Spanish Civil War

[Ridgerunner]

No, it’s not. If you have no assets, then you don’t care who owns the assets.

Imagine a situation where 70% of assets is owned by aristocracy, 30% is owned by the Church, and the populace owns 0%. If communists come around and say we will take assets from aristocracy and church and convert them into schools and cheap rental housing, an average member of the populace has nothing to lose by supporting them, because he has no assets anyway. The only group which has something to lose is the group which has the assets, but this group is a minority.

Communist revolutions were popular revolutions, and they did not happen without a cause.

Communist revolutions are not typically “popular” in the sense of being supported by a majority of the population. It took the Bolsheviks in Russia quite a while to root out the parties that greatly outnumbered them. What communist revolutions really are, are coups by very determined and disciplined elites.

I’m not sure your analysis is correct. Franco’s support was mainly in the countryside. Few of those people owned property. And yet, they supported Franco and many fought and died for his cause.

There is a tremendous imbalance in ownership of assets in the U.S. right now, and while some accuse Obama of being a Marxist revolutionary, the popular will really hasn’t turned to radical asset redistribution. Most people care about income/expense, not assets/liabilities.

I don’t share that point of view, and neither do the Social Encyclicals. But I don’t think asset ownership, in and of itself, was the trigger for the Civil War in Spain. Most city people don’t own much in the way of assets anyway. But when the Depression hit Spain, it was really bad, and perhaps hardest of all on industrial workers. At least country people could raise their own food or depend on the charity of the Church or even landowners whom they knew personally. But if you’re an industrial worker in a city?

The urban centers were where most supporters of the Popular Front came from. And of them, not all were communists. A lot of them, particularly from the Basque region and Catalonia, were really separatists.

 

[Kaninchen]

Ahem, if I may.
A peasant revolution is hardly a communist one, in fact it cannot be as by definition Communist revolutions require a large industrial workers class.

The thing about Spain was that, in some ways, it resembled late Tsarist Russia. There were pockets of rapid industrialization (Barcelona for example) and things might have worked out eventually if there had there been time for the socio-economic structure to move along - given the structure of wealth distribution and political power, that would have been on a time scale approaching glacial.

Rather like Russia there was a history of anarchism, of course, which wasn’t dependent on an industrial proletariat.

 

[Ridgerunner]

The thing about Spain was that, in some ways, it resembled late Tsarist Russia. There were pockets of rapid industrialization (Barcelona for example) and things might have worked out eventually if there had there been time for the socio-economic structure to move along - given the structure of wealth distribution and political power, that would have been on a time scale approaching glacial.

Rather like Russia there was a history of anarchism, of course, which wasn’t dependent on an industrial proletariat.

Severe disruptions in an economy can cause people to become revolutionary. I agree with you that Tsarist Russia might have turned out in time. But the disaster of its participation in WWI caused widespread misery. The Depression in Spain did the same thing. Interestingly, the Depression caused a lot more revolutionary, even Communist, sympathy than we usually read about. I have read that, for example, the red flag flew over some of the country courthouses in Oklahoma; a place that’s a long way from being leftist now. And, too, a significant number of the “elites” in this country went Bolshevik. McCarthy might have thrown too wide a loop in his assertions, but he wasn’t entirely wrong, either, as the Venona disclosures established.

 

[magnumo]

Former mover & shaker in the CPUSA/Communist Party USA, Bella Dodd, inquired about the pacifist-when-convenient CPUSA sending people to fight and die in the Spanish Civil War. The response from her party boss was that, hey, where else could revolutionaries learn to handle weapons? Fast forward to “Fast & Furious” arms trafficking…

 

[weller2]

Ahem, if I may.
A peasant revolution is hardly a communist one, in fact it cannot be as by definition Communist revolutions require a large industrial workers class.

Yes, because peasants often own land.

Anyway, the idea here is that Ridgerunner claimed that a choice between a system where Church owns 30% of assets and one where the state own 100% of assets is clear – the implication being that in the latter scenario the government will also confiscate your assets. I’m pointing out that if you have no assets, then you just don’t care who owns them – in fact you may even welcome the idea of violent redistribution, in hope that you can get a piece of redistributed assets.

A communist revolution is enabled by a particular social structure, i.e. existence of a large class of people with no assets (it usually means urban working class) and a small class of asset holders. It is largely impossible if there is a big middle class.

Since the Catholic Church tends to be a big asset holder, then it also tends to take the side of the upper class (hence Church’s affinity for right-wing regimes – it’s a strategy of self-preservation). So the revolting lower class then sees the Church as an extension of the regime, and proceeds to topple it.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Yes, because peasants often own land.

Anyway, the idea here is that Ridgerunner claimed that a choice between a system where Church owns 30% of assets and one where the state own 100% of assets is clear – the implication being that in the latter scenario the government will also confiscate your assets. I’m pointing out that if you have no assets, then you just don’t care who owns them – in fact you may even welcome the idea of violent redistribution, in hope that you can get a piece of redistributed assets.

A communist revolution is enabled by a particular social structure, i.e. existence of a large class of people with no assets (it usually means urban working class) and a small class of asset holders. It is largely impossible if there is a big middle class.

Since the Catholic Church tends to be a big asset holder, then it also tends to take the side of the upper class (hence Church’s affinity for right-wing regimes – it’s a strategy of self-preservation). So the revolting lower class then sees the Church as an extension of the regime, and proceeds to topple it.

I think you misunderstood my “implication”. What I was saying is that churches were long the source of social aid. For a very long time, people accepted the churches’ ownership of assets because of that role; something they would not have done if they were terribly dissatisfied with the arrangement. The remarkable thing, it seems to me, about the massive church ownership of assets in Russia, for example, is that it went on for centuries and didn’t cause social upheaval and confiscation. That’s because of the charitable role the Orthodox Church (primarily) played there.

