In July 1936, the Fascist Generals Franco and Mola revolted against the centre-left Spanish government which had been elected earlier the same year. Their intention, supported by virtually the entire Spanish rightwing, was to overthrow the government and replace it with a rightwing, and highly authoritarian, Catholic dictatorship. Democracy had never been fully accepted by Spanish conservatives and now they were prepared to destroy it through force and bloodshed. This sort of event is not mere history but in fact resonates through the years to the present; we can see parallels in the US-backed military and paramilitary attacks on democratic governments in Chile and Nicaragua.

The Nationalists, or supporters of Franco’s coup, did not win easily, and the civil war extended over almost three years. The Fascists got support from four main sources:

• Spanish conservatives
• the German, Italian and Portuguese fascist governments
• big business in the US and elsewhere
• the Catholic Church

In addition, the formally "neutral" policies of the British and American capitalist governments were in practice to the advantage of the Fascists.

The Republicans, or Loyalists, who remained loyal to the democratic Spanish Republic and its elected government, got support from:

• Spanish liberals, socialists, and communists
• many socialists worldwide, who volunteered in their thousands to go to Spain to try to save the Republic

In addition, after the British and French governments had refused to help, the Spanish government was forced to buy arms from the Soviet Union. (The only other country that agreed to sell arms to the Republic was Mexico.)

The French Prime Minister, the socialist Léon Blum, had wanted to help the Republicans but could not because of British intransigence. Along with the Germans, Italians, British, and Americans, he pledged to remain neutral. The Germans and Italians broke their promise immediately, and supplied ample arms, mostly at no cost, to the Fascist rebels. In contrast, the Americans and British legislated to try to stop aid from going to either side in the conflict. In practice, their policy helped the Fascists, as the American liberal magazine The Nation pointed out at the time.

Paul Preston tells us: "The pro-Nazi president of Texaco oil company, Thorkild Rieber, for instance, risked six million dollars by supplying the Nationalists with a substantial proportion of their oil needs on credit. He was penalized with a small fine." Today, of course, oil corporations continue to be at the heart of western imperialism and western business backing for dictatorships (such as Shell’s support for Nigerian blooshed).

On 31st March 1939, the Fascists finally won victory, and the Pope greeted their success with "great delight". The following day, Franco announced: "Today, with the Red Army captive and disarmed, our victorious troops have achieved their final military objectives. The war is over." But the war against the Spanish people was not over. It had only just begun. Franco’s regime - a brutal, authoritarian military dictatorship which had come to power with the enthusiastic backing of big business, world fascism and the Catholic Church - remained in power until Franco’s death in 1975.

This is not much of a revelation for anyone who has studied history. It is not just that big business backed Franco. It also backed Hitler and Mussolini. Anyone who claims otherwise is trying to rewrite history. Nor is this all in the past; today, too, big business frequently gives its backing to extreme rightwing dictatorships, which it prefers to left-leaning democracies with elected popular governments.

The Texas Oil Company was given a "free hand" by the US government to help the Fascists. They accorded "valuable long-term credit, without guarantee" to Franco’s insurgents, according to historian Hugh Thomas (who wrote the authoritative account of the war, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd edn 1977). The fine was $22,000, but 344,000 tonnes of oil were delivered to the Fascists in 1936; 420,000 tonnes in 1937; 478,000 in 1938; and 624,000 in 1939. Texaco earned $6 million from this, so $22,000 isn’t very much.

Other aid to the Fascists came from such companies as Standard Oil of New Jersey; Ford; Studebaker; and General Motors. The Fascists spent at least $10 million on US oil alone. (Ford, of course, was run by Henry Ford, the widely respected capitalist who was also a Nazi sympathizer.)

Eleanor Roosevelt and several prominent members of the US administration were sympathetic to the Republic. The US Ambassador to (Republican) Spain begged President Roosevelt to help the elected government. Roosevelt and his secretary for state refused. As a mitigating factor can be quoted Roosevelt’s utter ignorance of the situation. (He allegedly said that he hoped that Franco would establish a liberal regime!). In 1939, after the Nationalist victory, Roosevelt admitted to his ambassador: "We have made a mistake; you have been right all along." The liberal capitalists of America and elsewhere were belatedly beginning to realize the truth of what many socialists worldwide had been saying for ages - that a Fascist victory in Spain would give European Fascism almost unstoppable momentum and make a new world war inevitable.

Very few people from abroad volunteered to fight for the Nationalist side. One of the biggest foreign groups of Nationalist volunteers came from Ireland, where there as a Fascist movement known as the Blue Shirts. (600 Blue Shirts fought. In contrast, the number of Englishmen who fought for Franco was probably, literally, a dozen, of whom some were partly Irish.) The terrorists of the IRA were split between supporting the Republican and Nationalist sides, with some volunteers on each side.

The Republican side, on the other hand, had no trouble at all in finding foreigners willing to fight to save the Spanish Republic. Ultimately their might was no match for the soldiers enlisted by the Germans and Italians to fight on behalf of world fascism. But the heroism of those - mainly socialists and communists - who fought against fascism was recognized more than half a century later, when the Spanish government, once more democratic, gave honorary citizenship to the surviving members of the International Brigades.

About 40,000 people from outside Spain volunteered to fight on behalf of the Republic. Around 35,000 of these were in the International Brigades (which were organized by communists) - probably never more than 18,000 at any one time (Thomas); and there were probably, in addition, 10,000 or so doctors, nurses, engineers and others from abroad. The rough estimates of volunteers for the Republic from each country are:

• 10,000 Frenchmen (of whom 1,000 died)
• 5,000 Germans and Austrians together (of whom 2,000 died)
• 5,000 Poles and Ukrainians combined
• 3,350 Italians (Of these, nearly 2,000 were Communist Party members, and around 300 were from socialist and republican parties; the remaining 1,000 were mainly from CP-run organizations; 600 died)
• 2,800 US volunteers (of whom 900 died) - many of these were in the famous Abraham Lincoln Battalion - it was the first time ever that US whites had served under the command of a US black! US blacks were prominent in the movement against Spanish fascism, and suffered no discrimination in the Spanish Republic, unlike at home
• Between 2,000 and 3,000 Russians
• 2,000 Britons (500 were killed, and 1,200 injured)
• 1,500 Yugoslavs (around half killed); 1,500 Czechs; 1,000 Canadians; 1,000 Hungarians; 1,000 Scandinavians (of whom 500 were Swedes); and many others

The most obvious of these was the Nazi bombing of Guernica. The Spanish Fascists covered it up and until the 1970s claimed there had been no such bombings, or that if there had, it must have been Republicans bombing themselves. The historical evidence is, however, found by Preston and Thomas in their authoritative studies to be incontrovertible.

Guernica was the first time that a town had been bombed almost out of existence. The editor of Britain’s most prestigious national newspaper, the Times, Geoffrey Dawson, agreed very reluctantly to report the bombing in his paper: "I did my best, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt [German] susceptibilities." Despite the Fascist denials of the German attack on the Republican Basque town, there were "far too many reliable witnesses" (Preston) - such as the Basque priest, Father Alberto Onainda. (The Basque priests, almost uniquely in the Catholic Church, opposed fascism.) Onainda reported aerial raids continuing over more than three hours almost totally uninterrupted; and the Nazi planes actually swooped down to shoot those who were trying to flee. Preston tells us that not all fascists denied responsibility: one high-ranking officer said to an American journalist, "Of course it was bombed. We bombed it and bombed it and bombed it." But apart from the Basques, Catholic priests and laity remained happy to sing the praises the Fascist regime, even after Guernica (April 1937).

Preston estimates that, before the end of 1938, the Nationalists had executed 150,000 people in Andalusia; 20,000 in Seville. Count Ciano said in July 1939, after the war had ended, that eighty people per day were still being shot in Seville; a fellow fascist estimated it at a mere twenty or twenty-five per day. A Basque priest named nearly 2,000 people executed by fascists in Navarre, "a province in which the left barely existed. Other estimates of victims in Navarre are more than 7,000". Historian Paul Preston also tells us: "In their religious fervour, the Carlist Requetes were also guilty of barbaric excesses. Details of appallign atrocities committed by Nationalist troops against women and men were published by the Madrid College of Lawyers... They were carried out under the watchful gaze of the Church and the forces of law and order - the Armny, the Civil Guard and the police." The victims were easily in the hundreds of thousands.

After the civil war, the blooshed continued apace. In Madrid in summer 1939, 200 to 250 executions were beign carried out daily. In May of the same year, 300 people a week were being shot in Valencia, according to the Manchester Guardian. The British consul in Madrid reported that there were 3,000 political prisoners in that city alone, and estimated conservatively that 10,000 people were executed by Franco within five months of the end of the civil war. Preston says: "The killings went on well into the 1940s... Prisoners numbered hundreds of thousands... to be used as forced labour. Many were hired out to private firms... 20,000 were employed in the construction of a giant mausoleum for Franco and a monument to those who fell in his cause... Franco rarely missed an opportunity to boast that he had eliminated the legacy of the Enlightenment, the French revolution and modernity.... Wages were slashed, strikes were treated as sabotage and made punishable by long prison sentences." The trade unions were destroyed and their property seized by the single-party state and the Fascist Party. There was no welfare safety net, and in 1951, wages were still only 60 per cent of 1936 levels. The Civil Guard was brutal in its defence of fascism.

Big business was impressed. "Foreign capital flooded in." As late as the year of his death, executions of anti-fascists continued. Democracy was not restored to Spain until 1977, and within five years, the Socialist Party had won power in a free election. Before that glorious day, the Spanish people had to suffer under a fascist regime that was glorified by the US government as "anticommunist"; an authoritarian dictatorship that US propagandists referred to as part of "the free world".

© 1998 Richard Pond