Guerrilla units were especially active in Spain’s mountainous regions but they also fought in some major cities like Barcelona. ibid.
Part of the population stood behind Franco and the opposition was brutally silenced. ibid.
It’s estimated that by the end of the Second World War Franco’s regime had executed 200,000 people. Often the victims were shot without trial. ibid.
Social inequality was part of everyday life. Nepotism and corruption ensured that the upper class retained its privileges. ibid.
After four years of [UN] isolation, Spain was brought in out of the cold. ibid.
Large scale child abduction: the disquieting end of a totalitarian system with the blessing of the Catholic church. ibid.
Dwight D Eisenhower even paid a visit to Franco’s dictatorship. ibid.
He then used every available means to retain power. The Truth About Franco: Spain’s Forgotten Dictator IV: The Leaden Age
The dictator ruled like a monarch. ibid.
Franco was convinced that the people’s stood behind him. Thanks to foreign aid, living conditions in Spain had improved. Surely that had to ensure loyalty? ibid.
In Spain Opus Dei were especially powerful. ibid.
Tourism especially bought in foreign exchange. ibid.
The old despot felt untouchable. ibid.
‘He never considered stepping down or making significant changes.’ ibid. Werner Herzog
Hospital de la Paz 14 November 1975: Franco suffered the first of several heart attacks. ibid.
I was six years old when they came for my mother. People from the town, Franco supporters. They found her the next day by the side of the road. They couldn’t take her to the cemetery. The townspeople wouldn’t let them. Storyville: Facing Franco’s Crimes: The Silence of Others, old woman, BBC 2019
We call it the Spanish Civil War, and it began with a military coup … Franco was dictator in Spain for almost forty years. The left fought for an amnesty to free political prisoners. And thought they had won. But the new law also granted amnesty for all the crimes of the dictatorship. This came to be known as The Pact of Forgetting. ibid.
‘How can you serve justice for crimes committed by the state?’ ibid. dude
2010: A lawsuit is filed on Franco era crimes in Argentina: 2 plaintiffs … September 2013: 3.5 years after filing the lawsuit: 235 plaintiffs. ibid. caption
‘After Franco’s Death, many of his police, judges and politicians simply continued on.’ ibid. victim
‘In Argentina they estimate 500 children were taken by the military dictatorship.’ ibid. recovery group
In July 1936 General Francisco Franco led a revolt backed by the army, a revolt that soon blossomed into full-scale civil war. Foreign intervention in this confrontation seems to have begun right away. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia **** audiobook 8.05.29, foreword
The nationalists’ international brigade of left-wing partizans made up of volunteers from many countries including England, France and the United States came to Spain to join the loyalists. ibid.
The red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy ice-cold trenches of the mountains: this was in late December 1936. ibid. ch1
It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-workers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. ibid.
Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. ibid.
Complete social equality between all ranks. ibid.
Every militia column had at least one dog attached to it as a mascot. ibid.
Above all it meant mud, lice, hunger and cold. ibid.
A ragged barricade of sandbags, a red flag fluttering, the smoke of dugout fires … a deep festering bed of bread crusts, excrement and rusty tins. ibid.
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last. ibid.
The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding of the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.S. but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war. ibid.
For days together clothes, boots, blankets and rifles were more of less coated with mud. ibid.
Firewood was the one thing that really mattered. ibid.
‘It is a comic opera with an occasional death.’ ibid. visiting big-wig
Of course they [guns] were far too precious to be fired. ibid.
It was pneumonia that we were fighting against. ibid.
If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered, ‘To fight against fascism,’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered, ‘Common decency.’ ibid.
It was only the beginning of the revolution and not the complete thing. ibid.
Every subsequent reshuffling of the government was a move towards the right ... The Russians were in a position to dictate terms … It was the communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain. ibid.
The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. ibid.
No-one was penalised for holding the wrong political opinions. ibid.
Meanwhile nothing happened, nothing ever happened. The English had got into the habit of saying that this wasn’t a war, it was a bloody pantomime. We were hardly under direct fire from the fascists. The only danger was from stray bullets, which, as the lines curved forward on either side, came from several directions. All the casualties at this time were from strays. Arthur Clinton got a mysterious bullet that smashed his left shoulder and disabled his arm, permanently, I am afraid. ibid.
The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at the least when it is warm enough. The men that fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles. ibid.