Comments by "Arthur Mosel" (@arthurmosel808) on "5 Curiosities of the Spanish Civil War that Nobody is going to Like" video.

Nice typical one sided account. Nationalist forces besides fascists include both Catholic militias and Carloist militias (monarchist). Political warfare had been going on for several years before the war with anarchist death squads. The International Brigades, which were part of the Comintern, organized out of Paris and took members` passports; strangely for years afterwards Rusdian agents turned up using passports from dead brigade members. Also , remember Franco insured a constitutional government before he died; know any communist dictator who did that?
13
@dukecraig2402 I agree in many of your statements; however it wasn't until somewhere in the 1950s that the last "Republican" (actually anarchist and communists were put down, and the various separatist movements minimized (think particularly the Basque). As to his willingness to go with the flow, Franco was a Spanish nationalist before anything else. My own opinion is that he would literally made a deal with the devil to preserve the Spain in which he believed. I believe that you have under estimated the fracture lines in Spanish society when the civil war ended in 1939. The war put Franco in what was at best an awkward situation. The socialist leaning and communist leaning governments had backed his enemies; and the Axis had supported him. He couldn't afford offending those who supported him, especially when the Axis seemed to be winning; nor offend the Allies who weren't beaten. His strategy during WWII, therefore, was to avoid offending either. The Blue Division that fought in Russia is a good example, volunteers allowed to go (probably encouraged) to fight with the Axis; but keeping the Spanish army out of the war, thereby giving the Allies no reason to waste the effort to go after Spain. I also wonder how many of the officers and men of that division were more strongly national socialists that Spanish nationalists. I think too many take the easy way out and judge him by their own belief systems and not by the society from which he developed. From the RIF War leading the Spanish Foreign Legion (making it an elite force) to the Spanish Civil War, he seems to have only shown belief in Spain. As far as atrocities, it is interesting to note that following the civil war the Swiss Red Cross did a survey on that issue with some interesting results. Franco's forces committed some 50,000 war crimes; however the supposed good guy Republicans had committed some 80,000. One done by either sides is too many, but it shows that the Western perception of the Republicans as the good guys is far more false than most Westerners believe. Desecration of churches, the murder of nuns and priests are some of the more telling, with the additional twist of having the priests violate their vows by violating the nuns before killing them both. As the communists took over from the anarchists, they began eliminating them. Franco's forces included church militias, monarchists and national socialists (some of whom supported Germany or Italy more bean Spain) that type of polyglot force probably accounts for much of the war crimes on his side. You can imagine, for example if a church tied militia did if it caught an anarchist who had raped and/ or murdered a nun. Other war crimes were less crimes than propaganda, the bombing of Guernica was not the wanton attack on the public that is usually mention. Guernica was a choke point on the supply route to the front with military convoys having to go through it because of the road net. The attack was actually on a convoy during an offensive, you saw the same thing by both sides in WWII. I wondered around a great deal to make this point, Franco, while not great, has received a very bad handling by many on the Allies, especially those with sympathy for the so-called Republicans who were just as tyrannical.
5
@dukecraig2402 You missed the point, when it was turned over, the nation was stable with little or no political violence. There w a s no long period of confusion. Franco had been working toward this, it wasn't something he did as he was dying. He had a lready established a Parliament (I know of the Spanish name) and a working election system. I can understand your desire to have seen an earlier turnover; but if you realize what was happening before the civil war, he turned over a nation that didn't have rampant violence and political death squads, a feature of the zspsnish government before the civil war.
4