Religion & Law

Richard's cherry picked quotes are unconvincing and, to be honest, somewhat misleading.  I will admit to oversimplifying the history a bit in the interest of brevity, but I could easily have cited Hugh Thomas in support of my thesis.  Certainly it is true that some violence directed against the Church occurred prior to the 1936 uprising, and I agree that I was guilty of suggesting otherwise.  But that hardly undermines my point or legimiates Mr. Krog's ludicrous suggestion.  The occasional violence directed at symbols of the Church was simply not on the scale of destruction and wanton violence that occurred in the period immediately after the nationalist uprising.  It was certainly nothing on the scale that could even possibly (1) carry the weight of the abortion analogy or (2) justify Franco and the work of his murderous colleagues, which I had thought was the point I was criticizing.

The church burnings that Thomas descibes around page 58, and to which Richard points as evidence contrary to my position, were part of a brief (that is, several day long) wave of protest in May 1931 in which, Thomas says, "[n]o one died," (p. 56) and perhaps 100 churches were damaged, with a small number of them burning to the ground (Thomas only describes one that did so).  And it is hardly the case that the government sat idly by.  As Thomas describes it, "Maura [the minister of the interior at the time] got permission to use the army . . . , and martial law was proclaimed." (p. 56) It is true that the state might have reacted more quickly, but it did not do nothing.  In fact, as Thomas explains, the burnings were the work of the anarchists, who were not very sympathetic with the more moderate politics of the republican government in 1931 (see pp. 68-69).

Just to cite a bit more support.  Thomas does, as Richard said, say that, immediately after the elections (but before the actual fascist uprising), there was "a trail of murder and arson" across the country and that "[t]his was partly caused by the euphoria of the socialists and anarchists at being released from prison."  But he goes on, in the next sentence, to say that "[i]t was also the conscious work of the Falange, determined to justify the establishment of a regime of 'order.'" (p. 153) 

In any event, this pre-July violence was simply not of the scale of murder and violence that occurred after the revolution, when thousands of priests and religious were brutally murdered.  And there, as Thomas notes, my description of the violence in republican Spain  as the result of the breakdown of the state in part as a consequence of the rebellion (in contrast to the intentional policy of extermination in rebel Spain), was accurate.  Here's Thomas, one last time (p. 268):