THE WAR TO EXTERMINATION.

Evening Star, Issue 22448, 19 September 1936, Page 14

THE WAR TO EXTERMINATION.

That the Spanish war will not end until one or the other side has been exterminated was the cheerful prophecy of one of the Fascist leaders. Both parties are doing the best, by their atrocities, to hasten the process which Russian Communists, by a more kindly word, would call “ elimination.” Sir Percival Phillips, the most responsible of correspondents, writing to the most sober of journals, the ‘ Daily Telegraph,’ tells of “ safety committees ” in threatened Malaga who go round the prisons taking out forty or fifty prisoners every day and shooting them, and when General directing the attackers, announces that his troops will show no mercy when they toJke the city, his words can be accepted literally. A correspondent of the ‘ Spectator ’ gives some of the background of events which explains this emulation in ferocity. The majority of the Left alliance in the elections was small, but the victors improved it, as soon as they were ensconced in power,' by annulling the returns of many Catholics and Monarchists and arbitrarily appointing their defeated opponents to sit instead, which is a tradition in Spain, The popular vote was neither for Socialism nor against the Catholics, but for the release of thousands of victims who had been imprisoned under the previous regime. When the amnesty was declared, however, it proved impossible to distinguish between political and other prisoners, and the same difficulty confronted a decree that all who had been dismissed from jobs for political reasons should bo reinstated and compensated by employers. Both edicts ’ were interpreted in the most generous way, with resultant new dismissals and chaos. The prisons were refilled with supporters of the defeated party, and many of the new incarcerations must have caused as much resentment as those which had gone before. “ Why did they lock up So-and-So?” asked this correspondent’s valued washerwoman, when a friend of hers on the popular side was released. “ Poor fellow, he never did any harm. He only threw a bomb into a tank.” The effect of that action would be no more than to destroy the water supply of some hundreds of people and put some scores of irrigation workers permanently out of work. Fascism, we are told, was negligible in Spain before the election. It seems to have made strides since. The peasants of Spain are half-starved and half-clothed, but their condition, according to this correspondent, does not enter into the programme of either of- the contending parties. “Spanish Socialism is independent of economics.”

It would bo strange if the rebels had not had much clandestine assistance from Portugal. That neighbouring State has been ruled for ten years past by what has been called a “ dictatorship without tears.” General Carmona does not strike attitudes or seek mass salutes or try to excite his people or tell them they are the only people on earth. For a decade his object has been to rule them so quietly that they should not know they were being ruled. To an astonishing extent he must have succeeded, because a recent writer tells ns that he knows of no happier country than Portugal. “It has enjoyed the blessing of an honest and apparently stable Administration, which has put the national finances in good order, brought more land under cultivation, and enabled it to make rapid progress. If much still remains to be done, few countries in Europe at the present day are as well off, contented, and comparatively prosperous.” It is natural that General Carmona’s Government should not want a State ruled by Communists and AnarchoSyndicalists for neighbour. But the. Portuguese are a different people from the Spaniards. Catholics, most of them, without question, they have no religious feud to aggravate their problems. And the fact that they have always cut short and padded the horns of their bulls for the bull fight would suggest that they are less cruel.