EVENTS IN SPAIN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22987, 16 September 1936, Page 3

EVENTS IN SPAIN

PARTIES OF THE LEFT CAUSES OF CIVIL WAR DANGER OF EXTENSION By the Right Rev. Bishop Liston 11. Into the Popular Front of Spain Socialists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, and Communists entered as legal parties for the purpose of the elections of February, 1936. Though it polled but 46 per cent, of the electorate, it was able by better political strategy to obtain a majority of seats in the new Cortes and passed into power. 1. Azana, born a Catholic, owing all his education to priests, bourgeois, now professes atheism, scorns religion, and is the open and bitter enemy of the Church. After a brief term in March as Premier he had Zamora removed and became President.' His party—Left Republican, Radical, 100 strong in the Cortes — seeks to withdraw all support from the Church and her vast work in schools, hospitals, homes of many kinds, leper stations, to dissolve religious communities, to forbid religious schools, to nationalise Church properties, and, oh the other hand, to give over to the State all education, which must be free, compulsory and secular—that is, in Spain, irreligious. On July 28, the Government announced that Article XXVI of the Constitution of 1931, providing for the nationalisation of all property of religious communities, hitherto a dead letter, was to be enforced within five days. The chief appeal of the party to the electors- was the better distribution of land and wealth, without violent social revolution. 2. Socialism has, or at least had, its two elements. The moderates spoke of peaceful evolution toward a better order of justice—greatly indeed to be desired in Spain. The extreme Left wing is now in full charge, having cast aside the moderates, whom they had used merely to seize power. The leader, Largo Caballero, dubbed the Spanish Lenin, has for many a day held up the Red flag and talked loudly of civil war. His aim—he has made no secret of it—is to use the power of Government • to. overthrow by violence the whole framework of existing institutions—the Church, in particular—and to set up a state of terror (as in the Russia of 1917) that would lead to the dictatorship by the proletariat. The dictatorship having been established (he scorns, of course, parliamentary government), he would nationalise the land, banking, commerce, industry, the railways, and would give Spain a Republic of Soviets, as he explains, just like Russia. 3. Anarcho-Syndicalists are said to number over 1,000,000 among the workers of the cities, especially of Barcelona, the miners of the Asturias, and the illiterate and exploited peasants of the South. They stand for the denial, complete and violent, of God, the family and property. The great Lenin himself they look upon as almost a reactionary. Like the Socialists, they scorn parliamentary government, and seek the new order by the direct action of the revolver and the bomb. The Azana Government, in its hour of peril, has armed them all, and so we have on a vast scale the burning of religious houses, libraries, the magnificent scientific laboratories of the Jesuit teachers, and of cathedrals and churches that were the glory of Europe, the butchering of bishops and priests, the outrages upon nuns living and even dead, the sacrilegious dances in Barcelona. Our thoughts go back in horror to the worst, mad days of the French Revolution.

There are 2000 Marist Brothers in Spain, of the same order as our own', hitherto engaged in the work of teaching, and several, hundred nuns (also engaged in teaching and in works of charity), whose orders have houses in Australia and New Zealand; of their fate little is so far known.

4. The Esquerra, a combination of Marxists and Republicans, with companies at its head. 5. Communists are probably few in number, but they are the guiding and driving force of the several political groups if the Popular Front in Spain, as in France. In 1921 Lenin predicted that Spain would become the second Communistic State in Europe! With the advent of the Azana Popular Front, parliamentary government , went out. Leaders of the various groups took upon themselves to govern many affairs, on their own authority, independent of Parliament. Workers' groups in many places took over property from its owners, and in several provinces labourers seized the landed estates.

According to America of August 15, al ays exceptionally well informed, an immense gathering of 100,000 Soviet trade union delegates, recently held in Moscow, declared its solidarity with the Spanish Leftists, and pledged material aid. The Central Council of Trade Unions was to undertake a campaign for mone> throughout Russia, and through monthly contributions from each worker raise a fund of over 200,000,000 roubles. Although the Soviet Government avoided any sign of identification with the demonstration and pledge, it is obvious that the gathering could not have been held v/ithout the Government's appro -1, and that, owing to the drastr monetary regulations, its promoters and participants would know how impossible it would be to send to Spain the smallest fraction of the money collected without permission from the Government.

While Russia expouses the cause of the Spanish Popular Front through t'-ef mass demonstrations and over the radio in several languages for all the world to hear, Italy and "" rmany, openly over the radio and actually, if. clandestinely, in other ways, support the rebels, France is divided; there are strong Right Wing forces, but the jovernment is a Popular Front combination; one of its Ministers has openly declared in favour of the Government in Spain, and much help is going to it. England ha- deep concern in the struggle. Were the rebels to triumph, aided by Italy and Germany, her interests in the Mediterranean would be threatened: wer" the Left to win outright, victorious Communism would spread to France and be definitely established in Europe. In all this lies the grave dang, of civil war in Spain growing into civil war in Europe, with the whole future of Europe and nf the world at stake.