This is a fascinating article. The left have controlled the narrative about the Spanish Civil War for like, ever, but this post by Cheradenine Zakalwe at Islam Versus Europe:
https://islamversuseurope.blogspot.fr/2013/03/franco-was-right.html#more
The article contains extensive quotations from the book “The Spanish Civil War” by the American historian Stanley G. Payne, and is well worth the read. The tl;dr version of this is that the left started it.
I was at the Tate Modern in London the other day, and the exhibition was laid out very carefully to present the Spanish Civil War as a centrepiece in the fight against fascism throughout the Twentieth Century. In fact, left-wing activism seemed to be what the entire floor I endured for about 5 hours was all about. (This is just one aspect of the white-genocide horror that is the Tate. More on this another day.)
Picasso painted “The Weeping Woman” in response to seeing newspaper reports of the bombing of Guernica by the anti-Communists. The Tate made sure to point this out. There was no mention of the hundreds of political murders perpetrated by the left in the lead-up to the civil war, nor the thousands they murdered in the Red Terror once it began:
“The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy, the vast majority in the summer of 1936 in the wake of the military coup) as well as attacks on landowners, industrialists, and politicians as well as the desecration and burning of monasteries and churches.”
“Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000 to 72,344 lives.”
(The right did kill a lot more in response. I have mentioned before why those of us who understand what is going on in Europe have been so hesitant to kick things off..)
What I find most fascinating is that the left in Spain leading up to the War only cared about democratic rules when they were not in power. Once in, they openly followed a platform which denied democratic rights to conservatives, simply on the grounds that the conservatives were opposed to the leftist agenda:
“…The elections of 1933 produced a result almost diametrically opposite to the balloting two years earlier, when the CEDA won a plurality, albeit not a majority, of seats. The number of Socialist deputies declined, while the left Republicans were almost wiped out. The leaders of these last two groups responded with demands that the president of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, cancel the results and permit them to change the rules for new elections in order to guarantee victory for a chastened and reunited left. They did not charge that the balloting had been unfair or invalid, but simply protested the fact that victory had gone to the right and center. Whereas the CEDA had accepted an electoral law written by its opponents, the left contended that the Catholic party could not be permitted to win elections – even under rules drawn up by the left – because the CEDA proposed fundamental changes in the Republican system. Although the left had just finished drastically altering Spain’s political system and the Socialists proposed to go much farther yet to introduce socialism, the left maintained that the Catholic right could not be allowed to introduce any other changes, irregardless of how many votes it received. The left insisted that the Republic constituted not an equal democratic regime for all, but a special project exclusively aligned with the left.”
That must be, like, the only time in history that this has ever happened.
From there:
“What happened in Spain was simply a Jacobin revolution that provoked a counter-revolution, as the Jacobins expected it to. They simply underestimated the strength of the counter-revolution, which ultimately defeated them and rolled back their transformation project.”
The left started the Spanish Civil War. The right resisted, and won, and the left have been crying about it ever since.
Photo by NichoDesign 
