The other night I watched, with fascinated horror, an Open University history of Spain presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
It was called “BLOOD, GOLD AND THE MAKING OF SPAIN”
It recalled how in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella effected the clearance of the Moors who had brought learning and literacy.and wonderful art to the peninsula for 600 or so years.
Books of great scientific and literary value were burned by the thousand. Torture and murder were inflicted on Moslems and Jews who were obliged to convert to the gentle teachings of Christ under inhuman duress, and the Inquisition was established and continued for hundreds of years, inflicting unspeakable torture on the descendants of Jews who established the Judeo-Christian Monotheism and Moslems who honoured Abraham and Christ. and professed and tried to live by the Ten Commandments.
Tariq Ali’s novel “Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree” tells the story of the fall of Granada and the landing of Colombus in the Americas the same year .
For centuries the unfortunate inhabitants were mercilessly treated and Spain became a superpower growing rich whilst promoting Catholicism in a fanatical fashion with little evidence of justice, mercy or charity.
Philip II of Spain was King Consort to Queen Mary of England, daughter of Henry VIII. King’s County and Queen’s County in Ireland were named for them. It was in their reign that they profited from a massacre at Mullaghmast in County Kildare (in 1577 or 1578) which might have served as a blueprint for that at Glencoe in 1692 when the Campbells, guests of the MacDonalds, fell on their hosts and murdered them on behalf of Wiiliam of Orange. Bloody Mary was a Tudor.When Mary died in 1588. Philip proposed to her sister, Elizabeth. But Elizabeth had no intention of becoming a Catholic.
Spanish Catholicism was merciless well into the 20th Century . But it had powerful friends in England. Simon Sebag Montefiore attributes the establishment of Franco’s tyranny to support from Mussolini and Hitler, neither of whom were prime movers.
The prime movers included British Major Hugh Bertie Campbell Pollard who chartered a plane, piloted by a friend of his, Captain Cecil Bebb, who with two young women posing as tourists flew from Croydon to the Canaries and took the murderous mutineer Franco to Tetuan in Morooco, where he resumed command of the Spanish Foreign Legion. Pollard served with MI6 in the British Embassy in Madrid from 1940. Both he and Bebb were decorated by Franco.
On Hitler’s only meeting with Franco (in 1940) Hitler lost his temper with him.
There is a very long account of Pollard’s extraordinary career on Wikipedia.
It is hard to believe that Simon Sebag Montefiori is unaware of Hugh Pollard’s role, and that of other prominent Britons, mentioned in the Wikipedia article in facilitating, indeed sponsoring, Franco’s attack on democracy.
Montefiore is a manifestly intelligent and learned man and an expert in his field. It is difficult to believe that he is unaware of the role of right-wing influential Britishers in kick-starting the creation of Francoist Spain.
The scholar would appear to have a brass neck and leaves the OPEN UNIVRSITY open to contempt,The programme went out on the BBC.
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