Was General Franco a Fascist? by Brian Bamford

JOE Bailey sends NV a quote from Paul Preston, historian: “If people are looking for a quick and easy insult to those on the right, then fascist, is your go-to term,” he says. “If you’re asking an academic political theorist what constitutes a fascist then you’d have to say Franco isn’t.”

Derek Pattison had asked the question 'Was Franco a Fascist?' and he drew attention to some similarities and differences: 'Franco did use forced labour, concentration camps, and mass executions and terror was a deliberate strategy used to pursue his goal of overthrowing the republican government and winning the war. He then established a military dictatorship, but I don't think he'd much time for fascism, the Falange or its leader, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera.'

The historian, Sir Paul Preston, is an interesting personality to turn to for an answer to this question 'Was Franco a Fascist?'. The then Prof. Preston answer to the interviewer Rob Attar, was:

'If people are looking for a quick and easy insult to those on the right, then fascist, is your go-to term,” he says. “If you’re asking an academic political theorist what constitutes a fascist then you’d have to say Franco isn’t.'

And then Preston continued:

'But that’s not intended to let the Spanish dictator off the hook. “I caused quite a stir in Spain a few years ago when asked this question,” Preston recalled, “and I said Franco wasn’t a fascist … he was something much worse.

'What I meant by that is that the only absolutely indisputable fascist leader is Mussolini and the only indisputably fascist regime is Mussolini’s regime. And, there are so many ways in which Franco is different.'

'How, then, was Franco “much worse”? Preston argues that Franco was a “deeply conservative” man who, having previously served with the Spanish Army in North Africa, “had the mental furniture of a Spanish colonial officer”. This had seemingly imbued him with a shocking disregard for human life.'

Derek Pattison was questioning Stuart Christie's assumption that Franco was a 'Fascist' and I believe Derek is right to say General Franco didn't have much time for the Falange (the Spanish Fascist Party). In 1963, my boss pointed to a house where a local Fascist lived in Denia, Alicante, and told me that he'd been imprisoned for a time under Franco. What Sir Paul Preston now calls 'the mental furniture of a Spanish colonial office', Sr. Juan Paris, my boss, saw Franco as a solid army man who couldn't be swayed by the dodgy nature of party politicians. Later on in 1975, after Franco had died* my boss told me that he then regarded democracy as the best thing for Spain.

Juan was probably the best boss I've ever had and he looked after me and my family as best he could, but when I think on this, I'm put in mind of what Ignazio Silone said in 'School for Dictators' where he wrote on Fascist Italy about how folk flock to those in power and this was his advice:

'Don't be in such a hurry, I beg you. The poets and the monsignori, the generals, the ladies and their escorts will all come to you after you are in power. With some exceptions, they flock to success like flies to honey, or if you prefer, like rats to cheese. Democratic when there is a democratic government, they are naturally fascists under a fascist dictatorship and Communists under the hammer and sickle. The behaviour of the priests might surprise us, if the pagans hadn't already advised us that the winning cause has always pleased the gods. Christian theology later corroberated this interlectually, explaining that all authority comes from God. And as for the ladies, it's well known that Venus has always felt a particular attraction for Mars, the God of strength.'

This quote is probably a good explanation of the evolution of Franco's Spanish dictatorship, which was an authoritatian, regime rather than totalitarian as in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia.

Sir Paul Preston himself also represents a good example how to get on in academia, he doesn't yet seem to have commented on the death of Stuart Christie, which is a little strange given that he was very keen to court Stuart, particularly in the early days, and Stuart told me he helped to get some anarchist publications into print in English. One of Preston's students 'Neil' told me that Preston made much of his association with Stuart in academic circles. When I once, some years ago, mentioned to Stuart about Prof. Preston's association with the International Brigade Memorial Trust, he told me that 'it was his bread and butter'..

************************************************

* Officially, Franco died a few minutes after midnight on 20 November 1975 from heart failure, at the age of 82 – on the same date as the death of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, in 1936. Historian Ricardo de la Cierva claimed that he had been told around 6 pm on 19 November that Franco had already died.[171] Juan Carlos was proclaimed King two days later.

REVIEW: The Spanish Revolution 'Explained'

Review:  'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution 1936-39' 

by Vernon Richards (introduction by David Goodway). 

