Roman Catholic Church 2013: Spanish Civil War 'martyrs' beatified

TwoGallants wrote: »

I would have to agree with the previous poster. 'Fascist' has to be the most over-used word in the English language.

Yet it's very hard to get worked up about it's application to the Spanish Civil War. The Falange remained one of, if not the, largest Nationalist militias and much of its manifesto served as the political base for Franco's coalition. Which isn't to even mention the international context

Now, it can be argued as to where exactly Franco's authoritarian and reactionary regime sat on the far-right axis (no pun intended) but, in this context, that's largely splitting hairs

Fratton Fred wrote:

Have you ever considered angermanagement, or an operation to have that chip removed?

This is a profoundly useless post

robp wrote: »

You can't really define Hitler by the political statements he made. He was an utter populist and many of the themes in his speeches contradict each other hugely. Actions speak larger then words

And it's the actions that I'm talking about: the smashing of the unions and workers' cultural clubs, banning of strikes, fall in real wages, narrowing the applicability of unemployment insurance (and easing the employer's contribution to this), etc

Far from being a rabidly anti-capitalist party, on the assumption of power (and before, via campaign contributions) most large industrialists were happy to accept Nazi rule in exchange for the removal of Weimar restrictions on their power on the factory floor. Or as Kershaw puts it: "Business recovery, high profits, secure private property (apart from that of Jewish businessmen), the crushing of Marxism and the subduing of labour saw big business increasingly content to adjust to full collaboration with the new regime, whatever the irksome bureaucratic controls imposed on it."

In the class divide of late Weimar Germany, there is no question whose side the Nazis took in practice, if not always in propaganda. It wasn't the workers

It is well known that Franco distrusted Hitler. Normal allies don't offer impossible prices. The fact is he didn't enter the war is the bottom line

Unlike Mussolini who was demanding effective control of the Mediterranean and an African empire? Franco made the offer to join; it was Hitler who rejected it. See the bottom of the post for more detail

the competing parties weren't far right at all. Actually they were just centre right and centre left. the establishment, as you write else where.

My language was inaccurate in that it was the general right, not just the 'far right'. The centre and left remained relatively unscathed. Below shows the voting patterns in Weimar, the left on the top and the right on the bottom. Note that the overall left vote remains solid at around 40% (the Centre Party is also resilient but slightly less so), with the Nazi votes coming from former DVP and DNVP voters

(For some reason the graph has the DDP (who were fairly centrist) lumped in with the DVP but even by the early twenties the DDP had become a fringe party of circa 5%)

Snickers Man wrote:

This is not to deny that Franco's dictatorship was a brutal one, although rather less so once the civil war had ended. But don't you think it's a little disingenuous to use a pejorative term which refers to something utterly different to what he was when his own record is bad enough to deserve criticism under a more appropriate description? Like Francoism?

If you call it Francoism then fine, but it sits alongside Italian Fascism or Nazism on the political spectrum

My point is very obviously that Franco's regime was not "something utterly different". It was a brutal dictatorship that was nationalist, authoritarian, reactionary, militarist, anti-communist, run by one party, anti-liberal, anti-intellectual and racist. It policies included the abolition or control of trade unions, irredentism, a cult of personality, mass violence and headed by a fascist party. Please stop me if anything here sounds particularly un-fascist

It's clear that there is no single blueprint for fascism; as I say, this is not a particularly doctrinaire ideology. When you go into detail then there were real differences between Nazism and Italian Fascism as well. But I see no reason why the regime that I've described above should not be considered alongside the fascist regimes of Germany or Italy


(Definitely not fascist)

(And, for the record, far from being "rather less brutal once the civil war had ended", Franco's regime continued to execute people en masse up to the mid-1940s. The bulk of the 200,000 people murdered by his regime (Beevor's estimate) may actually have died after the Civil War had ended)

Doesn't Godwin's Law mean anything to you?

In a discussion about 1930s European fascism? Not particularly

Not revolutionary!!! I suppose the concept of an army of brown-shirted goon squads parading through the streets, beating the crap out of political opponents and demanding a complete overhaul of the financial and administrative apparatus is normal bourgeois parliamentary cut and thrust. The Beer Hall Putsch was a social gathering.
The March on Rome was a stroll in the country.

