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| Franco's Black Spain page 1 | |
 1Wherein General Franco dreams pleasantly among his valiant fellow crusaders, a peer among equals. | |
| Introduction | |
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Most Americans have a guilty conscience about Spain -- and this book will not make them feel any less guilty. Only too late have they come to realize what a few had long tried to tell them: that what was going on in that sad, brave country in the days before the official outbreak of the Second World War was neither a meaningless fratricidal strife nor a crusade in defense of Christian civilization, but the tragic prologue to that global struggle against international fascism and aggression. Too late they have been brought to see that the Spanish Republicans were fighting the battle of all of us, and that the Franco forces were the agents of their German and Italian masters. Slowly they have come to understand that if they had listened to men like Quintanilla recent history might have been less terrible and fascist aggression cut down without recourse to world-wide war. There is bitterness in Quintanilla -- the bitterness of the prophet who knew not only the heroism and the hope of the Republican Spain which our heedlessness helped to wreck, but the black ugliness of the corrupt reactionary Spain which we helped to survive. It is that black Spain -- the Spain of decadent, diseased medievalism in thought and deed, a mockery of even the things it pretends to defend -- which fills him with a loathing that gives every detail of his work such brutal power. Here is the Spain that Americans helped to make.
Richard Watts, Jr., 1946 Franco's Black Spain, Reynal & Hitchcock, New York: 1946 40 images with accompanying text Texts and images are reproduced here in their entirety, numbered as in the original, each text relating to a single image on the facing page. This on-line version frequently includes several texts and images on a single 'page'. |
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