£15.00 ($21.95) Published by PM Press / Freedom Press.

reviewer Brian Bamford

Spanish Civil War &  

Sinful Post-Hoc Reasoning *

VERNON RICHARDS, a former long-term editor of the anarchist newspaper Freedom, in his introduction to the First English Edition (1953) of his 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution' made a modest admission of his own limitations as he tried to counter his  critics:  'Some have cricised me for being wise after the event and for writing on events of which I was but a spectator from afar.  I mention these criticisms as a warning to the reader of my limited qualifications for dealing with such a complex subject.  But I feel I should in my defence also point out that that most of the criticisms I have made in this book were expressed by me in 1936-1939 in the columns of the journal Spain and the World.'

When recently I spoke to the historian David Goodway, who wrote the introduction for this current PM PRESS edition, he suggested that his distance from the events in Spain allowed Vernon Richards to be more 'objective' in his analysis. His remark did not entirely surprise me both because it reflected the view of other people in the Freedom group with whom I have discussed this matter, but additionally this approach fits with what Dr. Goodway argued when I attended one of his lectures at a Northern Radical History Network event in Bradford in April 2013, where he passionately argued that historians in the nature of things all develop a narrative, and then go on to relentlessly pursue the advocacy of that perspective.  Thus, history becomes a form of the art of advocacy and polemical presentation. 

'History is what historians do'?

'History is what historians do', declared Isaiah Berlin in his book 'The Proper Study of Mankind'.

Post-hoc reasoning is the fallacy where we believe that because one event follows another, the first must have been a cause of the second.  In some cases this is true, but other factors may be responsible.

Did the decision of the CNT to participate in the governments first in Barcelona and later in Madrid lead to a degeneration of the integrity of the whole of the Spanish anarchist body politic?  Was the leadership to blame for the compromise of principles or was it also a dereliction of duty on the part of the rank and file in the CNT?

In Chapter XX Vernon Richards responds to some of the critics of the original English edition.who claimed he had 'over-emphasised the faults of the leaders of the CNT-FAI' and 'had been "over-charitable" to the rank and file members of the revolutionary organisations.'   Richards admits these criticisms are 'valid, though we (he) also believes that we (he) has erred in the right direction!'

He argues further:  'The rank and file saw - or "instinctively felt" - more clearly than the leaders, and we (he) have no doubt in our mind that the action of the workers in raising the barricades in Barcelona in May 1937 was a last desperate attempt to save the revolution from strangulation by the Jacobins and the reactionary politicians who had insinuation by themselves once more into positions of power.  Barcelona in May 1937 was to the Spanish Revolution what Kronstadt, sixteen years earlier, had been to the Russian Revolution.'

The seeds of the 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution'?

VERNON Richards admits in his Introduction (1953) that his historical account would never have been written but for the publication of the first two volumes of La CNT en la Revolution Espanola by Jose Peirats.  Other sources he gives are Diego Abad de Santillan's Por que perdimos la guerra and Gerald Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth.  

Recently Stuart Christie told me that Vernon Richards had written this history in response to Felix Morrow's Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Spain (New York: Pathfinder, 1938).  I haven't been able to confirm this but in his Biographical Postscript in 1972 Vernon Richards welcomed 'more material.... from.all quarters on the left' including Felix Morrow's  book.  

Stuart Christie e-mailed me to say:  'My recollection of Vero’s book was that it was an attempt to respond to Felix Morrow’s half-decent 'Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain’.

What is notable about Felix Morrow's Trotskyist account here is that he, like so many Marxists, focuses on the correct  political leadership and he argues that the anarcho-syndicalist CNT 'had changed little since its origin in the Cordoba Congess of 1872' and being 'Hopelessly anti-political, it played no role in bringing the Republic', adding  'Spain would not find its ideological leadership here'.  

Mr. Morrow concludes his analysis:  'Thus, the (Spanish) proletariat was without leadership to prepare it for its great tasks, when the republic arrived.  It was to pay dearly for this lack!'

What Morrow is doing here is using apriori or cookbook thinking in which he and Leon Trotsky use to make sense of the Spanish context in the historical background and development of the Spanish Civil War and to create a blueprint for what to do.  He takes the view that what was needed in the Spanish conflict was a 'Bolshevik methodology' (p6 of 'Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Spain' pub. by Pathfinder) arguing:
'The making of the Soviet Union and its achievements - a peasant country like Spain - were extraordinarily popular in Spain.  But the Bolshevik methodology of the Russian Revolution was almost unknown.  The theoretical backwardness of Spanish socialism had produced only a small wing for Bolshevism in 1918.'   