The Russian revolution didn’t occur because of that. it occurred because the entire society was in a shambles, the economy was in the dumper and the war was not going well. When the Bolsheviks finally killed off the other revolutionary parties, THEN the confiscations began in earnest. The Orthodox Church was not allowed to distribute charity even when it could. But neither did the Bolsheviks, who used the resources of the country to support their own cadres in relative plenitude (considering the conditions) while the rest of the population starved.

So, if we look at Russia before the revolution when the church owned vast assets, and the situation after it when the state owned everything of significance, the superiority of the former over the latter is obvious.

Solzhenitsyn, I think, put it well. He remarked that it was an acknowledged truism, in pre-revolutionary Russia and elsewhere in Europe that “Nobody ever starves in Russia”, and that was with the Orthodox Church owning massive amounts of land. After the state appropriated 100% of it, 30 million starved to death in the terror famines.

As I previously pointed out, most people don’t own significant assets anyway, (average family net worth in the U.S. is about $86,000) and in an urbanized environment, most don’t even seek them other than to own a house and some consumer goods. Assets or lack thereof don’t cause people to take to the streets. Lack of income or equivalent is what does that.

As I have said before, I do not disparage ownership of assets. Far from it. But ownership of assets, in and of itself, is not what causes violent revolutions.

 

[O_S_C]

youtube.com/watch?v=xQbXO828Vio

Around the time I saw the light of morning
A comradeship of heroes was laid
From every corner of the world came sailing
The Fifth International Brigade.

They came to stand beside the Spanish people
To try and stem the rising fascist tide
Franco’s allies were the powerful and wealthy
Frank Ryan’s men came from the other side.

Even the olives were bleeding
As the battle for Madrid thundered on
Truth and love against the force of evil
Brotherhood against the fascist clan.

Chorus:
Viva la Quinta Brigada,
No Pasaran, the pledge that made them fight
Adelante! was the cry around the hillside
Let us all remember them tonight.

Bob Hilliard was a Church of Ireland pastor
Form Killarney across the Pyrenees he came
From Derry came a brave young Christian Brother
And side by side they fought and died in Spain.

Tommy Woods age seventeen died in Cordoba
With Na Fianna he learned to hold his gun
From Dublin to the Villa del Rio
He fought and died beneath the Spanish sun.

(Chorus)

Many Irishmen heard the call of Franco
Joined Hitler and Mussolini too
Propaganda from the pulpit and newspapers
Helped O’Duffy to enlist his crew.

The call came from Maynooth, “support the facists”
The men of cloth had failed yet again
When the Bishops blessed the Blueshirts in Dun Laoghaire
As they sailed beneath the swastika to Spain.

(Chorus)

This song is a tribute to Frank Ryan
Kit Conway and Dinny Coady too
Peter Daly, Charlie Regan and Hugh Bonar
Though many died I can but name a few.

Danny Boyle, Blaser-Brown and Charlie Donnelly
Liam Tumilson and Jim Straney from the Falls
Jack Nalty, Tommy Patton and Frank Conroy
Jim Foley, Tony Fox and Dick O’Neill.

 

[JimG]

In 2013 the Vatican beatified over 500 martyrs of the Faith who were killed during the Spanish Civil War.

I’m not knowledgeable on the subject, but it seems to me that a perusal of Warren Carrol’s book “The Last Crusade: Spain 1936” might bring some needed balance to common leftist viewpoints.

 

[VeritasLuxMea]

Catholicism has always had a problem with liberalism, not just revolutionary leftism, and that includes classical liberalism, libertarianism and even some of modern conservatism.

So, yes, the Church did support the condemnation of liberals, even though they weren’t leftist revolutionaries per se, because they are also opposed to the influence of the Church, socially and religiously.

This is my stance on this, as you can see, heavily biased, but I hope it helps.

Benedicat Deus,
Latinitas

I don’t want to put words in your mouth here. Are you suggesting that the Church opposes self-government/democracy/republican forms of government?

 

[manualman]

I’ve been thinking about this issue after hearing a call on Catholic Answers Live. What should be the attitude of Catholics about the Spanish Civil War?

The biggest lesson catholics should have learned is NEVER to fall for the fallacy that the enemy of our enemy is necessarily our friend. Easier said than done. It’s perhaps necessary to make common cause with other foes of those who hate us, but that’s no excuse for conflating their identity with ours.

Had catholics in America learned this lesson better after the Spanish civil war we wouldn’t have had a virtual takeover of catholic institutions by people whose primary ideology was the Democratic party after WWII. And we’d be better able to hold the more offensive planks of the Republican party further from our noses today too.

The lesson is that the faith comes FIRST, even when it hurts.

 

[Cojuanco]

The biggest lesson catholics should have learned is NEVER to fall for the fallacy that the enemy of our enemy is necessarily our friend. Easier said than done. It’s perhaps necessary to make common cause with other foes of those who hate us, but that’s no excuse for conflating their identity with ours.

Had catholics in America learned this lesson better after the Spanish civil war we wouldn’t have had a virtual takeover of catholic institutions by people whose primary ideology was the Democratic party after WWII. And we’d be better able to hold the more offensive planks of the Republican party further from our noses today too.

The lesson is that the faith comes FIRST, even when it hurts.

This.

Also, I would note that the Holy See only recognized the Nationalists as the legitimate government of Spain pretty much when it was pretty obvious they were going to win the war and there was no way the Republic would bounce back. Also, many of the anticlerical laws of the Republic were kept by Franco for years (not all, of course). So while certainly many churchmen in Spain supported Franco, the support was not rock solid from the Holy See.