Socialist correspondent Felix Morrow writes a powerful account of the revolutionary uprising of Spain's workers and farmers in the 1930's and the heroic battles they waged to defend the rights and organisations won through struggle.

The counter revolution began in Spanish Morocco under the command of fascist General Franco, aided and abetted by Hitler and Mussolini while the liberal democracies from the United Sates to Britain and France, sitting under the shade of "neutrality" looked the other way secretly hoping for the Generals success.

For revolutionary fighters who thought the Soviet Union's bumbling help to the Spanish toilers was due to a series of bad misjudgements came to the realisation they were in fact coming up against counter revolutionary Stalinism.

Despite the impediments posed by social democracy and Stalinism, the Spanish workers had an ability to learn the lessons of previous events at great speed and combined with their almost unlimited capacity for struggle, were able to overcome what stood in their path.

However, they were let down not by the usual suspects but by the organisation that seemed to be the most free of the Stalinist and social democratic straightjacket - the POUM.

Morrow takes the reader through the earth shattering events that unfolded in Spain at the time and takes up central challengers facing that countries working people in the battle for state power.

Morrow's book concludes with a chapter entitled "Two Roads," to revolution or to counterrevolution, to workers power or to Franco. It was not only the abstract need for socialism, that Morrow explains the Spanish revolution could have won only by going to workers power. The disastrous policies of the Stalinists, the social democrats, and the anarchist labor bureaucrats subordinated the struggle to the dictates of big business in Spain and imperialism abroad, the same forces that welcomed Franco.
Morrow is very good at explaining how this policy prevented the workers, peasants, and oppressed peoples in Spain from solving the many national and democratic tasks, supposedly solved in the US in 1776 and in France in 1789: land to the tiller, freedom from feudal rights and powers of nobility and church, national independence for the colonies in Africa, linguistic freedom and national rights up to self-determination for Catalonia and the Basque Country, to name a few. Fighting for these things was the natural reaction of popular masses in Spain as soon as Franco tried to overturn the republic. Sadly, Morrow shows how the Republican government lost because it turned its back not only on these rights, not only on socialism, but even the basic democratic right of workers and peasants to organize political parties, unions, workers councils, to publish and speak freely.
Morrow is not all depression and criticism. He saw with his own eyes the natural response of the working peoples in Spain to fight beyond the limitations of class collaboration. He saw how that power nearly defeated Franco and how it could have defeated Franco especially if the Republic had joined with the struggle of the colonial masses and oppressed nationalities to gain freedom Read Morrow and learn how the coming struggles will be victories and not defeats.

Morrow was a great editor, a great journalist, a man who captured the spirit and realities of the Spanish civil war, not as an uncritical supporter of the Republicans, but as a revolutionary critique familiar with the lessons Leon Trotsky tried to give about the Russian Revolution, familiar with the betrayal of the class collaborationist leaders of the Communist and Socialist parties in Spain.
In this book we see in the flesh what we may here about in other writer's analysis of this civil war. I was always struck by how he shows the imporance of the struggle for land and support to the small farmers, not by analysis but by describing the debates he heard on this subject between Spanish peasants and Franco's troops.
The rise of Le Pen and France and the attempts of the same social democrats and stalinists to get workers in that country to subordinate the struggle to supporting Chirac is an errie echo of the same policies that Morrow shows led to the defeat in Spain.

5 stars if you're planning to make a hollywood horror movie; you'll be swarming in dubious info, perfect for any imaginary work. -1 star for taking every thrown-at anecdote as proof enough, as if the phobia of all (so-called) secular beliefs after the beginning of the world's christianising would not result in as many fictional beliefs and false histories as that which secular cultures heathenishly accept. -1 more stars because 4 points is too high a grade.

However, there may be some truth to what he says. How widespread these practices were, and whether they were at all related to a diabolic entity from Christiandom is another matter.

It must also be noted that present-day Witchcraft (Wicca) and Satanism (Church of Satan) are mostly harmless institutions: they do not eat pies made from human babies and exhumed corpses. There are practically no police records of any virgins being napped off for sacrifice at some altar or other. None to worry there. Nor prejudice.

I read a review of someone talking about how this author doesn't understand Wicca... This book was written a long time before Wicca came to be, and before the Wiccan rede and all that other (...) was thought up, so that's not really relevant to this book.

This is a lengthy and exhaustive history of witchcraft and the occult written by the eccentric occult historian Montague Summers in 1927. Summers was well known for his many books on witchcraft, vampires, werewolves, and the history of the occult in general. He was generally considered The Expert on the history of witchcraft in the early 20th century and was filled with little-known anecdotal tales of witches, warlocks and dark devilish conspiracies as is evidenced by the many long dry examples in this book. This work is, however, a thorough reference on a arcane subject and is valuable for its many historical accounts of witch trials and other tales of witches, devils, and their arts. Summers is often criticized for his lack of skepticism, as noted below, as well as the heaps of praise he showers on the works of the Inquisition and its supposed war on witchcraft during the height of witch hysteria. His translations of notorious books like the Malleus Maleficarum and the Compendium Maleficarum, both witch hunting manuals used for centuries to detect, judge, and execute suspected witches, are his best-knwn works. Summers appears to revel in the age-old war against witches and often seemed a man born into the wrong time. He seems to wax nostalgic on the "Burning Times" and its blatant mysoginistic undertones, and this was in our "modern" age. In fact, he seems almost like a magistrate plucked from a 17th century witch burning and transplanted into the 20th century to write about his esteemed accomplishments! Yet, all this comes from a man who went to great lengths to transcribe and republish Reginald Scots' "Discoverie of Witchcraft", a 16th century treatise DISCOUNTING the existence of witches and demons and which was banned by the Holy Office and ordered burned by King James I of England! Very interesting stuff indeed.