The War and Its Shadow Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century

Across the continent, Hitler's war of territorial expansion after 1938 detonated myriad "irregular wars, of culture as well as of politics, which took on a "cleansing" intransigence as those driving them sought to make "homogeneous" communities, whether ethnic, political, or religious. So much of this was prefigured with primal intensity in Spain in 1936, where, on 17-18 July, a group of army officers rebelled against the socially reforming Republic. Saved from almost certain failure by Nazi and Fascist military intervention, and by a British inaction amounting to complicity, these army rebels unleashed a conflict in which civilians became the targets of mass killing. The new military authorities authorized and presided over an extermination of those sectors associated with Republican change--especially those who symbolized cultural change and thus posed a threat to old ways of being and thinking: progressive teachers, self-educated workers, "new" women.