Catholic Church in Spain fights Franco-era image

[Ridgerunner]

Just an informational note. It appears estimates vary wildly as to the numbers killed in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War, the war itself and its aftermath, and just how many died from what cause, including those who died as a result of privations throughout the struggle, but in captivity and outside captivity. Ignoring the highs and lows, and arbitrarily adopting a “median” of about 200,000 from all causes, the toll seems roughly comparable to the deaths in the Greek Civil War, the Columbian Civil War and the struggle for East Timor.

That’s not to say civil wars are something we should all wish for. But should we prefer a bolshevik outcome any more in Spain than in Greece, or any more than the Franco regime?

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

Just an informational note. It appears estimates vary wildly as to the numbers killed in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War, the war itself and its aftermath, and just how many died from what cause, including those who died as a result of privations throughout the struggle, but in captivity and outside captivity. Ignoring the highs and lows, and arbitrarily adopting a “median” of about 200,000 from all causes, the toll seems roughly comparable to the deaths in the Greek Civil War, the Columbian Civil War and the struggle for East Timor.

That’s not to say civil wars are something we should all wish for. But should we prefer a bolshevik outcome any more in Spain than in Greece, or any more than the Franco regime?

You’d love to see 200,000 dissenters killed, right? if they’re the right kind of dissenters.

franco destroyed the CC in Spain.

 

[inocente]

That’s not to say civil wars are something we should all wish for. But should we prefer a bolshevik outcome any more in Spain than in Greece, or any more than the Franco regime?

We can’t rerun history to see what might happen, so how could we know? All we can do is live with the past and pick up the pieces. I’ve no idea how to play numbers games as if this doesn’t involve real people.

 

[inocente]

Spain adopted NASCAR driver Kevin Harvick’s colors

I guess he hopes some of our brand image for winning will rub off on him by adopting our colors.

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

I guess he hopes some of our brand image for winning will rub off on him by adopting our colors.

It does lend you a certain cachet.

 

[Adeodatus]

Where would we be without American experts on Europe?

Living under the jackboot of the 3rd Reich, probably.

Oh, I forgot. Americans are supposed to die by the thousands for Europe, but never criticize her wicked ways.

 

[Adeodatus]

Despite all the misinformation to the contrary, General Franco was a good and Catholic man who strove mightily to save the Church from complete slaughter and who valiantly crushed the wickedness of Communism, Anarchism and Atheism. A true hero of Christendom.

Viva la Muerte!

If there is a single antidote today for the vile and satanic state of Spanish culture as it has fallen once again into the grips of the evil socialists, it is the Falange. May Spain once again find her way back to the Church.

 

[Ridgerunner]

You’d love to see 200,000 dissenters killed, right? if they’re the right kind of dissenters.

franco destroyed the CC in Spain.

First point: Of course not. But if the question is posed whether I would prefer to see the prisoners of the Kolyma drop dead (as, of course they mostly did) or their NKVD tormenters, and if there was no third option, the choice would be obvious.

Second point: Did Franco also cause the decline of the Catholic Church in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands? Did he destroy the Lutheran Church in Scandinavia? The Anglican Church in England? Or is something else responsible for the very similar declines in all?

I realize that, to someone with a leftist orientation, it may be attractive to attribute religious decline to Franco. But it may be that the left could look to its own contribution to better effect.

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

Despite all the misinformation to the contrary, General Franco was a good and Catholic man …

Good Catholic men kill hundreds of thousands of people? Is that how you see it? Did /does your Church approve of this?

For all the evasion you’ve been doing, at least answer that question.

Does the CC approve of franco’s actions?

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

First point: Of course not. But if the question is posed whether I would prefer to see the prisoners of the Kolyma drop dead (as, of course they mostly did) or their NKVD tormenters, and if there was no third option, the choice would be obvious.

Second point: Did Franco also cause the decline of the Catholic Church in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands? Did he destroy the Lutheran Church in Scandinavia? The Anglican Church in England? Or is something else responsible for the very similar declines in all?

I realize that, to someone with a leftist orientation, it may be attractive to attribute religious decline to Franco. But it may be that the left could look to its own contribution to better effect.

I’m interested in what franco did to the CC in Spain. He was either calling himself Catholic as a pretense, or was an atrocious example of what it means to be Catholic – unless mass slaughter really is your thing. And it might well be, as long as the right people were dying, its not that big a deal to you, is it?

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

…Viva la Muerte!..

That’s pathetic and if I were Catholic I’d be outraged.

So how many people should franco have murdered?

 

[Ridgerunner]

I’m interested in what franco did to the CC in Spain. He was either calling himself Catholic as a pretense, or was an atrocious example of what it means to be Catholic – unless mass slaughter really is your thing. And it might well be, as long as the right people were dying, its not that big a deal to you, is it?

