SPAIN: Everybody's War

That no simple civil war of two Spains, Leftists and Rightists, is being fought, made itself clear again last week as some other Spains became active afresh, notably the Basques and the Catalonians. These regions are violently separatist, even when Spain is at peace. The fact that today Catalonians and Basques are both classed as being with the Leftists of Valencia and Madrid makes them no less rugged individualists.

In Barcelona, the capital of more or less autonomous Catalonia (through which supplies for Madrid enter Spain in a steady stream), local President Luis Companys umpired a heroic political dogfight in which the Cabinet of this one of the Spains fell. At last Barcelona's quarreling hot anarchists & communists and warmed-over socialists & republicans grew so helplessly embroiled that most of them seemed relieved when President Companys agreed last week to add the Premiership of Catalonia temporarily to his other offices and worries. Dispatches reaching Valencia said that what had chiefly been accomplished at Barcelona was to "oust the anarchists from their previous control of the police."

Barcelona is the proletarian Pittsburgh of Spain, but violently Catholic Bilbao, capital of the Basques, is a sweating, sulphurous Spanish Youngstown, its skies red every night with the belch of blast furnaces. Up to last week the bouncing, battling Basques had been almost left to their own quarrels by the Rightist Spain of Generalissimo Francisco Franco this year, but suddenly he sent General Emilio Mola with a mixed force of Spaniards, Germans, Italians and Moors swarming north over the Cantabrian Mountains to get Bilbao or bust.

This woke up that lion-hearted lawyer, President Jose Antonio de Aguirre y Lecube of the Basques. If a devout Catholic and a communist fanatic could be rolled into one, the result might approximate President de Aguirre. He keeps a tall ebony-&-gold crucifix on his desk but pounds this piece of furniture with voluble class-conscious vim remindful at times of Father Coughlin. As the offensive of General Mola was just getting under way, Basque de Aguirre went on the air with an impassioned broadcast;

"Two conceptions are now struggling in the world: first, the old capitalist conception, clinging to abuse of privilege; and second, a deep feeling for social justice latent in the masses. Branding this deeply just social commotion as communism is wrong!"

The President of the Basques is thus not a communist but a Social Commotionist, and so are many Spanish Leftists. "Our social advancement policy is a daring one!" went on Radiorator de Aguirre. "We will promote access of workers to capital profits and the coadministration of business enterprise. We are empowered to socialize all elements of production!"

No coward is this Coughlin of beleaguered Bilbao. When he heard that General Mola's forces were advancing down the mountains, President de Aguirre hopped out of the luxurious hotel in which he has been living, ordered to the front every male in Bilbao capable of bearing arms, seized a rifle himself and rushed off to a brilliant, impromptu Basque counter- offensive which in latest dispatches was blocking Mola some 16 miles outside the city.