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Post by dodger on Aug 30, 2013 7:25:01 GMT
The best book on the war in Spain, 21 April 2008
This William Podmore review is from: Spain, the Unfinished Revolution (Paperback)
by Arthur H. Landis
This is much the best book ever written on the war in Spain.
In 1936 General Franco, backed by most of the financial oligarchy, of the landlord class, the church and the army, launched a fascist coup against the elected Spanish government. The rebels used the colonial `shock and awe' tactics they had used in Spanish Morocco. General Quiepo de Llano told those who resisted, "We will kill you like dogs." The rebels killed 9,000 people in Seville, 5,000 in Grenada, 9,000 in Valladolid, 7,000 in Navarre and 7,000 in Corunna.
Yet in eight days, the people defeated the rising. The rebels failed to seize Madrid and controlled only a third of the country.
Then came Hitler and Mussolini's interventions, and others: 50,000 German troops, 100,000 Italians, 20,000 Portuguese, and 100,000 Moorish mercenaries from Spanish and French Morocco.
The British Con-Lib coalition government claimed to be upholding peace and non-interference while actually aiding the rebels. It claimed to hold the ring, while it rigged the fight.
As Anthony Eden said, in private, "England [he meant, the government] preferred a Rebel victory to a Republican victory." The British Ambassador to Spain, who based himself in France rather than in Republican Spain, said, "I am but awaiting the time when they finally send enough Germans to finish the war."
The government launched the infamous `Non-Intervention' Committee and persuaded the French government to propose it. It aimed to withdraw the issue of Spain from the League, where it should have been debated as a case of open aggression and a menace to the peace of the world.
The Non-Intervention Committee gave Germany and Italy cover by pretending that were not intervening in Spain. It backed their lies that they were not sinking ships supplying the Republic.
Lord Plymouth, chair of the NIC, said, "Save the Soviet Ambassador, the Committee of Non-Intervention has agreed unanimously that no proof exists of Italo-German violation of the accords of the Agreement of Non-Intervention." Trotskyists echo this by ignoring the huge German and Italian interventions. Felix Morrow wrote a book on the war, but, as Landis points out, "in the entire two hundred and twenty-two pages of Revolution and counter-revolution in Spain, the Trotskyist Bible on the subject for three decades, there is no single page devoted to the scale, duration and purpose of the Italo-German invasion of the Spanish republic."
For more than a year, the 300-kilometre Aragon front, under anarchist `leadership,' did nothing to aid the Republic's fight for survival. Even George Orwell admitted `the inaction on the Aragon front'. In 1936 anarchist pistoleros killed more than 200 Communists and Socialists.
Landis concluded, "When the peoples of the Western World demanded in their overwhelming majority that aid be given Spain and Czechoslovakia, their governments decreed the opposite. It was the test of the democratic process within the confines of the capitalist system. The failure was conclusive. Majority opinion not backed by concrete actions suffered the ultimate cynicism of power elites having more in common with the barbarity of European and World fascism, than with their people."
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Post by dodger on Aug 30, 2013 8:06:17 GMT
Homage to fascism, more like, 26 Mar 2008
This review is from: Homage to Catalonia (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)
Note how the great Orwell never says anything positive about those doing the bulk of the fighting against Franco - in fact, note how he barely mentions Franco and fascism at all! In the course of the events he describes in this book, he spends most of his time doing nothing, like the rest of his Trotskyist and anarchist friends. Meanwhile, the Republicans, whom he slanders from afar, were fighting and dying in the front line against the Nazi and Italian forces who enabled Franco's victory. Note also how he never says a positive word about the Soviet Union, which was the only country to help the Republic, while the British and French governments helped Hitler and Mussolini to intervene.
