Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made

by Richard Rhodes

If destructive technology amplifies violence, constructive technology amplifies compassion, and the lessons of technology are universal.

I thought it wasn’t worth it, I thought no war is worth all this, this misery and this horror. Perhaps no war is, not even that first desperate war against fascism to which the Spanish people were abandoned by the democracies and by the Soviet Union as well, so that of Spain’s 24 million souls, fully half a million died directly, or from hunger and disease, or immediately afterward in Franco’s hundred thousand vindictive executions.

“Our regime,” Franco announced grandly, “is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections.”