Book Review: The Spanish Holocaust (2012) by Paul Preston

In the game of My Holocaust Was Worse Than Your Holocaust, the Spanish always lose out because the carnage that took place during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was immediately dwarfed in scale and popular memory by the Grand Guignol that was World War II. Paul Preston has done a superb job of dragging the horrors of the Spanish Civil War out of the shadows, and at the same time making a compelling argument that the atrocities committed by Franco's Nationalists should be considered as part of a genocidal program.

Tossing around the term "holocaust" isn't something historians do lightly. It's a politically-charged definition that continually sparks controversy; the best example being the continuing scuffle over whether or not the massacre of Armenians in Turkey from 1915-23 was a genocidal holocaust. The Turkish government, not surprisingly, has consistently denied the claim, and, most controversially, some Jewish groups have been accused of denying the Armenian Genocide in the interest of protecting the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. Historian Howard Zinn has a short but effective piece on this issue here.

Preston methodically assembles his evidence and shows that the rebels, a coalition of the military, police, landowners, industrialists and the Catholic Church, and led by General Franco, were quite clear in their intentions even before the war broke out. What we now call "eliminationism," the belief that political opponents must and should be removed from society through expulsion or killing, was rife in Spain in the years preceding the war. Political, economic and social relationships between the ruling classes and the peasantry and industrial proletariat in pre-Civil War Spain were still essentially feudal in nature. In short, the upper classes saw those at the bottom as beasts of burden, as virtually another (inferior) race. With the rise of unions and left-wing political groups (Anarchists, Communists, Socialists), the ruling classes became possessed with a hysterical and fanciful fear of a Jewish-Masonic-Marxist cabal that was somehow plotting to bloodily overthrow all that they held dear.

When the war broke out, rebel-held areas became the scene of mass executions of anyone with the slightest, most ephemeral link to the left wing. Preston estimates that over 150,000 people were massacred by the rebels, but cautions that since the Francoist forces held power  in Spain for decades afterwards, there's a reasonable suspicion that the historical record has been altered to reduce the evidence of rebel atrocities, and the true figures of those killed may be far higher. What's undeniable is that the rebel killings were genocidal in intent. Time and time again they stated that their opponents were sub-human or perverted, and the ferocity and cruelty of their actions against leftists are bloody proof of their beliefs. Not content with merely killing their enemies, the rebels also indulged in mass rapes of lower-class women that rival anything the Soviet Army did in Germany at the close of World War II. The role of the Catholic Church in the war deserves special criticism. Not only did high-ranking members of the Church advocate war on the left and the lower classes, more than a few rank and file priests actually took part in the killing.

The killing wasn't all on the right hand side of the ledger. The Republican forces are reliably credited with 50,000 extra-judicial killings. These murders also had an eliminationist flavour as some hardcore leftists, especially the Anarchists, saw the upper classes as irredeemably parasitical. The main difference between the right and left when it came to extra-judicial killings was that the Republican government did not advocate genocidal killings and even took steps to stop them. The problem was that the Republican government was shambolic, ineffectual and hesitant. The rebels, on the other hand, made murder, torture and rape an unofficial policy.

What gives this conflict an additional layer of horror is that its victims are almost completely forgotten. The Spanish Civil War now stands as a historical footnote, known mostly as a warmup for World War II, and as a venue in which various famous writers (Orwell, Hemingway, Koestler) earned some street cred. Even in Spain there's evidently a lot of resistance to digging up the past, and I wonder if that's had a subtle influence on Spanish filmmaking, which has produced  some excellent horror/fantasy films (The Devil's Backbone, The Orphanage, Pan's Labyrinth) that have their roots in the Civil War. One recent Spanish film that seems to be all about the corrosive heritage of the Civil War is The Last Circus. My review's here. And if I was a wealthy Spaniard whose recent ancestors owned large rural estates, this book would make me wonder not if, but how much blood was on the hands of my grandfathers.

The only fault I can find with this book is that it feels like it needs an additional chapter, rather than a brief epilogue, to describe how the post-1945 Franco regime worked to suppress the history of its crimes. That aside, this is a fantastic history of crimes that are largely unknown and have certainly gone unpunished.

Book Review: The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

The genocidal slaughter of Armenians by the Turkish government in the period 1915-22 is a historical fact. Few people other than Turkish nationalists and the present Turkish government would argue with this. That it is little talked about has something to do with its distance in time and also with the desire of many governments to avoid annoying a strategically important Middle Eastern country. Shafak's novel is an attempt to show that this tragic event resonates in the present.  She fails miserably.

Technically, this is a terrible novel. Most of the characters exist only to act as mouthpieces for various points of view. This is particularly true of Amy, the young Armenian-American who goes to Istanbul in search of her roots, and along the way delivers a variety of speeches about the Armenian genocide that may as well have been lifted from newspaper editorials. Just to hammer home her talking points even more, the author has "scenes" set in a cyber chat room that consists of more stilted speechifying. Asya, the bastard of the title, is more symbol than character (more on that later), and secondary characters, such as the Turkish Kazanci sisters and Amy's various Armenian-American relatives, do little more than act in a colourful manner, which generally means forcing various foodstuffs on people. And the plot? There barely is one. Shafak trots out a busload of characters and then gives them little to do, hence we get a lot of parenthetical discussions of folklore, food, and customs, most of it no more insightful or revelatory than the average travel article. And the less said about using a character's imaginary djinn ally to fill in some historical and personal background, the better.

But Shafak's biggest error is her decision to shoehorn in a Symbolic Event which is meant to stand as a reflection of Turkey's denial of what it did to the Armenians.  This event revolves around the mystery of who Asya's father is, and any astute reader should have the mystery solved at the halfway point. It's at that point I wanted to toss the book away because the symbolism was so obvious, so contrived, so clumsily handled, it makes the book feel like it was produced by a committee of creative writing students.

Yes, this novel is a comprehensive disaster, but Elif Shafak is not entirely without talent. She can write with energy and humor, and in the character of Zeliha, Asya's mother, she actually creates someone we want to follow and learn more about. For more current and interesting information on issues surrounding the Armenian  genocide, check out Robert Fisk's columns online at the The Independent.