Republican Left were no angels

Dear Sir, AS Dr. Smith has had “three bites of the cherry”,I think I am entitled to the FINAL reply. I too, will not bore your readers by mulling over the same sterile arguments Dr. Smith has repeated ad nauseam (dragging in yet another “authority”) to bolster his position over Franco and The Monarchy. He then adds the same slur about my condoning a military coup, which I showed had its causes in the violent and bloody state that existed in Spain before Franco's intervention finally led to a stable Democracy and Monarchy. There is just one aspect of that struggle, that should be mentioned. For far too long the Republican Left has been portrayed as “Whiter than White” fighting for the ideals of Socialism,the Brotherhood of Man and all the left–wing shibboleths, so “cruelly betrayed” by Franco.In fact, the Socialists/Communists killed and imprisoned hundreds of their own supporters,especially in Catalonia the Republican stronghold, where the P.O.U.M., a Trotskyist organisation with a Minister in the Government that was anathema to the Stalinist Russians who dominated. This is fact, Dr. Smith, as one of the great Left Wing figures of the time, George Orwell, in his seminal work, “Homage To Catalonia” so vividly portrays, the dragging of people to prison and worse, by squads of police and other Militias, all orchestrated by the Russian cadres who had infiltrated and then dominated the Government. Orwell himself lucky to escape with his wife, who, as he wrote,had been “shamefully treated”. Andres Nin, the Minister mentioned above, Leader of POUM, was one of those who was arrested, disappeared and was almost certainly murdered in true Stalinist style, by a so–called Socialist Government in 1937.