Argentine Neutrality, Mediation, and Asylum During the Spanish Civil War

1963 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-403
Author(s):  
Joe Robert Juárez

Civil War broke out in Spain in 1936. Following eight years of dictatorship by General Primo de Rivera, who had acted with the approval of King Alfonso XIII, elections were held in June, 1931, for a constituent assembly. The election returns brought in a republican-socialist majority, which forbade the king’s return, confiscated his property, and proclaimed Spain a republic. The republic had enemies on both the right and the left. The large landholders, the army, and the Church had vested interests which the republic proceeded to attack. On the left, the anarchists and socialists became more /radical, competing for the loyalty of the Spanish workers. The republic’s problems were compounded by the traditional separatist movements of Catalans, Basques, and Gallegans. Power shifted from the left in 1931 to the right in 1933, and, finally, in February, 1936, to a “popular front “government. The Popular Front, however, proved to be a coalition for election purposes only. Largo Caballero, the leader of the left wing of the socialists, declined to serve in the moderate Azaña cabinet. In July, 1936, army, monarchist, clerical, and Carlist groups joined with the Falange to bring about a counter-revolutionary coup under the leadership of General Francisco Franco. The Civil War had started. It was to last for three brutality-filled years.

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-79
Author(s):  
Peter Kovačič Peršin

EDVARD KOCBEK'S 'REFLECTION' ON SPAINDue to the Spanish Civil War, the ideological conflicts in the Catholic circles became more distinct. The clerical part, particularly the Slovenecdaily, which published biased articles on the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and 1937 with a special emphasis on condemning the rise of the popular front, understood the publication of Edvard Kocbek's essay as an attack on its views. Kocbek's purpose behind the Ponderingwas, however, to present a more balanced picture of the Spanish tragedy that was based on the reports by West European writers who favoured the Spanish republic.The Ponderingwas the central crystallising point that led to the final split in the Catholic circles, while at the same time stirring the left-wing political groups to start fighting for a common goal. But the main reason that it became the central crystallising point was the militant response by the right-wing Catholic group; the essay in itself would have otherwise been only considered a balanced representation of the situation in Spain, which were presented one-sidedly by the clerical press. This shows that political tensions on the territory of today's Slovenia had already reached their climax as early as a few years before the war, thus rendering a dialogue and a democratic compromise that could unite the Slovenians in a national defensive attitude impossible.


1985 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Lincoln

In the first weeks of the Spanish civil war, there occurred massive popular assaults against the Catholic Church in those cities which did not fall to the Nationalists rising, the Church having been widely (and correctly) perceived as hostile to the Republic and sympathetic to the generals who sought its overthrow. As rumors of priests firing on the populace from church towers circulated wildly, churches and convents were rapidly sacked and burnt. Supporters of the Republic killed religious personnel in large numbers—certainly well into the thousands—while desecrating and destroying church paraphernalia and cultic objects en masse.


Oceánide ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 29-35
Author(s):  
Luis Alberto Lázaro Lafuente

The Spanish Civil War sparked a heated debate in the recently created Irish Free State, as the Republic of Ireland was then called. A country that had also gone through an eleven-month civil war after the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was again divided between those who supported the left-wing democratic Spanish Republican government and those who favoured Franco’s “crusade” against atheists and Marxists. In fact, some Irish volunteers joined the International Brigades to confront Fascism together with the Spanish Republican forces, while other more conservative Irish Catholics were mobilised to fight with Franco’s army against those Reds that the media claimed to be responsible for killing priests and burning churches. Both sections were highly influenced by the news, accounts and interpretations of the Spanish war that emerged at that time. Following Lluís Albert Chillón’s approach to the relations between journalism and literature (1999), this article aims to analyse the war reportages of two Irish writers who describe the Spanish Civil War from the two opposite sides: Peadar O’Donnell (1893–1986), a prominent Irish socialist activist and novelist who wrote Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937), and Eoin O’Duffy (1892–1944), a soldier, anti-communist activist and police commissioner who raised the Irish Brigade to fight with Franco’s army and wrote The Crusade in Spain (1938). Both contributed to the dissemination of information and ideas about the Spanish conflict with their eyewitness accounts, and both raise interesting questions about the relations between fact, fiction and the truth, using similar narrative strategies and rhetorical devices to portray different versions of the same war.