And yet most of the Spanish anarchists rejected the Bolshevik model.  Indeed, one of the main concerns of the adherents of the CNT and the anarchists in the FAI in July 1936, was to avoid what they saw as the errors associated with the development of the Russian Revolution.   Vernon Richards presents it thus in Ch. IV entitled 'ANARCHIST DICTATORSHIP OR COLLABORATION AND DEMOCRACY':
'The dilemma of the "anarchist and confederal dictatorship" or "collaboration and democracy" existed only for those "influential militants" of the CNT-FAI who, wrongly interpreting their functions as delegates, took upon themselves the task of directing the popular movement. '

Mr. Richards begins by saying:  'The first mistake, it should be remembered, was made in the early days of the struggle, when an ill-armed people were halting a carefully prepared military operation carried out by a trained and well-equipped army, which no one, not even some of the "influential members" of the CNT-FAI, imagined could be resisted.'

Richards concludes:  'The slogan of the CNT-FAI leadership - "the war first, the revolution after" - was the greatest blunder that could have been made.'
He supports this with a quote from Diego Abad de Santillan:
'We knew that it was not possible to triumph in the revolution if we were not victorious in the war.  We even sacrificed the revolution without noticing that that sacrifice also implied the sacrifice of the objectives of the war.'

Against this there is the view of Paul Preston, perhaps currently the most widely read historian in the English language on the Spanish Civil War, who argues:
'While exhilarating to participants and observers such as George Orwell, the great collectivist experiments of the autumn of 1936 did little to create a war machine.... The May events witnessed by Orwell in Barcelona were provoked by the need to remove obstacles to the efficient conduct of the war.  Despite incorporating the working class militias into the regular forces and dismantling the collectives, Negrin's government still did not achieve victory - not because its policies were wrong but because of the international forces arrayed against the Republic.'

Shortly before I embarked on this review one of  Preston's former students sent me this e-mail:
'The bottom line is Paul’s (Preston) fundamental and unshakeable belief that the absolute priority on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War should have been to focus on the conventional war effort and not on the Revolution, which was detrimental to that effort — and his total support for the actions of the Negrin government and the integrity of Negrin himself.'

On the 15th, July 2016, during an interview with the historian Ian Kershaw, entitled 'The Last Days of the Spanish Civil War', Paul Preston had even claimed that Negrin was 'the Churchill of the Spanish republic - the great War Leader.'   

The main danger in philosophy, as Lars Hertzberg identifies it, is the danger of apriorism, the idea that we can tell how things “must be”.  It strikes me that some English historians like Sir Paul Preston and Dr. David Goodway readily embrace apriorism: Preston in 'The Spanish Holocaust'** and Goodway in his claim that all historians pursue and advocate a preconceived narrative.*** 

Yet Isaiah Berlin in his monumental book The Proper Study of Mankind wrote:  'History does not reveal causes; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events.'   

In Sir Paul Preston's interview above with Ian Kershaw, Preston said that he intended to write a book about the 'guilty men' and specified Largo Caballero as a principle culprit in this respect.  Similarly Mr. Richards reveals his own bias when commenting on Burnett Bolloten's book, which he otherwise admires, he writes:  'The new material I think presents the socialist/trade union leader Largo Caballero in too favourable a light - as a victim of intrigues - whereas he was an old fox, as are all trade union leaders - not least the anarcho-syndicalist variety, such as Lopez, Peiro, and Pestana.'

I remember Jim Pinkerton, the former International Secretary of the old Syndicalist Workers' Federation, once told me that Vernon Richards would never join a trade union because it was not in his nature to do so.  At one point in this book he even describes a trade union as if it were what the sociologists call a 'total institution':  
'And trade unions just like other self-contained concentrations of human beings, such as prisons, armies, and hospitals, are small-scale copies of existing society with its qualities, as well as its faults.' 

Like Vernon Richards I've spent some time in prison in the UK, and in the summer of 1963, I was even held in a dungeon in a small village in the province of Segovia, and I can tell him that there is a vast qualitive difference in these experiences to being a rank and file member of a trade union in either the UK, in the T&G in Gibraltar, or in the La Linea branch of the CNT in Spain.  
 
Mr. Richards demonstrates his apriorism in the section subtitled 'Anarchism and Syndicalism' which begins by declaring:  'In organisations with a mass following, the small anarchist minority can only retain its identity and exert a revolutionary influence by maintaining a position of intransigence.' 

Then Richards concludes by telling us and the Spaniards struggling to tackle the privations of the Civil War, that:  'Thirty years earlier, Malatesta, with that profound understanding of his fellow men which inspired all his writings, had clearly seen the effects of the fusion of the anarchist movement with the syndicalist organisation...'  

