![]() ![]() And it contained some telling anecdotes - manhunts conducted by Falangist aristocrats were known as reforma agraria because they finally gave the landless peasant a piece of ground for himself. ![]() ![]() It was well illustrated - indeed, the first edition had more and better photographs than the present book. It told a chronological, nuts-and-bolts story that held the reader's attention. First published in 1982, it was regarded as a competent but not especially original account of the war. So Antony Beevor's revised history of the civil war, which vividly anatomises a state and a society in the process of disintegration, is a tract for our times. The psychopathic General Queipo de Llano, who also encouraged rape, promised to hunt down Republicans without mercy and "if they're already dead, I shall kill them again". He approved a process of limpieza (cleansing) and altogether slaughtered some 200,000 people, four times as many as the Republicans. ![]() Meanwhile Franco proved to be, as HG Wells said, every inch "a murderous little Christian gentleman". And such was the hatred felt for the church, a medieval institution with an auto-da-fé mentality, that some priests were buried alive after being made to dig their own graves. Among the victims were 6,500 clergy and 280 nuns. The "Red Terror", which creamed the scum off the top (to paraphrase Stalin's ambassador), reminded some of barbarian massacres. ![]()
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