You seem to have mistaken the terms 'extra-parliamentary' and 'revolutionary'. They are not synonymous

But let's look at them: Hitler was invited into power by Hindenburg. Mussolini was invited into power by Victor Emmanuel. The Winter Palace it was not. The idea that these were revolutionary movements that had seized power - as opposed to the backroom political manoeuvres that they really were - is pure propaganda. If at any point the establishment had chosen not to invite either into the corridors of power (and nobody's hand was ever forced) then both Hitler and Mussolini would have been footnotes of history

Ironically, Franco is the sole member of the trio who actually fought his way into power

Oh yes there was. Not the sort that a student-union leftie would demand, admittedly, but there were quite stark changes. The suspension of elections, the subordination of the civil service to the Nazi party, not to mention the Race Laws (similar in method if with a silghtly different target to those pertaining in the majority of US states at the time) the introduction of standardised greeting forms like "Heil Hitler" (Did Spain have an "Hola Caudillo" greeting? I don't think so) to name but a few of the more obvious ones

So by "student union leftie" you mean 'anyone who knows what a social revolution' is? Look, I'm not going to bother with someone who makes up their own terms. Nothing you described there comprises a social revolution. The question is not 'Did Hitler enact race laws?' but 'Was Hitler revolutionary'?

To paraphrase your question given above: Does it make a lot of difference whether goodies for the working class came from the Strength through Joy movement or through free collective bargaining via an independent trade union?

Yeah, it does. Entirely. What with there being a fundamental difference between trade unions organised by the state to control the working class and weaken their position vis-a-vis employers, and workers collective organising and bargaining to improve their collective position. You can see the difference, right?

And again, the reality is that less "goodies" weren't making their way to the working class. Total public welfare spending in the Reich was no greater in 1936 than it had been in 1930 (approx 1.6b marks). The difference is that now it was being channelled away from unemployment insurance or workers' education programmes towards racial hygiene programmes or other initiatives to improve the genetic stock (with corresponding hardening attitudes towards the those who actually needed welfare, eg the 'work shy'). The apparent expansion of Nazi social welfare was little more than the state amalgamating previously independent charities into more central bodies

The point is, it was a redistribution of SOME wealth into the hands of the workers mediated through the state. Is this left wing or right wing? In a free market economically liberal society such goodies are dispensed (in theory) by companies keen to retain staff and keep their workers happy.

The state getting involved is a sure vestige of left-wing sensibilities.

So what you're suggesting is that both Bismarck and, say, successive US governments have been socialist. That's very a idiosyncratic definition

Yup. It was authoritarian. And collective. And the needs of the Volk were promoted ahead of the needs of the individual. And this is right wing how?

I'm not sure that you've read my post. I wrote, in essence, that the Nazis favouring business over the working class was a sign of anti-worker policies. (I actually wrote quite a lot more but you skimmed over the rest). Implicit in that was the understanding that if it's anti-worker then it's pro-capitalist and therefore right-wing. You've completely ignored that and come back with something entirely irrelevant which in no way addresses my point

Besides, if I really have to explain to you how the elevation of a racial or national group above an individual or class is not right-wing... well, then we've clearly got to dial this back a level and go into some pretty basic political theory

I'm sorry. That's bull****. Usually put about by Basque extremists. Hitler couldn't have cared less who got hold of French North Africa as long as it wasn't the Brits or Americans. And I suspect when the Anglo Saxons came invading during Operation Torch a Spanish army might have put up a sterner defence than the Vichy French did.

Any Spanish ambitions in Africa would have been a very small price to pay for the closing of the straits of Gibraltar. It has always puzzled me as to why Hitler never took such an opportunity to strangle the British in North Africa when he could have done it quite easily or had Franco do it.

The only rational explanations are that Franco realised Spain couldn't afford an extended war after their own Civil War and Hitler regarded North Africa, and indeed the whole fight against Britain, as a sideshow to the real war; which was the one against the Soviet Union. North Africa was always an Italian venture anyway, not a German one.

