i still barely have a clue about Fascism in Spain.

but i notice that he was installed, as a replacement to a democratically elected left-wing government.

which sounds, terribly, horribly, familiar.

[ 03 November 2007: Message edited by: Pride for Red Dolores ]

[ 03 November 2007: Message edited by: Pride for Red Dolores ]

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Originally posted by Pride for Red Dolores:
actually, they actively suported him with the onset of the cold war because he wasn't a communist.

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The us was interested in Spain as a military base primarily, they cared little about anything else. It doens't excuse the fact that they supported a fascist government, similarly to what they did in south america on a greater scales from the 19th century.
[ 03 November 2007: Message edited by: Pride for Red Dolores ]

[ 03 November 2007: Message edited by: Pride for Red Dolores ]

[ 03 November 2007: Message edited by: contrarianna ]

The fact remains that a line was drawn at NATO membership, which was held out as a carrot for Spanish reforms (though on the other hand the Portuguese were admitted decades earlier, and were just as bad).

[ 03 November 2007: Message edited by: contrarianna ]

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Originally posted by Free_Radical:

It might not be a whole lot in comparison to the otherwise positive relations that existed between Spain and the west, but there it is.

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Free_Radical: On the other hand, the restoration of democracy was held as a precondition for Spanish membership in NATO - which did not come until 1982 - and closer relations with the western allies.

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Who knows what you mean by "western" when countries to the east of Spain were in NATO. I presume it's a euphemism for "capitalist" but you can correct me if you mean something else.

In any case, I don't see the point of requiring Spain to be a democracy as a condition of NATO membership when Greece was allowed to continue to be a member after the coup d'etat and the Régime of the Colonels (1967-1974). And I'm not even mentioning Turkey here. That's a pretty loose interpretation of "democracy" to include those countries, as well as Portugal up to 1975, as such.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
I'm sorry, but few of us here can find anything positive about the fact that Britain, France and the U.S. stood idly by while Spanish democracy was overthrown by Franco with the aid of fascist countries and corporate America alike in the 1930's.

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Originally posted by Free_Radical:

In response to the fighting in Spain, the League of Nations (the forerunner to the United Nations) passed a resolution banning other countries from interfering in this internal Spanish conflict.

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And they didn't just stand idley by while fascists overthrew Spain's democracy, Conservatives in the west made it illegal for workers to travel to Spain and fight fascism. Western governments tried to hold back workers from joining the fight against fascism. As a result, Soviet Russia stood virtually alone against two-thirds of Nazi Germany's war machine for over two years before a second front was realized.

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Free_Radical: Unfortunately, Britain, France and the rest of the west largely obeyed the League of Nations' prohibition while Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union did not.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
In your view, which part is unfortunate?

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Unfortunate in that German and Italian aid flowed to the Nationalist forces without heed for the League of Nations embargo (putting another nail in the organisation's coffin), and unfortunate in that the only support the Republicans received was from the USSR which sabotaged the cause from the inside, and radicalised it to the outside world.

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I'm sorry, but few of us here can find anything positive about the fact that Britain, France and the U.S. stood idly by while Spanish democracy was overthrown by Franco

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of course, inspired by the leftward drift (i think?), their withdrawal from the Iraq War, the fact that i speak the language.

but i'd like to know where they've BEEN, to get a better understanding of where they're going.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:

But I always hear some people on the left say that countries should NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. Why is Spain an exception?

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
What if the elected government of Afghanistan wants our help - does that mean that sending troops to Afghanistan is suddenly OK?

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Yet, liberal democrats and Stalinists had a greater fear which is the underpinning story of the Spanish Civil War, namely, the Spanish Social Revolution.

Liberal democrats like conservatives (monarchists etc.) were afraid of a genuine worker and peasant revolution taking hold on the footsteps of Europe. Furthermore, Stalin did not want any other example of democratic form of Socialism either. So to undestand the Spanish Civil War one had to understand that it was not merely a battle between the Republican loyalists defending Spanish democract versus Fanco's Fascists, there was something deeper at play.

