| Monday, May 25, 2009

I’ve just discovered that The Times has an online archive and that the archive has a whole section dedicated to interesting articles about the Spanish Civil War.

If you’re either a history enthusiast or you’ve been following the recent demise of the media industry, you might think this is one area where long-established newspapers and news magazines could provide real value to people that bloggers and new-media outlets will never be able to match.

In The Times Spanish Civil War archive, there are a number of interesting articles about Guernica, the Battle of the Ebro and German support for Franco and so on, but I clicked through to an editorial article which was published scarcely four months before the start of the civil war, in February 1936, titled ‘A Left Turn in Spain‘.

I thought their 1936 Spain correspondent’s concluding sentence could easily have appeared in a modern-day article or blogpost on Spanish politics:

If the minority will acquiesce for the time being in the decsiion of the majority and the majority respect the rights of the minority – if, in other words, Spaniards will in the last resort put Spain before party – a bright future lies before the country.