Igor1941 wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2020 10:14 pm
kondi754 wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2020 7:07 pm
terminator wrote: ↑Tue Feb 11, 2020 1:19 pm
Another solution maybe more historical :
During Spanish Civil War,
the USSR supported Spanish Repulican forces with "volunteers" and tanks, including 50 BT-5 ones. They saw extensive action since late 1937 and some of them became Nationalst trophies with colorfull bands on the turret to avoid friendly fire.
Let's say it clearly - the USSR didn't support Republicans for free, but sold equipment and was paid in gold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_gold_(Spain)
Combined - pleasant with useful ... 510 tons of gold were transported from Spain to the Soviet Union ...
Expensive, but the Communist Gulag is more expensive, minus 50 percent of the population ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_gold_(Spain)
Franco Luck of Spain ... We are so unlucky
We can send you what remains of Franco in exchange for the gold if you want him
Now seriously, I am not against a political discussion about the spanish civil war (although i feel a bit uneasy using english to discuss this topic) but I am more interested in creating a mod which can be used as a starting point for people who know little about the conflict to begin to learn about it. That was one of the my main motivators at the beginning, since i feel that OoB did a wonderful job for me in that department in conflicts like the sinojapanese, the winter war or the burma road: i knew almost nothing about this wars/theaters/regions when i play the dlcs, but after finish them, i had read during dozens of hours about each of these topics. Of course my political views had a lot to do with the picking of the sources, the books, etc... and also about my final conclusions (who were the bad and the good guys, if you want, or maybe the bad and the worse side
) but nevertheless i enjoyed playing the dlcs. So one of my objectives here is that you can have fun with the Spanish Prelude even if you see the republicans as mere dirty bolsheviks and Franco as a white teutonic knight in shiny armour (spoiler: he wasn't, we was quite short for a stormtrooper, i mean, for a knight;)) as i had fun with the Morning Sun campaign even after reading about the Nanjing Massacre, for example.
A second topic i’m also quite interested in is until which point my political sympathies can influence the mod (or someone's sympathies to any mod, or creation in general). My short answer would be that my beliefs in this regard are, at least in a superficial way, both important and unimportant, and both in a good way. They are important in a good way because they are a motivator: I like to read about the topic of the spanish civil war and getting ideas for the scenarios because i feel emotionally moved by those stories. And they are also unimportant (again, in a good way) because since the point of view of the commander you impersonate during the mod is the republican point of view, a general and superficial bias toward the republican cause is (imho) completely justified inside the campaign. The vanilla game does exactly the same when you play the official campaigns: you play with the good guys, no matter who you are playing with. Said that, the game does not vilify or mock the enemy, it does not use a lot of slang and it does not make any emphasys in the political conflicts behind the wars. So my mod does try to not do, since I have chosen to mimic the general tone of the creators of OoB in TSP.
I am talking about the big picture here, or the superficial level if you want. But what about the minor details, the deep levels of meaning choosing one or another battle, the political events reflected in the game... Well, the vanilla game has the Waffen SS, has the Todt, has the british repression in India,... Sometimes the devil is in the details, yes, and these are also interesting topics. But what i am trying to say is that TSP does not intend to be a pro-republican propagandistic pamphlet, not more than Blitzkrieg is a pro-lebensraum pamphlet
Briefly about the politics, in case you are interested in my views. Was Spain a testing ground for two totalitarisms? Yes, absolutely (as it is implied in the mod description, I think:) ). Was the Spanish Republic a soviet satellite before the Iron Curtain era? No, even when the stalinists reached its peak of influence over the republic at the end of the war, the spanish government was quite independent and still a legitimate democratic power. In fact, when the war broke in the 36, the Spanish Communist Party was a minor party inside the gubernamental coalition elected by the spaniards. It only grew stronger because the URSS was the only world power to support (in exchange of a generous payment, as we said before) the Republic. The government turned first toward France or Great Britain to get help, and only after it was evident that the other democracies did not act, they "activated" the soviet option (specially when it was clear that the italians and the germans were helping the other side since day 1). Therefore the sovietization of the Republic during the war was a consequence of the appeasement policy of Great Britain and France (that also provoked the sudetenland crisis and so and so). In fact most of the revolutionary leftists in Spain (yes, they existed, yes they were important both qualitatively and quantitatively) were anti-stalinists: they were socialists, trotskyists and also anarchists (all of them very prosecuted in the URSS during the time). And they were just a fraction (although important) of the government: most of its members were non-revolutionary socialists, liberals from the left and many center-left politicians. Is this anyhow portrayed in the mod? Well, the division among the republicans, yes, sure. More than that... I don't even name a single politician, or party, in the mod.
