Gerald Warner: Digging up a history of murder and propaganda

NEWS that the family of the Spanish Republican poet Federico García Lorca, shot by Nationalists in August 1936 near Granada, has agreed to the exhumation of his body will be grist to the mill of the anti-Franco industry – the rust-bucket propaganda machine that is the Gartcosh of historiography.

And guess which magistrate signed the exhumation order? Judge Baltasar Garzón, who acted for the Spanish Communist Party in its prosecution of General Pinochet in the name of human rights (never say communists lack a sense of humour), galvanising Jack Straw into abduction of the former Chilean president. All this is part of the campaign by the government of Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to reopen the wounds of civil war, 30 years after a national pact to close down the issue.

A Law of Historical Memory has been passed to forbid commemoration of Nationalists and glorify Republicans. Streets have been renamed in honour of Red murderers and the assault on the Church renewed. It may be a helpful distraction from Spain's 10.7% unemployment rate. So, when the grave of Lorca is opened you may expect an avalanche of Franco atrocity stories in the media, based on the simplistic equation: Republic good, Franco bad.

The Second Republic was an obscenity: a regime that thrived on murder and the organised burning of churches with government-supplied petrol. Figures you will not hear quoted in the forthcoming lamentations anent Lorca will be the 110,965 people murdered by the Reds during the conflict. These included 6,832 priests, monks and nuns.

This satanic holocaust, amounting to 12% of all Spanish clergy, was the worst persecution ever endured by Catholic clerics, exceeding that of Nero, Diocletian and the French Revolution. Since Republican killings were mostly committed by groups, it is mathematically logical that the murderers must have numbered several hundred thousand. Yet when some of them were tracked down and executed after the war, this was denounced as "reprisals".

Note the distinction: when a murderer was hanged in Britain at that period, it was justice; when a murderer was executed in Spain it was a "reprisal". The whole British perception was coloured by traditional anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic prejudice. Useful idiots flocked to join the International Brigades. The myth of the Spanish Republic was based on a tissue of lies.

The most popular myth was Guernica: a helpless market town wantonly attacked by German bombers. In reality, Guernica was a divisional HQ, with three arms factories, two Republican battalions in garrison and 23 more battalions about to retreat through it. Any commander who had not attacked it would have deserved to face court martial. The Republicans, who had air superiority in the early days of the war, pioneered air bombardment of towns.

The episode became notorious when the NKVD launched a propaganda offensive, claiming 1,600 deaths; the true figure was between 250 and 300 – less than one night's tally for the Cheka murder squads in Madrid. Picasso's grisly daub, commissioned as propaganda by the Republican government, created a cult; understandably, he never painted Republican atrocities.

Then there was the myth of Laurie Lee, author of A Moment Of War, in which he boasted of his adventures in the International Brigade, including hand-to-hand fighting at the Battle of Teruel, where he killed a Nationalist soldier and looked into "his shocked, angry eyes". In fact Lee was rejected for the International Brigade as "physically weak". He was posthumously exposed for the liar he was in 1998.

Another Republican icon, the famous Robert Capa photograph showing a Republican militiaman being shot, has long been denounced as a fake. So it is, but not in the way previously suggested: the irony is even greater. The soldier, now identified as Federico Borrell García, was indeed killed on September 5, 1936, at Cerro Muriano on the Córdoba front – because his platoon was surprised by Nationalist troops while Capa was posing them for his camera.

Only defeat permitted the romanticisation of the gang of butchers that debauched Spain from 1931 to 1939. If they had won and ruled an Iberian version of old East Germany, liberals would have hailed their downfall. The rules, however, are inflexible: you have to endure a half-century of murder, midnight knocks, gulags and a Palaeolithic economy to earn the approbation of liberals. If you free yourselves, you are fascist monsters.

So, lay in some boxes of Kleenex and prepare to weep for Lorca. His death was an atrocity: the 110,965 victims of the Reds were "tragic mistakes". Long live stupidity.