CIVIL WAR TERROR

Dunstan Times, 2 November 1936, Page 2

CIVIL WAR TERROR

BRUTAL TRADITIONS

VENGEANCE OF OLD WORLD

The extreme ferocity with which both sides in Spain arc conducting their civil war has startled and shocked tlie world, writes J. B. Firth, in the ‘ Daily Telegraph.’ Yet ferocity has always been in the tradition of civil wars. Nota inter fratres odia. When brothers turn Uieir arms against brothers, the struggle is desperate and merciless. And now, dreadful to relate, sisters join in the cruel fray. Observe the progress of the sex! The tricoteuses who took their knitting to watch the heads fall under the knife of the Revoiution became the petroleuses of the Commune and are now the massacreuses of Red Barcelona. All this consorts with the special tra. dition of Spain. Three hundred years ago there used to be an ironical saying in Navarre: “May the unity of Spain be securely established before the last combatants in the fighting line have succeeded in exterminating one another!” , The strain goes back in the Peninsula to very early times. The Carthaginians settled freely in Fastern Spain and drew thence their best recruits. Punic cruelty, like Punic faith, was notorious in the ancient world. They were masters in the evil art of refining upon simple killing.

MOORISH CONQUEST’S MARK

The Moorish conquest of more than half Spain also left its indelible mark upon the Spanish character, and the Moors were never a gentle race. Add the furious heats of the Spanish sun and the long dominance of a religion which, for all its virtues, admits no compromise, and who can wonder if the strongest ingredients in the Spanish temperament produce in times of civil war the dreadful scenes which have recently occurred at Barcelona, Badajoz, San Sebastian, and apparently scores of other places. It is the same “ Spanish Fury which once spread lire and sword through the Netherlands and disfigured with appalling massacres the brilliant military exploits of the Spanish conquistadores who won for Spain the New World Empire which sapped so soon the sources of her strength at home. Ferocity and fanaticism are frantic in combination, and this Spanish civil war is at one and the same time a war of political parties struggling for rival and irreconcilable forms of government, the agrarian war of a povertystricken and landless peasantry impatient to acquire the vast latifundia of the grandees and the church, a bitter industrial war between Capital and Labour, and, not least, a religious war. Wars of religion have been amongst the most bloody and ruthless wars in history. In Spain to-day the religious war is not between Catholicism and Protestanism —the latter hardly exists there—but between Catholicism and the fierce anti-religious fanaticism of Anarchists, Socialists, and Communists — whose one religion is a common hatred of all religion. There their Credo stops. In such a'land no one listens to suggestions of compromise. The intellectuals who established the Republic only five years ago have all been swept aside.

“ THE RELIGION OF VENGEANCE.”

In his ‘History of - the Middle-Ages in Italy,’ Sismoncli speaks of the “ Religion of Vengeance ” which Spain derived from the Arabs—a religion “ which admits no other reparation for an offence but the death of the offender. 1 ’ This is still in full operation to-day. Both sides have hurriedly clutched at hostages—to be reserved for purposes of reprisal as and when occasion may arise. To avenge the execution of JO, honour demands the massacre of 100; to avenge a stubborn resistance at the barricades, this deadly Religion of Vengeance requires that all suspected of having borne arms shall face the firing squads. Alas' 1 say for the noble Spanish nation which co-exists with these murderous elements which have seized control. All this is familiar reading to the student of history, yet it is startling to be confronted with such savagery in cities which we know as tourists. Listen to Kritias, the leader of The Thirty, demanding the death sentence in ancient Athens; “ If any of you imagine that more people are perishing than the occasion requires, reflect that this happens everywhere in a time of revolution. We cannot afford to bo scrupulous We are engaged in a scheme of aggressive ambition, and must get rid of those best able to hinder us.” The words might have been uttered yesterday at Burgos or Madrid. “Here’s a health to the gentle Kritias!” said his victim. Theramenes, as he drained the cup of hemlock and flicked the lasi drop on to the prison floor as he uttered Ids final “Good health!” Veui/.olist or anti-Venizelist in one of modern Athens’s innumerable civil wars might have said the same. RESORT TO REPRISALS. So true has proved the famous prophecy of Thucydides iu those two short chapters of his 1 History ’ (Bk. 111., chap. 82-Bfl), winch ought_to lie read by way of gospel and lesson at the opening of every party convention. “ And revolution brought upon the city of Hellas many terrible calamities such as have been and always will lie while human nature remains the same, but which are more ■ r less aggravated and differ in character with every now combination of circumstances.” Why, then, if that searching pas.-ago bo accepted as true, should Hie woW-i be startled at these latest horrors Irom Spain? Because in this country, at any rate, the easy political philosophy of to-day will not have it that if yon scrape the Cossack yon line! the Tartar. They swear by the veneer which peels off at a touch. While human nature remains the same! In an instant partisans reel back into savage reprisals. Let me quote one or two more sentences from the Old Master: — “When troubles bad once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo the

