Madam, - Jane Walker's recent report on the possible exhumation of Garcia Lorca and other Spanish Civil War victims was, I don't doubt, timely and well intentioned (World News, September 29th). At the same time, it repeated various myths which were widely believed 50 or 60 years ago but should no longer have any currency, now that respected historians such as Hugh Thomas have given us a much more objective view of the period.
To begin with, Ms Walker more or less states that General Franco headed the 1936 rising. He didn't, in fact: Franco entered the army plot quite late and rather reluctantly. The original leaders were two other generals, Mola and Sanjurjo, of whom Mola was a disillusioned republican and Sanjurjo a monarchist. None of the three had anything to do with the brutal killing of Lorca, who was no political activist and seems to have been denounced on largely personal grounds.
She also says: "By a conservative estimate, some 60,000 nationalists were killed by republican forces." I assume she means 60,000 civilians, since the overall toll of the war, counting both sides, was well over half-a-million. Many of these civilians, in fact, were not politically minded but were killed to settle personal scores, or simply because they belonged to the upper and middle classes, or owned shops and businesses.
During the early years of the republic, anarcho-syndicalist gangs in lorries regularly raided towns and villages, executing people in whole groups and often quite at random. The Madrid government did little to check them, and ugly, bloody counter-revolution could have been anticipated well before it came.
The article quotes Emilio Silva as accusing the Catholic Church in Spain of trying to suppress memories of its "sinister role" in the Civil War. To my knowledge, leading churchmen such as Cardinal Segura were not privy to the army plot, which seemingly was known to few people outside the officer class and some politicians and shadowy figures of the right. However, it would have been strange for the clergy to remain loyal to a regime which had often stated its intention of more or less extirpating Catholicism in Spain (vide the speeches of Manuel Azaña, head of the first republican government and later president). Under the Popular Front, churches were vandalised or burnt by the hundred, many religious works of art (including a Titian painting) were destroyed, valuable old libraries were burnt and convents desecrated. Most of this, again, was the work of the anarchists whose prophet was Bakunin, not Marx. Several thousand priests died violently during or immediately before the civil war. Many of them, no doubt, were vocal right-wing supporters or even reactionary bigots, but almost all of them were unarmed men.
It seems to me that, on the whole, the ill-fated Second Republic has had a much better press than it deserves. The time-honoured scenario of power-hungry fascists against progressive-minded democrats should by now have been shelved for good. Good intentions are not enough in politics, and with a handful of exceptions such as Juan Negrín, the Republican leaders were a mediocre, blinkered lot - particularly in the economic field. (Their opposite numbers in the Cortes were not impressive either; the centre parties soon faded out, the right became virtually leaderless, and the Radicals under Alexander Lerroux - for a while prime minister - were ruined by financial scandals.)
As one ephemeral coalition succeeded another, and the various groups on the far left - Anarchists, Communists and Trotskyists - fought their own private war, Spain inexorably descended into a condition bordering on anarchy. The final nail in the coffin of the Republic was probably the assassination of Calvo Sotelo, leader of the opposition, by leftist military police who went virtually unpunished. After that, a rapid slide into civil war was all too predictable . - Yours, etc,
BRIAN FALLON,
Manor Kilbride,
Co Wicklow.