July 27, 1936: which side are you on?

[luiz]

I find it a little weird that the power struggle of the Republican side is always emphasized, and support for it can always be qualified and specific, but the Nationalists always get flattened into just Franco (and still Fascism at the same time. Funny how that works).

Yep, that's a good point.
I think it would be quite unfair to characterize say the Carlists as Fascists, and yet in popular imagination, which was of course fed by massive propaganda during the Spanish Civil War, it was all about a conflict between "democrats" and "fascists". Never mind the fact that a sizable chunk of the Republican forced hated democracy, and a sizable chunk of the Nationalist forces hated fascism.

 

[Antilogic]

All that, plus Franco did not emerge as the sole Nationalist leader until 1937 when Mola was killed.

 

[ParkCungHee]

It's a bit of a puzzle to me why we didn't see more internal conflict on the Nationalist side, given that their divisions seemed to have much deeper historical roots than among the Republicans. In 1936, Stalinists and Trots were still at the "it's complicated" stage of their divorce, but Carlists and Alfonists had been trying to kill each other for more than a century.

I think that's a reflection of the generally negative program of the Nationalist side.