The Spanish Civil War
Yeah, we’re doing this.
It’s a once-proud and wealthy nation that suffers from the high expenses of babysitting its colonies, beset by a crumbling economy, and in which radical left-wing nutjobs run riot in the streets, and in which quiet and reasonable men long for a strong man to storm in and set things aright. No why would that setting resonate so strongly today?
Although overshadowed by its big brother, World War Two, the Spanish Civil War makes for a fascinating study. As is usually the case, you have to wade through a bunch of history nerds booty-tickled because their commie friends took the Big L on this one, but once over that hurdle you find a ripping good tale of a very complex suite of strange political bedfellows aligning in some strange ways. You also get big, sweeping actions and ironic tales of teams scoring short-term wins that cost them big in the long run.
On the one side you have the usual collection of freaks and fugs and useful idiots – anarchists, labor unions, feminists, anti-Catholics, and socialists – who manage to rope a few gullible local interests into their struggle. The latter took the form of Basques and Catalonians who believed that communists would honor an agreement to grant them autonomy if they defeated the Capitalist Pigs.
The other side of the fight consisted of equally strange allies. You had two groups of monarchists, Carlists and Falangists, who couldn’t agree on which monarch to back. You had run-of-the-mill conservatives who would have bene happy to serve a genuinely democratic republic, but who refused to stand by and let socialists steal elections and violently suppress their political rivals. Stranger still, these conservatives were able to recruit huge numbers of colonial troops, Africans whom they had just finished kicking around, on the promise that they could shoot Spaniards. Like the left-wing nutjobs, the conservatives promised these troops a post-war independence that was never going to happen.
You’ve got two very mixed forces all vying for control of Spain, and all vying within their alliances for primacy. The difference maker, in the end, was one stolid and stubborn general who blunt-forced his way through the war, while playing the man in the funny moustache and Il Duce as nimbly as he did his fellow countrymen.
This is how you do it, people.
Oh yeah, did I mention that the foppish would-be leader of Team Franco was a fop whose plane crashed because he couldn’t bear to leave his wardrobe behind? Or that Franco organized the first real air-lift in history? Or that both sides suffered set-backs when those internal rivalries turned hot? Or that the commies burned through a lot of goodwill among the normies by burning churches before consolidating all power? There’s just all kinds of fun stuff going on in this forgotten little chapter of history.
Some day, we may just be glad to have learned from it.