Faction: With the Crusaders - Authors' Note
Many years ago, when I began to write my first novel Faction, I somewhat casually decided that the Shea family patriarch, Josef, would be a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. At the time my knowledge of that conflict was limited to a handful of English-language sources: Orwell, the BBC documentary series, a long ago read general history or two plus impressions gleaned from later anarchist writers I’d read while an edgy teen. I began research for Faction: With the Crusaders in 2019 and devoured as much material on the subject as I could find, beginning with the better-known English language sources, then worked through their bibliographies wherever possible, which led to Spanish language sources. Thanks to the timely re-release of Peter Kemp’s Mine Were of Trouble, a lock turned and the great door swung open, tearing away accumulated dust and cobwebs to reveal a bright vista – characters with whom I could make the emotional connection necessary to write a story worth reading.
An extensive Bibliography in this Appendix attests to the sheer volume of source material pored over so that I could tell this story as accurately as possible. As I am not a Spaniard and have no personal connections to Spain other than having visited and fallen in love with that nation many years ago, I can only write this story from the point of view of a provincial American who learns about Spain along with the reader. Any mistakes are my own, though some very small details I just made up because I felt like it.
It has been said by men wiser than I that one cannot understand reality if one’s first principles are incorrect. The Spanish Civil War was not “a prelude to the Second World War” centered upon Funny Moustache Man or “portrayed accurately by an already-completed painting” renamed after a historical bombing campaign against an urban area only a few years before that practice became normalized by the entire world. The Spanish Civil War was a conflagration wherein a great nation, forged of oft disparate components around Christ and the reconquest of their lands from the Moors, rose to a global empire over centuries then tore itself apart after a series of invasions, regional wars, political struggles and colonial uprisings led to that empire’s collapse. Its national institutions, sotted and decrepit, liberalized, along with the rest of the world, then went to war with its ancient traditions; that liberal central authority intermittently constrained or encouraged new, radical, often foreign ideologies fueled by rapid urbanization and what some assert was a pre-medieval, others say Moorish, strain of class relations lacking the ancient noblesse oblige found in the more harmonious north. Two discordant definitions of tradition, the latter appalling for all but the upper classes it immediately benefitted, the former embraced from top to bottom by a plurality of those lands as preferable to liberal democracy.
To use extreme shorthand: in the Anglosphere we have been taught that the Magna Carta, the Great Charter of rights and privileges signed under duress by King John of England in 1215, is the basis of English common law, and was created because that king from Robin Hood was a big jerk. In reality, the Magna Carta was simply one in a series of charters defining the relationship between the English King, Church, nobles and commoners as codified in rights and privileges which predated the Norman invasion of 1066. Similar charters existed all over western Europe in various forms; the Visigothic laws, for example, were committed to velum, based upon older oral laws, in the late 5th century Anno Domini. Spain’s Fueros, whether Basque, Navarrese, Aragonese or Catalan, had similar provenance; though each individual legal code was drafted for a specific reason at a specific time, “hubo antes leyes que reyes;” there were laws before kings. This, somewhat confusingly for ideologitards, was the primary driver of Basque support for the Republic – they and the Catalan had been promised a return to a degree of autonomy as exercised before the centralization of authority under Queen Isabella’s Constitutional monarchy in 1839. 19th Century Rule By Centralized Libtardism birthed the Carlist movement: while the movement was named for Infante Carlos, Count of Molina, who objected to The Ol’ Succession Switcheroo which placed Isabella on the throne in his stead, rank and file Carlists were simply traditionalist Catholics who preferred the old deal – rights and privileges for each class, with the ability to appeal to the Church, against the central authority as codified in their various local Fueros. Indeed, the Carlists and other traditionalists understood the Succession Switcheroo as merely an expression of the typically covert behavior of liberal democracy, wherein the usual suspects impose their own laws and morality upon the people without the checks and balances of rights, privileges and institutions which protect individuals and families. As the Carlists had been fighting the central government, on and off, since 1833, steeled by their experience in Napoleon’s Peninsular War, and had reinvigorated their paramilitary organization in the early 1930s, they were able to mobilize tens of thousands of fighters in their territories and, in a historic irony, fuse their Requeté militias to the rebel army’s Navarre Brigades. The future belongs to those who show up. For more information about the Carlist Requetés, see the article “The Right Prepares for War: The Carlist Requetés” in the Appendix.