In reviewing this book it is clear that it is well worth reading the present work, for as Jose Peirats in 1954 wrote:  'It is important to anarchists to draw the lessons of the facts and actions of their own movement.'    Yet Peirats argues Richards's book which extols Malatesta and anarcho-communist insurrection over the anarcho-syndicalist General Strike has flaws as well as virtues.  Indeed I seem to recall that Peirats book on  The CNT in the Revolution Espanola arguing that the anarchists were in fact 'too insurrectionary' in so far as they seized the towns and then neglected the small pueblos.

And yet, though I would have you read these histories I am mindful of what Peirats said about the Vernon  Richards' Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, he declared:  
'este obrita' (small work) is too 'severo' and 'demasiado lateral' (too bias) and 'selectivo'.  Peirats concludes that 'none of his (Richards's) statements will be contradicted by history' but it is necessary 'to give to facts their relative importance.'

We must be aware that all these historians Richards, Goodway, and Preston are guilty of  apriorism.  Both Richards and Preston, have criticised Orwell for his original naivety about both the situation in Spain when he went to Spain.  That, in my view, makes Orwell's observations more reliable because it helps him to observe the unfolding of events without the clutter of preconceived notions.

Lars Hertzberg takes up this question 'apriorism' by addressing an issue that was absolutely fundamental for a philosopher like Wittgenstein: the question of honesty.  According to Hertzberg, Wittgenstein always regarded honesty as an issue in philosophy, and the question of what it means to “try to keep philosophy honest” is unavoidable for anyone working in the Wittgensteinian tradition.  Hertzberg is not saying that philosophers in that tradition are more honest than others.  His point is rather that for Wittgenstein “a concern with one’s intellectual honesty is internal to the difficulty of philosophy”. 

In the case of the historians like Richards, Goodway and Preston, their primary concern is the art of advocacy. 

When Peirats writes it is necessary 'to give to facts their relative importance' it is because he is conscious that Richards has undervalued the experience of the heat of the moment in the context of the Spanish Civil War.  When I wrote in Freedom an obituary for Frederica Montseny**** in January 1994, Vernon was critical complaining to Charles Crute that it was too sympathetic to 'someone like her' and that that I hadn't refered to his own book.  Frederica had joined the republican government as a Minister but had later admitted that it was a mistake.

Helenio Capellas, the Catalan anarchist whose father was in the same Los Solidarios group as Durruti and Garcia told me in the 1990s that while Durruti was not so bright, Spanish anarchism had a lucky escape when Garcia Oliver didn't succeed in dominating the anarchist movement, because he would have proven to be a bit too much like an anarchist Lenin.

This is what Peirats means when he claims Richards is too severe on 'individuals' by which Richards means those guilty folk who joined and supported the republican government: I remember in 1964 reading in a  glossy Spanish Civil War history publication on a news-stand, that was produced by people sympathetic to Franco, and it claimed that the effect of anarchists joining the government was shocking in its effect on Spaniards in the 1930s.  

“Propuesta Premio Nobel de la Paz al Generalísimo Franco”

In 1964, General Franco's Spain commemorated 'XXV años de paz franquista : sociedad y cultura en España hacia', and I was with my family in the Andalucian town Ronda in the August of that year when the festival was in full swing; indeed 1964 was also the year that Franco was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace.  At that time I was just discovering Ronda a town which Ernest Hemingway and Ava Gardner spent time, but it was also where my one-year old eldest son caught a dose of hay fever and started to vomit and failing to keep his food down.  A visit to the local Chemist - we could't afford a doctor - who gave us suppositories (Spain at that time depended on imported French medicine and it meant using suppositories for more ailments than constipation) which cured him within a couple of days.

But such everyday problems are trivial to the historian who works on a grand scale.  The problem with the historians according to Tolstoy is that 'Everything is forced into a standard mold invented by the historians:  Tsar Ivan the Terrible,... after 1560 suddenly becomes transform from a wise and virtuous man into a mad and cruel tyrant.  How?  Why? - You mustn't even ask...'  

This is what Dr. David Goodway has already admitted above and it is something which truly represents the poverty of the historians.  At least Goodway was honest about that,   But Vernon Richards, unlike his companera Marie Louise Berneri, never went to Spain during the Civil War.  He later, after 1958 helped to set-up a resort on the Costa Brava.  In that way he had contact with the Catalans and found that in the rural areas the people in the villages 'talked openly, because they knew who could not be trusted in the community, whereas in Barcelona, for instance, you did not know your neighbour at the next cafe table and therefore talked openly at home or outside away from the crowds.'  That seemed  consistent with my own experience in Alicante in 1963 and later in Andalucia; I remember what a shock it was in 1967 when I went to live briefly in Portugal, in Elvas, and found the Portuguese talking freely in bars about politics.

