24 August 2008

If anyone thinks about the Spanish Civil War any more it is to remember the proxy war fought between German Faschists and Russian Communists  just prior to WWII, but there are more interesting lessons for us to learn.  Henry Kamen discusses some of them in his book Disinherited - Exile and the making of Spanish Culture.  The important lessons are about contention.

"In Spain," he quotes artist Menendez Pindal as writing, " difference of opinion degenerates into a contest of irreconcilable animosity."  Arab legacy perhaps?  Arabs are famous for the same.  Kamen describes "two Spains", with interplay between the African and European, isolationist and international, liberal and conservative, locked in an unending struggle.  Superimposed upon this has been a feeling of superiority resulting in stong cultural rejection of everything foreign.

A fragile barrier exists separating democracy from anarchism - can we call it ability to compromise? - and the Spanish experience, where it was breached, demonstrates it rather poignantly.  It is quaint to say that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, but more realistic to observe that those who ignore examples from history do so at their peril.  The extension of Spain's example is that without williness to discuss, and compromise positions, democracy can fairly rapidly morph to anarchy, which of course is untenable and inevitably leads to dictatorship.

But this could never happen in the United States.  Could it?