The Spanish Civil War
After Mexico, Vidali and Modotti left for Spain during the Spanish Civil War, where Vidali headed the anti-Trotskyist faction of the International Brigades known as the 5th Regiment (Quinto Regimiento). He is known to have participated in the assassinations of many suspected anti-Stalinists, in collaboration with GPU agent Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich. In Republican Spain, many of the "accidental deaths" of fellow Republicans, especially those of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification and probably the "disappearance" of their leader Andreu Nin were said to have been carried out under his direction. As a result, Vidali was greatly feared. Vidali, identified as "Carlos Contreras, one of the first Commanders of the 5th Regiment " was shown addressing an assembly of military personnel in the 1937 pro-Republican propaganda film The Spanish Earth.
Read more about this topic: Vittorio Vidali
Famous quotes containing the words spanish civil war, civil war, spanish, civil and/or war:
“Stiller ... took part in the Spanish Civil War ... It is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined—a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“It’s like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don’t understand how you can live there. It’s really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there’s nothing moving. I’ve lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren’t as boring as Los Angeles.”
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“There is reason in the distinction of civil and uncivil. The manners are sometimes so rough a rind that we doubt whether they cover any core or sap-wood at all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Then think I thus: sith such repair,
So long time war of valiant men,
Was all to win a lady fair,
Shall I not learn to suffer then,
And think my life well spent to be,
Serving a worthier wight than she?”
—Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey (1517?–1547)