Dispelling myths about the Spanish Civil War.

• Author: Mosettig, Michael
• Position: Brief article - Book review

The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 By Antony Beevor Penguin Books, 2006, 560 pages

One message permeates this latest English-language account of the much-chronicled Spanish Civil War: that it was the rarest of wars because the losers wrote most of the history.

For more than 35 years from the victory of his Nationalist forces until the dictator's death in 1975, Francisco Franco's Spain lived a world apart from the political, economic, social, cultural and literary forces that shaped Western Europe after World War II--except for the ever-swelling numbers of pale northern Europeans getting themselves sunburned on Spain's southern beaches. And it was during those years that Western memory embedded a narrative of the Spanish Civil War championing the opposition to Franco's takeover and extolling the Republican cause that was aided by outsiders so passionately (and unavailingly) in the 1930s and afterwards.

The Republicans failed militarily, but their idealistic-sounding struggle prevailed in memory, casting them as the good guys whose defeat opened the way to the larger war between the fascist Axis and the democracies, belatedly but decisively joined by Communist Russia and America. Not only a testing ground for aerial bombing and other weapons of the coming world war, the Spanish Civil War was also an ominous prelude with the unfolding victory of the local fascists aided by Germany and Italy. Ennobled by their heroic efforts to forestall it, the Spanish Republicans and their friends from abroad were cast as innocent leftists. In fact many were hard-bitten communists, but even the dissonant message in George Orwell's book Homage to Catalonia, with its tale of disillusion about the Stalinist takeover of the anti-fascist Republican forces, did little to displace this received picture of the struggle in Spain. The image stuck as the official version, even among many Spaniards themselves and even after the country's successful move to democracy following Franco's death.

Now, a new Spain--one prosperous, liberal and modernized in the partnership of the European Union since 1986--is coming to grips with some underlying tensions that preceded the war, including regional separatism, terrorism and long pent-up tensions between secular forces and the entrenched Catholicism inherited from the Spanish empire. However gingerly, for fear of re-opening wounds from the first modern conflict in which civilians were routinely killed and savaged, Spanish writers are addressing the civil war and sifting through their country's searing upheaval then in order to see more clearly now into the current pressures for change and their limits. What they see is how deeply all sides were bled and ultimately discredited by the excesses of the civil war.

The effect of this awareness of the war seems to have translated into a new appreciation of limits--a mainstream sense that is also salient these days in contemporary Spanish politics, which have tended to divide almost evenly between left and right parties. Symptomatically, Spain's constitutional monarchy has been secure enough to put down one briefly comical coup attempt and, more seriously, in a democratic election, throw out a government the public believed to be lying in the face of a terrorist attack. Until Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government won power in...