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As might well have been expected , the above review provoked comment...link below:www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1ZAE7J0RY3PAW/ref=cm_aya_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0141183055#wasThisHelpful
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Post by Admin on Aug 31, 2013 22:34:36 GMT
The revolutionists like the POUM and CNT hindered the we effort. The revolution should've been put on hold until Franco and co. were defeated. It's a romantic notion to think that the creation of the popular army was a bad thing, as it performed much better than the ragtag, loosely not militias. The PA was based on the red army of the Russian civil war, so was highly disciplined. However, the fascists had Italian and German planes and troops to assist them, whereas the republic had poorly trained international brigades and about 200 Russian tankists and pilots. In the end the republic held on as long as it did due to the arms from the USSR and the disciplined PA (and the 5th communist brigade), but the fascists won due to better equipment and training.
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Post by dodger on Oct 12, 2013 15:43:26 GMT
Britain, Italy, Germany and the Spanish Civil War [Hardcover]
Will Podmore (Author)
Amazon reviewer.
There are many factors that led to the second world war and many people have different ideas and theories through hindsight that try to answer the question(s) of how Mussolini and Hitler managed to gain the power that led to WWII. Among these theories rests the ideas of the U.S. Great Depression, revenge of the Treaty of Versailles or Economic problems in Italy and Germany. Another theory by hindsight is the policies of appeasement that Great Britain and Chamberlain held that led Mussolini and Hitler to the great powers the led to WWII. Will Podmore's book Britain, Italy, Germany and The Spanish Civil War, is about the appeasement polices that Chamberlain had that let Mussolini take advantage of Britain. The text briefly referred to how the appeasement polices influenced Hitler and his acts of aggression but the book primly focuses on Britain and Italy and why Chamberlain excused Italy's acts of aggression in Spain and other countries.
I liked the book, it gave me an unequaled presentation of the appeasement of the British government during the 1930's. I felt the audience of the book was intended to be scholarly because of the format Podmore used white writing the text. I felt the dating method he used to date events was confusing, most of the time he does not specify the year. This made it hard to follow certain events and put everything in a time line with other events of history from the same time period. One advantage of the text is that it is well documented with a large works cited list after the end of each chapter. I felt the text was very reliable because of the many different sources the author used. The large list of sources used convinced me that this was a purely academic work to be used by scholars in a research intuition. I had no trouble accepting Podmore's point of view simply because he had many outside sources to back up his opinion. Every chapter had over 50 different sources that led me to believe that his text was extremely creditable.
I would consider this book a historiography because of its presentation of the progression and interaction between the different governments during the 1930's. The reader of the text will discover that it covers the main tenants of appeasement and treaties between Italy and Britain and the social polices in Britain that kept the public unaware of the bad decisions Chamberlain was making to keep peace with the aggressive nations of Italy and Germany. My only real complaint in consideration of this book as a historiography is that I was clueless to some to some of the events that led up to the rise of Franco and how Italy got involved. If Podmore mentioned this it was very brief, and must have been very dry because I do not remember, I could of fallen asleep (sorry). If he could have detailed the events surrounding the Franco Civil war I would have had a better understanding of the entire situation and understood the book more thoroughly.
My biggest praise of the book is the use of the sources he combined to create the text. He went back to original sources from England directly quoted people like Chamberlain. The quotes he used made me want to yell at people: like Chamberlain for his stupid appeasement policies. It was fun reading the text because of the hindsight I have of WWII and how it started. When Chamberlain did something to promote appeasement of Mussolini or Hitler I gasped with frustration because WWII could have been avoided if Britain would of worked with France and bullied up on the Axis powers. For the most part, excluding the rise of Franco, Podmore was effective in creating a story that kept me involved by sharing events that led to the great powers of Italy and Germany. This book gave me first hand information because Podmore drew from hundreds of sources. The author got the point across about Britain's policy and how it led to the dangerous power that Italy and Germany after the Spanish Civil War. This is a good book for research and I would recommend it to anyone who wanted more information on how Britain reacted to Mussolini and Hitler's acts of aggression. Podmore gave a good presentation of the facts and created a nice book to read for fun or research.
