Chloe Glover (Reporter)
THE SHOCKING realities of the Spanish Civil War will be laid bare in a new colour TV documentary.
British historian Antony Beever’s Divided Spain: The Civil War in Colour has for the first time in Spain colourised thousands of rolls of films for a feature length broadcast.
The first episode of the three part series, made possible by using thousands of film rolls, will be aired on satellite channel DMAX at 10.30pm.
One of Beever’s aims through it is to engage a new, young audience on the history of the devastating conflict and teach them about the perils of extremism.
He and a 60 strong team spent one and a half years trawling through 90km of film negatives for clips and colourised more than 150,000 frames using modern techniques.
They have been used in an attempt to give an accurate picture of the events that fractured the nation.
Its release coincides with the 80th anniversary of the start of the war proper, which formally began with a military coup against the democratically elected left wing Popular Front.
In an interview with El Pais, Beever said: “One of the reasons for colouring the films is to make them more recognisable to a young generation
For young generations, it is difficult to imagine how the hatred came to the point of ripping the country in two.
“Families broke with brothers going to different sides.
“Documentaries like this can give an idea of how it all occurred.
“It must be a lesson for the future-that democracy can only survive with trust and tolerance between the different sides.
“You can’t have a democracy if you have extremes attacking each other and forcing people towards these extremes.”
Franco was a hero who saved Spain from the fate of Bolshevik Russia.
There’s a very good Grenada TV 6-part documentary, The Spanish Civil War, which interviews many of the participants, on YouTube.
You are right. Modern leftist media and socialist dogma paints Franco as only a tyrannical dictator. Not true. Both sides were equally as guilty of atrocities. For example, the last time I looked burning down churches and murdering nuns and priests was not a worthy cause? This was a battle to preserve traditional Spain vs an anti-God Socialist/Communist takeover. It should also be noted that Franco incredibly kept Spain out of WWII, along with the further death and destruction that would have ensued in Spain and by the Allies. So for all of you who were taught like lemmings to blindly despise Franco, perhaps tens of thousand of your grandfathers survived and are alive today because of him.
And – it’s Springtime for Hitler is’nt it?
Here’s a good summary of the actual reasons why the Spanish Civil War began… both the Socialists/Communists and the Nationalists under Franco were to blame. And both were equally guilty of terrible violence and atrocities.
“http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918-to-1980/the-spanish-civil-war/the-causes-of-the-spanish-civil-war/”
“Saved Spain from Russia”? Then delivered it to fascism, poverty, oppression, murder and imprisonment, ignorance, Nazi bombs, a population frozen in time, strengthened the Catholic death-grip, laid siege to Gibraltar. On and on.
If that is a hero, dread to think of your version of a baddie Arjuna.
Oh dear Arjuna
When you return from planet Zog, give us a call so we can try and repair the damage that exists therein!! Yes, of course, nobody is 100% evil, but under no view of anyone semi-intelligent can Franco be called a hero – even by the standards of his days (as opposed to today’s view).
If indeed, he were such a hero, why was it that he instituted a no-retribution law so that none of his cohorts could be persecuted for any wrong doings during his regime?
Does that sound like the act of a man with a totally clear conscience?
Franco not institued that law. He hoped that his regime will remain unchanged after his death
The tenacity of Franco era fascist corporatism is remarkable. Anselmo’s comments indicate the ‘success’ with which Spain’s non-democratic social and cultural institutions have operated in the century to keep alive toxic spores of fascism. We must always remember that distorted young minds develop from familial and childhood education, and those experiences set the stage for the distorted ahistorical interpretations and propaganda Anselmo and others disseminate. Change will come slowly, but will come.
I am only speaking about an historical fact. I am not saying that it like me or not.
With respect to your ardent diatribe, I only can say that I have read the book that you recommended to me for to understand better the Civil War (Spanish Testament, by Arthur Koestler), and I must say that in my opinion this book is not very objetive. I´ll thank you that you recommended another books and I compromise to try to find , and to read , these as soon as posible.
Violence against someone is for the victim both subjective and objective. What other response could a tortured person have? Koestler and Orwell were there to feel, smell, hear and suffer the Civil War.
All wars are characterized by atrocities from both sides. The Civil War in Spain is no exception. The real tragedy of the Spanish Civil War is its toxic aftermath into todays political culture in Spain. Followers of the left and the right parties are unable to make political compromises, having in mind what their grandfathers have suffered from the grandfathers of their political opponents.
And Franco is not a hero but the winner of a random situation. If not Mr. Bebb, a rented British! Civil Pilot, had carried Franco masked as a “tourist” from Canary Islands to Tetuan, then Francos military coup would have failed in the very beginning. If Major Lapuente, a pro-government officer and nephew of Franco would have been successful for another 12 hours in defending the Tetuan airport against the fashist insurgents, then Franco had failed to take the lead of the insurgents army at Spanish Marocco. If not fashist General Sanjuro had died in an aircraft crash on the first day of the mutiny, then Franco had never become the Spanish fashist leader. If not fashist General Mola died in another aircraft crash, then Franco had not been appointed at the city of Burgos as “caudillo”. If not Goering had persuaded Hitler to support Franco by German aircraft, in order to test German military equipment, then Franco had no chance to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and to win the battle against the Spanish republican forces. In 1936 Hitler had no interest in Spain, as he had to prepare the Berlin Olympic Games and to sack the former German province of Saarland from France as well as to plan the hostile takeover of Czechoslovakia and Austria.
