Barcelona, another city that we visited on this trip was a site of actual trench warfare between fascist and non fascist forces. Barcelona as the the capital of Catalonia was one of the real centers of left wing labor socialist communist anarchist mobilization, it was a city really under the control of the left, it was the great hope in many ways of an anti fascist alternative. And Barcelona fell apart, as Orwell describes, fell into street fighting, largely because the left forces themselves started fighting with one another, for a time or wealth describes an homage to Catalonia, different forces on the left firing upon one another. And the collapse of the left wing forces in Barcelona allowed the fascist forces eventually to take control of what was one of the last strongholds of the anti fascist resistance in Spain?

Zachary Suri 4:18
Yes, and part of the problem of the left wing parties in Spain was that they were so many of them, there were so many factions. Reading homage to Catalonia is like an alphabet soup. There are so many abbreviations, it is impossible to follow which parties are which, and and so how did this sort of factionalism and regionalism that in many ways is embedded in the Spanish society? How is that? How does that play a role in the collapse? of the left?

Jeremi Suri 4:47
Great question. It’s one of the eternal challenges of democracy that Orwell wrote about not only an homage to Catalonia, but in so many of his other books and essays. Spain, as you said, so intelligently is that great is composed of regions, regions that not only have their own separate histories, their own separate languages, their own separate cultures, you know that you notice that just driving from Catalonia through Aragon, into the Basque Country. These are distinct historical areas, and a democratic party or a democratic movement seeks to draw on those differences seeks to bring those pluralistic forces together. But that’s always very difficult, a militaristic force. What Orwell describes in dystopian terms in 1984 is big brother, a militaristic totalitarian force doesn’t have those problems because it doesn’t seek to bring groups together consensually. It seeks to force them and intimidate them into unification. And so Franco’s forces in Spain for Orwell were first run at totalitarianism, they were forces that were not trying to draw on the different histories of the different regions, but instead to force the regions to all act together under some militaristic leadership, whereas the left forces that Orwell and Hemingway and others supported, they were composed of pluralistic groups with very many differences. And as a consequence, it was much harder for them to unify Orwell’s insight. And it’s an important insight for us to think about today is that democracy highlights differences, which is good from a moral point of view. But it makes political union and cooperation more difficult doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, but it makes it much more difficult. And the the forces and the collapse of the forces on the left in Orwell’s audit homage to Catalonia is Exhibit A of that difficulty.

Zachary Suri 6:42
So what role did the United States and what would become the Allies? The Allied front of World War Two, what role did they play in the Spanish Civil War?

Jeremi Suri 6:52
So one of the great insights from Orwell’s homage to Catalonia, us how many Americans and English citizens like world are involved with the Spanish Civil War, but how uninvolved the US government and the British government are the United States and Great Britain, as Orwell says, at the end of homage to Catalonia was sleeping, they were sleeping through this history, they were not involved. The Soviet Union was actively involved supporting communist forces and then actually collaborating with the fascist, but nine states in the Soviet Union were uninvolved, and homage to Catalonia also stands as one of the first nonfiction works criticizing American isolationism and anticipating that American isolationism in particular would contribute to worse warfare there after those after World War Two, who are critical of the United States for being uninvolved in Europe in the 1930s. Individuals like George Kennan, who’s the author of containment, john Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson major foreign policy figures, and as john F. Kennedy, who writes his undergraduate thesis on this topic, they see homage to Catalonia as an early warning of the problems of appeasement and non involvement in areas of the world that are undergoing violent revolution and civil war. Similar to what we see in places like Syria today.

Zachary Suri 8:11
When we talk about World War Two we often forget, it’s almost after chief of the Spanish Civil War. In many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the beginning of World War Two. Could you speak a little bit more to that and, and what role specifically the Spanish Civil War had in the onslaught of World War Two,

Jeremi Suri 8:32
but it’s a great question, we have to be careful about being teleological determinists. Many scholars would say that the Spanish Civil War was not necessarily a lead into World War Two. But the continuity is are important in two areas. There’s no doubt that the Spanish Civil War gave the fascist forces that were already in control of Germany and Italy in Europe and fascist forces operating outside of Europe, gave them more support, and more of a sense inevitability in their own victory. So it emboldened Hitler and Mussolini and others. And second, the Spanish Civil War up the level of violence that was normalized and politics, Franco’s forces, with the support of air and ground forces from Germany and Italy, conducted massive attacks on civilians. We will talk about this in our next episode on Grenada, where you have actual fascist Air Force’s bombing civilians, for one of the first times and the level of violence conducted in on behalf of fascist forces was more than had been seen in at least a while in Europe. World War One was, of course, a very violent conflict, but it was not a conflict largely fought against civilians. Spanish Civil War used massive modern violence against civilian populations. And unfortunately, and this is the point made by many military historians, Michael Howard and many others. The distinction between civilians and combatants broke down in the span of civil war, and it became more acceptable to use massive military force against civilians than it ever had been before. And this is the beginning somewhat argue of the aerial bombardment, the use of massive military, air force against population civilian populations in places like Dresden, Coventry and elsewhere during World War Two.

Unknown Speaker 10:30
So what what,

Zachary Suri 10:32
what was the influence of the Spanish Civil War and the violence and utter destruction that it wrought? What influence Did it have on the many artists and writers who were there at the time? And how did you really bring forth the future artistic and literary world of Europe?

