In the introduction to the third revision of what was once called A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War – it’s no longer said to be concise – Paul Preston points out that this prelude to the Second World War has generated as many books as the Second World War itself. During the Cold War, with the CIA busy collaborating with anarchists and Trotskyists to try to obscure ‘the fact that Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Chamberlain were responsible for the Nationalist victory, not Stalin’, it made sense that foreigners continued to fight the war out in print. The unabated rehearsal of the conflict since then is harder to account for. Preston suggests various reasons: the sheer length of time that Franco remained in power, along with the tolerance of his regime by democratic governments; the parallels between what happened in Spain and national liberation struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua; and the hope that in the Spanish experience we might find ‘the idealism and sacrifice so singularly absent from modern politics’.

LRB 21 February 2013 | PDF Download