Uncomfortable Parallels

The Spanish Civil War and the future of America

It’s often said that history is written by the winners, but in at least three cases I’m aware of, the early drafts were in fact penned by the losers, and those drafts had significant effects on the history of the affected nations. The most obvious case to Americans is, of course, our own Civil War. While there was no shortage of memoirs by Union officers, many of the histories of the War Between The States were written by Confederate officers and those who sympathized with them, with effects that damaged the United States’ military efforts almost eighty years after Appomattox and its civil affairs for another three decades after that. In a similar manner, partially due to the Cold War, the history of the Eastern Front in World War II was at first largely shaped by Wehrmacht officers who had fought there, and these memoirs were seized on by NATO officers who expected to be fighting the Warsaw Pact in a similar manner.

The third and most relevant case is that of the Spanish Civil War. While the Nationalist rebels were successful on the battlefield despite beginning their rebellion without a superiority in men and materiel, they lost the propaganda war to the Republic, and it wasn’t until relatively recently that more balanced histories of the war began to appear. There is a definite change in perspective between the early editions of Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War and its later editions; the early editions portrayed the Loyalists as the good guys while the Nationalist rebels were condemned as cruel Fascist oppressors, while the later editions showed the Loyalists to be a bickering collection of Anarchists, Communists, Socialists, and separatists who hated each other more than they did the Nationalists - while on the Nationalist side, the friction between Carlists and Falangists was moderated by the centrist Catholic army officers and subordinated to the main objective of destroying the Republic.

The parallels between the Second Spanish Republic and our own unhappy country are hard to miss. The Left has succeeded in destroying the trust of the average citizen in the proposition that we are all equal before the law: those on the Right are persecuted and severely punished for minor breaches of the peace, while Leftists engaged in thuggery and vandalism are frequently set free by their fellows in the prosecutors’ offices and judiciary. In a similar way, harassment and outright political assassinations were carried out by Socialist and Communist members of the Spanish Republic’s security apparatus and eventually provoked Falangist death squads to begin striking back. We have not reached that point - yet. Several Republican politicians have been attacked and severely injured, and there are frequent calls by radical leftists for more of the same.

The Left has been more active in politicizing the American military than was the Spanish Republic. Senior officers in the U.S. military are more frequently promoted for their fealty to the Left’s creeds of “climate change” and DEI than for any skill in warfighting (see Afghanistan and the catastrophic withdrawal from same), while the Republic could count on its Army’s senior leadership to be apolitical…until they weren’t.

There is no parallel in the U.S. to the Carlist and Falangist militias that joined the Nationalist rebellion, but our gun culture tends to be more popular among the Right and Libertarians than the Left. A future Franco or Mola might find himself with a large population of irregulars joining whatever fraction of the Regular Army and National Guard rallied to their cause, whereas a Miaja would not.

There is also no parallel to the Army of Africa and its almost warrior-monk component the Spanish Foreign Legion that followed its former commander Francisco Franco to war against the Republic. On the other hand, the deliberate opening of the border has caused thousands of military-aged men to flood across it, and it is certain that many of them have military training. Like the Moroccans of the Army of Africa, they will likely be prone to rape and pillage civilians on the wrong side, and will most likely rally to the Left.

I would prefer not to see a Spanish Civil War 2.0 play out in my country. I am an old and sick man who depends on a modern industrial society for his medicine and a steady supply of clean water & electricity, not at all in shape to drop everything and become a 21st century Requeté. Still, as the saying goes, there are worse things than death, and one of them is surrender to people who intend to destroy my Church and my way of life. This was the motivation of the men who followed Franco; one wonders where our future Francos and Molas are toiling today. No doubt the FBI is searching desperately for such men as well.