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| Imagen: Telemadrid |
Everyone was guilty, but no one was to blame; the great culprit was the world was in crisis.
Our civil war had possibly the greatest number of causes of all the wars in Europe. It happens at a historical moment when it can be said that everything is in crisis, which will facilitate the conflict:
Capitalism because of the collapse of the stock markets, whose values were air, the result of speculation.
The religion for the rationalism that the development and the spectacular advances of the sciences entail and of increasingly many and better educated middle classes and, therefore, more critical.
The progressive abandonment of rural areas and the agglomeration in large cities because of the demographic effects that the industrial revolution will cause. What Ortega y Gasset calls "The rebellion of the masses"
The arts, because they abandon classical naturalism to open new perspectives and artistic values.
The disintegration of the family due to social mobility caused by the use of the car and the telephone.
The fear of a new world war, for the rearmament of Nazi Germany.
In short, a large number of causes as a consequence of ruptures with the past, which justified experiencing all kinds of alternative political, cultural and social proposals, among which stood out fascism and anarchism, the most radicalized options of that time.
Capitalism because of the collapse of the stock markets, whose values were air, the result of speculation.
The religion for the rationalism that the development and the spectacular advances of the sciences entail and of increasingly many and better educated middle classes and, therefore, more critical.
The progressive abandonment of rural areas and the agglomeration in large cities because of the demographic effects that the industrial revolution will cause. What Ortega y Gasset calls "The rebellion of the masses"
The arts, because they abandon classical naturalism to open new perspectives and artistic values.
The disintegration of the family due to social mobility caused by the use of the car and the telephone.
The fear of a new world war, for the rearmament of Nazi Germany.
In short, a large number of causes as a consequence of ruptures with the past, which justified experiencing all kinds of alternative political, cultural and social proposals, among which stood out fascism and anarchism, the most radicalized options of that time.
Within the country, in addition to the deep regional divergences, there were some social strata in crisis practically anchored in the Middle Ages: the commoners later called proletarians, to whom the majority of the population (day laborers and workers) belonged. The upper classes, formed by an amalgam of aristocrats, landowners, oligarchs, bankers, great industrialists, and the high clergy. They all fit Gil Robles' political ideas.
In the political center were the incipient urban middle classes, the only ones awake, capable of interpreting reality as it was, while on the left they dreamed and on the right they slept. Among them were the best contemporary politicians our country has given, divided among the radicals, republicans and social democrats, such as Azaña, Fernando de los Ríos, and Besteiro.
All the upper classes believed that they had gained rights little less than by divine will and did not see themselves as responsible for the enormous social inequality.
The right believed itself invulnerable because it had God's blessing, at least that was how the cardinals, bishops, canons and other members of the high clergy made them understand during their frequent private meetings of confessions. Everyone was forgiven of their sins with a simple penance, even if they did not show the slightest regret.
The aristocracy only had the supposed blue blood left as a class badge because in that turbulent situation it was difficult to live off the income, so they were in the hands of usurer lenders, "friends of the family" and jealous guardians of their most valuable family jewels.
The landowners felt rooted in their farms and crops, as a tree might be, because for them the land did not belong to the one who works it, which is a worldly property, but by inheritance, which is a property founded on history.
The capitalists considered that any means was licit to get benefits because in that principle it base the same nature. But in reality, the only sure thing they owned was the diamond embedded in the tie pin, the rest of the capital they manage did not know the real value that it had from one day to the next.
Anarchists, experts in dreaming of utopias and with human beings with values close to angels, were born not as a reaction to the extreme right-wing attitude, but as a “spontaneous generation”.
An anarchist could be illiterate without diminishing his social aspirations, he just needed to speak and listen, because the ideology was simple: everything belongs to everyone and everything is resolved in assemblies. That is why the most many formations were the CNT-AIT. No anarchist would think of writing "Capital", because, as I have already said, his bible was the thought of the ruined Russian aristocrat, Mikhail Bakunin, whose proposal would describe Marx as "slop", and his church was the assembly.
The case of the communist crisis was its dependence on the Moscow directives, but in the Kremlin, there was no longer talk of communism but of Stalinism. A rude Georgian, opportunist who changed the Marxist axiom "to each according to his knowledge, and his needs" by "to each according to his obedience to the communist party".
As for the high clergy, he believed that his destiny in this world was not only to save souls from the clutches of Lucifer, but to enrich the heritage of the Church so that its members would benefit, and the best way to achieve it was through Christian education in theory but the economist in practice.
The first bishop to be assassinated in the early days of the war was shocked when he tried to escape from his assassins with a jewel fortune hidden in his clothes. Neither did he believe in the value of money.
In summary, we can say that the main cause of our civil war was the deep generalized crisis of all the values and classes that give solidity to a social group. The crisis that gave rise to the rise of fascism, or the party of the lower middle classes, which suffered in its flesh the effects of this general crisis.
After the inevitable World War II, and transferring the position of universal gendarme from the United Kingdom to the United States, we are trying in vain to avoid a new generalized crisis, not only because time changes values, but because we have not learned the lesson and incurred the same mistakes of our ancestors.
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CASTELLANO
Todos fueron culpables, pero nadie tenía la culpa; el gran culpable fue el mundo que estaba en crisis. 
