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11 The Repression Revolutionary civil wars of the twentieth century have generally been marked by a high degree ofpolitical violence against civilians. It has been observed that civil wars tend to be much more conflicts of principle than are most international struggles, while those of this century have been stimulated by intense ideological and moralistic passion. In the past, civil wars might take a heavy toll of life on the regular battlefield-as in the case ofthe English conflict ofthe 1640s and the American Civil War ofthe 1860s-yet be generally free of atrocities against civilians. This was presumably due to the fact that despite the intense differences in political principle that divided the participants in these earlier conflicts, they continued to share a certain common world outlook, religion, or sociomoral framework. Mass atrocities against civilians at the time of the great English civil war were directed almost exclusively against Irish Catholicsbeyond the general pale of English civilization. By contrast, nearly all the twentieth-century conflicts have reflected intense civilizational and ideological conflicts that demonize the enemy and serve psychologically and emotionally to legitimate the most extreme and atrocious measures. These were initiated by Lenin's imposition ofthe Red terror in 1918, to which the counterrevolutionaries responded, though in somewhat lesser degree. The Hungarian revolution was characterized by considerable atrocity, albeit not of the Russian scale, and widespread violence against civilians was also a feature of the subsequent civil wars in Greece and in east Asia. Even in restrained and legalistic Finland, the civil war of 1917-18 took a proportionately heavy toll of life during or in the aftermath of a four-month conflict-about one percent of the total Finnish 209 210 lI. The Civil War, 1936-1939 population,1 roughly equivalent, for its duration and the population involved , to the loss of life in Spain during a three-year conflict. From the very beginning, the political violence that attended the struggle in Spain attracted widespread publicity and revulsion, not because it was more severe than in other revolutionary civil wars but simply because it was the first to be widely publicized, and took place in a western country at that. On any reasonable comparative scale, political violence against civilians in Spain would have to be rated somewhere in the middle range among conflicts ofthis type. It was more severe than that of Hungary, rather less than that of Russia, and as indicated, about the same as that of the only example to be found in Protestant Scandinavia. Political violence had already become a major factor in mutual polarization before the war began. All the left revolutionary groups made repeated appeals to the legitimate use of revolutionary violence, as did the Falangists, and the rightist radicals differed only in the greater decorum of their outward expression of such urges. When the Civil War began, violence came naturally to the left, who had long been primed for it and incited to it by their propaganda media and had actively practiced it in Asturias, Barcelona, Madrid and elsewhere. The same might be said of the Falangists, who had lost about sixty oftheir number as fatalities to leftist violence before the war began and had slain an approximately equal number of their enemies. From the start, both sides blamed the other for having initiated political executions and reprisals, and each claimed that the repression was much more widespread and vicious in the opposing zone. Vague references in the planning of the conspirators that were later published might be taken as tenuous indication that a very harsh policy was planned from the beginning.2 In fact, the first general slaughter-and one that imme1 . The principal study of the fatalities in the Finnish Civil War is Jaakko Paavolainen, Poliittiset viikivaltaisundet Suomessa 1918, 2 vols. (Helsinki, 1967). It arrives at a total of 31,000 or about 1 percent of the Finnish population of 3,200,000. The bulk were direct or indirect victims of the White terror, which killed about 8,400 outright. Another 11,800 (included in the total) died aftelWards in camps. By comparison, the numbers executed by left and right in the Hungarian revolution and counterrevolution of 1919 were relatively minuscule. Cf. Andrew C. Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary 1825-1945 (Princeton, 1982), 197-202. The most lethal ofall the revolutionary civil wars was that which took place in Yugoslavia during World War II. There the triangular conflict between Croatians, Serbs, and Communist Partisans was inextricably mixed...

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