CRUELTY IN SPAIN

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19130, 26 September 1936, Page 5

CRUELTY IN SPAIN

NATIONAL CHARACTERISTIC MOORISH INFLUENCES SYDNEY, Sept. 10. In an address to the Legacy Club yesterday, Sir Hugh Poynter said that the cruelty and bitterness of the civil war in Spain were largely to be accounted for by characteristics implanted in the Spanish people by Moorish Mohammedan influences. "It has been said that Europe ends at the Pyrenees," Sir Hugh Poynter observed. "That is quite true. Spain is thoroughly oriental, because of Moorish Mohammedan influence. Arabic words are found all through its language, its music and dancing have a distinctly oriental flavour, and the Moorish influence in architecture stares you in the face in its cities." A fatalistic disregard for human life, Sir Hugh Poynter continued, was inculcated by the Mohammedan religion. He described bull-fighting and the Inquisition as two things of purely Spanish origin, neither of w'hich had tended to produce gentleness or kindness to man or beast. Bullfighting was very brutal, but "so exciting that you forgot what is going on." A successful toreador was "Don Bradman and everybody else rolled into one." The Spanish people were thoroughly inured to the sight of cruelty and blood. These influences explained to some extent the absolute cruelty and bitterness of the present civil war. Sir Hugh Poynter explained that he had known Spain since 1898, had visited it several times since, and had been attached to the British Military Mission there after the armistice. The peasantry, he said, were simple, illiterate, " hardworking, and honest people. Spaniards were very proud, and extraordinarily sensitive on points of honour. The spirit which animated Don Quixote— chivalry, idealism, and touchiness—was still very much in evidence to-day.