The Spanish Civil War Quotes

“The past is another country. But doing history is, by definition, an unending dialogue between the present and the past. Much of what was at stake in Spain remains in present-day dilemmas at whose heart lie issues of race, religion, gender, and other forms of culture war that challenge us not to resort to political or other types of violence. In short, as this book’s epigraph exhorts, we should not mythologize our fears and turn them as weapons on those who are different. The Spanish Civil War and all the other civil wars of Europe’s mid-20th century were configured in great part by this mythologizing of fear, by a hatred of difference. The greatest challenge of the 21st century is, then, not to do this.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“But Spain in the immediate post-war period remained a place of frighteningly separate social worlds. Alongside savage poverty and widespread terror, there existed other milieux of ease, security, and order regained. As Republican women were shaved and dosed with castor oil by the ‘victors’ of their villages, or transported with their children across Spain in cattletrucks, or raped in police stations, women of the southern landed aristocracy or from affluent provincial middle-class families in Spain’s conservative heartland celebrated the redemption of their private family sphere and revelled in the upsurge of public Catholic ceremonial. As one woman who had been close to the conservative Catholic party, CEDA, commented resonantly many decades later: there was an absence of freedom, but logically for those of us who had well-ordered lives, those of us who were professionals and saw things from the personal viewpoint only, we felt very much at ease and happy.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“What is demonstrably the case is that Franco did Hitler the colossal service of altering the European balance of power in favour of the German-Italian Axis, while Spanish Republican resistance, achieved for nearly three years in the teeth of British policy, actively delayed other forms of Nazi aggression in Europe and, in so doing, made Britain itself a priceless gift of time to re-arm.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“So we see the complex and contradictory motives that so often lay behind the apparently binary choices made by people in the wake of the rebellion. Indeed, this enforced reductiveness, the obligation to ‘take sides’, constitutes the coup’s first, and most enduring, act of violence.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“The 1930s in Spain saw the development of a series of culture wars that would play out during the years of the Civil War itself. As in all culture wars, the way people mythologized their fears generated violence.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“The challenges that beset Spain’s new democracy in the 1930s were complex and deep-rooted and thus not susceptible to rapid resolution. In so far as the Republic can be said to have ‘failed’ (another historiographical commonplace), then its failure was a quite specific one: it proved unable to prevent sectors of the officer corps from making a coup. It is not the business of historians to engage in counterfactual speculation, but one could argue that what established the preconditions for a successful coup attempt was not Spain’s deep tensions, but republican-socialist failure to implement key policy reforms in 1931–3: most crucially, perhaps, the failure to demilitarize public order. But, as historians also know, the benefit of hindsight is really only the dangerous illusion of twenty-twenty vision.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“Polemics about secularization are very much still alive in politically liberal and culturally diverse Western societies of the 21st century, yet few would suggest that their basic constitutional credentials are negated thereby. Not ‘liberalism’ nor ‘constitutionalism’ nor ‘democracy’ are free-floating concepts; all have to be understood and interrogated in specific historical contexts. Conservative Catholics in 1930s Spain were outraged that their beliefs and practices were being constrained, but they themselves entertained no concept of civil and cultural rights within the Spanish state for those professing other religions, still less for freethinkers or atheists.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“The absence of a functioning police force or judiciary in Republican territory in the first weeks after the coup, plus the de facto amnesties that saw gaols empty, made it possible for all manner of personal scores to be settled and acts of outright criminality to be pursued in the guise of revolutionary justice.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“For urban and rural workers, and for the poor more generally in Spain, the state still had overwhelmingly negative connotations: military conscription, indirect taxation, and everyday persecution — particularly for the unionized. Thus for many Spanish workers, resistance to the military rebels was initially also directed ‘against the state’ and was bound up with the building of a new social and political order, often on radical anti-capitalist economic lines (money was frequently abolished).”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“From the start, the Left was handicapped by the great ideological differences between its constituent parts. Widest of all was the gap between the parliamentary socialist movement and the anti-parliamentary anarcho-syndicalist CNT. These differences were not a matter of voluntarism or sheer bloody-mindedness, as the standard historical narrative so often implies. Rather, their irreducibility was a result of the vastly different political, economic, and cultural experiences of the Left’s social constituencies in what was a highly unevenly developed country. For example, the direct political action favoured by many anarcho-syndicalists instantly recommended itself to the unskilled and the landless poor, whose lack of bargaining power and social defencelessness made socialist promises of gradual change through the ballot box seem immensely improbable, if not downright incredible.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“The loss of empire deprived Spain’s over-large officer corps, which had been inherited from the continuous wars of the 19th century, of any meaningful external defensive role. In so doing, imperial defeat turned the military into a powerful internal political lobby determined to find a new role while guarding against any loss of income or prestige in the interim.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“Notwithstanding the currency of ideas about ‘two Spains’ ready to confront each other on 18 July 1936, ‘us’ and ‘them’ were categories actively made by the violent experience of the war and did not fully exist prior to it.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“The Spanish Civil War began with a military coup.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

“The Spanish Civil War was the first fought in Europe in which civilians became targets en masse, through bombing raids on big cities.”
― Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction