I listened to quite a few chunks of Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain through an audiobook recording last year and thought it would be a good idea to read the book as a follow-up, assuming that all the confusing details would fall into place through a slow, sequenced reading. That hasn't happened. If anything, I found the sheer amount of detail Beevor provides harder to follow when reading it directly off the page, being forced to provide the 'voice' of the text myself. But in a way this seems appropriate to the subject. The early part of the twentieth century was a deeply confusing time for the Spanish people and the events of the 1930s seem like a dark conclusion to decades of bitter divisions on all sides.
Beevor is brilliantly even-handed in his sober account of it all, out of which hardly anyone emerges with any sort of credit. The pages covering the outbreak of the conflict with the nationalist coup d'état make for particularly uncomfortable reading as all sides seem terribly enthusiastic to kill off their opponents simply, I suppose, out of a deep sense of hatred tempered with a big helping of simple fear as to what the other side would happily do to them if given the chance. Human life becomes cheap indeed under such circumstances.
Can't help but wonder if we're seeing a similarly toxic climate being created these days in parts of the world that seemed comfortably stable just a couple of decades back.
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