RELATIONS WITH , SPAIN
Sta,—Dr. Brandt's revealing article on German activities in Spain and Spanish America is pedlar the best comment upon Mr. Loveday's astonishing and self-contraaictory apologia for the present regime in Spain. This is the sort of tendencious exculpation which was common enough six or seven years ago but which one might have hoped the experience of the war yeas would have made impossible today. May I mike some brief comments on Mr. Loveday's four " statements "?
(a) The first is true, though an understatement. Falange does not "represent all Spain." Opposition to it (brutally suppressed) appears indeed to be widespread enough to make mockery of
(2) the assertion that today "Spain is more democratic than most countries of Europe." Has Mr. Loveday not heard of the evidence df what imprisonment in Franco Spain means, of the shootings without trial, the persecution1 of all opposition to the regime, the closing of Protestant churches and schools, the censorship of books, the penalisation of liberal and socialist opinions? Who exactly in Spain is "free to lead his own life in his own way "? And does Mr. Loveday really imagine that Falangist Spain does not bristle with regulations?
(3) It is nonsense to say that Spaniards "experienced the reality" of Communism during the civil war. The Republican government was a coalition of the left, and though certainly its partisans committed many atrocities, impartial judges seem to agree that there was quite as much violence and cruelty on the side of the rebels under Franco. But there was on the Republican side no official persecution of Christianity as such: or why did the Republican Government permit the free dis- semination of bibles in Spain, which has now been forbidden? Certainly there was nothing comparable to the Falangist persecution of free thought
as such. • (4) If "Spaniards believe that freedom and true democracy should alloi• them to choose the form of government that most suits them," then obviously the present regime stands condemned, for no popular choice has ever ratified it. It stands indeed upon a basis of naked com- pulsion and intimidation more manifestly even than Nazism does.
Is it not quite beyond dispute that Franco's Falangist regime is and always has been •a would-be kenemy of democracy everywhere: that his controlled press has openly gloated over Allied reverses so long as it was safe to do so, and even as late as the Rundstedt Ardennes offensive: and that so long as the regime remains it is bound to be a centre of persistent Nazi and Fascist intrigue all over the world? Let us "stand by the principles of the Atlantic Charter" and do nothing to save a Government that stands unmistakably for every one of the four Unfreedoms. Pre- sumably the U.S.S.R., against whom Franco has been waging war and which has one of his chief collhborators on its war criminals' list, may have something to say as to how so deal with Franco's regime.—Yours
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