Blind on Spain

...DAVID FELLMAN is Vilas professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin...

...Among his books is "The Defendant's Rights...

...his books include "A Question of Slavery" and "Portugal in Africa...

...most intelligent contemporary accounts are those of the Left simply because most intellectuals in the late 1930s were bitter enemies of Franco, whom they saw not as a product of Spanish history but as an exemplar of European Fascism...

...He teaches intellectual history at Northwestern...

...It has been difficult for the impartial historian to cast off this burden of bias...

...Therefore, a book by a Nationalist like Senor Luis Bolin is bound to raise our hopes, for there is much to say about the Nationalist version of the struggle, and no one seriously interested in modern Spanish history will want to leave it unsaid...

...CHRISTOPHER LASCH wrote "The New Radicalism in America: 1889-1963...

...The author believes that Guernica was in reality "deliberately dynamited or set on fire by the Reds...

...that millions of Spaniards, submerged in poverty and backwardness, felt anger, despair, and alienation from the regime...

...But who will convict the Spanish Left of its failures and crimes when the case for the prosecution is supposed to be adequately represented in a book like Bolin's...

...Blind on Spain Spain: The Vital Years, by Luis Bolin...

...JAMES DUFFY teaches at Brandeis University...

...WILLIAM McCANN reports regularly in these pages on quality paperbacks...

...The major merit of the book is that it provides some glimpses of clarity into the reasons why men fought for the Nationalists and why they were better raw material for a disciplined army...

...Bolin also pinpoints an often forgotten element in the Nationalist triumph: Franco did not call up recruits in excess of requirements...

...For him Guernica became a tragedy because "only the Reds had diplomatic representatives in London" and because "a great deal of money was spent on it abroad...

...Bolin cannot recognize facts known to any student of Spanish history: that Spain had been spiritually and ideologically divided for more than a century before the Civil War...

...he emerged from Africa a dedicated professional officer bred in the Foreign Legion on a mystique of loyalty and discipline...

...What emerges from Bolin's book is the horror at the "proletarization" of political life in Spain after the Republican victory of 1936...

...Once more we are asked to believe that millions of Spaniards who supported the Republic were "a rabble" of thugs bent on destruction...

...Rightly Franco's Moroccan antecedents are stressed...

...that Catalan nationalism, whatever its Twentieth Century ambiguities, had its origin in the Seventeenth Century...

...SIGURD F. OLSON, a naturalist and woodsman whose base is Minnesota, wrote "The Lonely Land" and "The Singing Wilderness...

...lican cities—a discovery which distressed Bolin, whose task was to revive Spain's tourist industry...

...Reviewed by Gabriel Gersh The history of the Spanish Civil War has been written mostly by men of the Left...

...Had Bolin limited his book to these personal experiences, or attempted to make an autobiography of them, his book would have had considerable interest...

...Instead, he has produced a personal memoir around which are arranged some distorted propaganda reflections on Spanish history and politics, from the Primo de Rivera dictatorship to the end of the Spanish Civil War...

...He is a devout Roman Catholic and a fanatical monarchist...

...In this way the German bombing of a defenseless village, one of the traumatic moments of recent history, is relegated to the realm of myth and propaganda...

...there is the shock felt by conquering Nationalists at the spectacle of starvation, dirty streets, and general dilapidation of the RepubTHE REVIEWERS ROBERT WIEBE, a professor of history at Northwestern University, wrote "Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement" and "The Search for Order, 1877-1920...

...GABRIEL GERSH is a free lance writer and critic who has specialized in Mediterranean affairs...

...Bolin's portrait of Franco, a politician whose durabliity is explained neither by his friends nor his foes, is orthodox: the man of iron, whose judgments and decisions are tempered by charity and compassion...

...We are assured that all of Spain's ills flowed from Communism, and that the Civil War was started to save the nation from the horrors of Communism...

...He is half-Spanish and half-British and, as he reveals in this book, his prejudices are those of the upper classes of both countries...

...Senor Luis Bolin was Franco's press and intelligence officer from 1936 to 1938...

...The cry, "To me the Legion," was transmuted into, "To me Spain...

...he ended the war with a trained army, not, as his enemies did, with a mass army...

...The bombing of Guernica finds Bolin at his most inventive...

...He finds it eminently respectable, to the point of needing no explanation or apology, to have organized the charter flight of Franco from the Canaries to Morocco at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, to have been a member of Franco's first cabinet (as head of the Spanish Tourist Office), and to have solicited help as Franco's representative from Mussolini...

...He wrote "The Politics of Reapportionment...

...Instead of trying to understand the causes of the Spanish Civil War, Bolin invokes the specter of Communist agitators to explain the violence that convulsed Spain...

...MALCOLM E. JEWELL is a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky...

...Most of the book, apart from the virtue of its personal observations, consists of such distortions...

...What is sad is that the republic did not rise to the challenges before it, and that the Communists did unscrupulously and ruthlessly try to use these failures for their own ends...

...Indeed, it is an example of the old, invincible blindness of many Spaniards to the character of their country...