THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

http://www.guardian.co.uk/galleryguide/0,6191,395635,00.html

July 17/18, 1936 - April 1, 1939...
In a century of horrors which included two world wars, the Holocaust, the Stalin terror and Hiroshima, one event stands out like a blazing beacon. It is the Spanish civil war, whose stark injustice moved tens of thousands of selfless young people from Europe and America to offer their lives in defence of democracy.
They failed, thanks mainly to the craven cowardice of - among others - Britain's Conservative government. Its prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and his foreign office spokesman, RA Butler, consistently denied the blatant presence of German and Italian troops fighting alongside Franco's fascists. On the basis of Butler's lies, Britain and France enforced a one-sided policy of so-called "non-intervention" which denied the elected government of Spain the weapons it desperately needed.
The cause of the Spanish republic became the great moral crusade for the European and American left in the 1930s. It wasn't an obviously romantic cause, as it had been for Byron in the Greek war for independence. It was a grim battle to halt worldwide fascist aggression and thereby avert a second world war. The volunteers of the International Brigades were, quite simply, fighting to save the world from Nazism.
True, the issues were clouded by sectarianism. Something close to a second civil war broke out between Spanish anarchists and communists behind republican lines. Many of the foreign volunteers were communist party members, and their leaders were often communist. But most were straightforward idealists who had identified a cause worth fighting for. Contrary to legend, they were mostly working class.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,395343,00.html
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/spancivwar/Spanishcivilwar.html
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/spancivwar/lispeas.html
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Spanish_Civil_War_in_literature_film.html?id=XszxexAXmF4C