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The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction QUOTES

The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " The Spanish Civil War began with a military coup. "

― Helen Graham , The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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