The texture of life & 'unreal histories'

or how historians get fat?

When Isaiah Berlin***** addressed what Tolstoy had to say about the historians he quoted from the War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1:  'If we we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed.' 

According to Berlin: "Tolstoy wanted to write a historical novel whose 'principal aims was to contrast the 'real' texture of life, both of individuals and communities, with the unreal picture presented by historians.  Again and again in the pages of War and Peace we get a sharp juxtaposition of 'realty' what 'really' occurred - with the distorting medium through which it will later be presented in the official accounts offered to the public, and indeed be recollected by the actors themselves - the original memories having now been touched up by their own treacherous (inevitably treacherous because automatically rationalising and formalising) minds.  Tolstoy is perpetually placing the heroes of War and Peace in situations where this becomes particularly evident."

What we have in these histories of the historians is what Tolstoy calls the 'great illusion' which he sets out to expose.  The historian Paul Preston in the interview already referred to with Ian Kershaw,  related about when he went to Spain:  'Of course the Spain of the late 1960s, was much nearer to the Spain of the civil War than the Spain of today, ... original memories.'  He also made a joke to Kershaw:  'I was thin when I went to Spain'.  Since then he's made a good living writing about little else.


It is because of this defect attributed to the historians so clearly perceived by Tolstoy, that explains why George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' with all its limitations is in the end is so much more a populat and influential to the work of the professional historians of the likes of Paul Preston.   As I write this Sir Paul Preston himself is having to admit his debt to Gerald Brenan, formerly a member of the Bloomsbury Group; with  ‎Lytton Strachey,  Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster, and later author of The Spanish Labyrinth: an Account of the Social & Political Background of the Spanish Civil War.  Brenan was more of an anthropologist than a historian and besides the Spanish Labyrinth wrote about village life in Andalucia, as was  Julian Pitt-Rivers who wrote People of the Sierra a study of the village of Grazellema a short bus ride from Ronda.  Franz Borkenau  produced an eye-witness accounts in the The Spanish Cockpit as a sociologist who visited Spain in the midst of the war in 1936 and 1937.  Even Vernon Richards and Jose Peirats were really autodidacts rather than professional historians, and I believe they were better off for this.

I together with my young wife lived for over a year in the home of a recently widowed seamstress and her two daughters, Conchita and Pepita, in the fishing village of Denia.  It was there that my eldest lad was born in August 1963.  Vernon Richards refers in his biographical postscript to Margarita Balaguer, an eighteen-year-old seamstress in a haute.couture fashion house 'which she had attempted  unsuccessfully to collectivize found the liberation of women the most rewarding of all the revolutionary conquests.  For as long as she could remember she had fought the accepted notion that 'men and women could  never be friends.'  Now she found she had better friends among men than among women.  A new comradeship had arisen."  I don't know what my seamstress landlady, Senora Lola, in Denia, would have had to say about that all those years ago when we went to tidy-up her dead husband's niche in the cemetery on All Souls Day in 1963.  Last month, some 65 years after General Franco was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the socialist goverment of the acting Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez has had the remains of its former dictator from the state mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen, where he was buried in 1975, for reburial in a private grave, and  Sanchez claims it is a step towards national reconciliation, the exhumation was the most significant move in years by Spanish authorities to lay the ghost of the general whose legacy still divides the country he ruled as an autocrat for nearly four decades.  Meanwhile Catalonia is in crisis over the imprisionment of the Catalan nationalist leaders, and a poll by the pollster 40dB for EL PAÍS is suggesting that Spain which will be holding its fourth general election in four years his coming Sunday, and yet the new vote is not likely to break the prolonged political stalemate, according to a survey by the pollster 40dB for the newspaper EL PAÍS.


*  Logic and Sin in the writings of LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN by Philip R. Sheilds:  Bertrand Russell was fond of relating the following story about Ludwig Wittgenstein's student days at Cambridge:  "he used to come to my rooms at midnight and, for hours, he would walk backwards anf forwards like a caged tiger.  On one such evening, after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, 'Wittenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?'  'Both,' he said, and then reverted to silence." .'

**Danny Evans in the Bibliographical Postscript to 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution' writes:  'Paul Preston, has moved in the opposite direction to the drift of specialist historiography, providing increasingly caricatured depictions of Spanish anarchists in his later work, most notably 'The Spanish Holocaust' (London: Harper Press, 2013).'

