given the people he had to deal with some of those not so nice things were a necessary evil.
I always got a kick out of that he paid Hitler for arms with paper IOUs, while the socialists were compelled to pay Stalin for arms with gold bullion.....and while Franco got his orders filled, the socialists' orders were "lost in the mail."
One primitive who knows something about the Spanish Civil war is Attila Marc the Hun, the DFW primitive, the primitive who's holier-than-thou because he's an American expatriate living in Germany. When he was a teenager during the 1960s, he was a foreign-exchange student in Spain--but of course given that his host family were rabid (but secret) anti-Franco socialists, he was probably lied to a lot.
