Volume 29, Number 14 · September 23, 1982
Purity and Danger
By Raymond Carr
The Anarchists of Casas Viejas
by Jerome R. Mintz
University of Chicago Press, 336 pp., $20.00
Time and again politicians come a cropper over a minor episode which they have failed to foresee and which blows up into a crisis that escapes their control. Casas Viejas was an Andalusian pueblo of some two thousand inhabitants, a sizable number of whom embarked on an ill-conceived rising in 1933 against the government of the Spanish Republic. In re-establishing 'order' a degenerate captain of the Assault Guards, a unit recently set up by the government, massacred twelve peasants and day laborers. The subsequent outcry discredited the prime minister, Manuel Azaña y Diáz, and with him the democratic republic of which he was the most able and eminent defender.
Review, 1146 words
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