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Religion & Law

: Mirror of Justice

Abortion and the Spanish Civil War

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I have my own thoughts about abortion analogies (the analogy to slavery, for example, strikes me as ironic, given the Church's participation in that institution, and its ambiguous position on abolition during the ante-bellum period). But the suggestion to use the Spanish Civil War as an analogy comes close to self-parody. More to the point, the account of the Spanish Republic offered in the ND student's email to Rob Vischer merits at least some challenge. The student said:

In both cases you have groups of private individuals intent on wreaking violence on a particular group in society (Catholics and the unborn); in both cases the government refuses protection to the targeted group and implicitly supports the violence while issuing occassional platitudes about it being unfortunate; and in both cases startlingly large numbers of the targeted group are killed. Also in both cases the violence had political benefits and dimensions for the perpetrators and the government protecting them.

This is a common claim by those attempting to (1) soft-pedal the atrocities of the Franco regime and/or (2) explain widespread Catholic support for the Spanish rebels. I think the account that the student gives certainly describes Catholic perception in the United States during the civil war, but, as I read the history, the destruction of churches and slaying of priests in Republican Spain did not begin until after the beginning of the nationalist uprising, not "immediately prior," as the student suggested. And, in fact, the repression of the Church was in part a consequence of the chaos sparked by that uprising. Here is the description by LSE historian Paul Preston:

Of course, the atrocities were not confined to the rebel zone. At the beginning of the war, particularly, there were waves of assassinations of priests and suspected Fascist sympathizers. Militia units set themselves up to purge their towns of known rightists and especially churchmen. Churches and religious monuments were destroyed. More than six thousand priests and religious were estimated to have been murdered. Falangists and yellow unions were favourite targets of the spontaneous checas, or pseudo-secret police units, set up by various left-wing gropus, particularly the anarchists. In part, this was the consequence of the fact that the military coup had provoked a collapse in the structures of law and order that, in turn permitted an outburst of revolutionary optimism in the midest of which the prisons in the Republican zone had been emptied of common criminals. Some of the groups that carried out the grisly work of repression, such as the self-styled Brigadas de Investigacion Criminal, under the leadership of the sinister Agapito Garcia Atadell, were driven by greed and bloodlust rather than any political motivation. . . If there was a differenc ein the kllings in the two zones, it lay in the fact that the Republican atrocities tended to be the work of uncontrollable elements at a time when the forces of order had rebelled, while those committed by the Nationalists were officially condoned by those who claimed to be fightingt in the name of Christian civilization.

On the nationalist side, there was, from the beginning of the uprising, a deliberate use of mass execution to spread terror among the working classes in order to prevent any challenge to the nationalist cause, even in parts of Spain that the nationalists had taken without any bloodshed. Here's Preston again:

In the Catholic heartlands, where the rising had enjoyed instant success, blood soon started to flow with the blanket repression of Republicans of all kinds. It was not just the region's relatively few anarchists, Communists and Troskyists who were rounded up and shot, but also moderate Socialists and centre-left Republicans. General Mola's conviction that terror behind the lines would play a crucial role was harshly revealed when he called a meeting of all the alcaldes of the province of Pamplona and told them: 'It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do. There can be no cowardice. If we vacillate one moment and fail to proceed with the greatest determination, we will not win. . .' Those who claimed to be rising in defence of law and order and of eternal Catholic values inaugurated a savage purge of leftists and Freemasons which was to leave a smouldering legac y of hatred in the area for more than forty years. . . . The scale of terror and repression in those areas which had been easily won by the rebels made it clear that their objective was not simply to take over the state but to exterminate an entire liberal and reforming culture.

Estimates of non-combatants killed put the numbers at 55,000 on the republican side (including the 6000 priests and religious mentioned above), while the numbers on the nationalist side are harder to come by, due to decades of silence on the issue within Franco's Spain, but reliable estimates tend to range from 150,000 to 200,000. Many of those killed by the nationalists were killed summarily, or after trials lasting just a few minutes, for "crimes" such as supporting FDR, reading Locke or Rousseau, or being a Freemason.

Though the balance of killings of civilians tips in favor of the nationalists by a factor of three, neither side comes off looking good in most histories of the Spanish Civil War. A bloody civil war in which Catholics by and large favored the perpetrators of countless horrifying atrocities because the other side had committed similar, though less numerous, atrocities against Catholics and priests? The notion of holding up that tragic conflict as an analogy for the cause of abortion strikes me as dubious, unless the goal is to highlight the moral intractability of the abortion debate. If, however, the goal is to seek a rhetorically powerful analogy that conveys moral clarity, I think the pro-life cause might want to go in a different direction.

Full post as published by Mirror of Justice on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).