In 1912 Spain and France divided the independent kingdom of Morocco, until then independent under its sultan, (today Morocco is united and a free kingdom).
The Spanish got the worse part of the deal but they did get the territory opposite the Rock, Gibraltar, held by the British by then a century since the Napoleonic wars on the Iberian Peninsula (the Napoleonic king of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte, half-brother to Napoleon, fled Spain and ended up in Bordentown, N.J. of all places, where I lived for 36 years. His once grand estate there is now a small, nearly abandoned Catholic seminary/retreat).
Spanish Morocco held a strategic position on the Straits of Gibraltar. It was held by the Spanish Army of Morocco and the Spanish Foreign Legion, from both of which sprang the uprising against the Second Republic of Spain on July 17, 1936 led by “Los Quatros Generales”, the four insurgent generals (this is the title of an important song of those loyal to the Republic and so called, the Loyalists).
The war spread to Iberian Spain the very next day and by October had become the full-blown Spanish Civil War in which 1,000,000 died; in which 100,000 foreign volunteers called the International Brigades, including 3,000 Americans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion/Brigade and several hundred more in the John Brown Artillery Battery served. Like most of the men in the brigades, these Americans were committed men of the left, yes, many who were Communists, served the Spanish Republic.
The Americans came home to ostracization, persecution and hounding for years. (In this piece published in 2016 ago on the New York Times Op-ed page, our conservative Sen. John McCain pays the homage of the brave to the brave in a tribute to the last member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to die (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/opinion/john-mccain-salute-to-a-communist.html).
Loyalist/Republican Spain and its lost battle epitomizes all great lost causes and may have been the most romantic of all lost such causes. Certainly, Ernest Hemingway made it so in his “For Whom the Bell Tolls”.
Among the four insurgent generals the one intended to lead the rebels, called the Nationalists and with their civilian far right supporters the authors of the Falange Movement, died in a plane crash. The equivalent of the Fascist Party in Italy and the NAZI Party in Germany. NAZI Germany and Fascist Italy (the latter apparently lately reborn in the new Italian government) actively and quickly entered the war early on the Fascist/Falangist side, leading to the German bombing at Guernica, in the Basque Province.
That event is seared in human memory by one of the masterpieces of 20thCentury Art, Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”, depicting the first mass bombing ever of civilian populations. Picasso was a Basque. He was a Communist. He was a Republican in the full meaning of that word in Spain. He left Spain and refused to set foot there again until after the death of Gen. Francisco Franco 40 years later.
Why Franco? Because that first general in charge of the rebellion died in the plane crash, it is written the plane crashed or may have crashed because it was overweight as he insisted on moving all his weighty worldly goods with him when he flew from Africa to take command of the rebels as they advance through southern Spain from Ibiza to Majorca, onto Sevilla and Valencia and across Andalusia, aiming for a quick end to the war by taking Madrid.
His place was quickly assumed by Franco, who had commanded the Spanish Army of Morocco, made up mostly of Moroccans led by Spanish officers, which was the seedbed of the rebellion. Indeed, Franco had been the chief plotter of the rebellion. He now took command of it and within a year proclaimed himself El Cuadillo, the Leader, the Spanish equivalent of Il Duce in Italy, of Der Fuhrer in Germany.
The first 500 American volunteers in the Lincoln Battalion/Brigade were bloodied at the Second Battle of Jarama on the Jarama River near Madrid in late February 1937, immortalized by Woody Guthrie in his song “Jarama”, sung to the tune of “The Red River Valley”.
In the First Battle of Jarama, the 15thInternational Brigade, a composite of internationals including British, Canadian and German volunteers (the Germans in the Thalmann Brigade, named for the concentration-camp incarcerated German Communist Party leader Ernst Thalmann, who died at Buchenwald in 1944) helped mightily as the Republican forces held, then counterattacked and absorbed the second Jarama assault by the Nationalists, in which the Americans fought.
The rebels failed and the Republic held Madrid where a Communist woman leader of the Republic, Dolores Ibarurri, daughter of a Basque father and called “La Passionara” (the passionate flower) raised her fist in the Loyalist popular front salute and declared in a famous speech, “No Passeron” – “They shall not pass. They did not that winter. Eventually though the Fascists would pass and take all of Spain.
On the fall of Madrid, Franco declared “Hemos passada” (“We have passed”) and La Passionara went into near 40 years in exile in Moscow, returning to Spain in 1977, where she died in 1989 after a life spent as a hardline, un-repenting Stalinist internationalist. She bore considerable responsibility for savage infighting and persecution during the Republic by Communists of anarchists and others who were loyal to the fallen Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky. The world is complicated. Always.