Spain’s liberal constitutional monarchy convulsed its way through several decades until the First Spanish Republic was announced in 1873, by which point Spain had hemorrhaged most of its overseas empire. In the span of eleven months, the Republic had four presidents; it was overthrown in a coup d’état January 3, 1874 and ruled via dictatorship until the Restoration of Alfonso XII began in December. The Restoration regime, under siege by a diverse set of Republican, regionalist, socialist and anarchist factions, was overthrown in a coup d’état by Miguel Primo de Rivera – with the approval of King Alfonso XIII! – in 1923. Republican forces, across a wide variety of factions, kept up their agitation and Primo de Rivera resigned in 1930. On April 14, 1931, after Republicans won landslide victories in municipal elections considered a plebiscite on the monarchy, Alfonso XIII abdicated the throne, quit Spain, and the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) was proclaimed. The Republic imposed a social revolution upon Spain, most egregiously the nationalization of Church properties, imposition of rent for use of “formerly” Church buildings, the banning of public manifestations of religion – Christianity in general, Catholicism in particular – such as processions on the many feast days, removal of the crucifix from all schools, and the banning of monks and nuns from teaching; at the time, in the majority of the country, nearly every primary school was administered by the Catholic Church. Almost immediately, leftist mobs began burning churches, convents and religious schools. The right complained that the Republic, particularly the Guardia de Asalto (“Assault Guards,” a national urban police force), ignored such crimes and attacked rightists engaged in community defense. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1932 put a 23 hectare cap on land which landowners would be “permitted” to keep, with anything above available for purchase by the government for distribution to peasants. The stated intent was to address the real problem of vast estates, primarily in southern Spain, known as Latifundia, based upon slave labor under the Romans, a tradition that carried on under the Moors and remained quite exploitative post-Reconquista. The agrarian reforms weren’t entirely malicious – social justice-oriented rightists such as the Carlists and Falangists generally supported such reforms, if conducted according to their own preferences – but the Republic’s implementation was largely anticlerical as well as arbitrary. The government lacked the means to carry out the “reforms” in a coherent fashion which failed to satisfy the left while outraging powerful people on the right. Soon after General José Sanjurjo, figurehead of the Carlist faction, attempted a coup, successful in Seville but a dismal failure in Madrid and elsewhere; he claimed to only be rebelling against the ministry then in power, not against the Republic. He was sentenced to death, soon downgraded to life in prison, then granted amnesty and exiled to Portugal, where he cooled his heels awaiting the next coup attempt.
The fundamental challenge to the integrity of the Republic was that a plurality, or possibly a majority, of its public supporters were only using it as a means to an end, and they never intended to deal with other Spanish citizens in good faith. Parliamentary systems, as a feature, anoint the largest plurality in the body with control of the government, which requires the creation of broader coalitions to actually govern. After the excesses of the Republic’s social revolution, as well as increasing street violence in general and arsons against churches in particular, the 1933 general elections saw the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), or the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, a group of various conservative, primarily Catholic nationalists, take power; the majority of their party wished to do away with the parliament in general and Republican government in particular. This was not a peculiarity “of the right;” a general strike and “workers’ uprisings” in Asturias, supported by communists, anarchists and other -ists, suppressed by the Republic’s Guardia Civil (Civil Guard, a national rural police and border force), Guardia de Asalto and army, led the left to follow the Communist International’s Popular Front strategy and to unite their disparate factions into a single voting bloc for the 1936 legislative elections. The Catalan and Basque separatists, the anarchist CNT, flavors of Trotskyist (POUM) and Bolshevik communists (PCE), and the various left-republican parties, reinforced by ballot stuffing and other forms of well-documented electoral fraud, were swept into power. Next door, in France, a Popular Front bloc under Leon Blum, consisting of republican, socialist and communist parties, was similarly “elected.” The right smelled a rat.
