@Martin
Novels are excellent and often more insightful than what paid hacks and party flacks will write.
In any case, journalists do describe the anarchists as violent.Even anarchists admit it:
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/spain/durruti.html
“Here the anarchists, ‘socialists’, Stalinists and the neo-Trotskyists worked together. Moreover, many of the workers attacked their old enemy, the Catholic Church, and convents and some churches were burned down; a few nuns said they had been raped and the Bishop’s Palace and much of the University of Oviedo was destroyed. Several unpopular priests were shot.”
Is Hugh Thomas a good enough expert for you? Read his account.
Having been caught out on the facts, Martin tried to rephrase:
Even Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, mentions the violence visited upon the clergy class at the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. I was not denying that historical event, only questioning the usefulness of using a work of fiction to analyse the complex interplay between less than tight-knit groups orchestrating a revolution. As John Howard (above) notes, religion is, or rather, can be the handmaiden of tyranny. While it’s certainly not justifiable, I can understand the anarchists, and other revolutionaries, at the time punishing the clergy-class after their stalwart defence (aided by Rome, no doubt) of the monarchy and the coup–that is to say, the dictator Franco.
To this vague folderol, I again came back with specifics:
Lila Rajiva May 22, 2014 at 5:04 PM
@Wrong again?
Authoritarianism (not the same as authority) is greatly to be preferred to totalitarianism and has historically been a bulwark against it
Will Grigg:http://www.advancedchristianity.com/pages/mpc/docs/francisco_franco.pdf
Philip MartinMay 22, 2014 at 6:00 PM
It’s difficult to comment on this sort of stupidity. Please talk to a Catalan about Franco before you continue passing off shit articles–based solely in religious hocus pocus–about how he saved anyone. Calling Franco a savior is a new, lower, level of idiocy.
The two posts in which I rebutted Martin were not published (as of posting).
But from memory, let me recap what I said.
I argued the following:
1. I hadn’t called Franco a savior. Martin had.
2. I knew many Spaniards and they all felt the same way about Franco.
3. I had used logic and evidence to present my case and had been met with ad hominem, proving BM’s point.
I then cited more sources, including this one:
http://www.tcr.org/tcr/essays/EPrize_Franco.pdf
Right. Anarchists are tools. Same as “socialists, Stalinists and the neo-Trotskyists [who] worked together. Moreover, many of the workers attacked their old enemy, the Catholic Church, and convents and some churches were burned down; a few nuns said they had been raped and the Bishop’s Palace and much of the University of Oviedo was destroyed. Several unpopular priests were shot.”
Should we mention what the leaders of these ‘movements’ all had in common? And also the Nationalists and ESPECIALLY the people who funded them from the begining and everything that came after?
Or do we have to continue to pretend we’re discussing ANYTHING of relevance when these very same people are playing exactly the same game in Syria, Ukraine and dozens of of other countries? Let’s everybody get serious. These megalomaniacal monsters are responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people over just the last several years. Subscribing to their manufactured reality does nothing but enable them.
These people — all of them, need to be convicted for their crimes against humanity according to their own rules, full stop.