the_dunk_tank

Yep. Some of the clergy absolutely were active participants in the civil war on the side of the fascists.

Your comment illustrates exactly why religious groups are included in the legal definition of genocide and it dovetails directly into legal stuff on collective punishment.

Look, I'm not going to armchair quarterback history and I'm not about to defend the legacy of the Catholic church or historians like Preston or Beevor but what I have illustrated in broad brushstrokes above is there is a idealised notion of an immaculate revolution that some people blindly cling to while they hypocritically denounce the excesses of other revolutions which they deem to be from the wrong team.

I explicitly avoided discussing matters like the checas and the assassination of the journalist Josep Maria Planes i Martí by the FAI forces (because they didn't appreciate his investigative journalism into the links between anarchists and organised crime in his work Els Gàngsters de Barcelona) because of the likelihood of inciting partisan bickering by talking about it and because this stuff requires people to actually dig into the historical scholarship surrounding these events and you can't arrive at a position on the matter especially from English-language historical sources by just reading one author - it requires a historiographical approach to the literature because most of the major historians are libs.

In the same way that I don't engage in discussions with people who invoke the Kronstadt Rebellion or the Great Purge or the execution of the Romanovs with people who don't understand anything beyond the name of the event and the spoonfed, boogeyman narratives about them, I don't engage with discussions about the details of the Spanish Civil War because people approach these moments in history as static, isolated moments with a partisan lens and they make their minds up about what happened before they even understand what happened and the context surrounding it.

The point of my comment isn't about arguing that the good side was actually bad and the bad guys were really the good guys. That's the one of the exact mentalities that I reject, and I'm trying to illustrate the lack of engagement with history when people fall into this way of thinking.

The original meme was clearly made by the type of person who is ideology-first when engaging in history: communist bad, anarchist good therefore whatever communists did was bad and whatever anarchists did was good.

A deeper level of this same mentality is to engage with history but to then retreat to an ideological position: Catholic church bad therefore whatever was inflicted upon the Catholic church is good.

That's still a problematic way of approaching history. It's still idealism, inherently.

If you're going to be a historical materialist then you need to engage with history on the terms of history and then to develop a political ideology from that point. Marx didn't start Capital from the position of "Capitalism bad therefore everything capitalism does is bad", far from it, and he also didn't start with the position of "Capitalism bad therefore whatever opposes it or seeks to replace it is good". He started by examining capitalism as it functions and developed political analysis from that place.

If you aren't able to hold that two things can be true at once then you aren't going to get very far.

Was the assassination of Planes by the FAI bad? Yes.

Was the assassination a violation of anarchist political principles? Yes.

Was the assassination a political necessity? Maybe. I know that I don't know enough to come to a conclusion on that.

Were the deep connections between the FAI and organised crime bad? Yes.

Were these connections a political necessity? Yes.

Were the conditions that produced these political connections bad? Yes.

Was the overthrow of the system and the conditions which produced these political connections by the FAI good? Yes.

Good guys do bad things, bad guys do good things. This is even more true when you expand that to groups such as organisations.

Did the clergy in Spain actively participate on the side of the fascists? Yes.

Did all of the clergy in Spain actively participate on the side of the Fascists? No.

Was the suppression of the Catholic church a political necessity? Yes.

Was it a political necessity to burn clergy alive in their churches? No.

Did every member of the clergy who was killed by the Republic deserve to die?

I don't know enough to make that call but you'd have an easier time convincing me that there were people who were killed that were essentially innocent than you would convincing me that no innocent clergy were killed, especially if we draw upon historical scholarship surrounding this.