Only a civil war? 1936 as a colonial civilizing conquest and modern catholical yihad

Abstract

For over half a century now, the Spanish war of 1936 has been defined as a civil war. Trends in the social sciences and the humanities on one side, and on the other the dynamics of historiographic research on the Spanish Second Republic and World War II allow now to observe and classify the massacres of civilians during and after the Spanish war as characteristic of a type of civilizing colonial conquest and a modern Catholic holy war. This text offers a justification of these two definitions of the Spanish war of 1936 and reflects on the biopolitical and tanatopolitical logics underlining them, arguing that, with their supplementation, the specificity of the Spanish war forces to reconsider the whole interpretation of the XXth century in Spain and worldwide, and the categories for the assessment of crimes against humanity.