Santiago Carrillo, who has died at the age of 97, belonged to another time, or perhaps more accurately, and depending on one’s age, to a number of other times: the Civil War; the decades of exile during the Franco regime; the first years after the death of the dictator; but above all to a time when people still took Communism seriously. Despite his failure to secure a lasting place for the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) in Spanish political life, he managed to reinvent himself as one of the guardians of that most revered institution, the transition to democracy. While still in his teens, as a member of the Socialist Youth, Carrillo took part in the uprising in Asturias in 1934, and was … [Read more...] about Santiago Carrillo: the nearly man
Santiago Carrillo
The Spanish holocaust
Even to this day, when asked about the slaughter and repression carried about by General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War and in the years that followed, the standard reply from many Spaniards is that atrocities were committed on both sides. But in this relentlessly harrowing read, British historian Paul Preston provides, page after page, factual, documentary accounts of the systematic policy introduced by Franco early on in the war to rid the country of the red menace and to install a reign of terror among the few that might still contemplate resistance. This was accomplished through disappearances, and in many cases, the murders of entire families, along with theft of young … [Read more...] about The Spanish holocaust