Wolfgang said: “All wars are characterized by atrocities from both sides.” We must not let that particular truth diminished into a single and false notion promulgated by Anselmo and others, who would have us believe that both sides are the same, because they were both violent. That is not true.
The cultural-historical antecedents for wars are found at several levels of analysis: familial and child rearing traditions, theological dogma, political structure and economic practice – to name the obvious.
What is not addressed in Spain, and still overlooked by the many “grandfathers” Wolfgang refers to in Germany and Spain, are the psychologically brutal child pedagogical practices, i.e., child development practices such as discussed at length by Alice Miller in her 1980 book ‘For Your Own Good’, ‘Am Anfang war Erziehung’ in German. Neuroscience now shows that brains are permanently altered by cultural practices, and do not forget the structures that cannot be consciously retrieved. See Bruce E. Wexler’s “Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change”, 2006.
We must still research complex systemic phenomena. When we do, we are left with two fundamental categories: 1. authoritarian and hierarchical religious and political ideologies and their structures; 2. the crucial question as to why individuals, sub-classes, sub-cultures or national traditions are suceptible and labile in the face of non-rational, tyrannical leaders.
The Swiss psychologist, Alice Miller, goes some distance in her cultural analysis of the family and culture which can be readily transposed to fit Spain, UK, US, Middle East, Russia, S America and elsewhere. By means of mass enculturation people are subjected to authoritarian pedagogy and may mindlessly accept it as ‘the correct way things are done’. Lacking competent, supportive education systems and families to challenge those destructive practices, children grow up and, in turn, pass the ignorance and brutality down to subsequent generations.
“having in mind what their grandfathers have suffered from the grandfathers of their political opponents”
I disagree, This is an artificial psyicosis generated since few years with purposes unknown for me.
The Civil War were in many cases literally a war between brothers. In my family, for example, my father fought against the father of my mother and , a brother of my father fought against him.
When the war finished, in less of ten years, all them lived with normality.
Do you believe that after the war “all them lived with normality”? From a scientific standpoint it is not possible for their horrible experiences to have had no effect. The masks they that they wore were a pretense to superficial civility, the same Pact of Forgetting , el pacto del olvido, that underlies the current political violence and dysfunction.
Good post Chas,
teach (indoctrinate) children from the earliest age and you’ve got them for life. My father grew up amid the insane Catholic/Protestant hate in Glasgow. He was a smart lad who saw through it all and it gave him a lifelong contempt for religion. I well remember him telling me about how the Catholic family living next door, poor as they all were, were terrified by the drunken Catholic priest who came round every week demanding money or face purgatory.
The Fascists posting are of course not giving the reasons for the fate of these vile nuns and priests – the priests were mostly paedaphiles and the nuns stole babies from working class women to sell to the childless rich. They only ever supported the rich. If I had been an Anarchist soldier I would have happily fast tracked these #~”¬ on their way to their ‘heaven’. Indeed they should have at the point of death have thanked the Republicans for expediting their passage there.
Whenever I’ve had the opportunity I’ve always asked these con-artists just where is their ‘heaven’ – I’ve never had a straight answer yet.
I cannot believe what Mr. Beevor has implied in equalising the Fascists to the Republicans, and stating that brothers from the same families fought on opposite sides. That is precisely what Franco’s propaganda machine fed the Spaniards for generations, as the excuse to stop people from discussing the war, because it was really bad that ‘brothers had been killing each other’. Right, so we were somehow related to the German Nazi, Italian Fascist, Moroccan soldiers and pilots who massacred our civilian population? Are you serious? This was NOT a civil war. This was a meticulously planned international conspiracy against a democratically elected government, which by the way was NOT communist but socialist. Please stop believing all this Franco propaganda! This was a political-religious genocide. Read Paul Preston’s book, The Spanish Holocaust. The Fascists simply killed more people, and they killed for years after the war had ended… so they do not exactly compare to the crimes committed by certain sectors of the Republican Army! We had babies stolen and sold off throughout the dictatorship, thousands of innocent civilians including schoolteachers were shot because they had dared teaching Spanish children to think by themselves. Please do some reading and you will soon realise how wrong your pro-fascist opinions are!!!!
Internacionalistsa,
an excellent post. It was an international conspiracy just as you said, which would not have been successful without the British and French ruling class. The same propoganda machine has fooled so many today into equating ordinary European citizens who have had enough of the corrupt scum in Brussels as Fascists and racists and sadly there are few on this forum who have sucked up these lies from fear and personal greed – esta la vida.