# What if the Spanish Revolution had survived? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 9, 2010, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-spanish-revolution-had-survived/546116 "2010-07-09T17:29:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Caffeine.addict](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f475e1/32.png) [@Caffeine.addict](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Caffeine.addict)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2010, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-spanish-revolution-had-survived/546116/81 "2010-07-16T15:49:00Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Had Allende stayed in power (he wouldn’t have - there was widespread opposition to him by the time of the coup), Chile would have wound up another as another dreary Marxist hellhole like North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, or the other countries where that misguided philosophy has held its grip on power. Instead, it’s one of the more wealthy countries in South America, with a higher GDP per capita than any of its neighbors, and about 10X higher than Cuba’s. Sam, do you have a cite for this? I’ve never seen any indicator that Allende was planning a self coup and was going to suspend free elections or anything of the sort. I suspect that had the coup not occurred, he would have lost the next election if the economy had continued to decline. I don’t think that his economic policies would have helped Chile but there is nothing indicating that they would have wound up like North Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2010, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-spanish-revolution-had-survived/546116/82 "2010-07-16T15:56:43Z")
Here’s a [thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=399625) I ran in 2006, when Pinochet died, debating his legacy, and whether Chile would have been better or worse off if he had never seized power. From the same time, a [thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=399626) on the role of Kissinger/Nixon/the CIA in Pinochet’s coup d’etat. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2010, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-spanish-revolution-had-survived/546116/83 "2010-07-21T03:42:03Z")
Here’s some interesting background from [_An Incomplete Education,_](http://www.amazon.com/Incomplete-Education-Revised-Judy-Jones/dp/0345391373) thought it’s really about the War, not the Revolution: > [@](#): > > Civil war didn’t start until 1936, but for the preceding five years, since King Alfonso XIII was driven out in a fairly uneventful revolution, Spain had been feeling shaky. The new republican government, pledged to economic and social reform and determined to propel the country out of the eighteenth century and into the twentieth, moved against the Church (separating it from the State, which it had been pushing around at least since the Inquisition); broke up a few of the big landed estates, redistributing the acreage among the peasants; and gave a degree of local autonomy to the Catalans, in and around Barcelona, as well as to the Basques. Frankly, it was all a case of too-little-too-late, at least in the eyes of the extremists (anarchists and Communists, mostly). But it was more than enough to infuriate the priests and the landowners, not to mention the former royalists, who were upset anyway. In 1933, the government fell into the hands of the rightists, who themselves proved both ineffectual and inflammatory: A simple miners’ strike was put down with more than your average brutality, and the Catalans were sent to their rooms without supper. > > Okay, now it’s 1936. New general elections. All the leftist types (republicans, socialists, communists, anarchists, trade-union members) join in a Popular Front against all the rightist types (monarchists, priests, landowners, army officers, and Fascists, known locally as Falangists). The leftists beat the rightists at the polls – but it’s _very_ close. Even so, the leftists push ahead with their vision of the new Spain, figuring reconciliation was a luxury, or an impossibility, or that it damn well could wait – this part isn’t so clear. > > Next thing you know, the military (never a factor to be discounted in Spain) has acted; revolts at Spanish army bases in Morocco, led by General Francisco Franco, result in what amounts to an invasion of Spain, with almost all of the soldiers siding with their officers – and the rightists. Thus the battle lines were drawn: the leftists, or Republicans, sometimes called the Loyalists, are concentrated in the south, which tends to be poor, in the industrial region around Barcelona, and in Madrid, the capital; the rightists, or Nationalists, sometimes called the Rebels (even though they’re the Establishment types), are strongest in the ancient – read strongly Catholic – heartland of Spain, plus Galicia, the northwest corner. > > Even without the foreign intervention, which we’ll be getting to in a minute, it would have been an especially appalling civil war. Neither side behaved itself particularly well; the Republicans, at their worst, raped nuns, cut off the ears of priests, and fought savagely among themselves. The Nationalists came in the night and shot in the dark, with the result that whole villages weren’t around in the morning; their most famous victim was the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca. In the end, some six hundred thousand Spaniards would die, with many more permanently crippled; still others were in exile, never to return. > > But it was the Great Powers – Hitler and Mussolini on the side of the Nationalists, Stalin on the side of the Republicans – who, by taking a local amateur production and turning it into a dress rehearsal for bigger things, made sure the civil war turned into chapter-length world-history-book stuff. The Germans and Italians sent troops (the Italians over fifty thousand); the Soviets technicians and military advisors; both sides as much equipment – tanks, planes, guns – as they could pack up, with the emphasis on those items that still needed to be tested on the battlefield. The British and the French, again, hung back, though plenty of Brits, French, Americans, and others went to Spain as volunteers, usually on the Republican side. > > A lot more happened in the course of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted until 1939, by which time the Nationalists, led by Franco, had crushed the Republicans. Guernica, in the Basque country, was bombed by the Nationalists, or at least by the Germans (Picasso got it down on canvas); General Mola tossed off his famous “fifth column” line (about how he had four columns of soldiers encircling Madrid, and a fifth column infiltrating and undermining it from within); and Ernest Hemingway completed his research for _For Whom the Bell Tolls._ > > But what really mattered was what the war had crystallized: the splitting of the world into Fascist and anti-Fascist camps; the proof that Germany and Italy could work nicely together in a Rome-Berlin Axis; the general belief that not just war, but War, was inevitable. Also to be noted: the arrival on the world scene of Generalissimo Franco, a brilliant strategist and so-so politician, who, far from attempting to conduct Spain into the twentieth century, would, over the course of the next forty years, insulated her from the rest of the world and immunize her to the present. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2010, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-spanish-revolution-had-survived/546116/84 "2010-07-21T05:37:14Z")
One thing a lot of people forget (or didn’t know) was that Franco was not the original leader of the Nationalist forces. Their original leader was General Jose Sanjurjo until he was killed in a plane crash three days into the revolt. With Sanjurjo dead, Franco and another general, Emilio Mola, split the command of the Nationalist forces. Then Mola in turn was killed in a plane accident a few months later and Franco became the undisputed leader. The convenience of these deaths caused rumors that Franco might have had a hand in one or both of them. But the evidence appears to be that they were genuine accidents. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2010, 6:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-spanish-revolution-had-survived/546116/85 "2010-07-21T06:42:39Z")
Getting back to the OP: It’s interesting that these so-called “anarchists,” though often in conflict with the Republican state, made no effort to overthrow it. Rather, they seem to have just done an end-run around it, reorganizing society on the ground they way they wanted without a by-your-leave. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-the-spanish-revolution-had-survived/546116.md?page=4)