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Last week I stumbled across a history book that was so awful, I had to return it immediately.  It was offensive to my very sight.

I'm referring to yet another book titled The Spanish Civil War (come on, people!  New title already!) by Frances Lannon.

This was intended to compliment my growing collection of information on the topic, but it actually acted as a subtraction to it. 

I've mentioned before how the Spanish Civil War remains a hotly-debated subject and one which demands stringent adherence to the facts.  That doesn't mean authors can't have opinions, but instead that they need to take extra care to support them.

For example, one can find a number of books comparing the generalship of U.S. Grant and R.E. Lee during the American Civil War.  The partisans on each side take great care to marshal data in support of their conclusions but we know that ultimately it's a subjective debate, which is of course part of the fun.

But what cannot be debated is that the Confederacy explicitly was defending slavery.  It was written right into their constitution.  This is a fact.  To argue that it would eventually go away is to engage in speculation. 

Yet that is exactly what Confederate apologists have to do to defend the "Lost Cause" myth in which brave, honorable Southern Aristocrats fought for the last stand of chivalry in an increasingly soulless modern world.

The same kind of myth-making is present regarding the Spanish Civil War.  The difference there is that it's still considered "mainstream history."

Under this myth, the Spanish Republic was a popular, progressive and totally democratic regime established by moderate statesmen seeking to modernize a backward and feudal Spain oppressed by a medieval religion.

Only fascists and reactionaries could oppose such noble goals.  Tragically, they did, and instead of a flowering of democracy, Spain knew only dictatorship and oppression until Francisco Franco died in 1975.

This is nonsense on stilts, yet Frances Lannon somehow convinced Osprey Publishing to let her create a 96-page propaganda leaflet that may well have been written by the Comintern.

As I noted in a (typographically challenged) Amazon review, the bias in the book is pervasive and obvious, starting with the chronology.

The May 1931 entry laconically states that "Churches burned in Madrid."  Who burned them?  Well, the left did.  The same people who were drafting the constitution of the Republic vehemently hated the Catholic Church and upon gaining power, used their newfound political power to start burning down churches.  Lannon downplays this, and later on in the narrative inverts the cause and effect of why the Catholic Church generally supported Franco's rebellion.

That is to say, she starts the discussion not with detailed descriptions of how the left imposed a ban on Catholic schools and launched a vicious persecution of clergy that killed hundreds of religious people, but instead emphasized the cultural conservatism of the Church – and then adds in wholesale murder, arson and lynching as an afterthought.

Here's another example, from July 16, 1936:  "Calvo Sotelo killed."  In truth he was murdered, and his murder was the catalyst for the Nationalist uprising.  The way he was murdered is also soft-pedaled.  Lannon admits that he was the leading voice of the conservative opposition in parliament and that his killer was a police officer who escaped punishment.

What she leaves out is that only a couple of days before, Sotelo delivered an impassioned floor speech against the leftist majority and when he was done and took his seat, the hero of the left, Communist Delores Ibarruri (aka" La Pasionaria") said "that's your last speech."

What people in Spain therefore saw was a legislator threaten another one with death and then the police appeared to carry out the sentence with impunity.  No wonder there was an uprising!

The story of the Spanish Republic and its collapse into violence and civil war is a tragic one, and that requires more than simply creating cartoon heroes and villains.  If we are to learn from history, we have to study its complexities. 

One can still support the Republican side, just as one can try to defend the Confederacy, but doing so requires an honest assessment of all the facts, not simply twisting them to conform to a sympathetic and simplistic narrative.