,
ELLIOTT ELLIOTT
ELLIOTT ELLIOTT OPTICIANS 0,0041:HA,4bt John Elliott mgr. Ex-Maris!. Bros:
Student 7988
7t9 IT 1 1)
OPTICIANS Piccadilly Arcade
Perth Tel. B 7988
Tel. B NO. 3,150.
PERTH, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 1944.
SEVENTY-FIRST Ye. AR.
PRICE THREEPENCE.
Why the Campaign of Hate & Calumny Against Spain? What Franco's Neutrality has meant to Allied Cause is
A Military Dictatorship is Result of
gatherings. It springs from Spanish history, geography and climate: above all, from the consequence of these things-the Spanish inability to compromise and the Spaniard's instinct, alike so noble and so ridiculBritons, ous, to die for his opinions. though they sometimes (as the world periodically discovers) die for their convictions, never do so for their opinions. They merely modify them by discussion and peaceful controversy. That is why the make Parliamentary Spaniards are not democratic work. social
Failure of Republicanism Distinguished English Historian Dismisses Red "Schoolboy" Petulance Hardly a week passes without effu- She cut the Mediterranean in half, isosion of bitterness against the Govern- lated Malta ,and encircled our forces in ment and people of Spain: and occa- Egypt, which, with the out-numbered sionally the press adds the spice of Mediterranean Fleet, alone then stood calumny against the 'Church to height- between Hitler and his ambition of an Axis bloc from the Pacific to the Aten the effect of its Spanish "news." Here condensed from the "London Il- lantic, Tens of thousands of our lustrated News" (June 17) is the com- countrymen lost their lives as a result ment of the distinguished English and a long period was probably added author and historian, Arthur Bryant, to the war. Spain, on the other hand, though her entry into the war in the on this sorry business. summer of 1930 would have let the Mr, Churchill's recent remarks on Germans into North Africa, given Spain in the House of Commons rub them the French Fleet, closed the bed a number of well-meaning people Western Mediterranean, and exposed up the wrong way. Those who form- our vital and precarious South Atlanerly viewed the Spanish Civil War as tic trade and supply routes to overa testing battlefield between demo- whelming attack, deliberately and cracy and Fascism seem to feel about wisely chose to keep the peace. She Spain to -day much as the more pious did so again in the autumn of 1942, kind of schoolboy feels, when grown when, as Mr. Churchill revealed, it lay up, about his old school and the hom- within her power to wreck our crucial eric contests of his happy, ferocious, North African expedition at the outpartisan youth. They want, of course, set. For whatever motives, and in like everyone else, to beat Hitler. But the teeth of ideological differences, her seem . the satisfaction of doing so would preferred peace with BriGovernment almost a sober pleasure to them com- tain to subservience to Germany-and pared with the ecstatic, poetic satis- in 1940, at any rate, such a preference faction to be got from seeing Dictator in a State with a land frontier exposIt was Franco violently slung out. ed to the German Army, showed a cerin Spain that they first pinned their Yet tain courage, if nothing more. hearts to an embattled ideology, and our would-be idealogical crusaders urge there is something, even in Blooms- us now to make no distinction between bury, about a first love that no later Italy and Spain. Both, they declare, attachments can ever quite obliterate. were Fascist, and both must therefore Yet, leaving ideology for a moment he treated alike. In other words, the out of the question, what are the fun- friendship the Prime Minister offered damental facts about Spain so far as to Spain in the day of our weakness is they affect this country and the cause to be repudiated by us in the day of The first is fur which it is fighting? strength. This is a little like the that enunciated by Mr. Churchill in our Herr Ribbentrop. It would In the summer morality of England, the House recently. and ill serve her ill become of 1940, when our plight was almost cause in the world. to show such Englishman, valiant desperate, this Nor would Machiavellian duplicity. whom even the most bellicose non- such an act of cynical bad faith rebelligerent has never dared to call an dound to the credit-or ultimate welappeaser, warned both Italy and Spain fare-of the Spanish party or faction in turn to keep out of the war, declarIt would almost certainly it assisted. ing, at the same time, that we had no Spanmake it intensely unpopular. miitant designs against them or their iards resent foreign interference in institutions, and that we had no wish their own affirs even more, if posbut to remain at peace with them. In sible, than we. this he was probably speaking for 99 This is not to say that we in this Mussolini's out of 100 British people. Italy chose to disregard that friendly country want to see Franco or any advice and warning. By doing so be- other dictator permanently establishfore she ruined herself, she nearly ed as the ruler of Spain, or for one brought down our cause and that of moment approve of such a conception Most Englishmen human liberty throughout the world. of government.
