Juan Negrin Quotes
You could break our front with bicycles.
Juan Negrin, 1891-1956, Spanish Finance Minister, Republican Prime Minister, Quoted in Williams, The Story of Spain
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
In a massive terror campaign captured Republican males were shot and the Republican women were raped as a matter of the General’s policy. He would commonly broadcast—see {592113}—what had and would happen to Republicans who remained loyal to the government and continued to fight. It was the actions of men like this that led to the modifications of the Geneva Conventions.
Many Americans and Europeans fought on the side of the Republicans against the Fascists.
This quotation has significance for two reasons. First, Lodge was one of the leaders of the conservative isolationist wing of the Republican Party which generally only wanted to provide the military with weapons to defend the mainland. However, the technology of the airplane caused much rethinking. Americans had seen what German bombing had done to Spanish cities and Italian air power in Ethiopia. This followed by Germany bombing city after city throughout Europe. There were huge calls for antiaircraft guns to be placed around all American cities so that Americans might be defended from air attack. However, Lodge supported another strategy that was a first for America: retaliation. From this point forward, America would rely primarily on retaliation rather than massive defense until President Ronald Reagan proposed his ill-fated Star Wars defense scheme. The second significant factor is that the senator suggested preemption—the attack on a military air base is that threatens us. This appears to be another first.
He was a strong believer in surprise attack and preemption.
Ibarruri is thought to have originated this slogan, in the context of the Spanish Civil War, during a radio speech to Madrid in 1936 when he declared, “Fascism will not pass, the executioners of October will not pass.” For use in a different context see Petain {46976}
It was this perverted logic that led the Nationalists to adopt a policy of killing lower class and poor workers. Though there were communists in Spain at the time, most of the peasants and the abject poor had little or no political philosophy or education. More sophisticated Nationalist apologists observed that the ultra poor were easily enlisted into left-wing causes like communism, so their elimination before the fact was a preventive technique.
The Nationalist/Fascist views in the Spanish Civil War were so gross that they actually hurt the Nationalist cause in International opinion. See {592113} for another example. Despite the facts, most of the Western world was not then knowledgeable about the evils of Fascism and distrusted democracy, socialism, and communism more.
There violence was extreme on both sides. However, the Fascist / Nationalists had a firm policy of violence and terrorism. The institutions of society had so broken down that vigilantism and revenge drove the Republicans to almost the level of atrocities as the Nationalists.
Spain was the most backward of the European countries at the time and had great difficulty coming to grips with modernity, not unlike the Muslims of the Middle East would 60 years later. The cultural influences of the “degenerate” democracies were to blame for Spanish ills.
The United States along with France, Britain and other Western nations maintained an arms embargo against both sides of the Spanish Civil War. However, Italy and Germany, not only shipped arms to the Nationalists but sent planes and crews to fight against the Republicans. Bowers warned that the freely elected Republican government would not be able to hold out against the Fascist attacks of two outside countries and the nationalists in Spain. Further that the arms embargo would force the Republicans politically into the hands of the Russians who became the only possible sourced of arms. The American right wing was opposed to involvement in such foreign disputes. After the Fascists took over Spain, the lesson was not lost on Roosevelt in terms of arms to Great Britain when WWII broke out.
Juan Negrín y López was a Spanish politician and physician. He was a leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and served as finance minister. He was President of the Council of Ministers of the Second Spanish Republic several times between 1937 and 1945, already in exile. He was the last Loyalist premier of Spain (1937–1939), and presided over the defeat of the Republican forces by the rebel faction under General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. He died in exile in Paris, France.
