La Pasionaria and the Spanish Civil War

ALL those communists who hero worshipped La Pasionaria (Dolores Ibarruri) would do well to read the biography of her written by Robert Low titled 'La Pasionaria: The Spanish Firebrand'.   La Pasionaria, the grand dame of international communism, makes no mention of the anti-Poum purge in her memoirs.  Her antipathy to the anarchists and the POUM in made patently clear in her partisan account of the May  Days in Barcelona (1937) and the events which preceded it.   'The Anarcho-Trotskyist putsch of May...has been in the making for months.   The time of the outbreak was not chosen in Catalonia but in the General Staff offices of Franco' (Ibarruri).  
George Orwell in his remarkable eye witness account in 'Homage to Catalonia' contemptuously dismissed this communist propaganda.  'The Communistic thesis of a POUM rising under fascist orders rests on less than no evidence.'  Furthermore he added:
'I believe that libels and press campaigns of this kind and the habits of mind they indicate, are capable of doing the most deadly damage to the anti-fascist cause.'
The International Brigades Memorial Trust would do well to heed the prophetic words of Orwell, and cease to glorify Ibarruris role in the Spanish Civil War.