Aren’t you getting close to wearing out your accusation that I want to see people die? Why not let it go? You’ll seem more thoughtful if you do.

If you’re really interested in what Franco did to the Catholic Church in Spain, then why not go out and find some real information on it instead of assuming the decline in religious observance in Spain is somehow different in cause than the nearly identical (sometimes greater) decline in virtually every other European country. There is a gap in your chain of causation, and simply repeating the same conclusion doesn’t fill it.

Franco was involved in a civil war. As awful as civil wars generally are, it is hard to say that none are ever justified, despite and not because of, the casualties. Having looked it up, I see there is no agreement among scholars in the number of people who died in it, before it and after it, which side they were on, or the precise cause of their deaths. There are a lot of variables and a lot of opinions. I realize there is a lot of propaganda about all that, but I have yet to see your proposition proved through reliable sources.

So let’s turn it around and in another context. If you could have somehow intervened in the Soviet Union, knowing the NKVD would have to be killed to keep them from kiling a million people in the Kolyma in the most horrific ways imaginable, would you refrain from shooting at the NKVD, knowing your failure to do so would mean the torture and death of that innocent million?

If your response is that you would shoot at the NKVD to save the million, then, when it comes to Franco, the only things remaining to be known are how many people really died, who killed them, how they died, at whose hands and why. If those who have researched and studied it don’t know, then I don’t know how you could.

If you’re an absolute pacifist, then you can just say that, and it will suffice as a response.

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

Aren’t you getting close to wearing out your accusation that I want to see people die? Why not let it go? You’ll seem more thoughtful if you do.

If you’re really interested in what Franco did to the Catholic Church in Spain, then why not go out and find some real information on it instead of assuming the decline in religious observance in Spain is somehow different in cause than the nearly identical (sometimes greater) decline in virtually every other European country. There is a gap in your chain of causation, and simply repeating the same conclusion doesn’t fill it.

Franco was involved in a civil war. As awful as civil wars generally are, it is hard to say that none are ever justified, despite and not because of, the casualties. Having looked it up, I see there is no agreement among scholars in the number of people who died in it, before it and after it, which side they were on, or the precise cause of their deaths. There are a lot of variables and a lot of opinions. I realize there is a lot of propaganda about all that, but I have yet to see your proposition proved through reliable sources.

So let’s turn it around and in another context. If you could have somehow intervened in the Soviet Union, knowing the NKVD would have to be killed to keep them from kiling a million people in the Kolyma in the most horrific ways imaginable, would you refrain from shooting at the NKVD, knowing your failure to do so would mean the torture and death of that innocent million?

If your response is that you would shoot at the NKVD to save the million, then, when it comes to Franco, the only things remaining to be known are how many people really died, who killed them, how they died, at whose hands and why. If those who have researched and studied it don’t know, then I don’t know how you could.

If you’re an absolute pacifist, then you can just say that, and it will suffice as a response.

I’m a retired naval officer, and anything but a pacifist. This explains my thorough disgust at your naive endorsement of franco’s murderous practices, which to you seems to be something that exists in a fantasy world, like a role playing game that you think is cool. I don’t believe the fact that they’re still digging murdered bodies out of the graves that franco put them in will ever penetrate your conscience.

So did/does the CC approve of franco?

 

[Rich_Olszewski]

Living under the jackboot of the 3rd Reich, probably.

But we don’t, thanks to the Red Army. The Eastern Front, not Normandy, was where the German Army was destroyed.

Oh, I forgot. Americans are supposed to die by the thousands for Europe, but never criticize her wicked ways.

Millions of Europeans died for America. They are entitled to criticize America’s wicked ways.

 

[Kaninchen]

Living under the jackboot of the 3rd Reich, probably.

Oh, I forgot. Americans are supposed to die by the thousands for Europe, but never criticize her wicked ways.

If a European on CAF talked about the US in the way that many American posters talk about Europe, there would be an avalanche of posts telling the individual concerned of their ignorance of America.

Meanwhile, in all my posts here, you would find no comment on American politics and no comment on American policy and the only criticisms of Americans, as Americans, you’d find would be about how Americans talk about Europe.

I’m a British Tory, I’ve always been Pro-American (even when it was very unfashionable to be so), I’ve lived in the US but, despite all the honour that we owe to the US for what was done in the Second World War and Cold War, there does come a time when one has to mention that some attitudes do rather sound like patronization at a colonialist level.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I’m a retired naval officer, and anything but a pacifist. This explains my thorough disgust at your naive endorsement of franco’s murderous practices, which to you seems to be something that exists in a fantasy world, like a role playing game that you think is cool. I don’t believe the fact that they’re still digging murdered bodies out of the graves that franco put them in will ever penetrate your conscience.

