One of these radical changes was the beginning of large-scale murders of people believed to be supporters of the Nationalists. In most cases, these supporters had taken no specific action to assist the Nationalist rebellion; they were singled out for their beliefs, or what people guessed their beliefs were. As Bolloten explains:
"The courts of law were supplanted by revolutionary tribunals, which dispensed justice in their own way. 'Everybody created his own justice and administered it himself,' declared Juan Garcia Oliver, a leading Anarchist who became minister of justice in November 1936. 'Some used to call this "taking a person for a ride," [paseo] but I maintain that it was justice administered directly by the people in the complete absence of regular judicial bodies.'"[7] This distinction no doubt escaped the thousands of people who were murdered because they happened to have political or religious beliefs that the Anarchists did not agree with. "'We do not wish to deny,' avowed Diego Abad de Santillan, a prominent Anarchist in the region of Catalonia, 'that the nineteenth of July brought with it an overflowing of passions and abuses, a natural phenomenon of the transfer of power from the hands of privileged to the hands of the people. It is possible that our victory resulted in the death by violence of ***four or five thousand*** inhabitants of Catalonia who were listed as rightists and were linked to political or ecclesiastical reaction.'"[8] De Santillan's comment typifies the Spanish Anarchists' attitude toward his movement's act of murder of several thousand people for their political views: it is a mere "natural phenomenon," nothing to feel guilty over.
