Archibald Maule Ramsay - Spanish Civil War

Spanish Civil War

After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Ramsay became a strong supporter of the Nationalists under Franco, largely arising out of his opposition to the anti-clericism of the Spanish Republicans and their attacks on the Roman Catholic Church (despite being an Anglican himself). In the early months of the war he objected in Parliament to what he saw as bias in BBC news reports on Spain, and pointed to links between Spanish Republicans and the Soviet Union. Late in 1937, Ramsay formed the 'United Christian Front' to combat attacks on Christianity "which emanate from Moscow". Many distinguished peers and churchmen joined, but the organization was criticized in a letter to The Times by senior religious figures including William Temple (Archbishop of York) and Donald Soper. The objectors said that, while they supported Christian unity, they could not support the United Christian Front as it was mainly concerned with the Spanish Civil War and "adopts a view of it which seems to us ill-founded".

Ramsay became aware of a plan to hold a conference of freethinkers in London in 1938, which was being organized by the International Federation of Freethinkers. Together with his supporters in Parliament, he denounced this as a "Godless Conference" which was organized by a Moscow-based organization. On 28 June 1938 he asked for permission to introduce as a Private Member's Bill the "Aliens Restriction (Blasphemy) Bill" (which would have prohibited conference attendees from entering Britain); he won the vote by 165 to 134, but the bill went no further. Ramsay's opposition to Communism led him to look to other countries for examples. On 13 January 1938 he had given a speech to the Arbroath Business Club in which he observed that Hitler's antipathy to Jews arose from his knowledge "that the real power behind the Third International is a group of revolutionary Jews". Some time later in 1938 he read "The Rulers of Russia" by Denis Fahey CSSp, which contended that of 59 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1935, 56 were Jews and the remaining three were married to Jews. At the same time, Ramsay was also becoming more sympathetic to Germany: in September he wrote to The Times to defend the right of the Sudetenland to self-determination.