Daniel S. Davis, on page 92 of "Spain's Civil War," wrote about a battle where Mussolini's Italian legions were fighting Italians in the "Garibaldi Battallion." Davis describes the effect produced by loudspeakers used by the Garibaldi Battallion: "Demoralized by the barrage of emotional appeals not to fight their countrymen, knots of Italian soldiers melted across the Republican lines." (How soon will Fox News be able to provoke Americans into bloody confrontations with other Americans?)
We were struggling with the challenge of finding a way to apply the analogy with the Post Dubya American scene. Could the Carlists (who wanted Spain's royal family to resume their role as the country's sovereign and legitimate rulers) be compared to the Bush family as they anxiously await the restoration of the Bush dynasty via a Jeb win in 2012?
The Germans and the Italians broke the International agreements to stay out of the Spanish Civil War. Great Britain and France did not. France closed its border with Spain and caused some fleeing peasants untold grief. Stalin committed Russia to a limited amount of help which also broke the aforementioned International Agreement to back off.
Davis states that the Germans, the Italian, and the Russians all interfered but notes that for selfish reasons none of them sent a massive amount of help which would bring a quick resolution to the conflict. It seems that the Spanish Civil War provided an excellent testing ground for all three countries to measure the effectiveness of their new weapons and tactics and a prolonged test run was much more preferable than a limited tryout period.
We were just about to scrap the analogy column when "the Rosetta stone" inspiration appeared (like the Lady of Fatima?). Rebels got an amount of help from the Germans and the Italians that was limited but ultimately sufficient enough to tip the balance in favor of the rebel troops under the command of Francisco Franco. Fasten your seatbelts, boys, here it comes: could the electronic voting machines give America's Republicans the extra bit of slightly unfair advantage similar to the help that the Condor Legion gave to the rebel troops?
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