IN July 2011, I shared a platform with Lewis Mates and
a local historian who was attached to the International Brigade Memorial Trust
at an event to commemorate the 75
th anniversary of the Spanish Civil
War in Newcastle.
Lewis has written a
book about the volunteers from the North East who served in the International
Brigade in Spain in the 1930s or fought in the Spanish Civil War in a militia,
and has studied extensively that period of history. Last week, in an e-mail responding to
my review of
Professor Preston's book
The
Spanish Holocaust, he writes:
'... thanks for this Brian; interesting, but I'd have liked to see a closer examination of Preston's treatment of the anarchists; his account focuses heavily on the CNT-FAI killings in the republican zone and the Communists et.al. hardly get a mention...'
The problem with what he is requesting here is that though
Preston's treatment of the Spanish anarchists is probably skewed against both
the CNT trade union and FAI political organisation, it is not Preston's central
argument which is about the parallels between the Spanish right and the
Great dictators of Europe. Another problem is that some Spaniish anarchists did
behave badly in the Spanish Civil War, and that this has been acknowledged by
Stuart Christie among others since Preston's book appeared.
If one wanted to put the conduct of some Spanish anarchists
into proportion we could do worse than turn to the sociologist Dr. Franz
Borkenau's book The Spanish Cockpit to get a more balanced grasp
of the nature of the Spanish war in a
Spanish context: often, it seems to me, that some writers demonstrate a degree
of Hispanic-phobia when dealing with the Spanish Civil War. Borkenau went to Spain with the intention of
doing some 'field work' on a country in revolution; he made two trips, the
first in August 1936, and the second in January 1937. It may be of interest for Mr. Mates to
consider the contrast between the two visits:
in August the Government was almost powerless, local collectives were
functioning and factories had been taken over by their workers, and the
Anarchists were the main revolutionary force; and as George Orwell writes in
his review published in a French journal of Borkenau's book:
'as a result
everything was in terrible chaos, the churches were still smouldering and
suspected Fascists were being shot in large numbers, but there was everywhere a
belief in the revolution, a feeling that the bondage of centuries had been
broken'. (The New Statesman had
refused to publish this Orwell review as being against editorial policy).
Come January 1937, power had passed to a greater extent from the Anarchists to
the Communists - though not so much as later in the war, and it seemed that the
Communists were bringing back the pre-revolutionary police forces, and
political espionage on the republican side was developing. Borkenau
himself was soon imprisoned, but luckily for him, unlike Orwell and others, he managed
to to save his documents.
Borkenau describes the position as Spain fell under
Communist control in January/ February 1937 as follows:
'It is at present impossible … to discuss openly even the
basic facts of the political situation.
The fight between the revolutionary and non-revolutionary principle, as
embodied in Anarchists and Communists respectively, is inevitable, because fire
and water cannot mix … But as the Press
is not even allowed to mention it, nobody is fully aware of the position, and
the political antagonism breaks through, not in open fight to win over public
opinion, but in backstairs intrigues, assassinations by Anarchist bravos, legal
assassinations by Communist police, subdued allusions, rumours …. The concealment of the main political facts
from the public and the maintenance of this deception by means of censorship
and terrorism carries with it far-reaching detrimental effects, which will be
felt in the future even more than at present.'
Mr. Borkenau is not a revolutionary and he may even welcome
a more orderly regime, but what he objects to is the arrival of the police
spies as the Communists begin to gain influence over the Spamish and Catalan
Governments, the lack of transparency, the censorship and the concealment of
what was going on on the republican side.
We can all recognise this even in the tin-pot politics of the British
left, nay especially there in those hole-in-the-corner parties and what Orwell,
in another context, called 'the smelly little orthodoxies'.
Posts
