It happened that, when I first found this eye-catching statement, I was living through an era of national and international upheaval that made Nancy’s 80-year-old challenge snatch up my attention. This was where the Spanish Civil War began to matter to me. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do. It is clear to many of us throughout the whole world that now, as certainly never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides.
Some months in, Nancy Cunard challenged her fellow writers to make public statements on the war in an urgent call that framed things like this: The reaction of foreign powers was significant from the start.įascist Italy and Nazi Germany offered decisive material support to Franco’s side (the nationalists) while the Republican government received from its fellow democracies in France, the United States and Great Britain only a queasy refusal to intervene.Īs the Republic battled to survive this well-resourced attack, relying on a tenacious popular resistance to the military takeover and on arms from Soviet Russia and Mexico, many observers understood the war as an opportunity to halt the global advance of fascism: one that their own governments seemed loath to take up. The Spanish war began in July 1936 when a group of disaffected generals-including Francisco Franco, who would emerge as their leader- attempted to launch a coup against their country’s elected government.
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