***  Dr. Goodway in his portrayal of the job of the historian at the 4th Northern Radical History Network meeting held on Saturday 20 April 2013, in Bradford

****    In November 1936, Francisco Largo Caballero appointed Montseny as Minister of Health. In doing so, she became the first woman in Spanish history to be a cabinet minister.^[2] She was one of the first female ministers in Western Europe (but preceded by Danish Minister of Education, Nina Bang and Miina Sillanpää of Finland). She aimed to transform public health to meet the needs of the poor and the working class. To that end, she supported decentralized, locally l-responsive and preventative health care programs that mobilized the entire working class for the war effort. She was influenced by the anarchist sex reform movement, which since the 1920s had focused on reproductive rights and was minister in 1936 when Dr. Félix Martí Ibáñez, the anarchist director general of Health and Social Assistance of the Generalitat de Catalunya, issued the Eugenic Reform of Abortion, a decree that effectively made abortion on demand legal in Catalonia.  Once in exile took the view that it was an error for the anarchists to have participated in the republican government in 1936.

***** The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays by Isaih Berlin (PIMLICO) 1998.

  

The Fall of Madrid: March 1939

by Brian Bamford (Sec. of Taneside TUC)

IN SPAIN on this day 80 years ago, the Republican defenders of Madrid raised the white flag over the city, bringing to an end the bloody three-year Spanish conflict entitled the Spanish Civil War  (30^th, March 1939).

In his reflective commemoration of this event Tom Sibley in the Morning Star (Thursday, March 21, 2019) wrote: ‘Until the end of February 1939 Prime Minister Juan Negrin and his only reliable allies, the Communists, were determined to fight on despite a series of crushing military defeats in Catalonia.’

Tom Sibley entitles his column 'The betrayal of Madrid & the triumph of fascism in Spain' but much of his argument seems to be rooted in an earlier article by Paul Preston attacking Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as 'bad history' published in The Observer (7th, May 2017).  

Yet what are we to make of the Spanish Prime Minister Negrin, who while urging the Spanish republicans to stand firm, moves to live close to the port of Alicante and make preparations for evacuation and exile?  No wonder people were puzzled, and even his generals were not convinced complaining of the lack of arms and supplies, and with Admiral Buiza, commander of the fleet, suggesting that without an immediate solution the fleet would have to abandon Spanish waters.

The distinguished military historian, Antony Beevor, in his book The Battle for Spain [2006] wrote: ‘Despite his calls for resistance, Negrin did not install his government in either Madrid or Valencia. He went to live in a villa near Elda, close to the port of Alicante, guarded by 300 communist commandos from XIV Corps. From there, by telephone and teleprinter, he sent a frenetic series of instructions, on the one hand attempting to invigorate the defence of the republican zone, and on the other making preparations for evacuation and exile.’

The International Brigades had already been removed from Spain in October 1938; although the International Brigades are often presented by some as a kind of cavalry saving the Spaniards from Fascism, by September 1938  only 7,102 foreigners were left in the International Brigades.   Antony Beevor in his observation of this decision to withdraw writes:   'It [the withdrawal] was an astute propaganda move, because both the Republic and the nationalists had greatly exaggerated their role'.

All this will have escaped Tom Sibley's attention because in his Morning Star diatribe he is all too anxious to deploy his scatter-gun approach to target George Orwell and his book Homage to Catalonia claiming Orwell 'knowingly misleads his readers to this day'. 

 ***********

GEORGE ORWELL's SOCIALISM

Wakefield Socialist History Group:

Brian Bamford's contribution to the event at the Red Shed

yesterday discussing George Orwell & Socialism 

(a more extensive report on the other four speakers will follow):

BECAUSE the subject of this talk is specifically about Orwell's socialism I ought to say what I won't be dealing with.  Orwell is such a vast subject, and he featured on Radio 4 only this week.

I’ll only be touching on Raymond Williams's differences with regard to Orwell. With regard to the philosophical issues, and what has been called the 'Plato Problem', the 'Chomsky Problem', and the 'Orwell Problem', I do not intend to tackle these unless someone should ask a question relevant to this.

Here I'm going to try to explain how Orwell was transformed into becoming a socialist.

In 2011, I gave some talks in Newcastle, London and Bristol dedicated to the 75^th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.  About that time at a meeting of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the historian Professor Preston had described George Orwell’s book 'Homage to Catalonia' by saying: 

'George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is a book which I would rank alongside Spike Milligan's “Adolf Hitler: My part in His Downfall”, another interesting book by a footsoldier who played a small part in a much wider conflict'.

