PRELUDE TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Adam Hochschild, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (New York & Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) (What does not get reported: "At the heart of the Authorized Version of the Spanish Civil War was an easy-to-understand, heroes-vs.-villains narrative. Spain has a democratically elected government fighting a right-wing military coup backed by Hitler and Mussolini, and a great European city [Madrid] was under siege. This, of course, was also the story that the Republic's government and its supporters urgently wanted told. . . . If you search the American and British press during these years, for every thousand articles about the ground gained and lost on the battlefield or bombs falling on Madrid, you are lucky if you can find one that so much as mentions the way Spaniards briefly wrote a new chapter in Europe's centuries-old battle between classes. Nor did any of the gifted photographers who won fame covering this war . . . ever turn their lenses on this story. Foreign correspondents had little interest in the revolution's epicenter, Catalina. 'The Catalans . . . are sort of fake Spaniards,' Martha Gellhorn wrote dismissively to Eleanor Roosevelt." "The fact that a utopian social revolution might have been an impractical and romantic dream even in peacetime, and was surely an impossible one when fighting a terrible war, made it no less worth reporting. Of the many hundreds of correspondents from abroad who passed through Spain during the war, not one showed much interest in the revolution that for months surround them. . . . Rare was the journalist who mentioned such things, even in passing. Not a single one bothered to spend a few days in a Spanish factory or business or estate taken over by its workers, to examine just how the utopian dream was faring in practice." Id, at 217-218. And, does this sounds somewhat contemporary?: "Meanwhile the demagogic Sir Oswald Mosley led an increasingly aggressive British Union of Fascists, its militants dressed in black tunics, black trousers, and wide black leather belts with brass buckles. Whenever Mosley was heckled at one of his rallies, he stopped speaking and searchlights focused on the heckler as jackbooted men beat him and then threw him out of the hall. With trumpet fanfare and flags showing a bolt of lightening, ranks of Mosley followers marched through Jewish neighborhoods of London, shouting insults, giving the Fascist salute, and violently attacking anyone in their way. The group boasted 50,000 members." Id. at 94.).