Giles Tremlett
Subject: The 90th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War
Bio: Historian and author of several books on the Spanish Civil War including El Generalisimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s topic is the 90th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.
Our speaker is Giles Tremlett who is the author of several books on the Spanish civil war and his most recent work is entitled El Generalisimo: A Biography of Francisco Franco.
I want to hear from Giles about what triggered the civil war, why did it become a proxy war between Hitler and Stalin, and what happened to Spain after Franco’s nationalists won the conflict.
Giles, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Giles Tremlett:
90 years have gone by since the Spanish Civil War. That war absorbed everybody across Europe and Russia. It’s an attempted coup by the conservative reactionary faction in the Spanish military. They think it’s going to be short in the classic version of a coup d’etat, you capture the interior ministry and the radio station and a few other significant places in the capital and with that, you’ve grabbed power. Well, in this case, it didn’t work. The uprising failed in Madrid and in Barcelona. It only worked in a few places which were provincial.
Spain had only thrown out its royal family in 1931. So, this republic was five years old. It started off with a left-wing phase then a right-wing phase. There had been elections in 1936 that changed the government back to a left-wing government. This war’s going to go on for three years until 1939 which is the start of the Second World War. I would say that the Spanish Civil War is the start of the Second World War because it is a civil war between Spaniards but it’s also an international war. Hitler and Mussolini will send troops, aircraft, pilots, and munitions to back the insurrectionary side. Stalin will send tanks, arms, pilots, and advisors supporting the Republican government.
There’s also a volunteer transnational army, the international brigades who fight for the Republic from all over the world. This war is defined in negative terms as anti-communists, that’s the insurrectionist side, and as anti-fascists that’s the Republican side.
Larry Bernstein:
Can you give us some historical context of what is happening in Spain beginning with the rise and fall of its empire?
Giles Tremlett:
The Spanish Civil War is in an era of imperial decline. Spain founded the first great global empire in 1492 when Columbus sailed across the Atlantic. For centuries it had the world’s greatest empire. I’m speaking as an Englishman, so I know what this feels like: God’s chosen, to teach the rest of the world how to organize itself and possibly rake off goodies at the same time, and suddenly wham, it’s all gone.
Spain during the 19th century lost its Latin American colonies and in 1898 the Spanish American War Cuba and the Philippines both lost. The American Navy completely trashes the Spanish, manages to sink both fleets in a morning reportedly with a break for tea in one battle.
Spain realizes its great past is gone, and that plays out violently over three civil wars in the 19th century between the Catholics and traditionalists and the liberals. Liberals are the people who want to bring change. The Spanish Civil War is the final battle of a foundational idea of Spain as a place run by Spaniards on the basis of Spanish tradition and ideas, or whether it should be open to the world and absorb modern ideas.
The rise of the great ideologies of the 20th century with fascism and communism setting up the great confrontation that will come in the Second World War all get mixed together in poor old Spain. That’s going to be three years of war with half a million people dying in battle another half a million dying outside the battle. It was a vicious war behind the lines. Afterwards it will get a 40-year military dictatorship led by Francisco Franco because his insurrectionists win, and Spain will not taste democracy again until after his death in 1975.
Larry Bernstein:
What triggered the Civil War?
Giles Tremlett:
You get a change of government, a left-wing government comes in and immediately pardons the people who had had a revolutionary strike against the previous government in October 1935 where the left was convinced that the right wing government was fascist, it wasn’t. Francisco Franco, the top general, was called upon to put down the revolutionary strike.
There is this anticlericalism, people are going out and occasionally burn down a church. In a deeply, traditionally Roman Catholic country like Spain that created an opposition to the government, which was much wider than the small fascist party or the military right wingers. Social support was created by the conditions in the months running up to the beginning of the war.
Larry Bernstein:
Talk about the anti-clerical nature of the left-wing regime. Churches were burned down, priests and nuns were killed. There was a law passed to close the Catholic schools. In a deeply traditional Catholic country, this was viewed as an anathema to the more conservative elements. And then there was a very anti-property approach, businesses with more than 50 workers were nationalized. Larger farms were taken over by the communes, and that this was communist in nature. How do you feel about the nature of the anti-Catholic and anti-capitalistic policies instigating this civil war?
