Civil Wars don't have the sweeping tank battles, sneaky submarine escapades, or the mass

death by famine that characterize your big Hollywood wars,

but it's exactly their intimacy that makes them venues for exceptional cruelty.

Nothing brings out the savagery in a population quite like the opportunity to finally punish their next-door

neighbors who have consistently refused to fertilize their lawns despite the neighborhood

covenant in addition to leaving their Christmas trees up until January 20th, and what better way to express this neighborly consternation than by draining the offender's blood into the gutters with masonry trowels and basking in the lamentations of their legal spouses.

During normal wars, we can barely muster an abstract hatred for enemy soldiers without drumming up some

tinpot xenophobia or F-16ified neoliberal geopolitical world-building chorus line.

Civil Wars enjoy a much lower barrier to entry, needing to appeal only to the blinding all-consuming hate people feel for the family next door

who otherwise completely shares their culture and values only didn't tweet in favor of their

preferred candidate in the Democratic primaries. The Spanish Civil War of the late 30s wasn't an

ancient conflict between adjacent tribes nor a social cleansing where everyone who

wore glasses and owned a pencil was denounced as a class enemy and beheaded.

Nor a fight between an agrarian slave-owning cast of second-class aristocrats and a mercantile

abolitionist nation of bustling arms dealers, nor a bureaucratic and industrialized persecution and

enslavement of an innocent and bystanding ethnic minority by a complacent

middle class enthrall to a fast-talking nutcase. It was basically a slap fight between liberals,

conservatives, and the Catholic Church over how to govern Spain. We don't have

strong impressions of it in most of the West because we too often either never heard of it or see it through the sun

also rises lens glamorizing it as a time when leftists wore berets and

turtles and petalecks and Picasso painted murals and people fighting a lost cause could still retreat into the mountains and sit around

a campfire debating dialectical materialism.

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