report of all who had preceded them by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the activity of their revenges. “ The tie of party was stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why.” “ The seal of good faith was not divine law but fellowship in crime. “ The cause of all these evils was the love of power.” “ The loaders on either side used specious names, the one party professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, m reality their prize.” What effective heed has the world paid to those searching sentences wnt- ' ten 23 centuries ago? As much —or as little —as to other simpler injunctions ! delivered four centuries later?

FEROCITY OF ROMAN TIMES

There has not been an epoch or a century—luirclly ever decade ■without some new ferocity, the Sudan reprisals followed the Marian and bettered their example. Marius shut the gates ot Rome for five days and slaughtered every Optimate within. Sulla turned his legionaries loose among the 4,000 disarmed prisoners who had been herded into the Campus Martins. He was addressing the Senate when the cries of the victims reached thenears. “It is only a few criminals, he explained, “ paying the just penalty of their crimes.” The story of the Proscriptions winch accompanied the fall of the Republic makes one sick to react. The honois of the civil wars which ushered in every short-lived change of Impel ml dynasty are told in unforgettable sentences by Tacitus. The world which looked on at the struggle between Otlio and Vitellius with sure foreboding that the victor would prove the worse (deteriorem fore quisquis vicisset) was a world that had supped full of horrors and could neither endure its diseases nor their remedies.” . Suetonius’s picture of Vitellius and his staff gloating over the putrefying corpses on the field at Cedriacnm might have been drawn on a canvas by Wiertz. “ He stuck not ” —so runs Plnleinan Holland’s version—" to hearten and encourage them with this cursed speech that an enemy slain had a very good smell, but a citizen a far better.” Consider the horrors of the Thirty Years War (1618-1048), which reduced whole provinces of Germany to desert, and imagine the background of Mansfield’s plea that he “ must of necessity plunder where he was,” for that was his only means of supplying his army. A dozen other army commanders were doing the same for 30 years. ENGLAND’S HISTORY.

Our own history has its lurid pages. The Ulster massacre of 1641, for which Cromwell inflicted such bloody reprisals a few years later; the butchery in the West after Sedgmoor by Colonel Kirke (of Tangier celebrity) and his Lambs, and Jeffreys’s Bloody Assize; the deportation ‘bv Cromwell of the remnant of the gallant garrison of Colchester Castle to the Barbadoes—as slaves —or their sale —as soldiers —to the Venetian Republic. When starving women at Norwich appealed to Fairfax for food he is said to have replied: “Eat your babies.” It may well be false, but it was believed.' “ This marble is not harder than the heart of the king,” said Colonel Churchill, tapping the mantelpiece at which he stood in the antechamber at Whitehall, to the relative of one of Monmouth's followers who had come to beg for his life. Hardness of heart and insensibility of feeling are inevitably engendered by civil war. Thucydides was right. It is not one of what Bacon called “ the vices of the age.” It is a vice of all time and of every age, “ while human nature remains the same.”