Giles Tremlett:
I think the anti-Catholic policies have a much wider impact. Spain was a very traditional and rural country. The traditions of small towns and villages revolved around the church calendar, the yearly events, the Easter week, and the various saint celebrations are part of the tapestry of life. So, to try and tear that out is a violent act.
I think that is more important than the question of property, which particularly was to do with land reform. Spain had a very inefficient system of Latifundia, which meant huge properties that were farmed inefficiently that were dominated by landowners but populated by landless peasants, who were the workforce.
Larry Bernstein:
In the book, you say that to many in Europe, Africa started at the Pyrenees. You mentioned previously that Spain had this ideal of being a leader of the West in its grander days of empire, but it was not an industrial country. It was a rural country with a relatively high birth rate, and the only thing it seemed to export were people that moved to places like Argentina and Latin America. How should we think about the fact that it was an afterthought of Europe and a poor country and how does that impact this civil war?
Giles Tremlett:
Part of this crisis that occurs because of this fall from glory is that Spain begins to compare itself to other countries, to France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Belgium. The big measuring stick of the time is, “Is my empire bigger than yours?” And to Spaniards everyone else had an empire but Spain no longer had any empire at all. It was already a lesser nation than Portugal, its neighbor which was poorer but had land in Africa, India and elsewhere.
One of the terrible situations for Spain in the Civil War is that it’s this slightly irrelevant country where others can come and play at war. And that explains partly why Hitler will send troops and arms. He’s testing out his new airplanes. He has only just got his arms industry going. Spain is a practice ground for him. It is also a place where Mussolini and Stalin can come and play.
Larry Bernstein:
I had a podcast last week on the collapse of Venezuela with Francisco Rodriguez. He mentioned was that one of the reasons that Venezuela is a catastrophe is that both political parties there played scorched earth politics, that they lost their trust in the Democratic process, that winners of elections could win and rule, and that there would be no room for an opposition. They changed their constitution in the late 1990s so that the executive could pack the Supreme Court and replace heads of institutions, including members of Congress. And as a result, it became an executive autocrat after an election with little chance of removal.
I wonder if that was also something that happens here in Spain in the mid 1930s, is that although it had just begun a democratic experiment in 1931, which is not long, but there was a sense that the current government would not be a separation of powers or requirements of bipartisan support for certain actions. And this triggered the initial coup, particularly the attacks against the church, which set off reactionary forces.
In the book, you highlight that the coup leaders did not have an ideological bent. It was just to return to traditional nationalism. Take us through scorched earth politics as being a potential cause for the unrest.
Giles Tremlett:
Way back in the early 19th century, Spanish intellectuals and poets were writing about called the two Spains. There is a great famous poem which starts off, “Little Spaniard who comes into this world, may the Lord look after you, one of the two Spains will freeze your heart.” It’s this idea of a Spain that’s already divided between traditionalists and liberals and that divide already exists. There’s also a dictatorship in the 1920s, short lived. So that element is already present when Spain does this experimental leap. It goes from a monarchy supported by a dictatorship to democracy in the Republic.
Spain had had some electoral system in the 19th and early 20th century. All elections were corrupt, two parties decided that they would take turns to rule, and they would make sure that every two or three years, elections brought the other party in. So, there had not been a tradition of democracy in Spain. We have the two Spains, bitterly divided, suddenly trying to find a way to work in a democracy.
One of the problems precisely is that when the different parties came into power, they had an all or nothing version of power. The pendulum would swing wildly from one side to the other when it might just be that the percentage of votes that it had changed was 5%, which is enough to swing the government from one side to another, and then each side would do fairly radical reforms, which then would antagonize the others. And these two sides simply crystallize into something hard and violent in 1936.
Larry Bernstein:
When the Spanish Civil War is discussed in the United States, particularly in schools, it’s described as a proxy war between the fascists and the democrats. But when I read your book, I came away thinking that that had been a misleading description. Most proxy wars after World War II between the United States and the Soviet Union are made between those two sides, like North Korea versus South Korea or South Vietnam and North Vietnam. But here, the two sides are oblivious to each other.
