Word: spain
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Madmen & Dreamers. Historian Thomas finds an anomaly in the fact that Spain, so backward, should have been the first major battleground of 20th century ideologies. But there is no anomaly, any more than it was anomalous that Russia, also on the periphery of modern Europe, should have been the theater of Marxist revolution. Neither state-of dukes and campesinos, or grand dukes and muzhiks -had made any real step toward the compromise between feudal past and industrial present that other European nations had made in the centuries since the Renaissance. Spain, like Russia, was ungovernable. At the onset of Franco...
...apart from the madmen of the anarchist left, there were the dreamers of the right who had made no gesture towards the modern world since the Inquisition condemned slavery more than three centuries ago. Politics being the art of the possible, politics was impossible to the quixotic impossibilists of Spain-whether right or left...
...notions, he illuminates the quasi-religious nature of the whole struggle. In a sense, "the Church, which was to suffer so much in consequence, had paradoxically prepared the way" for revolution through its communalism and "its puritan hostility to competitive instinct.'' Adds Thomas: "The religious character of Spain also made converts to the new collectivism, as it had made the liberals more passionate, less ready to compromise, more obstinate than any other similar group in Europe...
Winner & Loser. Spain was only partly a "rehearsal" (as the familiar phrase has it) for World War II in which Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin experimented with military and political techniques. Actually, the only important military lesson-that mass civilian bombing does not break, but stiffens the morale of the surviving victims-had to be learned all over again in World War II. The political lessons, reaching well beyond World War II, were far more significant...
Slogans & Doublethink. Spain's bloody ground became a moral gymnasium for all the liberals of the West; theirs is by now a depressing record of human illusion and disillusion. On the level of national policy, the story is equally dismal -the impotence of the League of Nations, the nonintervention policy of Britain and France and the arms Embargo Act in the U.S. leaving the door open for intervention by Stalin and the Axis. Historian Thomas' sober judgment is that German-Italian intervention may have just barely tipped the scales in Franco's favor; Stalin could have...