I very much agree with this, as it shines more light for me on ulterior specific reasons for US neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, which make a lot of sense. Beyond the general reasons that I think were the main /moral/ reasons for the neutrality of the democratic European states (aside from the practical reasons, which were manyfold and included both self interest, fear of the socialist/communist elements among the Republicans, fear of igniting a larger conflict, and unsolved contradictions -- like Catholic Poland that sold arms to the Republicans for lots of gold, while the Polish population, following the Pope, sided with the Nationalists).

The moral reasons were that the violence on both sides was very shocking and, even where the desire to defend democracy might have been high, the inability of the Spanish government to prevent murderous violence by members of the parties that supported it and its own militarised organisations, including the police, and especially to prevent this before the coup, put democratic liberals in a conundrum.

Members of the Republican forces (mostly without direct organisation on the part of the central command) committed atrocities. The Nationalists committed two times as much and on a deliberate program of cleansing out of all socialist-communist-anarchist-liberal elements.

This is the tragedy of a civil war exacerbated by the interference of the USSR on one side and Nazi Germany and the Vatican (for somewhat different reasons) on the other. It has been hard for me, after having studied the research of other historians on the conflict, to see the Spanish Civil War in black and white and to consider the neutrality of the European democracies and the US a crime. Maybe there were ways in which actual democracy in Spain could have been saved. But is hard to take assessments of 'what ifs".