When the coup starts, Franco, who was a military commander in the Canary Islands flies to Morocco to gather the Spanish Legion troops to cross the Mediterranean. He has to ask Mussolini and Hitler for air support. And Hitler was completely unaware that this was even going on. He was oblivious to it. It wasn’t like he was an instigator. It was unknown to him. He’s like, “Sure, whatever. You need some planes to get some troops across the Mediterranean. Knock yourself out.” It doesn’t start as a proxy war, it becomes one. Take us through the Spanish Civil War and why it really is a Spanish civil war first and foremost.
Giles Tremlett:
It starts off as a purely Spanish war, and then it becomes a proxy war as everyone else piles in, takes advantage of the situation, or responds to the appeals for help that arrive from elsewhere. But essentially this confrontation between the two Spains produces a war in a moment where the rest of Europe is heating itself up for a big war.
Larry Bernstein:
An international brigade shows up to help the left side. These are a ragtag group of individuals from all over the world. And Franco is completely shocked. Who are these people? What are they doing here? Who do they represent?
Giles Tremlett:
Volunteers decided that what was happening in Spain was terrible, that Franco’s side was fascist and that it was their desire to come and defend Spain. One of Churchill’s nephews turned up, for example, Esmond Romilly. And so there was, to begin with, just a ragtag of people.
They also turned up cycling over and lots of foreigners who were already here joined in. The day the war started was the day that Spain was meant to have an alternative Olympics. There was an Olympiada Popular was to be held in Barcelona. It was the rival Olympics to Hitler’s great Berlin showpiece Olympics. They never happened because war broke out the night before, but some of those people stayed including a team from the United States.
There was a Jewish team. It was a very progressive for the time. It was very multicultural as well. And on the other hand, you have the big organizing capacity of the International Communist Party or Comintern which is run from Moscow, and is synced with the Spanish Communist Party. There were so many Jewish brigades who came from different countries that one of the common languages that the brigades could communicate in was Yiddish.
That was important now how we think of the Spanish Civil War, because a lot of the information that people received about it came from the international brigades. George Orwell was another volunteer. He joined a Trotskyist outfit, but he is part of this wave of people who arrive and want to help.
Larry Bernstein:
George Orwell wrote a famous book, Homage to Catalonia, in which he describes his volunteering and moving to Barcelona to fight. The book spends time discussing the struggles between the various left wing communist organizations that hated each other. The Franco forces do not even show up in the book. It’s about the Trotskyites versus Stalin’s groups. Stalin has provided substantial arms and this international brigade shows up to fight on behalf of communism. What were these guys trying to achieve? What was their ultimate utopian vision?
And what did Franco and his supporters make of this Marxist-Stalinist intrusion on Spain?
Giles Tremlett:
You have got an assortment of left groups, the anarchists, socialists who are running the government, the communists were Stalinist. And then the Trotskyists in the communist world are the romantics who want the revolution to happen now, and they want everything, all property be shared.
Funny enough, it’s the Stalinist communists who are the pragmatists in this moment. They are saying, “Forget the revolution guys, we’ve got to win this war.” They see the Trotskyist as the danger. This mirrors what’s happening in the USSR.
Stalinists decided that Trotsky is the big enemy and Stalinism is becoming a form of Russian nationalism and is losing its utopian ideas. In Spain the international communist community, they are becoming pragmatist. This idea of world revolution is dying down. It is becoming communism in Russia, and we will see what we can do everywhere else. The split on the left, the Trotskyists slightly supported by the anarchists versus the Stalinists.
What George Orwell saw infused his later writing. Spain is the place where Orwell became anti-Stalinist and led to his writing of Animal Farm. In Spain, Orwell saw himself as fighting for a just cause, suddenly finds posters on the street saying, “You are evil,” because the communist propaganda machine goes into overdrive. He becomes convinced that Stalinist communism is about power, repression, and manipulating the truth.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to discuss Franco’s ideology in the context of what was going on in Europe on the right to compare it with Vichy and Marshal Pétain’s philosophy. In 1940 when France surrenders, the Vichy government to set up in Southern France and decides that the reason France lost the war is that the French government is corrupted. To return France to greatness requires going back to its core values, the French Catholic Church, the French nation, the role of the family and the father as being the decision maker, going back to traditional values. That is in 1940. (For my podcast on Pétain and Vichy France here is link.)
Here we are in Spain in 1936 where Franco is espousing similar views as Pétain. Spain is culturally bankrupt. We need to reinvigorate the greatness of the Spanish nation. To do that, we need to extol the benefits of the Catholic church, the family, and the role of the genders to reinvigorate a great Spanish society.