Since then Professor Preston has cheerfully repeated this claim from time to time.  He did it at a lecture at the Imperial War Museum; on 'Start the Week' with Andrew Marr; and on Radio 3 on 'Night Waves'.

At that time in 2011, as an ethnomethodologist, I was keen to show that Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' was an eye-witness account in the tradition of an ethnography rather than an attempt at historical analysis.

In December 1936, George Orwell left England for Spain, but he was STILL unsure  whether he would participate as a soldier or as a journalist.

Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden in his book 'Orwell - an Authorised Biography' writes:

‘...[Orwell] doubted whether he had the stamina or the skill to be a good soldier. And because of the chronic weakness of his lungs, he suspected// he would be turned down for health reasons if he tried to enlist. Yet he did not rule out joining one of the Spanish political militias if they could use him.

‘But he decided that the best way to serve the cause was to observe the war and write about it for the New Statesman or some other English paper that was sympathetic to the Republican government.’

We know now that in the end Orwell opted to join the POUM Militia.  And we know that Orwell kept a journal and wrote notes in the trenches.  It is now on record that this journal was seized by the communist police from his hotel room while he was on the run sleeping on building sites in Barcelona in May 1937.

When I made reference to doing an ethnography in my Bristol talk in 2011, I was invited to explain was an ethnography was.

The definition taken from the Glossary of terms written by Simon Coleman and Bob Simpson is that:
'Ethnography is the recording and analysis of a culture or society usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, a place or an institution.'

Before I go on to consider its limitations and the methodological problems of what Orwell is doing here and perhaps elsewhere, let me say something to my current talk:
Timothy Garton Ash, who reported on the wars in the Balkans described Orwell's book 'Homage to Catalonia' as a gold standard in war reporting, and the journalist Paul Foot in his Guardian review of the book claimed it made him into socialist.

Yet Orwell eludes to the fact that his Spanish experiences and the good fortune to be among Spaniards turned him into a socialist.  Before that he had been described as a Tory anarchist.
About half way through the book, on page 101 of my own Penguin edition, Orwell wrote:
'I had dropped into by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.'
And he goes on:
'Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly but not all, of working-class origins, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality.'
He speaks of the sense of near perfect equality that he found up there on the Aragon front., and he says he felt he was 'experiencing a foretaste of socialism adding that he found 'ordinary class-divisions had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England.'
He writes that:
'No one was there except for us and the peasants, no one owned anyone else as his master.'

So, up there in the trenches South of the Pyrenees, Orwell concluded that for most people 'socialism means a classless society or it means nothing.'
Orwell also talks about the fashion to deny that socialism had anything to do with equality and he writes;
'In every country in the world a huge tribe of party hacks and sleek little professors are busy "proving" that socialism means no more than planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact.'
Orwell claims that 'the mystique of socialism is equality and it's this idea that attracts ordinary folk to socialism.'

That's what Orwell maintained in the 1930!
So for Orwell it was equality that mattered not left-wing Keynsianism or half-baked Fabianism.

I think it was over this distaste for 'planned state-capitalism' that Orwell and Raymond Williams differed.

So what is wrong with Orwell's book on Spain?

According to Professor Preston in the Guardian this year:
'However, limited to the time and place of Orwell's presence in Spain, Orwell situated on a quiet sector of a quiet front, his book would certainly not be there as a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war, particularly of its international determinants.'
He clearly, says Preston, 'knew nothing of its origins or of the social crisis behind the Barcelona clashes.'
To grasp the bigger picture 'the broader politics of the war', Preston seems to be saying that to get the analysis right we will have to turn to proper historians who have the benefit of hindsight.
Perhaps the kind of historians like Gabriel Jackson, that Noam Chomsky describes and critiques in his essay 'OBJECTIVITY AND LIBERAL SCHOLARSHIP'.
In that essay, Chomsky argues that what these academic historians like Jackson tend to do is ignore the views of the workers in a struggle such as that in Spain. 

Look at what Professor Preston says about Spike Milligan's book, belittling 'footsoldiers'.  Or where he writes:
'Homage to Catalonia is a book about the Spanish war written from a narrow perspective, by someone who left out much that the professional historian could now encompass, supported as he is, by the enriched body of scholarship which has been published in Spanish, Catalan, and English... since 1996.'