Murray Bookchin explains in an essay on the topic:

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What so few of us knew outside Spain, however, was that the Spanish Civil War was in fact a sweeping social revolution by millions of workers and peasants who were concerned not to rescue a treacherous republican regime but to reconstruct Spanish society along revolutionary lines. We would scarcely have learned from the press that these workers and peasants viewed the Republic almost with as much animosity as they did the Francoists. Indeed, acting largely on their own initiative against "republican" ministers who were trying to betray them to the generals, they had raided arsenals and sporting-goods stores for weapons and with incredible valor had aborted military conspiracies in most of the cities and towns of Spain. We were almost totally oblivious to the fact that these workers and peasants had seized and collectivized most of the factories and land in republican-held areas, establishing a new social order based on direct control of the country's productive resources by workers' committees and peasant assemblies. While the republic's institutions lay in debris, abandoned by most of its military and police forces, the workers and peasants had created their own institutions to administer the cities in Republican Spain, formed their own armed workers' squads to patrol the streets, and established a remarkable revolutionary militia force with which to fight the Francoist forces -- a voluntaristic militia in which men and women elected their own commanders and in which military rank conferred no social, material, or symbolic distinctions. Largely unknown to us at that time, the Spanish workers and peasants had made a sweeping social revolution. They had created their own revolutionary social forms to administer the country as well as to wage war against a well-trained and well-supplied army. The "Spanish Civil War" was not a political conflict between a liberal democracy and a fascist military corps but a deeply socio-economic conflict between the workers and peasants of Spain and their historic class enemies, ranging from the landowning grandees and clerical overlords inherited from the past to the rising industrial bourgeoisie and bankers of more recent times.

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LINK

In another essay Bookchin wrote:

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The wave of collectivizations that swept over Spain in the summer and autumn of 1936 has been described in a recent BBC-Granada documentary as "the greatest experiment in workers' self-management Western Europe has ever seen," a revolution more far-reaching than any which occurred in Russia during 1917-21 and the years before and after it.1 In anarchist industrial areas like Catalonia, an estimated three-quarters of the economy was placed under workers' control, as it was in anarchist rural areas like Aragon. The figure tapers downward where the UGT shared power with the CNT or else predominated: 50 percent in anarchist and socialist Valencia, and 30 percent in socialist and liberal Madrid. In the more thoroughly anarchist areas, particularly among the agrarian collectives, money was eliminated and the material means of life were allocated strictly according to need rather than work, following the traditional precepts of a libertarian communist society. As the BBC-Granada television documentary puts it: "The ancient dream of a collective society without profit or property was made reality in the villages of Aragon. . . . All forms of production were owned by the community, run by their workers."

The administrative apparatus of "Republican" Spain belonged almost entirely to the unions and their political organizations. Police in many cities were replaced by armed workers' patrols. Militia units were formed everywhere -- in factories, on farms, and in socialist and anarchist community centers and union halls, initially including women as well as men. A vast network of local revolutionary committees coordinated the feeding of the cities, the operations of the economy, and the meting out of justice, indeed, almost every facet of Spanish life from production to culture, bringing the whole of Spanish society in the "Republican" zone into a well-organized and coherent whole. This historically unprecedented appropriation of society by its most oppressed sectors -- including women, who were liberated from all the constraints of a highly traditional Catholic country, be it the prohibition of abortion and divorce or a degraded status in the economy -- was the work of the Spanish proletariat and peasantry. It was a movement from below that overwhelmed even the revolutionary organizations of the oppressed, including the CNT-FAI. "Significantly, no left organization issued calls for revolutionary takeovers of factories, workplaces or the land," observes Ronald Fraser in one of the most up-to-date accounts of the popular movement. "Indeed, the CNT leadership in Barcelona, epicenter of urban anarchosyndicalism, went further: rejecting the offer of power presented to it by President Companys [the head of the Catalan government], it decided that the libertarian revolution must stand aside for collaboration with the Popular Front forces to defeat the common enemy. The revolution that transformed Barcelona in a matter of days into a city virtually run by the working class sprang initially from individual CNT unions, impelled by their most advanced militants; and as their example spread it was not only large enterprises but small workshops and businesses that were being taken over.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
Aung San Suu Kyi is the legitimately elected leader of Burma. If she says so, should Canada invade Burma and bring her to power?

