• " THE SPANISH LABYRINTH "
Sta,—I snould like, if I may, to protest against certain statements made by Professor Allison Peers in his review of my book The. Spanish Labyrinth. He accuses me of Left Wing prejudices. I will not deny that, for I believe that the events of the last few years have shown conclusively that the Right can never solve Spain's problems. But when he asserts that my recipe " for getting out of the labyrinth is to take the first turning to the Left every time," I feel he simply cannot have read what I have written. For if I draw any one conclusion from recent Spanish history, it is that extreme political attitudes are disastrous for Spain and that her problems ought not to be approached in a doctrinaire spirit. This view informs almost every page of my book, and if Professor Peers will glance again at the passages in which I speak of the anti-clerical legislation of the Republicans and of the policies both of the Left Wing Socialists and of the Communists, he will see that he has misjudged me. My bias was always towards moderation.
In the same way his insinuations that I looked with approval on the rising of the Asturian miners in 1934 or on the Red Terror in 1936 are totally unfounded. My business as a historian was to explain, but explanations are not justifications, and what I have done for the Left I have endeavoured to do for the Right also.
As for my belief that the White Terror was worse than the Red, that certainly is disputable, but I did not come to this conclusion without weighing the evidence, some of which was collected by myself on the spot. I made it clear, too, that I did not claim for my brief epilogue on the Civil War any sort of historical finality. But I may say that neither the shocking accounts of conditions in Spain brought back by recent visitors, nor the wholehearted support which the Falangist Govern- ment has given to Nazi Germany, nor the blind eye which the Catholic Press has turned on the treatment of their co-religionists in Poland have encouraged me to revise my opinion on these matters.—Yours truly,
Bell Court, Aldbourne, Marlborough. GERALD BRENAN.
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