Is El País unintentionally accusing the left of committing genocide in the Spanish Civil War?

The Spanish left has been trying for years to present the Spanish Civil War as a confrontation between good and evil.

The names of the 50 children killed by communists in the Paracuellos massacre
Martyrs of Astorga: the torture and murder of three nurses by leftist militiamen

Crimes that do not fit with this vision of good and evil

In this sectarian rewriting of history, the good guys would be those on the Republican side (which included the left and the separatists) and the bad guys would be those on the national side. The problem for the left is that these supposed "good guys" committed countless war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as the Paracuellos massacre in 1936 (with thousands of political prisoners killed by the communists), the chekas (torture and murder centers following the savage Soviet model) or the brutal anti-Catholic persecution that It resulted in the murder of 13 bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 religious men and 283 nuns, many of whom were also raped.

Until now, the left has been claiming that all this was the work of "uncontrolled people", in an attempt to convince us that this wave of crimes in a side that was supposedly democratic (that's what the left claims) would have been accidental and not deliberate. This attempt by the left to hide the historical truth is combined, at the same time, with the desire of a certain left to blame these crimes on their victims , presenting them as "fascists" or "factionalists" who basically deserved the inhuman and criminal treatment they received.

El País publishes a report stating that these crimes were not hate crimes

This Saturday, the socialist newspaper El País published a news item (it can be seen here for free) that has generated controversy on social media. It is titled: "Anatomy of horror: the hidden reasons for the 1936 clergy massacres". The lead in the news item states the following:

"An investigation contradicts the theory of the explosion of hatred as the main cause and detects a “strategic” nature in the murders of religious figures during the Civil War."

Thus, El País attempts to dissociate these crimes from hate, which is the word that the left has used most for years to demonize anyone who contradicts its ideological dogmas. To claim that hate had nothing to do with it is grotesque, but it responds to the leftist ideological burden of always prioritizing its sectarianism over coherence.

This time the socialist newspaper does not use qualifying adjectives

Curiously, the socialist newspaper does not give any qualifying adjectives to this investigation, perhaps to try to present it as something respectable and neutral. It forgets to say, for example, that its authors are not historians, but political scientists, and one of them collaborated with the ultra-left coalition Sumar in the 2023 general elections.

Let us imagine for a moment the shower of adjectives that El País would use to discredit a report that claimed that Francoist crimes were not motivated by hatred. It is not hard to imagine it because this socialist newspaper always adds negative adjectives to describe things it does not like: ultra-right, ultra-Catholic, ultra-conservative, machist...

A violence that "was motivated by political calculations"

It is interesting to observe the conclusions that El País draws from this report:

"All the findings lead to the same explanation: apart from specific cases, anti-clerical violence was mainly due to a desire to “prevent the formation of resistance”, in which the clergy were seen as a key piece", says the socialist daily, which also adds the following: "the violence was not blind or indiscriminate, but was due to political calculations."

El País also tries to "reason" this anti-Catholic persecution by appealing to the testimony of a religious man who was told by a leftist militiaman that the Republicans only attacked the clerics "who dedicated themselves to politics", as if the fact of adopting a political position opposed to the left's theses would make these crimes more understandable. On the contrary: what El País does, unintentionally, is show that these crimes were motivated by a fanatical intolerance to any discrepancy, an intolerance that the Spanish left keeps alive today.

Criticizing victims for taking sides against their executioners

The socialist daily quotes these words from the promoter of this report as a conclusion: "There is no doubt that there was indiscriminate violence and savage murders, but there was also a political Catholicism that took sides." El País also points out that the report reviews the "proselytizing and anti-republican connections and activities that attest to the activism of “an important part” of the clergy in the 1930s."

Note how curious this conclusion is: the left had been burning churches since 1931, socialists and communists unleashed a wave of crimes against Catholics, but the complaint is that the victims took sides against those who massacred them. Imagine what El País would say if someone from the right were to allege the leftist militancy of many leftists murdered by the national side as a "reason" to understand these crimes.

The report allows the authors of these crimes to be accused of genocide

But the most significant part comes in the following paragraph published in that El País news item:

“While previous explanations have focused on hatred (…) and the presence of militias, we show that the former is not sufficient and the latter is only correlated [with violence] when there are strategic objectives,” conclude the authors of the report, who point out that killing religious figures was “partially leaving some critical groups leaderless” and they detect a “systematic pattern of violence.”

Thus, in their eagerness to "reason" this anti-Catholic violence, they are telling us that this was not the work of "uncontrolled people", but a strategic plan to unseat the Catholic Church, which they saw as an enemy to be destroyed. With this, both the authors of the report and the newspaper El País do a disservice to the left, since decapitating the enemy elite was, for example, one of the reasons for the Katyn massacre perpetrated by the Soviets in 1940.

Alleging the existence of a strategy to physically eliminate a social collective falls within the definition of the crime of genocide as set out in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 6 of which thus defines "the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such", citing, first of all, the killing of members of the group.

Crimes that the left is determined to silence

That being the case, it is worth remembering that right now we have in the government of Spain two parties, the PSOE and the PCE, implicated in many crimes of the Republican side, including the crimes related to that anti-Catholic persecution. These two parties intend to impose their vision of the Spanish Civil War on us with the title of "historical memory" and "democratic memory", and they do this, moreover, with a systematic omission of the crimes committed by the left in that conflict.

If, as El País seems to imply (even if unintentionally), these crimes were genocide, what the left would be doing is trying to cover up a genocide, which is the most serious crime of which a person or group can be accused. What a disservice El País is doing to the left in its attempt to "reason" this anti-Catholic persecution.

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Image: A work by Carlos Sáenz de Tejada on anti-Catholic persecution during the Second Republic.