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Post by dodger on Oct 12, 2013 15:51:54 GMT
Britain, Italy, Germany and the Spanish Civil War [Hardcover]
Will Podmore (Author)
From the Author
Baldwin and Chamberlain had rigged the fight while claiming to hold the ring. They had blockaded the victim and supported the aggressor. Never before had a government elected according to its country’s laws and recognised by all states been put on the same level judicially with the rebels in revolt against it. Never before had the supply of arms to the legal recognised Government been considered as intervention in its internal affairs. So non-intervention does not entail refusing to sell arms to the legal government; that was a quite original twist created by the British and French Governments. They applied sanctions once again not to the aggressor but to the victim. The British Government’s policy aided the aggressors and punished the victim, and was plainly unjust. The Daily Telegraph noted, "The Non Intervention Committee failed to prevent intervention ... and in effect, it helped to ensure the victory of Franco and his unofficial allies, the Nazi and Fascist dictators." It ensured it in intention too. This intervention, combined with the betrayal of Spain by the British, French and US Governments, was the major cause of the Republic’s defeat. These three Governments were indeed ‘collaborators with the Axis’ against Spain, ‘one of the blackest crimes against freedom in modern times’.
To what forces did Franco owe his victory? First, he could not have won without the 14,000 German and 73,000 Italian troops that Hitler and Mussolini sent to Spain. As the United Nations, including Britain, agreed in December 1946, "In origin, nature, structure and general conduct, the Franco regime is a Fascist regime, patterned on, and established largely as a result of aid received from, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy." Second, the British and French Governments’ policy of Non-Intervention, by imposing sanctions on the Republic, enabled this aggression to succeed. This blockade, enforced by the navies of Britain, France, Italy and Germany, stopped the Soviet Union’s supplies getting through to Spain. Alone, the Spanish Republic had to fight against the armed forces of Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spanish Morocco and reactionary Spain. Third, Spanish reactionary forces, in the landowning class, in the military and in the Church, backed Franco. And yet, Spain’s Popular Front Government fought on heroically against overwhelming odds for three years: in 1940, France’s anti-Popular Front Government fought for less than three months before yielding to Hitler.
The British Government’s actions had decided the war’s outcome. It alone had kept the policy of Non-Intervention going throughout the war. Pedro Sainz Rodriguez, Minister of Education in Franco’s first Government, said, "the fundamental reason for our winning the war was the English diplomatic position opposing intervention in Spain." David Lloyd George said, "Bilbao, Santander, the Asturias, were all defended by as brave men as ever went into battle - traditionally so, and racially so. But they had no munitions; they had no guns. Who is responsible for that? Non-intervention. Who is responsible for keeping non-intervention alive? His Majesty’s Government. If democracy is defeated in this battle, if fascism is triumphant, His Majesty’s Government can claim the victory for themselves."
About the Author
The author is a member of the University and College Union and a specialist librarian. He has also written a biography, Reg Birch: engineer, trade unionist, communist and a study of the European Union, The EU: bad for Britain - a trade union view.
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Post by dodger on Oct 16, 2013 23:41:31 GMT
Harrowing account of the horrors unleashed by Franco's coup, 6 Dec 2012
This William Podmore review is from: The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (Hardcover)
Paul Preston is the finest historian of modern Spain. This is a harrowing account of the brutality and sadism unleashed by General Franco's coup against the elected Spanish government.
In the resulting war, 200,000 people were killed on the battlefield. Another 200,000 were killed, either murdered or executed after the flimsiest of legal process, 150,000 by the rebels and 50,000 by Republicans. Franco lied that the Republic had killed 470,000 people.
Preston contrasts the rebels' programmatic violence with the Republic's episodic violence. The rebels aimed to kill "without scruple or hesitation those who do not think as we do", said coup director General Emilio Mola.
Preston notes, "In general, Francoist `justice' attributed all deaths to a deliberate policy of the Republican government and the Generalitat. This was simply not true and a projection on to the Republicans of the rebels' own murderous intentions." (Similarly, Franco accused the Republic of military rebellion!)
Field Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode said that Franco "is worse than the Reds." Preston writes of the rebels' `programme of extermination', of `Franco's slow war of annihilation' and of `the official encouragement of atrocities in the rebel zone'.
Preston observes, "While the rebel authorities actively sanctioned atrocities throughout the war and after, it was precisely the Republican government's opposition to them that limited them to the first five months of the war." The Republic tried to control the anarchist checas, death squads.
