I Cannot Read ‘The Spanish Holocaust’

It Is An Endlessly Depressing Trudge Through Church-Sanctioned Massacres

Look, I can take only so much misery porn these days. There was a time when I could wallow in it for a few hours at a time, but I have gotten older. I’ve grown tired of endless lists of tragedies I can do nothing about.

And Paul Preston’s ‘The Spanish Holocaust’ is a 500-plus pages of massacres. The prologue states upfront that the Republican, non-fascist side of the Spanish Civil War had atrocities and a couple of months where Anarchists groups went on a killing spree of clergy and executing rightist without trial. The Fascists end made a deliberate policy of terrorizing through rape, murder, disappearances, and public humiliation as part of their war on the left. They even made detours to make sure they could commit more genocide.

He then goes on to list every single one of the atrocities committed, with numbers and names.

It is horrifying, and the worst part is the take away.

The Role of The Catholic Church (and generally religion)

There were individual priests and nuns who insisted that wholesale bloodshed was bad. A priest who volunteered as chaplain for Franco’s army sent protests to Franco about the blatant use of terror. He was fobbed off and eventually shot in the back by his fellow Falangists who were tired of being told to not rape and murder.

For a bit, the church wanted to canonize him. The Franco regime claimed Communists had shot him, and he had spent a lot of energy in service. When the church discovered he wasn’t shot by Communists, they dropped the process.

He wasn’t bravely defending the church then, I guess. He was making feel bad the people defending family values by murdering heads of households, raping the wives and daughters that left behind, and then slaughtering the women they had gotten pregnant. The regime these brave defenders created had a secret police organization, fined Catalan priests for giving services in Catalan to Catalan folks, ‘disappeared’ folks by the score, ripped infants from their mothers or let the infants die painful deaths in hideously unsanitary jails, etc. Spain under Franco was a dictatorship, pure and simple.

The church not only volunteered in Franco’s army, they helped obscure the number of murders by lying on death certificates. They withheld services to leftists and preached that Franco’s murdering horde was protecting Spain from the ‘red menace.’

Because in the end, religion doesn’t make people purer and more ethical. It does give them an institution that attaches itself to governments so they can have more power. Some folks just want to uphold the institutional reach of their church, and murder is fine with them so long as that is the result. People may claim that joining forces with governments will make people better, but this is categorically untrue. It condones awful things, helps hide terrible crimes, and puts terrible people in power.

It always comes back to bite them too. The Anarchists and Communists had it in for the church so much because it had, for centuries, supported an oppressive feudal system. This is a constant with many, many religious groups.

It didn’t protect clergy members or give them much voice in the government either. Individual clergy members who went against anything the government doesn’t like got murdered or jailed exactly like leftists.

I don’t want to knock religion or people’s religious beliefs. But there is a historical trend with religious institutions backing terrible governments, and it is time they looked at the company they keep and remember that birds of a feather flock together, no matter what they think they are defending.

Moderation Is Doomed, Isn’t It?

The Republic was not even remotely all Anarchists and Communists. They just weren’t Carlists panting for the return of the Bourbon Monarchy or Falangists who took their points for Italy’s Fascists and Germany’s National Socialists. There was plenty of wiggle room, but Centrists spent all their time cleaning up after murderous extremists and paid for this by being treated as though they are the exact same as ravening beasts. Leftists squabbled, turned on each other, and everyone was left vulnerable.

I don’t want to pretend that the Republican side did not have problems. They POUM and the Anarchists were killing people, clergy in particular, and the government let the Communists take out the POUM.

They were at a disadvantage from the beginning, since big landowners were the ones up in arms against them. Nobody gets excited about improving what we have and being a policy wonk, the stuff that would stave off wars and revolution. Then the fringes go to war with all the money and excitement and commit all the atrocities. We’re all doomed.