There is another famous song of the Spanish Civil War titled “La Quince Brigada” (“The 15thBrigade”). In the song Los Quatros Gengerales (best versions to search for all these songs are the versions sung by Paul Robeson) there is a lyric that in English goes:
Madrid, you wondrous city,
Madrid, you wondrous city,
Madrid, you wondrous city, Mamita mia,
They wanted to take you,
They wanted to take you.
(And with intervening lyrics then continues)
We shall avenge them
We shall avenge them;
And all our bondage,
And all our bondage,
And all our age-old bondage, Mamita mia,
We’ll break asunder,
We’ll break asunder.
(Here are the songs one by Robeson, the other by sung by Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers about 80 years ago. But finish reading and then listen, they will be the more powerful and pertinent if you do)
The war of course ended with the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic as the western democracies and the United States, in one of their first, worst and greatest acts of cowardice and appeasement embargoed all weapons sales and shipments to Spain while Germany and Italy went all in.
Only the then Soviet Union, calling for a united international “Popular Front”, sent aide to the Republic. But not enough to overcome the Nazi/Fascist/Falangist onslaught and so the Republic fell in April 1939: Terror and dictatorship fell over and across Spain until 1975 when Franco died and the present Spanish constitutional monarchy was born with the consent and, indeed, the active participation of the late King Juan Carlos, who was determined it have a democratic constitution.
But in all the retelling of that epic event, there was a moment, is a moment in all of the terrible history of the Spanish Civil War that resonates today in the United States of America.
Miguel de Unamuno, another Basque (interesting the influence of that province on Spanish political, artistic and intellectual life) was perhaps the greatest, most world-renowned scholar, writer and philosopher of Spain in the 20thCentury, perhaps in its history (I admit I have read little he wrote but others so describe him).
When the rebellion and war started Unamuno, then 72, was Dean of the University of Salamanca, founded in 1164, 68 years after Oxford, 45 years before Cambridge.
On Oct. 12, 1936 a great crowd attended a celebration at the university of Día de la Raza (now called Día de la Hispanidad), celebrating what we call Columbus Day, the day Columbus made landfall in the New World, the day the Spanish language and culture began its conquest and spread throughout the Americas (as it continues to even today in our country).
As Unamuno had watched the spread of the rebellion, which he first supported, and the horrors of a war in which no quarter was given by either side as it moved across Spain, he began to doubt and finally to believe it was a terrible mistake.
Presiding that day at the Salamanca University Día de la Raza celebration, which heard from several vehement supporters and participants in the rebel Fascist cause, Unamuno saw in the audience the crippled (by war wounds from fighting against insurgents in Morocco when they rebelled against Spain in the 1920s)—the crippled, feared Gen. Jose Millan-Astray, who as commander of the Spanish Foreign Legion was a key Franco general.
From somewhere in the crowd a voice shouted “Viva La Muerte!”, which means “Long Live Death!”. Millan Astray responded “Espana!” and the crowd responded “Libre!” (“Freedom!”), and then the same again (Wikipedia and other online sources are reflected in all this for much of the detail here to supplement my memory and knowledge and this story owes to the greatest historian of the Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas).
Unamuno rose, acknowledged the crowd and that it been awaiting his words. He said a great deal at that moment including this:
“…Now I have heard this insensible and necrophilous oath, “Viva La Muerta!”, and I, having spent my life writing paradoxes that have provoked the ire of those who do not understand what I have written, and being an expert in this matter, find this ridiculous paradox repellent.”
He then singled out Millan-Astray, noting his war injuries and said, “But unfortunately Spain today has too many invalids. And, if God does not help us, soon it will have very many more. It torments me to think that General Millan-Astray might dictate the norms of the psychology of the masses. It should be expected from a mutilated who lacks the spiritual greatness of Cervantes to find solace in seeing how the number of mutilated ones multiplies around him.”
Millan-Astray responded with this: “Muera la inteligencia! Viva la Muerte!”, which means “Death to Intelligence! Long Live Death!”
Wikipedia says this account of the events is disputed but the weight of history finds historians like Hugh Thomas confirming it happened. In the prevailing accounts, Unamuno answered Millan-Astray by declaring: “You will win but you will not convince” (said to be the slogan of the city of Salamanca). And the rebels did win, did defeat the Loyalists and instituted a horrible, autocratic dictatorship summed up in the words “Muera la inteligencia”.
If this has a familiar ring today in the United States it should, because if there is a single phrase that captures the ethos and the ethics of the Trump regime it is that, it is “Muera la Inteligencia” – “Death to Intelligence.”
Only those dead to moral intelligence would tear 2,300 children from their parents and lock them up in concentration internment camps. It is a morally insensate, morally insensible, morally reprehensible act. And so they have and the spirit of the Falangist General Millan-Astray resides now in the America White House.
Peeling the Onion 
Would those be the concentration internment camps established by Commissar Obama and Commissar Biden?
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