George Orwell event in Red Shed

A crowd of 41 people packed into the meeting room of the Red Shed on the afternoon of Saturday the 16th, September, to discuss 'George Orwell & Socialism'.
The opening speaker, Alan Stewart (Convenor of Wakefield Socialist History Group) spoke about Orwell's time in Barnsley researching material for his book, 'Road to Wigan Pier'.  Orwell went down the pit, inspected housing and wittnessed a Mosley rally in the Civic Hall.
Brian Bamford (Secretary of Tameside TUC) made a spirited defence of Orwell against the criticism of Paul Preston.  Brian insisted that 'Homage to Catalonia' showed the 'true nature of war as a participant.'
Robin Stocks (author of 'Hidden Heros of Easter Week') focused in particular on the Barcelona May Days.  He noted that Orwell had been barricaded in the Hotel Falcon with the POUM leadership.  He added that POUM was an anti-Stalinist party that wanted the revolution to be 'continued, not watered down'.  It had links with the ILP in Britain and Orwell had had joined them after being given a letter of introduction by Fenner Brockway.
Granville Williams (former Editor of 'Free Press') argued that Orwell had been committed to a classless, egalitarian society to the very end.  His attachment to socialism was undiminished.  But he was appropriated by the right during the Cold War.  They used Orwell to bolster their argument that socialism inevitably led to totalitarianism.
Les Hurst (Orwell Society) noted that, despite attacks from the Communist arty, even in the 1930s many people wanted to read Orwell.  There was 'so much reality in what he wrote.'
The final speaker, Quitin Kopp, spoke movingly about his father, George Kopp, who was Orwell's POUM commander in Spain.  George Kopp went to Spain to fight fascism and did so bravely.
However he was then imprisoned by the NKVD in appalling conditions.

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Spanish Civil War event in Wakefield

Subject: Spanish Civil War meeting at Red Shed

 

Thirty six people packed into the Red Shed meeting room in Wakefield last Saturday (11 March) to discuss the Spanish Civil War and to remember those who so bravely fought against fascism.

The first speaker was the author and campaigner Granville Williams.  Granville noted that the Soviet Union, through the Comintern, was urging young workers to go to Spain.  However between 1936 and 1938 there were massive purges in the Soviet Union.  This "terror in the Soviet Union was projected into Spain" with the "persecution and extermination of Trotskyists."

Granville paid particular tribute to POUM which had "brilliant leaders" and activists who had led struggles including mass strikes.

The second speaker was Bob Mitchell, a former councillor and former Mayor of Wakefield.  He said the "democrats of Spain were defending an elected Government" and "defending reforms against a fascist and military coup."  All wars generated poetry, he said, but the Spanish Civil War in particular spawned an "immense body of work."  Bob then read a moving selection of poetry by John Cornford, Frank Ryan, Frank Edwards and others.

The final speaker was the environmental campaigner Tim Padmore.  Tim spoke in particular about a new production of the play, "Dare Devil Rides to Jamara", which tells the story of two volunteers Clem Beckett and Chris Caldwell who went to fight with the International Brigades in Spain.

The event was organised by the Wakefield Socialist History Group.  The Group's next event is on Saturday 1 April 1pm, again at the Red Shed, when Dr Martin Crick and Paul Bennett will speak at a meeting on "British Socialism and World War One." Fraternally

Alan Stewart

Convenor, Wakefield Socialist History Group

07931927451

POUM & THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

ON Saturday 11 March 2017, 1pm at the Red Shed, Vicarage Street, Wakefield both Granville Williams and Bob Mitchell will be speaking about the Spanish Civil War at an event organised by Wakefield Socialist History Group.  Admission is free and all are welcome.  Below are some comments about the organisation POUM.