The rebel forces massacred peasants, workers, civilians and prisoners, raped working class women, mutilated casualties, and murdered the wounded. The rebels used atrocity stories - false of the Republic, true of the rebels - to whip up hatred and justify mass murder.
The rebels killed priests and nuns who opposed them; they burned down churches, where Republicans were inside them. Many priests backed the rebels and joined in the repression. The Daily Express and the Daily Mail backed the rebels; the Daily Mail's reporter was embedded with Franco's forces.
The Spanish communist party alleged that there were fifth columnists inside the anarchist trade union movement the CNT. Preston comments that the `accusation was in fact entirely justified'. Italian agents infiltrated the CNT and Nazi agents infiltrated the Trotskyist POUM.
In March 1937 hundreds of CNT members abandoned the battlefront, went to Barcelona, and recruited 5,000 CNT members into a new body called the `Friends of Durruti'. Andreu Nin, head of the POUM, welcomed this treachery.
Preston remarks on "the conflict between the advocates of revolution and those who believed that priority should be given to the war effort. The notion that its culmination in the so-called `May events' was a carefully laid Stalinist plot has no basis."
Nin said that the working class had solved the problem of religion by not leaving a single church standing. Preston observes, "the assassination of priests and the burning down of churches were given an idealistic veneer by anarchists as the prior purification necessary for the building of a new world, as if it was that easy to eliminate religion." Likewise, shooting the whole ruling class would not make a revolution.
The border area La Cerdanya was run by an anarchist criminal. The anarchist FAI `presided over a network of terror throughout Catalonia' and carried out massacres.
Throughout the war, the British government pretended to be neutral, while assisting Franco as much as it could. Its `Non-Intervention' policy enabled the German and Italian interventions which took Franco to victory. At the war's end, Colonel Casado, the leader of the coup which ended the Republic, escaped to Britain on a British warship, along with the leader of Madrid's notorious anarchist checa.
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Post by dodger on Oct 22, 2013 21:01:45 GMT
Interesting but flawed analysis, 8 Feb 2010
By William Podmore
This review is from: The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War (Canto) (Paperback)
Paul Preston was fundamentally wrong when he wrote that Gerald Brenan provided the 'foundations of all modern scholarship on the Spanish Republic and Civil War': "While most contemporary writers were still playing with the simplistic notion that the Spanish war was a battle between fascism and communism, Brenan perceived that it was a fundamentally Spanish affair."
It was neither a battle between fascism and communism, nor a fundamentally Spanish affair.
The German and Italian intervention in Spain in July 1936 changed the nature, and the prospects, of the war. The government's, and people's, defence of the legitimately elected government against an attempted fascist coup became a war of national defence, waged by a sovereign nation against international fascist aggression. A matter internal to Spain became a matter of international concern.
The British government worked against further intervention, not against the growing German and Italian intervention, but against any French intervention in support of the Republic. When socialist Premier Leon Blum came to London on 22 July, Baldwin warned him that Britain would refuse to aid France if Germany or Italy attacked her because she was aiding Spain, and told him to ban at once the supply of arms to the Republic.
Blum did so. Later, too late, he admitted that prompt arms shipments could have saved the Republic and that non intervention had been idiotic.
The British Government wanted Hitler and Mussolini to win. Eden said that his Government "preferred a Rebel victory to a Republican victory." It aimed to deny the Republic the right to buy arms. From the start, it secretly embargoed arms exports to the Republic.
The British government tried to justify its policy by defining the war as a civil war between 'rival factions.' This analysis deliberately left out of account Hitler's and Mussolini's interventions.
If the British government had instead correctly defined the war as one of national defence against foreign aggression, then the Republican government alone could legitimately have been awarded belligerent rights.
Non Intervention could be enforced against the Republic, which would be denied its legal right to buy arms abroad. But Germany and Italy would ignore the ban and would carry on both their direct aggression and their aid to the rebels. In effect they were being awarded belligerent rights in the country they were illegally invading, while that country's legitimate government was denied its right to defend itself. Japan, when attacking China, was allowed to buy arms. Spain, defending itself from Axis aggression, was forbidden to buy arms.