In the late 70s, Cuba sent troops to Angola at the "invitation" of the government of Angola. Was that an "elected government"

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I'm not sure why you're bringing up these particular cases and I don't know enough about them to give an opinion. But they don't move me to abandon my general position.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
I'm just trying to find some consistency.

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No, your trying to change the subject and move the fight to ground you feel most secure on.

Then someone will pull your feet out from under you there and you'll pretend it never happened and make another red-herring argument from another position of believed security.

As usual you're using the old "some have said" without showing that "some" are the "ones" you're speaking to. It's called a strawman.

But, what else is new? It's Stockholm's version of Gotcha...

[ 14 November 2007: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

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Originally posted by Abdul_Maria:

was the United States involved in the installment of Franco ?

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This is what Friendly Dictators has to say about Franco(friendly dictator#32)

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But Franco, a staunch conservative, was infuriated when a Republican alliance of socialists, Marxists, and liberals won Spain's first free elections in 1936. So the General decided to "restore order" by force.
Franco's Nationalists were losing the civil war, but military support from Hitler, Mussolini, and the U. S. corporations that backed Hitler (see card 32) turned the tide in his favor. Italy and Germany sent 6,000 trucks to Franco's fascists, but 12,000 were supplied by Ford, General Motors and Studebaker. The U.S. claimed neutrality but didn't stop these companies from aiding Franco. The failure of the U.S. and other democratic nations to assist Spain's democratic government was ultimately responsible for Franco's victory in 1939, and, sadly, American volunteers who had fought for the Republic were branded "premature anti-fascists" and relentlessly persecuted during the U.S. anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s.

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And so there were American anti-fascist freedom fighters who were persecuted in the 1950's. I believe that African-Americans were military leaders for the first time in 1930's Spain.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
I just want to know if there is any actual principle behind whether or not foreign intervention is ever justified or whether people just favour intervention to save governments they like and oppose it when it would involve saving a government they don't like.

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Saddam was a former CIA front man who personally tried to assassinate Iraq's communist leader but failed. And see Iraqgate for deep-deep US involvement in Iraq as well as Gerald Bull, a Canadian stooge of the CIA dealing arms to Iraq in the 1980's.

Note that although Saddam was on the CIA's payroll in the 1950's to at least the time of Iraqgate, Friendly Dictators web site does not list Hussein as a friendly-to-the-US dictator, which then leads one to quickly realize that the total number of friendly dictators is actually more than three dozen and probably closer to three baker's dozen.

Spain, otoh, experienced the overthrow of their democracy in the 1930's by a right-wing whacko with the aid of U.S. corporations, Adolf Hitler and his fascist ally Benito Mussolini. So there is a diff.

[ 14 November 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Saddam was a former CIA front man who personally tried to assassinate Iraq's communist leader but failed.

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and escaped to Egypt, with a broken leg, on a motorcycle (?).

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Note that although Saddam was on the CIA's payroll in the 1950's to at least the time of Iraqgate, Friendly Dictators web site does not list Hussein as a friendly-to-the-US dictator, which then leads one to quickly realize that the total number of friendly dictators is actually more than three dozen and probably closer to three baker's dozen.

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so much for motherhood and apple pie.

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Spain, otoh, experienced the overthrow of their democracy in the 1930's by a right-wing whacko with the aid of U.S. corporations, Adolf Hitler and his fascist ally Benito Mussolini.

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i would guess that if Prescott Bush loaned money to Hitler (was Bush working for Hitler, or was Hitler working for Bush ? ref.
http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm
)

... that the Harriman group with which Bush was involved, may have had some business contacts with Franco. anybody know ?

oh well. America hasn't invaded Venus yet.

[ 14 November 2007: Message edited by: Abdul_Maria ]

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Originally posted by Lard Tunderin' Jeezus:
You seem to have missed a key word RosaL used: "legitimately".

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Originally posted by Abdul_Maria:
... that the Harriman group with which Bush was involved, may have had some business contacts with Franco. anybody know ?

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