For Value and Service
not to be solved by the resolutions
of English debating societies or the innocent enthusiasm of Bloomsbury's
that-yet.
GENERAL FRANCO. would gladly give their lives rather than allow a similar rule to be estabBut most lished in this country. Englishmen, I fancy, would give their lives just as surely (were they ever by ill chance brought face to face with it) to terminate in their own law-abiding land the anarchy, lawlessness and violence which existed in Spain before Franco rose by the sword to power. I happened by an evil chance to see something of that anarchy, and all the special pleading of idealists will never convince me that what I saw was anyThat it thing but cruel and evil. arose from past neglect and social injustice I am fully prepared to believe, but I do not hold --and scarcely any
Englishman does when he is brought face to face with it-that cruelty and injustice justify cruelty and injustice. A blood -frenzied crowd wreaking vengeance on the helpless and innocent is as terrible and vile a spectacle as a tyrant doing the same thing. A gang of lawless toughs is hateful whether it does its dirty work in black shirts or If allowed its head, it always red. produces a despotic military reaction. If anyone wants to study the tragic story of the last Spanish Republic he will find it dispassionately set out in one of the greatest hooks of our age, Salvador de Madariaga's "Spain-the work of a man who hates Franco's dicYet tatorship and all it stands for. the overwhelming impression left by a reading of Madariaga's tragic pages is that the inevitable consequence of the Republican leaders' failure to keep public order was a military dictatorship-in other words, Franco. The truth is that the Spanish problem is an intensely complicated one, and of long and painful standing. It
Perhaps in time they will become so, as their regionalism grows less intense and the spread of knowledge becomes more general. What Spain probably needs to -day above everything else is some unifying institution or symbol which can arouse a common enthusiasm in all Spaniards and give them a common ground on which they can gradually break down the barriers of internicine hatred, fear and revenge. They need a constitutional monarchy like ours, or, to use a less insular idiom, such as their own monarchy was in the unifying days of Ferdinand Perhaps one day the and Isabella, world will see a King of Spain who marries an anarchist's daughter and gives a red and golden Prince of Asturias to a people reborn. Then once again Spain may do the world some great and unique service, as she did 11
the fifteenth and sixteenth centur-
ies, when she enlarged for all time the material and spiritual frontiers of humanity. For the Spanish race is one of the very greatest of all the great races of mankind, and the fires of Spanish genilfs and faith are not extinct, They may one day blaze into a new creative flame that will warm and illuminate the whole 'world.
The best service Britons can do to
Spain-as every Briton 'from Welling-
ton onwards who has had long experience of Spanish politics has advisedis to leave her alone to work out. her own salvation, and, instead of darkening Iberian counsel with angry AngloSaxon words, do their best to understand the peculiar political difficulties Let under which Spaniards labour. us. in justice to a great people, remember that we too had such up's and downs in our earlier democratic evolution three centuries ago. and that, when England, trying to run before she could walk, lapsed into anarchy, a military dictator called Oliver Cromwell ruled her for seven Years by the sword until, on his death, another military dictator called General Monk discarded the sword and restored the rule of Crown and Parliament.
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Murray St., Perth Est.45 years
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