@rjpeters70:
Yeah, I never got the “oh, so and so fought against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War”, as though that were a good thing. I always say “oh, so he fought with the Stalinists? Got it.”
Sigh….take the pain away sweet brown liquor. Take away the pain of gross over-generalizations of an ideologically diverse united front. “Oh so you happened to be fighting against the same enemy as the Stalinist faction of the communists were? Clearly they were all Stalinists.”
The Stalinists would eventually gain the dominate position in the Republican government after Stalin was able to provide the most tanks, guns, etc., but even then that wasn’t until they spent a year crushing the numerous non-stalinist communists, the socialists and the anarchists, and the moderate republicans simply went along with it because the Communists were the best bang for the buck, and if the French or British had forked over the money and supplies, the stalinists would have been readily cast aside by the majority of moderates and left-wing groups, especially latter in the war.