Author(s):  
David Jones

The Spanish Civil War was a major military conflict between right-wing Nationalists and left-wing Republicans that erupted after a coup d’état was staged by rebel generals against the democratically elected Republican government. Following the ‘defense of Madrid’, during which Republicans held off a Nationalist siege on the Spanish capital, the conflict settled into a war of attrition, with Spain divided into two radically opposed territories. On the Nationalist side, an authoritarian dictatorship bolstered by the fascistic Carlist and Falange militias under General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) emerged, representing the interests of Spain’s conservative and Catholic élites. On the Republican side, defenders of the government of President Manuel Azaña (1880–1940) organized around radical anarchist and socialist trade unions (CNT, UGT, POUM) and volunteer militias.


Μνήμων ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΙΝΟΣ ΚΑΤΣΟΥΔΑΣ

<p>Konstantinos Katsoudas, "<em>A Dictatorship that is not a Dictatorship". Spanish Nationalists and the 4th of August</em></p> <p>The Spanish Civil War convulsed the international public opinion and prompted most foreign governments to take measures or even intervene in the conflict. Greek entanglement either in the form of smuggling war materiel or the participation of Greek volunteers in the International Brigades has already been investigated. However, little is known about a second dimension of this internationalization of the war: the peculiar forms that the antagonism between the two belligerent camps in foreign countries took. This paper, based mainly on Spanish archival sources, discusses some aspects of the activity developed in Greece by Franco's nationalists and the way Francoist diplomats and emissaries perceived the nature of an apparently similar regime, such as the dictatorship led by general Metaxas. The main objectives of the Francoist foreign policy were to avoid any escalation of the Spanish civil war into a world conflict, to secure international assistance for the right-wing forces and to undermine the legitimacy of the legal Republican government. In Greece, an informal diplomatic civil war broke out since Francoists occupied the Spanish Legation in Athens and Republicans took over the Consulate in Thessaloniki. The Francoists combined public and undercover activity: they worked hard to achieve an official recognition of their <em>Estado Nuevo, </em>while at the same time created rings of espionage and channels of anticommunist propaganda. The reason of their partial breakthroughs was that, contrary to their Republican enemies, the Nationalists enjoyed support by a significant part of the Greek political world, which was ideologically identified with their struggle. Francoist anti-communism had some interesting implications for Greek politics. An important issue was the Francoist effort to reveal a supposed Moscow-based conspiracy against Spain and Greece, both considered as hotbeds of revolution in the Mediterranean, in order to justify both Franco's extermination campaign and Metaxas' coup. Although this effort was based on fraudulent documents, forged by an anti-Bolshevik international organization, it became the cornerstone of Francoist and Metaxist propaganda. General Metaxas was the only European dictator to invoke the Spanish Civil War as a <em>raison d'etre </em>of his regime and often warned against the repetition of Spanish-like drama on Greek soil. Nevertheless he did not approve of Franco's methods and preferred Dr. Salazar's Portugal as an institutional model closer to his vision. For Spanish nationalist observers this was a sign of weakness. They interpreted events in Greece through the disfiguring mirror of their own historic experience: thus, although they never called in question Metaxas' authoritarian motives, the 4th of August regime was considered too mild and soft compared to Francoism (whose combativeness and fanaticism, as they suggested, the Greek General should have imitated); it reminded them the dictatorship founded in Spain by General Primo de Rivera in 1920s, whose inadequacy paved the way for the advent of the Republic and the emergence of sociopolitical radicalism. Incidents of the following years, as Greece moved towards a civil confrontation, seemed to strengthen their views.</p>