Jeremi Suri 10:51
Well, this is a really important part of things. And it’s how the world has changed in the last 20 to 30 years, from 1938, really until the late 19, 70s, and 80s. And perhaps even until 2000, the Spanish Civil War was a central cultural moment in Western society immortalized in paintings by Picasso. literary works not just by George Orwell, but Ernest Hemingway, and many others, the poetry of TS Eliot, and many others, it was a central moment, a central cultural experience, because so many artists had become disillusioned in what they saw as traditional liberal values, not by the experience of World War One, they were too young for that. But by the experience with the Spanish Civil War, you can’t understand Ernest Hemingway’s somewhat jaded view of Western society without understanding the Spanish Civil War. So it was a central cultural moment and a cultural moment that was recreated in the teaching of literature as well as history. That’s changed in the last 20 to 30 years, there isn’t the same consciousness about the Spanish Civil War among the younger generation. And that’s interesting, there are lessons that shouldn’t be lost, as perhaps we become less obsessed with this moment. There’s also been an intentional silence. And one thing we’ve witnessed in our visit to Barcelona, is how little Spanish government museums that we have visited historical museums how little they talk about the Spanish Civil War. that’s largely because many Spanish citizens today don’t want to acknowledge their own collaboration with the fascist the fascist government that was in control of Spain, from the late 1930s until 1975, when Franco died, the history of post war Spain is a history of fascism, not a history of anti fascism.

Zachary Suri 12:35
So we often talk about this in This is Democracy about the fact that many countries that now are democracies have really had a struggle to find democracy. What was the struggle that Spain went through, after the Spanish Civil War after Franco came to power?

Jeremi Suri 12:53
Well, this is why studying this history is so important. You can look at Spain today and think it’s like Germany and how this post World War Two experienced at least in Western Germany of democratization that was not the case in Spain, Franco’s regime was not overthrown during World War Two and large part because the battles were not fought in Spain. And at the end of the war, the United States did not want to have to put the effort into unseating Franco. And we were concerned that if Franco were unseated, in fact, the Communist or socialist would take control. So Franco look to the United States like a soft fascist, a soft, authoritarian alternative to communism or civil war. And so Spain went through three and a half decades after world war two have continued authoritarian rule that was not totalitarian or oppressive. But it certainly involved limitations on freedom, limitations on freedom of the press, and the absence of basic constitutional democratic procedures is only after 1975 that Spain move toward democracy. It’s interesting to remember, therefore, that the United States was in a sense of participant in propping up a soft, fascist soft, authoritarian regime in Spain for at least 30 years after World War Two.

Zachary Suri 14:15
And also Franco perpetuated mass violence, the sort of killing that had not been seen before World War Two that later became the norm in in countries like Argentina and Brazil that went through their own military dictatorships.

Jeremi Suri 14:30
Yes, one could argue that Franco’s persistence after world war two and American support for Franco contributed to authoritarianism and other especially Spanish speaking countries in Latin America. Franco’s regime was less violent than Pinochet’s in the post war period in Chile and less violent than the Argentine dictatorship. After World War Two, but Franco’s regime was violent descent was repressed in Spain. And cathedrals, Islam was enforced in many ways a state religion, there were a lot of limitations on democracy. And there was what again, we would call a violent restriction on free press and free speech in Spain, they really existed until the 1970s.

Zachary Suri 15:18
So we really talked a lot about the political, the cultural and political legacies of the Spanish Civil War, and particularly from the point of view of George Orwell, and I think it’s a really important point to emphasize that Spanish Civil War, and the events of world war two had such a strong influence on the creation of the world order after World War Two, the Spanish Civil War helped create a situation where the United States felt that it needed to intervene more because of the mistakes that had made in the Spanish Civil War, in some ways, a point that was over emphasized during the Cold War.

Jeremi Suri 15:54
Yes, I think this is a really important point. For us to close on. What do you think about lessons, the lessons are not clear, it’s certainly reading Orwell becomes evident that the absence of American and English support for democratic forces in Spain contributed to the victory of the fascists, but the opposite interventionism would not necessarily have made things better. One of the real dilemmas. And one of the reasons to study the Spanish Civil War, is because civil wars are all too frequent in our system in our world today. And influencing civil wars, where you have multiple factions and multiple groups fighting, influencing civil wars from afar, in a way that supports democratic forces is something that United States must be involved in doing, but also something that’s very, very difficult. So this history should encourage idealism and humility, and encourage the younger generation to think more creatively, you read Orwell, and it’s clear that doing nothing and a place like Syria is morally reprehensible. But the history is of the period after world war two and interventions in places like Vietnam and Iraq by the United States also makes it quite clear that intervening with military force out of moral self righteousness is often counterproductive. So finding the right balance finding the right tools, that’s the central question for us. And it’s it’s an open space for young creative minds, I think, to make a contribution to American foreign policy.

Zachary Suri 17:25
And and what makes this pair of civil war so fascinating is that there are no clear answers. There is not in, in essence, any clear lesson that we need to learn. And that’s really what makes it so fascinating for people like George Orwell, is that you can learn you can take so many things from it, we can learn so much in many different directions from it. And that’s really what we’ve tried to explore today. And this is democracy. And that’s why this is democracy. This is This is Democracy, signing off from Barcelona.

Unknown Speaker 18:04
This podcast is produced by the liberal arts development studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at Harrison lemke.com.

Unknown Speaker 18:19
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