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Bergonia and the Spanish Revolution

Click here for a display of Spanish Revolutionary PostersWe in the USA know this conflict as the "Spanish Civil War" and understand it largely through Hemmingway novels and the heroic Lincoln Brigade.  But we know very little about the anarcho-syndicalist movement that prospered behind the anti-fascist "Republican" lines.  In practice more than theory they initiated a revolutionary Left quite at odds with authoritarian Stalinism.  Had the "Republicans" won, they would have given the world an alternative leftist vision to compete with Stalinism.  In the same way, Bergonian is offered as an alternative vision.  Unfortunately the bad guys won in Spain, and Bergonia doesn't exist.  Tellingly, after he took over Spain, the adamantly anti-left Francisco Franco allied himself first with Hitler and later with the United States, both equally foes of the left.  

Franco won with material aid (tanks and artillery) from Hitler and Mussolini.  German bomber pilots (the Condor Legion) in fact flew missions for Franco against the leftists.  Mussolini sent bombers and also infantry.  Of course Britain, France and the other "liberal democracies" sat on their hands, because the money interests have always preferred a bad right-winger to a good leftist. Just ask Augusto Pinochet, Sukarno, Ferdinand Marcos, and the military butchers of Guatemala and El Salvador.  Even now in Columbia the US excoriates FARC but says nothing to condemn or curb the right-wing death squads. 

The Soviet Union provided selective support to the Spanish communists, with as much an eye on defeating the anarcho-syndicalists as on combating the fascists. After the fighting began, the Spanish communists grew in power because they controlled the flow of arms from the Soviet Union. By contrast the non-communist Left received no aid from abroad and relied exclusively on domestic revolutionary muscle.  In 1938 the Soviet Union let its flow of arms fall to a trickle, and the fascists gained a decisive advantage in arms.  Finally, the communists attacked the anti-communist leftists on 7 March 1939, allowing Franco to seize Madrid on 28 March.

    But what if Bergonia had existed?  Bergonia completed its revolution in 1934.  Fighting in Spain broke out in July 1936.  Imagine this version of history:

 

Alternate Histories,    Uchronia-- books on alternative histories,    Spartacus resources on the Spanish Cival War   

For information about anarcho-syndicalism, try the Links page.

 

 

 

 

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