1976 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas R. Greene

The sympathy of most English Catholics during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 lay with General Francisco Franco and the other generals who had rebelled against the Second Spanish Republic. If there was any doubt of this, the spate of literature which then appeared, much of it polemical, and the journalistic views presented could leave little doubt on the matter. The adoption of an anti-Republican stance in English Catholic circles, while not complete, nevertheless implied an adverse judgment upon the viability and legitimacy of the Republic, if not its legality, from 1936 onward. The Republic had failed in its primary obligation—to rule justly—and the military revolt had been necessary to forestall anarchy or communism. The judgment that the Republic had failed, however, was not an a priori one, nor was it enthusiastically reached so much as accepted.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942199789
Author(s):  
David A. Messenger

The bombardment of civilians from the air was a regular feature of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. It is estimated some 15,000 Spaniards died as a result of air bombings during the Civil War, most civilians, and 11,000 were victims of bombing from the Francoist side that rebelled against the Republican government, supported by German and Italian aviation that joined the rebellion against the Republic. In Catalonia alone, some 1062 municipalities experienced aerial bombardments by the Francoist side of the civil war. In cities across Spain, municipal and regional authorities developed detailed plans for civilian defense in response to these air campaigns. In Barcelona, the municipality created the Junta Local de Defensa Passiva de Barcelona, to build bomb shelters, warn the public of bombings, and educate them on how to protect themselves against aerial bombardment. They mobilized civilians around the concept of ‘passive defense.’ This proactive response by civilians and local government to what they recognized as a war targeting them is an important and under-studied aspect of the Spanish Civil War.


1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kessel Schwartz

Almost from the inception of the Spanish Inquisition which sought to stifle scientific investigation and philosophical speculation while rejecting foreign ideologies, contrary currents existed in Spain. The liberal humanistic movement headed by Erasmus preached intellectual freedom and a defense of interior religión. This ideology never disappeared in Spain in spite of the formation of the Company of Jesus by Ignacio de Loyola and the efforts of Spanish theologians who promoted the Counter Reformation at the Council of Trent. Under Felipe II foreign ideas were forbidden as heretical and interpretations independent of the Church were stifled. Nevertheless, criticism of the status quo continued. Reginaldo González Montano wrote the first attack on the Inquisition, Sanctae Inquisitioms Hispanicae in 1567.


2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 324-368
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Grantseva ◽  

For many years, representatives of Soviet and then Russian historical science paid special attention to the period of the Second Spanish Republic and, especially, to the events of 1936-1939. The Spanish Civil War was and remains a topic that attracts the attention of specialists and influences the development of a multifaceted Russian-Spanish cultural dialogue. There are significantly fewer works on the peaceful years of the Republic, which is typical not only for domestic science, but also for the historiography of this period as a whole. Four key periods can be distinguished in the formation of the national historiography of the Spanish Republic. The first is associated with the existence of the Republic itself and is distinguished by significant political engagement. The second opens after 1956 and combines the continuity with respect to the period of the 1930s. and, at the same time, striving for objectivity, developing methodology and expanding the source base. The third stage is associated with the period of the 1970s-1980s, the time of the restoration of diplomatic relations between the USSR and Spain, as well as the active interaction of historians of the two countries. The fourth stage, which lasted thirty years, was the time of the formation of the Russian historiography of the Second Republic, which sought to get rid of the ideological attitudes that left a significant imprint on the research of the Soviet period. This time is associated with the active archival work of researchers and the publication of sources, the expansion of topics, interdisciplinary approaches. Among the studies of the history of the Second Republic outside Spain, Russian historiography has a special place due to the specifics of Soviet-Spanish relations during the Civil War, and the archival funds in our country, and the traditions of Russian historical Spanish studies, and the preservation of republican memory.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document