I do not see Franco coming out of left field here. I see him as core to the traditionalist segment of these countries. What do you make of that?
Giles Tremlett:
What ideology did Franco have? Well, he did not have one because he is not a socialist, he is not a fascist, he’s not a communist, he’s not a conservative, he’s not a liberal, so what the hell is he?
Before he came to power, nobody would give you an answer about General Francisco Franco, this ambitious young military officer, what his politics were. He was ambitious, determined to get to the top of the army. There are certain advantages in not being overtly ideological. It meant, for example, that during the Second World War, he could drift towards the fascism, support Hitler, but not quite go the whole way. Then after the war, embrace a self-reliance of Spain, then flip in the 1960s to a more open liberal regime.
One way of describing Francois is that more than an ideology, it is a form of social control keeping people within certain margins of behavior, and it is a very military concept as well.
Larry Bernstein:
I think of it as traditional Catholic, family oriented, less opposed to anti-religious, anti-clerical behavior, instilling moral values through Catholic schools, just highly traditional, family and church.
Giles Tremlett:
Absolutely. He wants people to be obedient and for there to be a strong chain of command. He is going to go to his own traditional view of what Spanish society should be like. And you are right to draw the comparisons to Pétain’s Vichy because it is also about, what is the essence of being Spanish? We need to be true to ourselves. Everything else he opposed such as freemasonry, liberalism or even democracy. The ideas that come from France, Britain, or the United States. If you are going to be true to yourself in Spain, then the key identity factors are church, nation, and army.
Even priests will be incorporated into the functioning of Franco’s state. Under Francoism your local priest will be asked to help make wider governmental decisions about things that happen in your village. They started calling it National Catholicism.
Larry Bernstein:
We think of the Spanish Civil War as a proxy war between fascism on the one hand and Stalinism on the other. But there are two countries very nearby, England and France, and they play a peripheral role in this war away from the international brigade. Churchill was asked about it and he said he does not like either side, but if he had to pick one, he would be on the side of Franco. The French have a very liberal government at the time decides not to intervene on either side. What do you make of Churchill’s view that if he had to pick a side, he would choose Franco?
Giles Tremlett:
The British conservative establishment was very much in favor of Franco rather than the Republican elected government. Later in the Second World War, Churchill took a different opinion on Franco because Franco was helping Hitler.
All the calculations that are being made by all the sides have a lot to do with are we about to go into a big war? And the idea of being sucked into a war in Spain was something that the Britain and the French did not want even though they had a left-wing government.
Spain was left to look after itself and was pushed towards Stalin because that is all there was left in terms of support. There was a non-intervention agreement. Everybody signed up to it, including Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. But Mussolini had 70,000 men on the ground and Hitler sent squadrons of aircraft.
Larry Bernstein:
And Stalin sent his latest tanks and aircraft as well. And you mentioned in your book that they were superior.
Giles Tremlett:
The Russian tanks and fighter planes were better than the early German ones. It was a lesson for the Germans that they had to up their game. Their anti-tank guns were fantastic, and they would invent the idea of bombardment of civilian targets, and Blitzkrieg is taken out for trial. All those things we saw at the beginning of the Second World War with Stuka bombers coming down screaming, and tanks rolling forward quickly. All that was practiced and worked out in Spain.
Larry Bernstein:
Hitler and Franco do not get along very well personally. Take us through their one fateful meeting in France on the Spanish and French border in October 1940, just a few months after the French surrender.
Giles Tremlett:
Hitler wanted Spain to join the war and no one’s sure what Franco wanted because he was very sinuous and wily when it came to negotiating deals and hated committing himself. He found it hard to sign agreements that nailed him to a particular posture in the future. Hitler turned up convinced that Spain was about to join the war on his side. They had this conversation in Hitler’s train where Franco rabbited on about everything. He could talk nonstop about battles he had fought in or anything to stay off topic.
At the end, Hitler famously said, “I would rather have my teeth pulled out than to sit down with this man again.” Even then, Hitler came away convinced that Spain was going to join the Axis powers in the Second World War and treaties were written and they were signed.
But what those treaties basically said was, “Yes, we’ll join the war, but when we are ready,” and that never happened. Spain stayed out of the Second World War.
