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272 pages, Hardcover
Published July 9, 2024
"...History does not repeat, but it rhymes. For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill. This is the way of things in all things. There is light and there is dark. Always has been. Always will be. Civilization is the superstructure built on law and order that keeps the petty, the resentful, and the cruel away from the rest of us. Some societies have been better at this than others. Those who fail at repelling the repulsive fall to unhumanity—to a state of affairs in which human thriving is impossible and surviving improbable."
"The authors argue that it is humanity itself currently under threat. They unwrap the history of Communism, a dehumanizing philosophy of oppression, of denial of human rights and nihilism.
The reader is guided around the world, revealing the stories and histories the mainstream press won’t touch … from Cambodia, Nicaragua, Chile, Afghanistan and the Soviets, to Apartheid in South Africa. They bring us right up to President Donald Trump and January 6th, a day they correctly call “America’s Inverse Bastille.”
"While academic and reference titles explore the motives and agenda of household-name leaders during each left-wing upheaval, this book will give you on-the-ground descriptions of what it’s really like to witness (and fight) communist forces of change. We have recast the story of communism as individuals against individuals, as real people, to reveal how and why neighbors turn against neighbors. Why even yours might, against you. Along the way, we will reintroduce you to the household names of history, but in a way you’ve never seen before—we will tell their true stories.
And unlike some popular conservative commentators—who are nakedly reactionary and hyperbolically defeatist in their retellings of left-wing political history—this book will offer a measured tone. We will take this subject as seriously as deserved. And in the process, this book will inoculate you and by extension those you love from ever falling for revolutionary ideas that accelerate the end of everything."
Look up images of his rule in Spain, and you’ll quickly find amateur-edited photographs showing a side-by-side of Francisco Franco with Adolf Hitler and, naturally, swastikas.
The “Manuel Azaña good, Francisco Franco bad” narrative is retold and reinforced in popular media.
All that unhuman bloodshed unleashed upon Christians and landlords among other targets could not go unpunished. Total anarchy had been unleashed upon enemies of the red state; believers in an orderly, traditional Catholic Spain felt called to quell the terror. And so a counterrevolution was born in the shape of a big-tent coup d’état— a military uprising.
They also benefited from the full support of the Comintern; the leftist republic received weapons, ammunition, airplanes, tanks, and other vehicles from the Soviet Union to wage civil war, exceeding far more than comparable warfighting resources that were provided to the Nationalists by Germany and Italy combined.
Worldwide communist organizations also mobilized international brigades of volunteers so any would-be radical could come to Spain to rob and/or kill any and all non-communists. In fact, one of these was called the International Antifascist Brigade.
The governments of Germany and Italy supported the Spanish Nationalists against the Soviet-backed Rojos in the war. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
It was also a war between leftists and further leftists ... and the further leftists who came after these leftists were executed ... and then also against the even more extreme left following those leftists ... and so on and so on.
The Spanish communists were trying to speed-run a Bolshevik uprising and so couldn’t wait for that apparently.
Ironically, for being remembered in the West as a fascist dictator, the eventual victorious general Franco—the self-proclaimed caudillo, or leader, of postwar new Spain—didn’t actually do a lot of fascism or dictating.
Following the surrender of all communist Rojos forces in Madrid on March 28, 1939, Franco became, in our view, a Washingtonian figure but without term limits.
Franco did not execute thousands of his own followers as Stalin or Mao did, nor did he turn Spanish society upside-down in the name of progress. There was no terror-famine in Spain, no Great Leap Forward, or Cultural Revolution. He was, simply, the caudillo. The boss.
One right-wing faction of Nationalists called the Falange favored the fascism of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, but they were marginalized. World War II was all risk, no reward from the Spanish perspective.
right-wing parties won the November 1933 general election but were denied power.
fascist killers who wanted to drag the good working people of Spain back to the Dark Ages by hook or by crook.
Orwell, of course, came away disillusioned with the Rojos. Prior to service in the brigade, he had been pro-socialist. But after witnessing the violent purges of the Rojos side for himself, he was put off by all left-wingers from then onward.
The Spanish Civil War made willing martyrs of many. And that is one of many differences between the unhumans and the rest of us, particularly those of faith. Good, believing people are willing to die for a cause greater than ourselves. But unhumans are willing to kill innocents—and each other—for no cause at all.