The Myth of the Spanish Civil War

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Chronicles

The Myth of the Spanish Civil War

NOVEMBER 1, 2022 BY STANLEY G. PAYNE

One of the last great leftist myths of the 20^th century is that the Spanish Civil War was a struggle of republican democracy against nationalist fascism. In reality, it was a violent mass-collectivist revolution put down by Spanish moderates and conservatives.

  By the close of the 20^th century, nearly all the great political myths and secular religions of the era had been discredited: anarchism, fascism, National Socialist racism, and Marxism-Leninism. In Europe only one survived in its classic form to undergo a major revival: the Spanish Civil War as a struggle of republican democracy against fascism.

 During the past generation, the Spanish left has, under the old Popular Front banner of “Republican democracy,” tried to project their view of the Spanish Civil War as a sort of new founding myth for Spain, with the goal of either radicalizing the country’s present constitutional monarchy or replacing it with another extremist, Latin American-style republic.

 The Spanish Civil War, better termed the Spanish revolution of 1936-39, was the only violent mass-collectivist revolution of the 20^th century to take place in a Western European country. It failed for various reasons, but first of all because Spanish