POUM was formed in 1935 by a fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain (ICE) and the quasi-Trotskyist Workers and Peasants' Bloc (BOC).  It was led by Andreu Nin and Joaquin Maurin.
It took an independent communist position (it was anti-Stalinist) and was critical of the Popular Front strategy.  So much so that communists denounced it in the most vehement terms.  Santiago Carrillo for instance went "down the road of linking POUM to the Francoists" (Preston 2014).
Despite this POUM did participated in the Popular Front government initiated by Manuel Azana, leader of Accion Republicana, in the hope of advancing some of its' own policies.
In 1937 however POUM was repressed during the Barcelona May Days. It was outlawed by central government and its' leaders arrested.  Nin himself was detained, tortured and "disappeared" by NKVD agents.
Carrillo (1977) wrote that POUM and anarchists had launched a "putsch" which was "treason."  But Nin's death was an "abominable and unjustifiable act."
POUM remained proscribed during the Franco years but was legalised in 1977.  POUM then split but part of it stood as the Workers' Unity Front in elections, demanding the restoration of a republic.
It was finally wound up in 1980/81 although there is still an Andreu Nin Foundation.
Orwell famously joined the POUM militia and wrote of it in his book HOMAGE TO CATALONIA.

Fraternally

Alan Stewart (Convenor, Wakefield Socialist History Group)

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.

Foolish & Fertile Fabrications

Official lies produce black-market in truth & Rumour

Tameside TUC produced the booklet above
at the time of the 70th anniversary of the
Spanish Civil War, in 2006 (see Other Publications)
 

IN March, the International Brigade Memorial Trust will host an event entitled 'Taking Sides. Artists and Writers on the Spanish Civil War' see post on this Blog by 'Barry' on the 30th, December 2013 about George Orwell's comments on the promoting of false stories in much of the media in the 1930s about the Spanish war.   'Barry' refers to Frank Pitcairn (Claud Cockburn, 1904-1981) substantial contribution to the creation of fabrications and lies about the Spanish Civil War, but he failed to mention the defence of lying put forward by Cockburn, who was a Communist journalist and editor of The Week, 1933-46, (a Communist newsletter for private subscribers) that was together with the Daily Worker suppressed during World War II.

Mr. Cockburn (Frank Pitcairn)in March 1938, together with Otto Katz, fabricated a news story that there had been a military uprising against Franco in Tetuan (Spanish Morocco. Dr. Peter Davison in his edition of George Orwell's Complete Works 'Facing Unpleasant Facts 1937-1939' writes:

'This communist propaganda was designed to give the impression that Franco might still be defeated and so persuade the French to open their border; see Thomas, 805, n.3.' According to Dr. Davison, Claud Cockburn/ Frank Pitcairn 'was implacably opposed to the POUM', and Davison wrote that 'in a televised interview, broadcast in the BBC program "Arena" to mark 1984, he [Cockburn] said, "Any damage I could do them [the POUM] I would do".' 

 

Mr. Cockburn then added:
'No bones about that at all. In the same way after all you are prepared to shoot people with a gun. Well then - as in my case, the typewriter was somewhat more mighty than the rifle. (See his "Reporter in Spain" (1936) and his "Crossing the Line" (1956), which refers to this fraud (27-28)'.

George Orwell didn't think much of this kind of justification for lies, which was often used by the communists in the 1930s, was very prudent or indeed useful in so far as while it may deceive some people for a short time it often led to a violent reaction against the perpetrators of the fabrication once the truth dawn on them.
 

A recent example of this problem of official lying was reported in an article in yesterday's International Herald Tribune by the author Yu Hua, who writes:

'In recent years, all too often the Chinese authorities have issued false statements inn an effort to conceal the truth about matters of public concern, with the result that rumors thrive as people grope for clues about what really happened. As official lies and popular rumours vie for supremacy, it becomes all the harder to distinguish between fact and fiction, especially on the Internet.'
 

Mr. Yu Hua continues:

'Chinese people of my generation that grew up during the Mao era have long been accustomed to government mendacity: from the Great Leap Forward's grossly inflated claims about rice production to the recent fib about Mr. Wang's sick leave. (But) the difference [now] is thatbefore the Internet and microblogs, popular rumors spread mouth to mouth, with very limited circulation, and official fairy tales enjoyed a virtual monopoly. But once the Internet and, more particularly, microblogs came onto the scene, the social reach of rumors soon eclipsed that of official media - and official mythmaking's monopoly was broken.'
 

