Last week I wrote an essay in Takshashila Institution’s Pragati where I argued that Civil Wars don’t have a “good side”.
An excerpt:
Thanks to the efforts of individuals such as Pablo Picasso and George Orwell among others, the Spanish Civil War is often portrayed as a conflict between the ‘good’ (the socialist Republic) and the ‘bad’ (the Nationalist forces) – with the malicious Nationalists bombing the poor Republican people. The truth, however, is not so simple. Looking at other, more objective accounts, including Lowe’s, it turns out that it was a war fought between two evil sides (though it’s not clear if the sides were equally evil) – the Nationalists on one side and the Communists on the other, with the people of Spain being the real victims.