🦋 July of 1936
I started reading Peter Wyden's The Passionate War: the Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War today -- not chosen through any research, it was just the only title the bookstore had that matched what I was looking for. It seems all right though. (I felt a little disappointed when the first chapter was about some Americans who were stealing into Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade -- I had thought the book was going to be about Spanish history, not Americans' involvement therein -- but that seems to have been just a hook for getting into the history.) A few chapters in I haven't quite got a handle yet on how quickly events are moving. It seems like Sotelo was assassinated on July 13 and a week later, Sanjurjo has died, Franco is already victorious in Morocco, and Queipo de Llano has surrealistically seized power in Seville; but I don't see the connection between events yet.  I was interested to see that the slogan of the Foreign Legion in Morocco (under Franco) was "Long live death" -- Saramago makes very cryptic mention of this slogan in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, saying that a soldier had said that to Miguel de Unamuno but declining to tell what Unamuno's response had been. A Google search leads me to this article at libertarian site LewRockwell.com, which gives Unamuno's response as, "To conquer is not to convince." -- More information about this exchange is at José Millán-Astray's Wikipædia entry.
posted afternoon of Sunday, August 24th, 2008
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Ho-ho. The Spanish Civil War, aside from being the Spanish Civil War, was arguably the first battle of the Cold War. So it makes a difference far outside of Spain.
posted morning of August 25th, 2008 by Randolph
Yep, the introduction to The Passionate War makes the point that it was not a "Spanish" war or a "Civil" war, it was an international phenomenon. My reference to "Spanish history" in the first paragraph above is a misstatement -- I meant to say that I was interested in the particular history of this war rather than in the history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; and I worried when the first chapter was about Americans, that that was going to be the main topic of the book.
posted morning of August 25th, 2008 by Jeremy
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