Eighty-five years ago today, Francisco Franco declared victory in the Spanish Civil War. In an interview, historian Paul Preston tells Jacobin about the decisive role that Franco’s sympathizers in the British government played in crushing Spanish democracy.

meow-floppy

interesting if short interview

  • Pluto [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    8 months ago

    Excerpt:

    Yes, there was an extraordinary contradiction here between the rhetoric of how “great” Britain was — Britannia rules the waves — with the cowardly abdication of the role of the Royal Navy. Not that there was complete unanimity in the Conservative parliamentary party or the cabinet. MPs demanded reprisals [the following year] when you had British merchant shipping being bombed in Barcelona by German and Italian aircraft flying under Spanish rebel colors.

    Yet Neville Chamberlain’s response was to say that that would not be appropriate. Instead, he wanted the government to send Franco a message insisting that “if he must bomb the Spanish government’s ports, he must use discretion.” To this day, I am flabbergasted by this. He was basically conniving in the starvation of Barcelona, as he had done the previous year with the population of Bilbao. But I have to say that the level of debate in the House of Commons around the blockade of Bilbao — the interventions from Labour and Clement Attlee — were quite extraordinary. They skewered the Tories and exposed their hypocrisy.