The question at hand is not whether you would support Franco, because pretty much nobody is going to own up to that; it's who you would support out of the insanely complicated web of alliances that made up the Republic.
The Russians managed to acquire millions of dollars of gold reserves from the Republic in exchange for a disappointing array of weaponry, distributed only to their cronies, and accompanied by incompetent military advisors who were more interested in looking good back home than in winning the war. The anarchist unions seem to get more respect, but there's a strong argument that they were militarily ineffective, that their resistance to the Russia-aligned PSUC was destabilising at a critical period, and that the middle of a war against ascendant fascism was not the greatest time in the world to start redistributing land and making enormous social reforms. That's not even getting into Catalan/Basque independence, all the little minor parties, the different police factions, the wave of assassinations that led up the war (though fewer in number and in response to similar assassinations), the immense difficulty of forming a stable government, etc.
Reading into the war gave me a greater awareness of exactly how badly the "good guys" can behave, while in no way mitigating the horrors the Nationalist faction committed.
The Russians managed to acquire millions of dollars of gold reserves from the Republic in exchange for a disappointing array of weaponry, distributed only to their cronies, and accompanied by incompetent military advisors who were more interested in looking good back home than in winning the war. The anarchist unions seem to get more respect, but there's a strong argument that they were militarily ineffective, that their resistance to the Russia-aligned PSUC was destabilising at a critical period, and that the middle of a war against ascendant fascism was not the greatest time in the world to start redistributing land and making enormous social reforms. That's not even getting into Catalan/Basque independence, all the little minor parties, the different police factions, the wave of assassinations that led up the war (though fewer in number and in response to similar assassinations), the immense difficulty of forming a stable government, etc.
Reading into the war gave me a greater awareness of exactly how badly the "good guys" can behave, while in no way mitigating the horrors the Nationalist faction committed.