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History seems to have made the loyalists the heroes or "good guys" while relegating the other side to being the "bad guys". Do we forget that while yes,Franco and his group were aided by Hitler,the loyalists were aided by Stalin and the communists?
History seems to have made the loyalists the heroes or "good guys" while relegating the other side to being the "bad guys". Do we forget that while yes,Franco and his group were aided by Hitler,the loyalists were aided by Stalin and the communists?
I don't think the "good guys" and "bad guys" labels rest on who aided who.
The fact that war started with a coup by right wing groups to overthrow the democratic government of the 2nd republic already edges the labels in one direction or another, and after that there are three years of bloody war and many deeds and misdeeds that feed into the picture.
I think about the Spanish Civil War whenever the Giants are playing the Padres. San Diego has a first baseman whose name sounds to me like it would be the title of some expatriate's novel about the war....Yonder Alonso. Of course the title would feature the added punctuation making it "Yonder! Alonso!"
As for the issue raised by the OP, kevxu has identified the reason that the lefties held the higher moral ground in the struggle and whether one agrees with that is likely to be the product of that person's modern day political sensibilities.
I'll admit that I don't know a lot about the Spanish Civil War. But you might need to consider that for about 100 years, US public school education has been increasingly run by pro-left progressives. So they would probably be more likely to paint the Republican forces and their Socialist and Communist allies as "the good guys." Plus all those really "cool" famous people were in support of the Republican side --Picasso, Orwell, Hemingway...
I do remember a few baby-boomer age teachers in my youth portraying that side as the "obvious" good guys, and even as a teenager, I couldn't see either side as particularly "good."
I'll admit that I don't know a lot about the Spanish Civil War. But you might need to consider that for about 100 years, US public school education has been increasingly run by pro-left progressives. So they would probably be more likely to paint the Republican forces and their Socialist and Communist allies as "the good guys." Plus all those really "cool" famous people were in support of the Republican side --Picasso, Orwell, Hemingway...
Yeah those dastardly pro-left progressives and their love of free elections and democracy vs military juntas. Those silly lefties.
By the way, Mexico was the other country that supported the Popular Front which ironically got its name because in encompassed a wide range of pro-democracy parties and movements the three ideologically competing socialist/marxist parties (Franco was actually able to unify the Trotskyites and Stalinist, no small feat), peasants with workers and urban intellectuals not to mention Basque and Galician nationalist.
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I do remember a few baby-boomer age teachers in my youth portraying that side as the "obvious" good guys, and even as a teenager, I couldn't see either side as particularly "good."
They probably got that way because of their parents, The Greatest Generation â„¢
I'm not going to get into an argument about a war which I need to learn more about. But I'm very certain that the Republican side was not simply about freedom & democracy. They moved more and more extreme left. The whole thing then devolved into a war between communism and fascism. I would take neither of those sides, especially since contrary to what many believe, fascism is not a right-wing phenomenon. Both sides (communism and fascism) want centralized absolute governing bodies, and value the state above the individual. Those who got involved on the left side (in that war or in others) because of their value for democratic elections were naive, deluded, or dishonest.
Many of the American upper and middle class folks jumped onto that side because they were progressives (i.e. interested in incremental progress toward socialism and statism) and not because they were freedom-loving people who wanted to spread liberty around the world and who love free elections.
And regarding the Greatest Generation: I think the Greatest Generation are mostly rolling over in their graves when they see what their baby-boomer children have made of our country.
I'm not going to get into an argument about a war which I need to learn more about. But I'm very certain that the Republican side was not simply about freedom & democracy.
Simple question which is more indicative of freedom and democracy, wining electorally or by military coup? There seems to be the streak in American thinking that democracy is great as long as who gets elected has the approval of capitalist western "democracies."
Weeping and praying, I'm sure.
Or they're being forced to live in a dependent state with "well-meaning" boomers and government programs "caring" for them.
Look we need not get into an argument of right vs left. The point of the OP's post is why is the one side painted as "good" today when they were not really so "good."
My point was that you have to look at the lense through which this war from 75+ years ago is being examined. In my high school days, it was being looked at through the eyes of very liberal progressive baby boomer ex-hippie history teachers who chose the one side as "the good guys" because they were allied with socialists, and to them socialists were "cool."
Today, we're faced with an interpretation of history dominated by a progressive liberal media, a progressive liberal higher education system, a progressive liberal public school system, and progress-liberal writers of history texts. This war from 75+ years ago is largely now seen and translated through the lense of 21st centrury liberal progressives.
These are the same people who have convinced today's students and the general population that Hitler and the other 20th century fascists were "right wing" and equate that with today's conservativism.
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