Pro-Franco book a bestseller in Spain

A controversial, revisionist history of the Spanish civil war which claims it was sparked by a leftwing revolution and that Winston Churchill was crueller than General Francisco Franco has proved a surprise publishing success.

The Myths of the Civil War, by the former communist guerrilla turned Franco apologist Pio Moa, has outraged the Spanish left and many mainstream historians with its attacks on the icons of the period.

But it has become the second most popular non-fiction book in Spain as it is snapped up by former Franco supporters and those curious to see a different interpretation of a civil war which most historians agree was started by a rightwing military uprising against a democratic government.

The book's success comes as Spain experiences a belated awakening of popular interest in the fratricidal three-year war that ushered in nearly 40 years of Franco dictatorship, with the emergence of "historical memory" groups dedicated to digging up victims of his firing squads.

But Moa has no time for those investigating Franco's cruelty, claiming they have cooked the figures and that the left - along with Churchill in the second world war - were even more ruthless and bloodthirsty.

"Franco did not think he had rebelled against a democratic republic but against an extreme danger of revolution ... Undoubtedly, he was right," Moa states.

"Franco's victory saved Spain from a traumatic revolution ... his regime saved it from involvement in the world war, modernised society and established the conditions for a stable democracy," he adds.

Moa paints those who joined the International Brigades in the late 1930s to fight Franco as a bunch of lawless, anti-Spanish communists.

He lashes out at historians who have written about Franco and the civil war, including the British author Paul Preston, and claims there is a leftwing academic plot to demonise the dictator.

Moa, who in 1976, the year after Franco died, helped found an armed communist revolutionary group, now blames modern rightwing politicians for not defending the dictator's reputation. "The right will swallow anything just so that it does not seem itself to be Francoist," he complains.

His book had been largely ignored by academics until state television devoted a programme to him, bringing accusations that the rightwing government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's People's party backed his thesis.

"Moa gave up terrorism and claims to have become a liberal but, in reality, has been washed up on the shores of 1950s Francoism," retorted Javier Tussell, one of Spain's foremost historians. "He is by no means a professional historian ... The Myths of the Civil War is systematically against the left and in favour of the extreme right. It drips with extravagance."

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