Atrocities
See also: Red Terror (Spain)During the first weeks of the war, courts of law were replaced by revolutionary tribunals. Extrajudicial killings by militants and vigilantes soon followed.
"Everybody created his own justice and administered it himself...Some used to call this 'taking a person for a ride' but I maintain that it was justice administered directly by the people in the complete absence of the regular judicial bodies." —Juan García Oliver, Anarchist minister of justice, 1936During the initial fighting several thousand individuals were murdered by Anarchist and Socialist militants based on their assumed political allegiance and social class.
"We do not wish to deny that the nineteenth of July brought with it an overflowing of passions and abuses, a natural phenomenon of the transfer of power from the hands of privileged to the hands of the people. It is possible that our victory resulted in the death by violence of four or five thousand inhabitants of Catalonia who were listed as rightists and were linked to political or ecclesiastical reaction." —Diego Abad de Santillan, editor of Solidaridad ObreraBecause of its role as a leading supporter of conservatism, the Catholic Church came under attack throughout the region, church buildings were burned or taken over by the CNT and turned into warehouses or put to other secular uses. Thousands of members of the Catholic clergy were killed and tortured and many more fled the country or sought refuge in foreign embassies.
Antony Beevor estimates the total number of people killed in Catalonia in the summer and autumn of 1936 at 8,352 (out of a total of 38,000 victims of the Red terror in all of Spain).
Read more about this topic: Revolutionary Catalonia
Famous quotes containing the word atrocities:
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course.... I tremble with indignation when I think of ... the unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.”
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