Franco wanted things in return for joining and what he really wanted, and people forget this, he wanted an empire, and he wanted Hitler to say, “Okay, you can have the whole of Morocco,” which was mostly in French hands. If he had been given Morocco and Gibraltar, which was in British hands, he quite possibly would have joined the war. But Hitler was not prepared to do that.
Spain was worn out after the civil war, so its army was not in that great condition. It would not have been able to add much to Hitler’s war effort. It was more useful to him as a source of raw materials and as a place where the Brits were not welcome and that suited both Germany and Franco’s Spain. The result was Spain stayed out of the war.
At the end of the war, Franco declared that this was all due to his own personal brilliance. The headlines in the Spanish propaganda papers are, Franco has won again by keeping us out of the war.
Franco is not an ideologist. Hitler is. Mussolini is. He does not share the passion for some modern future. He is not bound to them in that way. He is pragmatic.
Larry Bernstein:
I consider Spain in the context of my own family’s movements. My grandparents and my mom lived in Vienna in the late 1930s, and after the Anschluss, they moved to France. My grandfather joined the French Foreign Legion as a physician. And then after the war ended in June 1940, went into hiding in Southern France just outside of Marseille. When the Americans and the British invaded North Africa in November 1942 in Operation Torch, the French did not put up much of an effort. Hitler decided that he had to occupy Southern France as well.
In that second week of November 1942, German storm troops entered Marseille, and my grandfather turned to my grandmother and said, “We got to get out of here.” And his landlord said that as she had gotten a letter from a friend that a bridge to Spain was unoccupied and might be an easy way to get out. And so, my grandfather, grandmother, and mom headed for the Spanish Pyrenees. He was able to hook up with the Maquis the French resistance in that area. Because of his participation in the French Foreign Legion during the war, he, along with two dozen British pilots, led by a Spanish smuggler, was able to cross the Pyrenees in December of 1942.
And when he crossed the border, he was quickly arrested by the Spanish police and military forces there. And under an agreement with Hitler that Franco had signed, Franco agreed to give all refugees back to the Germans, but that is not what happened.
My grandparents and my mom were released. They had a Spanish transit visa, and they were on their way to Lisbon to get to the United States. 80,000 Jews were able to escape through the Spanish Pyrenees under Franco’s regime, that they decided not to play ball with Hitler as it related to Jews coming through the country. This is important to think about is the role of the Spaniards during the war as it relates to Jews on the run.
Giles Tremlett:
Franco’s speech was antisemitic. Jews along with Freemasons are his other obsession as the natural enemy of the world that he wants. He appeals back into Spanish history; Spain expelled its Jews in 1492. The entire Sephardic diaspora starts with an expulsion of Jews from Spain.
As you say, Spain turns out to be a relatively safe country for Jews fleeing from Hitler’s world to cross. It is also a sign that that antisemitism was not as visceral as it was in other countries, quite possibly, because Spain did not have a Jewish population of its own, and therefore there was none of this neighbor against neighbor or envy. They had no experience of living with Jewish people.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism. It is the 90th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. What lessons can we take from it for today?
Giles Tremlett:
This hatred that the two Spains had for each other can go away eventually. Spain became a remarkably successful democracy as of 1978, just three years after Franco died. There is still two Spains, but they just argue in a parliament. And that’s fine because there are two of everything. There are two Britains, there are two United States’s. The idea of democracy is to civilize debate.
In the long term, Spain is a story of success. The civil war is not part of that success. It became defined by the people who are fighting it as we are anti-Fascists, and we are anti-communists.
I wonder whether there isn’t a warning to be learned from the Spanish Civil War about how we categorize our opponents. What language do we use to speak about them? And the more I read there was a centrist Spain in 1936, it was not necessary for Spain to go into civil war. There was a center that disappeared, and people scuttled off to the extremes.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Giles for joining us. If you missed the previous podcast, the topic was Venezuela after Maduro.
Our speaker was Francisco Rodriguez who is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the recent book entitled The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020.
Francisco explained why the US sanctions resulted in the implosion of the Venezuelan economy. Francisco also explained why he wants the US to encourage a negotiated settlement between Maduro’s party and its opposition to create a functioning civil society.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Venezuela After Maduro, here.
