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Comment by eznzt | Hacker News Reader

>All of the leftist factions resisting fascism in Spain were doing something heroic.

Not really. It was not a war between democracy and fascism, it was a war between communism and fascism. The war started when a communist militia killed the democratically elected José Calvo Sotelo after a communist deputy publicly threatened him in the parliament.

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I'm pretty sure that by definition a revenge killing didn't start anything. The fascists had been planning their coup ever since the election they had lost.

The people who overthrew a democratically elected government were the ones who were fighting democracy. That government isn't the one that killed your monarchist martyr.

They did not want to start the war, because they were sure they were going to lose it (they were vastly outnumbered). But they felt forced to do it after that.

A revenge killing for the assassination of a policeman by the Falange [0], which itself was a revenge killing (with a mistaken target) for the shooting of another man, who was shot dead in funeral procession for yet another man who died under unclear circumstances in a spiraling cycle of violence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Castillo_(police_officer)

These were socialists, or anarchists, not communists. grouping them together is an often made mistake.

EDIT actually there were also communists, turns out it was a mixed bag! I stand corrected.

It seems you missed the part where there were anarchist and socialist revolutionaries who had a very different idea of what outcome they envisioned.

Exactly, but leftists can't understand this and they think it was a war between capitalism vs communism. Everything solves by reading.

So maybe read a bit more then. The spanish civil war was a very complex struggle. A bit more complex, than OP you agree with.

I'm Spanish.

So?

I am german. I know people who lived through Hitler and still have no understanding about it all.

If you believe that the spanish civil war was merely "a war between communism and fascism" than I add you to that category of people. I mean, have you ever heard of feudalism, for example?

Well, I have it and I have read the entire story many times. Many family members died thanks to the communists, the house of my grandfather was burn to ashes because he didn't agree with the socialists. My family never liked the fascists too and fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism was all about corporativism. And yes, I know what feudalism was and has nothing to do also with socialism, capitalism.

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