The Spanish civil war.

SIR. I write to support the views of Hal Colebatch in his splendid review of W.H. Carroll's The Last Crusade: Spain 1936 (September 2007). May I draw attention to the following additional facts:

1. The current leftist myth that Franco's Republican enemies were fighting to preserve the old Democratic Republic is transcendental nonsense which not even the Republican leaders believed. Thus, on May 21, 1936, the Caballero Socialists resolved:

   The proletariat must not limit
   itself to defending bourgeois
   democracy but must ensure by
   every means the conquest of
   political power in order to make
   the social revolution.

On June 14, 1937, the Asturian UGT-CNT pact proclaimed:

COMRADES: The Spanish working class, at war and at work, is forging a Spain which must be fundamentally different from that which we had to live under before the fascist uprising ...

Again, in the January 1937 CNT-FAI Boletin de Informacion, it is clearly spelled out:

   It should be clearly understood
   that we are not fighting for the
   democratic republic. We are
   fighting for the triumph of the
   proletarian revolution.

These and other quotations to like effect may be found in Ronald Frazer's Blood of Spain.

2. Of the many Jews who fled to Spain during the Second World War, none were handed back to Laval or Hitler.

3. If Franco had lost the Civil War, not only would Spain have become a German satellite in 1939, as Colebatch says, but it would also have become a Soviet satellite from 1945 onwards for about fifty years, an even more calamitous result.

4. Even Orwell, despite his general idealism, was taken in by communist propaganda. In Homage to Catalonia he writes how he and his fellow soldiers took over and occupied a church as a military base, without considering that for many of the inhabitants that would constitute a gross sacrilege.

R.P. Meagher,

Sydney, NSW.