Yesterday was the anniversary of the Second Spanish Republic. On April 14, 1931, King Alfonso XIII left the country.
The Republic’s new constitution, adopted later that year, established freedom of speech and association, separation of church and state, universal suffrage and a right to divorce.
Overall, in spite of a wide range of liberties, the constitution failed to agree in key areas with the conservative right, which was very powerfully rooted in rural areas, and the powerful Catholic Church, which was stripped of schools and public subsidies under the new constitution.
The constitution also recognized Spain's regions' right to autonomy for the first time in history. Catalunya (1932) and the País Vasco (1936) exercised this right. Before the civil war broke out later that year, Andalucia, Aragon and Galicia had taken steps toward similar autonomy.
On July 19, 1936, fascists under the leadership of General Francisco Franco attempted to overthrow the elected Popular Front government and take the garrisons in Barcelona. Workers, soldiers, civil guards and policemen faithful to the Spanish Republic fought back and successfully drove out the fascists. The celebrations did not last, however.
Franco pressed his assault on the Republic from other fronts and was, crucially, lent support from Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. (Picasso's famous, immense painting Guernica, which I saw last year in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, depicts the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, destroying the town and killing many hundreds of people.)
Leaders of the so-called free world, on the other hand, largely stood by and watched as Franco’s forces defeated the Spanish Republic.
Despite the pretense of neutrality, in the United States, Roosevelt’s administration effectively undermined the Republic because it saw in it the threat of a popular revolution. Roosevelt's "neutrality" stand was carefully crafted to deprive the Republic of arms and oil. His administration pressured suppliers (including foreign ones) to refrain from shipping materials, including shipments contracted earlier.
The fascists were getting guns from Germany, but they didn't have any oil. But Texaco, which was run at that time by an outright Nazi, had contracts with the Republic. They terminated those contracts, and contacted ships at sea to deliver the oil to the fascists instead, which was illegal even under the U.S. Neutrality Act.
For its part, Britain, under Churchill, virtually absolved the fascist elements and outrageously blamed instead "the swift, stealthy and deadly advance of the extreme communist or anarchist factions" for the outbreak of violence in Spain.
Footnote: An Irish brigade of 700, La Bandera Irlandesa, organized by the right-wing politician Eoin O’Duffy, organized to fight for Franco’s fascists, despite a declaration by the Irish government that the war was illegal. Interestingly, the conservative Catholic Irish contingent originally refused Franco's order to fight against the separatist Basques of the Republican side, seeing parallels between their recent Irish independence struggle and Basque aspirations. Irish people fought on both sides of the war: many also joined the international brigades to fight for the Republic.
The Spanish left was far from blamless, strategically: At a point when German and Italian-supported fascist armies were marching on the cities of Madrid and Barcelona, Communists, Trotskyists and Anarchists--collectively the staunchest defenders of the newly formed Spanish Republic--began shooting each other. Instead of figuring out how best to defeat the fascists, these three forces fought to define which of them was the superior or true anti-fascist.
The fascists ended up capturing the whole of Spain in March 1939, a prelude to World War II. The divisions of the Spanish Civil war still echo today in Spanish politics.
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