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SPAIN: A Matter of Conscience

3 minute read
TIME

“Spain is a festering sore on the conscience of the Western powers.” So writes Emmet John Hughes in the best-informed book* yet published on post-civil-war Spain. The present U.S. attitude toward Franco, says Author Hughes, “can only hasten the likelihood of civil war and facilitate the rapid growth of Communism in Spain. . . . The Western democracies have failed to evolve and express a clear, purposeful policy that would free Spain’s democratic forces from the deadly Fascist-Communist cross fire in which they have been placed.”

Part of this cross fire comes from the Falange police state which can refuse jobs to all workers suspected of opposition to the Falange, which keeps some 150,000 political prisoners behind bars, and extends its power into every home in Spain. The common denominator of the Falange’s unruly elements is power, and so it is not surprising then that the Falange has turned Spain into a huge guardhouse.

Yet the Falange is not all-powerful. The Army and the Church hate and fear it. The three are held in uneasy alliance by the consummate skill of that underestimated little dictator, Francisco Franco, and by the inept and purely verbal opposition of the democracies.

Hughes points out that Army, Church and Falange stood together in the civil war, and that, therefore, any democratic opposition based on the origin of the Franco regime merely reminds these three very different forces of what they have in common. Democratic action against the Spanish Government based on its present practices might have the effect of widening the split between Army, Church and Falange. As long as the three institutions support Franco, the Spanish people (80% of whom Hughes marks down as opposing the regime) has little chance of liberation. Hughes’s first book, The Church and the Liberal Society, was a book-of-the-month choice of the Catholic Book Club; Hughes is now a TIME correspondent in Rome. He spent four wartime years as press attaché of the U.S. Embassy in Madrid. He thinks that economic sanctions by the Western powers, and not “international sermons,” will bring Franco’s downfall. The Communists throughout the world clamor for an economic embargo against Spain; Author Hughes does not believe them. His opinion is that the Kremlin wants the democracies to leave Franco in power only until the day comes when the Spanish people rise under Communist leadership (not now predominant in the underground) and engulf Army, Church, Falange—and the gateway to the Mediterranean.

*Report from Spain, by Emmet John Hughes; Henry Holt & Co. ($3).

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