It is to be hoped that those on the panel of speakers at the International Brigade Memorial Trust [IBMT] event in March this year dealing with 'Taking Sides: Artists and Writers on the Spanish Civil War', will deal with this problem of press fabrication in the Spanish Civil War. 
 

Bringing down the curtain on Professor Preston, Anarchism ad the Spanish Civil War

Professor Preston reveals his true colours in Prologue: In Extremis in his book  'Comrades'.   He refers to an act of  'thoughtless cruelty' carried out by FAI  militiamen.    There is an anecdote recounted to Preston by the Catalan politician Miquel  Roca Junyent.   It relates to his maternal grandfather Miquel  Junyent I Rovira - a prominent figure in the Catalan Carlist movement ( ultra-conservative monarchists).    On 22 July 1936 FAI militiamen arrived at Junyents house.   There was no doubt they had hostile intentions.    He had actually died of a heart attack one day previously.   The milicianos insisted on seeing the body.   The housekeeper led them to the open coffin.   On viewing the body one militiaman turned to the others and said 'Bollocks, I told you we should have come yesterday'.   

Preston on the following page juxtaposes anarcho-syndicalists and beyond to perpetrators of anti-clerical atrocities and common criminals.    An association which he repeated at a meeting in Manchester at the Peoples History Museum.    Incidentally in the same book which was lavishly praised by ex Tory Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo in the Sunday Telegraph, Preston described the communist apparatchik Dolores Ibarruri as an "extraordinary woman".    Perhaps Preston should devote his investigative skills to a forensic examination of the muder and torture of POUM and Anarchist militants carried out by the communist dominated Popular Front government of Negrin.

Finally Prestons book 'A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War' is described by the Communist paper the Morning Star in glowing terms.   'It  is an important and valuable contribution to the estimation of the anti fascist war in Spain.'    Prestons books are thus praised by communists and conservatives.    A prime example of a Popular Front if there ever was one!

Professor Preston and the Spanish Civil War revisited.

PROFESSOR Preston in his biographical essay in 'The Spanish Civil War- Reaction, Revolution and Revenge' sheds some interesting insights into his attitude to the anarchists and George Orwell.   He refers to Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as  a sane, moving but ultimately narrow vision of the May 1937 events in  Barcelona written with a pro POUM stance which has been taken widely and erroneously as an overview of the war which it is not.



In the main body of the book Preston appears to lend credence to communist slanders that the revolutionary collectives in Aragon were 'done at the point of a gun' and 'they were not spontaneous creations of the peasants but imposed by force'.   Elsewhere he concedes that Gaston Leval and Augustin Souchin's eyewitness accounts of the collectives were important anarchist versions.    Scarcely a ringing endorsement of self management and autonomous organisation.



Preston lets the cat out of the bag re his penchant for 'popular frontism' in his introductory discussion of the 'war and social revolution' dichotomy.   He alleges that the debate was used successfully to disseminate the idea that the Stalinist repression of the revolution in Spain led to Franco's dictatorship.    He goes on to say that several works on the Spanish Civil War were sponsored by the CIA funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to promote this idea.  He gratuitously refers to an 'unholy alliance of anarchists, trotskyists and cold war warriors' which obscured the fact that Hitler, Mussolini Franco and Chamberlain were responsible for the Nationalist victory not Stalin.    This technique of the 'amalgalm' is a classic exemplar of Stalinist hagiography.



The evidential basis for Preston's disdain of the anarchists role during the Spanish Civil War is manifestly demonstrated  by many quotations from  Preston's writings.    His book 'Comrades' for example was enthusiastically praised by The Morning Star a communist newspaper.

Professor Prestons appearance on "Start the Week"- Radio 4 programme presented by Andrew Marr.

Paul Preston is at it again. In response to a question from Andrew Marr about the anarchist split with the Stalinists described by Georg Orwell in 'Homage to Catalonia', Preston made further derogatory comments about Orwell. He claimed that Orwell's contribution to historiography was about as important as Spike Milligan's book 'Adolph Hitler, my part in his downfall' was to the history of the 2nd World War. Marr's response was 'ouch' and he quickly moved the discussion on. Preston cannot refrain from attacking Orwell who he disdainfully described as a foot soldier with no vision. No mention of Orwell's membership of the ILP  and joining the POUM.