The Evening Star (March 4, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Spain’s future of grave interest to U.S.
By Dorothy Thompson
The situation in Spain is of the gravest interest to the United States. Spain is one of our nearest transoceanic neighbors. An unfriendly Spain, with her North African empire, her position on the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and her great influence on Latin America, could constitute a serious menace to pan-American security.
We shall never be able to count on a comfortably stabilized situation as long as Spain is ruled by the Franco dictatorship. But neither would we be safer were it ruled by any other aggressive, expanding totalitarianism. To put it bluntly, a Spain which would make Soviet Influence as dominant in that geographical position as in Bulgaria would be a means of bringing powerful Soviet pressures on Latin America, and would be intolerable. The sooner the United States makes that clear, the better.
The Spanish civil war was the result of actions and reactions.
Left extremist pressures on the Republican government made orderly administration all but impossible and inflamed the reactionaries who made the Franco coup d’etat and precipitated a terrible civil war with ghastly excesses on both sides, with intervention by Hitler and Mussolini on one side and the Soviet Union on the other. The Spanish people, as a result of the horrors of that struggle, retained little affection for either white or red extremists.
In the manner of 20th century revolutions, whether of the extreme left or extreme right, the victory of Franco had to be maintained by the brutal suppressions of the civil war itself. These revolutions, being divorced from all concepts of humanism and law, are doomed to maintain themselves by the means through which they come to power. Not one of them, including the Russian, has ever established constitutional guarantees for the liberties and securities of the people. All rule by force alone, however they may camouflage it by police plebiscites.
All are police states of the crassest nature; all – such being the nature of the police state – never make an end of universal espionage, or people’s tribunals resembling medieval inquisitions. And all, without exception, seem driven, as though by the law of their nature, to totalitarian conquest, whether by Quisling methods or open force.
The people of Spain have already been bled white, and reduced to the utmost material wretchedness and spiritual despair, by the bitter struggles between fanatics of the Left and Right which have always made the common man with his eternal longing for life, liberty, and happiness, their victim – even when they speak in his name, as they usually do.
What Spaniards want is what all men everywhere want, the chance to be men, not instruments of plundering, raping, destroying political cliques. They want the protection of specific written laws, administered by courts that are not the slaves of arrogant bureaucrats. They are sick to the bone of race wars, class wars, international wars, Fascist wars. They want peace.
The Spanish Republican government in exile, on advice of a majority of the anti-Franco movement within Spain, has rejected Communist participation in any future government. Must it be forced on them, and if so, why? Must the Popular Front policy which has already been proved disastrous to social peace be revived?
The American government has an interest to see that totalitarianism does not spread, and that governments guaranteeing the civil liberties of the people under constitutional law be created or preserved. We have been defeated in Poland, Bulgaria. Yugoslavia and Romania because, instead of demanding constitutional protections of human rights, we merely demanded Popular Front governments – and did not even get them. But though these countries are also not, in the modern world, “far way,” Spain is our backyard.
What we should therefore support is the restoration of strictly constitutional government in Spain. We should insist that democracy is not mobocracy, nor the dictatorship of any glass or party, nor any form of police state, and is a total fraud unless it embodies in the basic law a bill of human rights.
We should make it clear that we will regard with extreme distrust any government which refuses to extend to its people the rights embodied in the preamble to the San Francisco Charter. We should hold no prejudices against economic systems provided the human person is guaranteed the right of opposition, the right peaceably to advocate change, without thereby endangering his life and liberty.
We should stand four-square for this. For our own freedoms will not survive if we are pushed to the periphery of the world’s system; we must stand for it because this is our character as a civilization, and every nation that once betrays its own character is doomed. That is the inexorable law of history, for which there is not a single contrary example.