CIVIL WAR TERROR

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3822, 16 October 1936, Page 5

CIVIL WAR TERROR

BRUTAL TRADITIONS. VENGEANCE OF OLD WORLD. The extreme ferocity with which both sides in Spain are conducting their civil war has startled and shocked the 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 their 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 Revolution became the petroleuses of the Commune and are now the massacreuses of Red Barcelona. All this consorts with the special tradition 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 Eastern 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 tne 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 fire 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 arc 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 poverty-stricken 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.