Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War: A Dossier (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War: A Dossier (2014)

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30 pointsrrnechmech4 comments

Delighted to see this here. As the editor mentions, there was also a separate effort to collect opinions from American authors, including Sherwood Anderson, Pearl Buck, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and many others. The text for that is online too--"Writers take sides: letters about the war in Spain from 418 American authors": https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/648/

My strongest recommendation for "Homage to Catalonia", Orwell's book about his involvement in the Spanish Civil war. It's not a history, it's just the story of what happened to him. This is before he wrote Animal Farm or 1984. But you can see how his views were formed.

I also enjoyed Homage to Catalonia when I read it years ago. More recently I read Richard Rhodes's Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made. Although I always rate finished books on Goodreads I rarely review them; this was an exception.

>* spoiler alert * What a disappointing book. It made me question the veracity of Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, both of which I enjoyed and accepted as reliable histories of those events.

>Taken at face value, the Spanish Civil War (according to Rhodes's book) was fought with Franco as the only actual Spanish nationalist. He commanded hordes of bloodthirsty Moroccan mercenaries, and uncountable German and Italian troops, but not a single other Spaniard.

>For, according to Rhodes, the entirety of Spain's cities, the countryside, the fresh-faced young men, the pretty chicas, the fathers, the mothers, were 99.44% for the republic. Which, of course, was not at all Communist (despite proclaiming itself, even in the 13-point proposal for a diplomatic solution it generously issues in 1938, as a "People's Republic"). The USSR backed the Spanish Republic for un-democratic reasons, Rhodes allows, but got out early so of course had no control over or influence on the Republic, you see.

>Again, taken at face value, the reader is left with many questions. Why, exactly, is Dos Passos upset as he leaves Spain and the war? What is POUM, the organization that appears out of nowhere to threaten Orwell and his wife's lives at the end of their stay in the country? If every Spaniard is for the Republic, and the Republic is constantly winning the tough battles with the help of the plucky democracy-loving foreign volunteers, why is the Republic always losing ground? And what about the Republican forces' murders of priest and nuns, and its own terror bombings against civilians, each of which Rhodes mentions exactly once in his book before quickly assuring readers that such only happened very early in the war? (After all, since according to the author all Spaniards barring Franco and the occasional fifth columnist were for the Republic, there couldn't have been any civilians for the Republic to terrorize.)

>I only give two stars because of the many interesting personal accounts Rhodes relates. I am surely not the only reader who followed Patience Darton's story only to be saddened, not just by her widowhood (which, admittedly, felt inevitable) but how she voluntarily ended up in the "People's Republic of" China in the late 1950s. Her time in Spain apparently hadn't taught Ms. Darton anything about totalitarian dictatorships ... or taught her too much. I'm not sure what's worse.

The war was such a defining moment for all sorts of fascinating people. Thanks for the opportunity to learn more.

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