So did/does the CC approve of franco?

Since I did not endorse Franco or his policies, you might have saved your disgust for a more appropriate project. I merely observed that there is a gap in your cause-effect relationship, and that you really don’t know who Franco killed, how or why.

So, would you shoot the NKVD to save the million or not? Since you’re a retired naval officer, and might have fired some shots in anger in your time, perhaps you could answer without undue difficulty.

I doubt the Catholic Church officially “approves” of any state leaders, whatever the various churchmen might think about any of them.

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

… and that you really don’t know who Franco killed, how or why.
…

How about he was a psychotic who killed because he enjoyed killing?

 

[Ridgerunner]

How about he was a psychotic who killed because he enjoyed killing?

Just as persuasive as if I were to assert the same about naval officers. There are, of course, those who think so, but their thinking so doesn’t make them right.

I am not saying I know what was in his mind, or what his motivations were, but neither do you. If he really did enjoy killing, one would think he could have at least eclipsed the record of the Greek Civil War, about whose participants I have yet to hear the same assertions; perhaps even that of the American Civil War, about whose merits on the Union side few dispute but which killed greatly more, both in numbers and as a percentage of the population.

Quite possibly we should regard Franco as the monster some want to think. But those who promote that point of view should have better ways of demonstrating it than to simply shout “fascist” or “psychotic”, as if somehow doing so had meaning. That doesn’t persuade any more than protesters did in yelling “baby killer” at vets returning from Vietnam.

Oh yes, and would you have shot the NKVD officers in order to save the innocent million?

 

[Miel]

General Franco was born in 1892 and he died in 1975. Franco is the man most linked to the army’s victory in the Spanish Civil War.

Franco had been born into a military family. From 1907 to 1910, he was educated at Toledo Infantry Academy and he served in Spanish Morocco from 1910 to 1927. He made a name for himself leading attacks against Moroccan nationalists and in 1927 was promoted to full general and made principal of Saragossa Military Academy.

He stayed out of politics until he was ordered to put down a strike by coal miners in the Asturias. Here, the miners had created a soviet – a word that struck fear into many western Europeans. Franco suppressed the coal strike with efficiency but very ruthlessly. This one incident sealed his reputation for brutality though Franco saw it as he and his army simply carrying out an order to the best of his efficiency.

By 1936, Franco was chief of staff for the military. In July 1936, Franco lead a revolt against the Popular Front. It started in the Canary Islands, where Franco was governor and spread to Morocco where he had made many contacts in the 17 years he was based there.

In October 1936, Franco was appointed generalissimo of Nationalist Spain and head of state. This had the support of all those various factions on the right. In November 1936, Nazi Germany and Fascist Spain recognised Franco as the legitimate ruler of Spain. His government was recognised as legitimate by the French and the British in February 1939. In April 1939, America recognised Franco as head of Spain.

Why did Britain, France and America recognise a man associated with brutality and right wing politics? First, the Nationalists had won the civil war by April 1939 when Madrid surrendered to Franco’s authority, so Franco as leader of Spain was a fait accompli. Second, the Popular Front was seen for right or wrong, as being associated with communism and the fear of this belief was still rampant in Europe. Franco was seen as the better bet of the two.

In 1940, Franco declined Hitler’s request to join the Axis in World War Two.

From 1939 on, Franco was a dictator. His rule was law. Franco’s Spain displayed all the usual characteristics of a right wing dictatorship. All opposition was ruthlessly dealt with; the nation had to endure the activities of a secret police force; all the aspects of politics that would have been taken

for granted in Europe, such as fair elections and political opposition, were not tolerated in Franco’s Spain. In July 1947, a law was passed that made Franco head of state for life.

Opposition did occur. Students protested about a lack of personal freedom. The leaders of the Roman Catholic Church also complained about his dictatorship and Basque separatists were a constant problem.

Despite this, Franco was not a political pariah. In 1955, John Foster Dulles, America’s highly influential Secretary of State, visited him. During the Cold War, Franco was seen as a safe bet against any spread of communism in western Europe.

When he died in November 1975, the monarchy was restored when Prince Juan Carlos became head of state, as Franco had decreed.

The leaders of the Roman Catholic Church also complained about his dictatorship

 

[inocente]

Viva la Muerte!

Assuming you’re not joking, that goes down like a lead balloon in Spain. Read the OP, the Church is suffering because “For four decades, the Church was closely allied with General Franco’s dictatorship”. The BBC and I could both be wrong of course, but people are definitely voting with their feet.

I guess one alternative would be a church of nihilism where nothing matters and no one gets saved but are forced to turn up once a week to make it look good on the Internet. Our nada [nothing] who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues [then] nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. – A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway