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Bergonia and the Spanish Revolution
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:
The Bergonian
revolutionaries found that they have many similarities with the anarcho-syndicalists (excluding their virulent anti-clericalism). When war broke
out in Spain Bergonia shipped arms and supplies to the Republicans.
The Bergonian revolutionaries had inherited a sizable navy from the Third
Commonwealth. Then Bergonia sent several
brigades, many of whom had become battle-hardened in Bergonia's own civil war.
They fought the fascists, and more than made up for aid from Germany and
Italy. Perhaps Bergonians would have directly fought Italians
and Germans in Spain. This intervention bolstered the anarcho-syndicalists and the other non-communist
leftists, and diminished Communist influence. As a result the Republicans won the
war. The resulting anarcho-syndicalist-socialist government put the communists
in their place. The religious sympathies held by
many Bergonian revolutionaries
might have caused some amelioration
of the sometimes brutal anti-clerical suppression waged by the Spanish left.
In any event, this
difference would have made for some mutual discomfort, but not enough to
rupture the alliance. After Hitler
invaded France in 1941, Hitler contemplated an invasion of Spain, but Bergonian
had already poured troops into Spain to defend it. Hitler
decided to put off invading Spain in order to invade the Soviet Union in
1942. He concluded that antipathy between Bergonia/Spain and
Britain/USA would keep divided his potential enemies on the western front. Just as Hitler opportunistically struck a pact with Stalin in 1936,
he
attempted a pact with Bergonia & Spain in 1942. The U.S. and Britain
considered launching their invasion of France from Spain, but decided to cross the English
Channel. However, Spain and Bergonia coordinated with them and invaded France on
D-Day as well. With this extra force, France was liberated quickly.
Victory would have come a little earlier in Europe. After the war French leftists, including socialists and anarcho-syndicalists looked to
Spain and Bergonia for inspiration. This alarmed the likes of John Foster Dulles and
Winston Churchill. Because of unremitting Anglo-American opposition to anything leftist, the
Bergonians and Spaniards entered into an uneasy relationship with the
Soviet-led communists.
Every
country in Europe had two left wings now. Tito in Yugoslavia, with his ideas of worker-controlled socialism, got along well with
both Bergonia and Spain. Many of the leftsts there turned to the
Bergonian model of socialism. Social Democrats
in Scandinavia and Britain as well drew some inspiration from Bergonia. In time, leftists in Latin America looked more toward Bergonia and Spain than to either
the Soviet Union or China. This brought Bergonia into direct competition with the
United States. Castro's communist credentials were not clearly established in 1959,
and he may have hewed a different line in this fantasy time. If so, Bergonians would
have boldly put troops in Cuba in 1960. Perhaps Spain (the mother country)
would have done so as well.
Had the United States initiated some sort of Bay of Pigs, war between Bergonia and
the United States might have broken out-- which would have invited Soviet adventurism in
Asia or Africa or Eastern Europe. When Portugal had its revolution in
1974, it followed the Bergonian-Spanish model. By now this bloc of leftist countries could have included Bergonia, Spain, Portugal,
Cuba, Chile, other Latin American countries, and Yugoslavia. Who knows how Bergonia-inspired political parties might
have fared in European elections? Perhaps France and Italy as well--
producing an Atlantic-Latin-Mediterranean bloc of libertarian-socialist states.
And maybe African states as well. "Liberation theology" within the Catholic Church perhaps
would have found active political partners. It would have
been difficult for the US to contend with two leftist blocks, and
perhaps in time the communists in Eastern Europe and Asia would have
learned something from the Bergonians too. Oh well, wishful
thinking.
Alternate
Histories, Uchronia--
books on alternative histories, Spartacus resources on
the
Spanish Cival War For information about anarcho-syndicalism, try
the
Links page. BERGONIAWe
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.
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