The British government set up the Non Intervention Committee (NIC). As the British Charge d'Affaires assured the German government, the proposed NIC "was not to have the task either of exerting control powers or of making majority decisions or the like." A Foreign Office official called it 'an extremely useful piece of humbug.'
The NIC, chaired by Lord Plymouth, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, first met on 9 September in the Foreign Office. It found `no evidence of foreign intervention in Spain'. The British government now asked fascist Portugal to join the NIC, promising Prime Minister Salazar that this would not stop him sending troops to fight the Republic. So Britain's 'oldest ally' joined the NIC, and promptly sent 20,000 troops to Spain. Salazar said his policy was one of "complete support for the rebels as far as it was possible to do so and maintain the semblance of complete neutrality" - just like Baldwin's.
The policy of Non Intervention effectively blockaded the Spanish Republic. "It isolates only the Spanish Government", as The Spectator admitted at the time. It tipped the balance decisively against Republican Spain.
Baldwin and Chamberlain had rigged the fight while claiming to hold the ring. They had blockaded the victim and backed the aggressors. The Spanish people fought "the overwhelming superiority of their enemy not only in personnel, but in the all-important weapons of modern war, trucks, tanks, artillery, and aircraft." "Success was impossible for the Republic without sufficient men, arms, basic equipment or transport." The British, French and US policy of non-intervention sanctioned the German and Italian intervention, which was the main cause of the Republic's defeat. The Daily Telegraph's obituary of Eden in 1977 said, "The Non Intervention Committee failed to prevent intervention. It merely localised the conflict, and in effect, it helped to ensure the victory of Franco and his unofficial allies, the Nazi and Fascist dictators. Eden loyally carried out the British Government's policy."
The British Government had ensured the fascist victory in effect, and in intention. It had not designed the Non Intervention Committee to prevent the decisive German and Italian intervention. It had always intended to leave the Spanish Republic alone and at the mercy of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and their agents the rebels. The British Government was determined that the Republic should be defeated.
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Post by dodger on Feb 13, 2014 16:36:32 GMT
This Will Podmore review is from: THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE (Hardcover)
This superb book tells the story of the American volunteers who fought against fascism in Spain in the 1930s. Arthur Landis is the author of Spain – the unfinished revolution, the best book on the war in Spain.
Landis observes that US companies sent 12,000 trucks to Franco, twice as many as Mussolini and Hitler sent. US companies also sold 1.866 million metric tons of fuel to Franco.
Landis noted that near the village of Azaila on the Aragon front, which anarchists and Trotskyists ran, “the nearest Rebel strong-point was at least two kilometers away. In this same area, according to Herbert Matthews, football games had actually been arranged between the line troops of both sides – and this while the militia of the central front and the Biscayan littoral were being bled white under the pounding guns of the Italian and Moorish legions. The very excellent hospital situated twenty kilometres to the rear in the town of El Pueblo de Hijar was staffed and equipped to handle the casualties of a major offensive. In the three months prior to the Americans’ arrival it had received exactly two wounded.”
Landis wrote of Neville Chamberlain’s Anglo-Italian Pact of April 1938, “A more despicable act of perfidy would be difficult to imagine. The pact provided that Italy undertake to withdraw her troops from Spain only after the war was over.”
He continued, “It may be correctly concluded, therefore, that British policy, supported by a vacillating France and an isolationist America was, in the long run, more responsible for the death of the Spanish Republic than the reluctant ‘volunteers’ of Mussolini, the jackbooted minions of the Condor Legion, and the open arsenals of the Axis powers.”
Landis concluded, “when the peoples of the Western world (inclusive of the United States) demanded in their overwhelming majority that immediate aid be given Czechoslovakia and Spain – their governments decreed the opposite. It was the test of the democratic process operating within the confines of the free enterprise, or capitalist, system. The failure was conclusive.”
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Post by dodger on Mar 4, 2014 15:20:08 GMT
Dolores Ibarruri
(farewell to the International Brigades)
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