The average Anglophone in The Current Year Plus Whatever is largely unaware of the tempo of communist revolutions in Europe between 1917 and 1923, or the extent of Europe’s 19th century proto-Marxist uprisings, agitated by the ancestors of the later Bolsheviks and Trotskyites; the Spanish of 1936 were well aware of these revolutions and the perpetrators’ rhetoric and tactics, particularly the apocalyptic destruction of the Russian people and Orthodox Christianity in the then-Soviet Union. Reds rose in, or marched into, Finland, Germany (Bavaria was a socialist/soviet republic under Eisner, Hoffmann and Toller for a year before being overthrown by the Freikorps), Italy, Hungary (where the Garbai/Kun government conducted a Red Terror for five months), Romania, Poland and Bulgaria.
The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, or National Confederation of Labor (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist labor union, declined to participate in the Popular Front or to support other parties’ candidates, although they continued to participate in strikes, “mostly peaceful” protests, anticlerical activity and assassinations of rightists, particularly members of the Falange. The most organized left paramilitary organization was the CNT-FAI, the union’s covert radical organization Federación Anarquista Ibérica, or Iberian Anarchist Federation, militarized after the failure of the 1934 uprisings; for more information about their organization, see the Appendix for the article “The Left Prepares for War: The CNT-FAI Defense Cadre Operating Concept.”
A third position, expressed in Spain as Falangismo, led by the son of Spain’s former dictator José Antonio Primo de Rivera, sought to reconcile Spanish tradition and Catholicism with the very real class issues found in many urban centers and the southern agricultural regions via a form of national syndicalism. The Falange, or Spanish Phalanx, were both anti-communist and anti-capitalist, and sought the nationalization of some industries such as banking and public services. Not revolution, but poverty alleviation and the end of class struggle to neutralize the potential influence of foreign Bolsheviks; not a return to empire, but the rebirth of Spanish cultural power and influence, particularly at home, then possibly also in Latin America. The Falange was not a “popular political party” before the war but rose to prominence in its first months, as they had prepared for the war through military organization and enthusiastic street fighting. When the war began, they had a parallel institution ready to go; one could join the Falange in most parts of the country and thus they grew explosively, from a few thousand “Old Shirts” to hundreds of thousands. While “fascist” has come to mean “The Bad Guys, derp” in the post-1945 Anglosphere, the Falange genuinely sought to uplift the poor, reconcile class conflicts and unite the people of the Spanish nation. In the chaos of late 1936 the commander of the Falange, Manuel Hedilla, urged his men to prevent persecution of workers and the poor who had simply voted for the left. In his own words, “there were – and are – right-wingers who are worse than the Reds.”
All of these various factions were forced to pick a side when rightist military officers attempted yet another coup on July 17, 1936, after a series of murderous escalations between left and right wing political parties and government officials, topped by the arrest and execution of prominent conservative parliamentarian José Calvo Sotelo on July 13th. Two days prior, parliamentarian Dolores Ibárruri, an avowed Stalinist known as La Pasionaria, famous for coining several memes during the war, is said to have exclaimed to Calvo Sotelo while he spoke at the podium in the Cortes, “This is your last speech!” Calvo Sotelo was an elected, mainstream right politician turned anti-Republican, though he was indeed allied with the coup plotters; his murder secured General Francisco Franco’s support for the Nationalist faction. And, thus, the war began, a story I tell from the perspective of Josef Shea, the adventure-seeking American youth hand-picked by forces he cannot understand.
All Biblical references in Faction: With the Crusaders are based upon the Douay-Rheims Latin Vulgate 1899 American Edition. Recall that Biblical chapter and verse were introduced in the second millennia AD; Latin Vulgate chapter divisions differ in places from those of Reform translations, which stands out in the Psalms; for example, Psalm 23, so lyrically rendered in the King James Version, is ever so slightly different here as Psalm 22.
Acknowledgements:
Nugger for the American Dreamtime.
My eternal thanks to Morghur for his assistance with Iberian Spanish slang and colloquialisms, as well as his essays describing Spanish political machinations in the lead-up to the Civil War not available in English language source material.
“I am the terror that stalks this forest” paraphrases an expression in Clay Martin’s outstanding novel The Wrath of the Wendigo.
My proofreaders and editors – you know who you are.
And finally, support the TND Party – for a Totally New Direction!