To be blunt: it's clear that Hitler had a much better grasp on the situation than you do. Your "only rational explanation" completely ignores the two other factors in the diplomatic equation: France and Italy.

Out of the carcass of the Third Republic Hitler had to not only satisfy Mussolini but also the power that actually controlled it: France, which in 1940 was still a more formidable military power than Spain. Laval expected to lose some territory but had Hitler simply signed away N Africa then the French soldiers and sailors that held it would simply have joined DeGaulle and the armistice would have collapsed. Aside from causing headaches in metropolitan France, this would have gifted all of N Africa and naval control of the Mediterranean to the Allies. All for little Spain

The chronology supports this. In mid-June Franco made his first offer. On 4 Oct Hitler meets Mussolini, who presses Italian claims and the importance of avoiding antagonising France. On 20 Oct Hitler meets Laval who stresses his eagerness to collaborate but with the expectation that France will be rewarded with retaining at least some of its colonies. On 24 Oct Hitler meets Franco where he makes clear that he has no intention of signing over the vast colonial territory that the latter is demanding. France was still considered the more important than a basket-case nation with limited military capabilities

But then it's interesting to hear you describe the likes of Ian Kershaw as peddling "bull**** usually put about by Basque extremists" :rolleyes:

robp wrote: »

You are misreading a pretty clear graph. This graph exactly what described. the Nazis party expanded at the expense of a crash of the centre right (DNVP etc) and the centre left (SPD) while extremist parties expanded (NSDAP, KPD) and the centrists maintained steady. The graph shows quite clearly the drop off of support for centre left SPD (18% drop according to this simple graph).

The graph clearly and unmistakeably shows that the SPD's fall was compensated for by the rise in votes for the KPD. The SPD was losing votes to the left, not the right. Taken as a whole, the left-wing of German politics, in federal elections at least, was gathering the same percentage of the vote in 1932 as it had in 1924 (the first federal elections the Nazis contested). There was, in short, no mass exodus of SPD voters to the NSDAP

In contrast, the centre-right DVP and far-right DNVP saw their share of the vote collapse in the face of the Nazi advance. It was from the right-wing constituencies that the Nazis drew their electoral support

Look at these left wing characteristics of the Party.

Nationalization of corporations and industries
Profit-sharing of industry
Expansion of the pension
Government-controlled capitalism instead of the free market.
Pro animal rights
Big Government

Some of these criteria are simply false (there was no mass nationalisation programme, no institutional profit-sharing), others are disingenuous (the Nazis were only slightly more active in economic affairs than the post-war planistes) and others silly (animal rights? big government?). None of these compares with the eradication of the bourgeoisie in Russia or even the Atlee reforms in post-war Britain. None of them aroused the wrath of the German industrialists, who generally supported the regime.

I think that what you, and Snickers Man, have taken some strange political axis that has 'little government' on the right and 'big government' on the left. Which is reductionist in the extreme

And you do this in the face of a regime that was spawned from the far-right Freikorps milieu, was bankrolled by far-right, that was explicitly anti-socialist (including the SPD, trade unions, the Weimar state, etc), held nothing but contempt for the working class ("The broad masses are blind and stupid and don't know what they are doing", he said in 1926) and, in power, set out to break working class institutions and increase the owner of industrialists. This is a man who upheld private property, individual entrepreneurship and economic competition, while despising trade unions and worker interference in industry

Yet you have him as a socialist? Really?

Its almost an academic point if the Nazis party were truly far right or something else, as for image purposes they clearly promoted themselves as pro worker and pro socialist.

This is coming from the person who asserted that "You can't really define Hitler by the political statements he made. He was an utter populist and many of the themes in his speeches contradict each other hugely. Actions speak larger then words"?

And the reality is that the Nazis certainly did not campaign as if they were a workers' party. They hardly would have appealed to the business (big or small) or Junker if they had. The KPD and SPD ran as working class parties, they Nazis made a few token gestures that failed to garner any real working class support. Any actual leanings towards socialism in the NSDAP were extinguished in the mid-1920s