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Beware that the title is highly misleading. They apparently helped to arrange the flight of Franco from Las Palmas to Morocco to start the war, but this step wa

by JorgeGT 10y ago

Beware that the title is highly misleading. They apparently helped to arrange the flight of Franco from Las Palmas to Morocco to start the war, but this step was just the culmination of a long conspiracy to overthrow the Republican government, which Franco himself only joined towards the end, when the coup was certain. It would have happened anyway, these guys just helped providing that particular flight. If not for them, the conspirators would had chartered someone else's plane or boat.

kafkaesq 10y ago
Like many major events in history (including most wars and revolutions), it's probably best interpreted as the product of both large-scale and systematic factors as well as happenstance and small-scale interventions -- like the timing (and relative speediness, compared to a boat) of this particular chartered flight. To refer to an even larger-scale example: clearly the Russian Empire was in the throes of an extended period of turmoil and conflict in the last years of the House of Romanov, which by that point was unlikely to stay in power for very long in any case... but at the same time things might very well not have turned out quite the way they did had not the German government approved that famous train ride from Zürich to Petrograd for Lenin and his entourage in February of 1917 (as nifty way, so they thought, of seeding just the right amount of chaos to induce in the Empire to soften its resolve to continue the fight against the Central Powers).
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  I agree, it is reductionist to claim that WWI happened just because Gavrilo Princip, or that the Kaiser "engineered" the birth of the Soviet Union with the sealed train. In this case the coup was too advanced to be aborted (top generals were already too implicated) so it would have happened one way or another. That the war itself and the dictatorship afterwards could have changed if Franco had to resort to other transport is indeed quite possible, but we will never know.
vacri 10y ago
A bit like saying that WWI started because of a sandwich, I guess. Archduke Ferdinand's assassin mistimed the original location, and stopped for lunch. As he was eating, Ferdinand passed by. If not for that sandwich "WWI would not have happened" (but of course it would have - something else would have sparked it, or the Archduke would have been assassinated later on)
nextos 10y ago
Exactly. Franco hesitated a lot, as he did not want to join if odds of success were slim. Furthermore, his role was not key till 2 other generals died on different plane crashes.

by JorgeGT 10y ago

kafkaesq 10y ago

Like many major events in history (including most wars and revolutions), it's probably best interpreted as the product of both large-scale and systematic factors as well as happenstance and small-scale interventions -- like the timing (and relative speediness, compared to a boat) of this particular chartered flight. To refer to an even larger-scale example: clearly the Russian Empire was in the throes of an extended period of turmoil and conflict in the last years of the House of Romanov, which by that point was unlikely to stay in power for very long in any case... but at the same time things might very well not have turned out quite the way they did had not the German government approved that famous train ride from Zürich to Petrograd for Lenin and his entourage in February of 1917 (as nifty way, so they thought, of seeding just the right amount of chaos to induce in the Empire to soften its resolve to continue the fight against the Central Powers).

JorgeGT 10y ago
I agree, it is reductionist to claim that WWI happened just because Gavrilo Princip, or that the Kaiser "engineered" the birth of the Soviet Union with the sealed train. In this case the coup was too advanced to be aborted (top generals were already too implicated) so it would have happened one way or another. That the war itself and the dictatorship afterwards could have changed if Franco had to resort to other transport is indeed quite possible, but we will never know.

vacri 10y ago

A bit like saying that WWI started because of a sandwich, I guess. Archduke Ferdinand's assassin mistimed the original location, and stopped for lunch. As he was eating, Ferdinand passed by. If not for that sandwich "WWI would not have happened" (but of course it would have - something else would have sparked it, or the Archduke would have been assassinated later on)

nextos 10y ago

Exactly. Franco hesitated a lot, as he did not want to join if odds of success were slim. Furthermore, his role was not key till 2 other generals died on different plane crashes.