Religion & Law

Readers will recall that Eduardo originally asserted quite flatly "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' ..." 

After my criticism of his statement, he graciously admitted his error, saying, "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 legitimates 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."

In point of fact, the burnings and killings were far more than "occasional," and were accelerating in 1936 before as well as after the military intervention, lending it apparent justification. But Eduardo's main point seems to be that "the pre-July violence was simply not of the scale of murder and violence that occurred after the July 1936 military uprising, when thousands of priests and religious were brutally murdered.  And there, 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 entirely accurate." 

I fully agree with Eduardo that Franco's junta planned their executions far more than did the Republican government. But this fact is of a piece with the pre-civil war toleration of private violence by the Republic. During the war, too, much of the Republican suppression was "farmed out," perhaps because of its weakness or perhaps because of a decentralist ideology, with radical political parties having their own private prisons where they could torture or kill with impunity.

In sum, the Spanish Civil War does raise the question of the meaning of private violence, which is the analogy to abortion that Mr. Krog and I pointed to. One way to understand the uniqueness of abortion is to point out that it is an authorization of private killing on a scale previously unknown. Mr. Krog simply noted that many of the killings in Spain were also private yet tolerated by the Republican authorities in the interest of placating their rivals on the left. (Do some moderate Democrats likewise placate those to their left when they support the Freedom of Choice Act?)

No analogy is perfect, but i do think this one comes closer in some ways than the more frequent comparison to the Holocaust. Government-tolerated private pogroms might be still better as an analogy. Imperfect as they are, these analogies are worth reflecting upon in order to gain the distance to judge the world in which we are immersed, and perhaps to avoid some of the resulting consequences. Calling the analogy "ludicrous", as Eduardo does, does not facilitate this reflection.