scholarly journals Polish discourses concerning the Spanish Civil War. Analysis of the Polish press 1936-2015

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-225
Author(s):  
Wojciech Opioła

The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, as an ideologised and mythologised event, has been and is still used instrumentally within the Polish public discourse. The war was an important subject for the Polish press in the years 1936–1939. The Catholic, national-democratic, and conservative press supported General Franco’s rebellion. The governmental and pro-government press also supported the rebels. The Christian-democratic and peasants’ party press remained neutral. The social demo­cratic, communist, and radical press backed the Spanish Republic — as did liberal-conservative organs such as Wiadomości Literackie. After the Second World War, the Polish communist media created the positive legend of Polish participants in the Spanish Civil War in the International Brigades, label­ling Franco’s post-war regime fascist. In contemporary Poland, the same division within the Polish political scene as in 1936–1939 can be observed. Starting in 1990, the Spanish Civil War, as a subject of the Polish political discourse, has been the source of heated disputes, whose participants often present more radical views and narratives. The key issues that entered the canon of Polish political disputes after 1989 the International Brigades of volunteers, religious crimes, the support of fascists and communists for opposite sides of the conflict, are concentrated along the lines of the dispute arising from the debate within pre-war Poland: the clash of the traditional, Catholic world with the communist revolution.

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIUS RUIZ

This article considers whether the Franco regime pursued a genocidal policy against Republicans after the formal ending of hostilities on 1 April 1939. In post-war Spain, the primary mechanism for punishing Republicans was military tribunals. Francoist military justice was based on the assumption that responsibility for the civil war lay with the Republic: defendants were tried for the crime of ‘military rebellion’. This was, as Ramón Serrano Suñer admitted his memoirs, ‘turning justice on its head’. But although it was extremely harsh, post-war military justice was never exterminatory. The article stresses that the institutionalisation of military justice from 1937, following the arbitrary murders of 1936, contributed to a relative decline in executions. Although the regime's determination to punish Republicans for ‘military rebellion’ inevitably led to the initiation of tens of thousands of post-war military investigations, only a minority of cases ended in execution. This was especially the case from January 1940, when the higher military authorities ended the autonomy of military tribunals over sentencing. This reassertion of central control in January 1940 was part of a wider policy to ease the self-inflicted problem of prison overcrowding; successive parole decrees led to a substantial and permanent decrease in the number of inmates by 1945. Allied victory in the Second World War did not mark the beginning but the end of the process of bringing to a close mass military justice.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev

The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.


Author(s):  
Igor Lyubchyk

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR. Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-267
Author(s):  
Eduardo González Calleja

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.


Quaerendo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 256-283
Author(s):  
Frederike Doppenberg

AbstractDuring the Second World War the social-democratic publisher De Arbeiderspers [The Workers’ Press] was transferred into National Socialist hands. The National Socialists wanted to transform the party press of the SDAP, the social democratic party of the Netherlands, into a National Socialist platform. The publisher, however, had a secure circle of socialist customers whom the new management did not want to deter. This article is a study, based on a reconstruction of the list of publications during the period ’40 -’45, of how the National Socialist managers attempted to change the ideological foundation of De Arbeiderspers.


1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick L. Mckitrick

On 10 July 1950, at the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Wiesbaden Chamber of Artisans (Handwerkskammer), its president Karl Schöppler announced: ‘Today industry is in no way the enemy of Handwerk. Handwerk is not the enemy of industry.…’ These words, which accurately reflected the predominant point of view of the post-war chamber membership, and certainly of its politically influential leadership, marked a new era in the social, economic and political history of German artisans and, it is not too much to say, in the history of class relations in (West) Germany in general. Schöppler's immediate frame of reference was the long-standing and extremely consequential antipathy on the part of artisans towards industrial capitalism, an antipathy of which his listeners were well aware.


2020 ◽  
pp. 983-1010
Author(s):  
David Mota Zurdo

Este artículo analiza la denominada estrategia atlantista y cómo fue puesta en práctica por el Gobierno Vasco en el exilio a través de dos grandes etapas: por un lado, las actividades de la delegación del Gobierno Vasco en Nueva York durante la Guerra Civil española, atendiendo a su origen, composición, actuación y relación con instituciones norteamericanas como la National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), el Departamento de Estado y sus diferentes agencias. Y, por otro, se estudian las labores de lobbying vascas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Un periodo clave, pues, como se verá en las siguientes páginas, durante aquellos años se produjo una colaboración efectiva entre las instituciones vascas y las agencias estadounidenses de la Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), la Office of Coordinator of Information (COI), la Office of Strategic Services (OSS) y el Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-281
Author(s):  
Vjeran Pavlaković

Yugoslav scholarship about the Spanish Civil War, specifically the Yugoslav volunteers who fought in the International Brigades, was almost exclusively tied to the partisan struggle during the Second World War and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Many countries in the Soviet bloc published books about their heroes who fought fascism before Western Europe reacted and raised monuments to Spanish Civil War veterans. However, many lost their lives during Stalinist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s since they were potentially compromised cadres who returned to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries only after the Red Army's occupation. Yugoslav volunteers, however, generally had a more prominent status in the country (and historiography) since the Yugoslav resistance movement liberated the country with only minimal support from the Soviet Union.


Author(s):  
Javier Cervera Gil

Cuando terminó la Guerra Civil Española (1936-1939) los derrotados republicanos tuvieron que tomar el camino del exilio y una gran parte de ellos fijaron su residencia en Francia. El estallido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial fue entendido por la mayoría de estos exiliados españoles como la continuación de la lucha que hasta meses antes habían desarrollado en España. Por ello, muchos antifranquistas se implicaron en la resistencia contra los nazis creyendo que su victoria sobre ellos sería continuada inevitablemente por el fin del Régimen de Franco, aliado del Eje y por tanto enemigo de los Aliados.When finished the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the defeated republicans had to take the way of the exile and a great portion of them took their residence in trance. The out break of the Second World War was understand by the most of these spanish exiled as the fight continuation that unta months before had developed in Spain. For it, many antifranquists helped in the resistance versis the nazis thinking that their victory over them would be continued for the end of Franco's Regime axis allied, and so allied enemy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-345
Author(s):  
Nir Arielli ◽  
Enrico Acciai

This is an introduction to a special issue on the role played by veterans of the Spanish Civil War’s International Brigades during the Second World War. It argues that the study of these veterans is worthwhile for three reasons: the extraordinary mobility that the antifascist struggle of the years 1936–45 enabled; the microcosm it provides for the assessment of what happens when ideologically fuelled concerns meet pragmatic wartime needs; and the relevance of how governments and military organizations have dealt with suspect returnees in the past for present-day dilemmas that several governments face.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document