With the greatest respect to Professor Preston and the rest of the community of scholars, I think we should remind ourselves of what Isaiah Berlin had to say and history and the historians.   To remind ourselves that no-one, not even Marx, managed in their powerful attempt to turn history into a science.

As an ethnomethodologist, it seems to me that history often verges on the art of advocacy.  Professor Preston's main gripe is that Orwell's book is the only book most people read about the Spanish war.

Why is Orwell's book so popular?  Why is it so widely read?

In the last few months I have just finished interviewing Joan Christopher about her husband Bill Christopher, who was a socialist and anarcho-syndicalist in the ILP, and she told me that Bill Christopher became politically transformed to socialism while serving in the Second World War.

Similarly, I have just discovered that the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was writing 'The Tractatus', while fighting in the Austrian army on the Russian front in the First World War experienced a similar transformation.  Before the war Wittgenstein had considered that he was preparing a book on logic, but after his experiences in the war he decided that he had written a book that was fundamentally ethical.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised then, that Orwell describes his transformation following his Spanish encounters thus:
'I was hardly conscious of the changes occurring in my own mind'.
Or where says on page 103 of the Penguin edition:
'I hope I can convey to you the atmosphere of the time.  The good luck of being among Spaniards with their innate decency, there ever present anarchist tinge.'
And when he writes this, unlike the 'sleek professors' and the historians, he's not trying to tell us something, he's not lecturing us as his readers, he's conveying something - he's showing us something of what it was like.  He's giving us a picture!

Orwell's memory broods over 'incidents that might seem too petty to be worth recalling':
'I am in the dug-out at Monte Pocero on the limestone ledge that serves as a bed.'
'I am... struggling to keep my balance and to tug a root of wild rosemary out of the ground.  High overhead meaningless bullets are singing.'

What Orwell is doing is showing us a picture of the underlying nature of the war.

Professor Preston feeds us facts and figures, while Orwell shows us something of the true nature of war.  Hence, 'Homage to Catalonia' is the most widely read book on the Spanish Civil War precisely because of this.

At my talk in Newcastle a lad there claimed that he'd stood where Orwell had stood on guard in Barcelona on guard on the Ramblas just opposite the Cafe Moka.  And he said that he didn't believe Orwell's account because he wouldn't have been able to see the Civil Guards across the street he was supposed to fire at.

Not being able to see everything symbolises the problem of Orwell's limitations.  The limitations of the eye-witness account; the limitation of the foot-soldier.

If we consider Tolstoy's Epilogue to 'War & Peace', we find that it was Napoleon not the foot-soldier who couldn't see the battle from where he was standing.  He couldn't see for all the smoke and dust produced in the battle.  Consequently, Napoleon had to depend on the dispatch riders whose messages were unreliable and useless, because the situation had changed in the time it had taken to reach their Emperor to get his orders.

Yet we find that at the Battle of Borodino, according to Tolstoy,  it was precisely the foot-soldiers and their morale that mattered, rather than the commands of the great man.

Regarding Orwell's lack of prior understanding of the Spanish conflict I want to say something.

I knew Vernon Richards the old editor of FREEDOM, the anarchist newspaper.  Vernon was close to Orwell in the 1930s and 40s, and he told me that Orwell didn't have much background knowledge of Spanish politics or indeed really deep understanding of the nature of the Spanish conflict before he went to Spain.

Orwell was really in the same situation as David in the Ken Loach film 'Land and Freedom'.  David was a bit of a scous bumpkin in the film, and he had to mature during the course of a two-hour film.  Yet precisely by being naive, both David, Orwell and the viewer, can begin eventually to see things as  we shall say, 'anthropologically strange'.  

Martha Gellhorn, who travelled around Spain during the Spanish Civil War reporting on events, shows us the importance of the on the spot account when she says:  'I wrote very fast, as I had to, afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place.'

Philp French in his Observer review of 'Land and Freedom' writes:

'David has a painful lesson that leads from naivety to maturity without making him a cynic.  He retains his belief in the essential decency of working people and their right to control their own destinies, individually and as a community.'

Hence, I believe it was an advantage from the point of view of an anthropological account that George Orwell didn't have any apriori made-up opinions when he first went to Spain.

******

Paul Preston pontificates about referendum

PROFESSOR Paul Preston, the distinguished British Hispanist speaking on the Radio Four news program today, revealed something remarkable by saying that the Catalan referendum is a 'complicated process' !

******

GEORGE ORWELL & SOCIALISM

Saturday 16th, September, 1p.m. at the RED SHED, 

Vicarage Street, Wakefield WF1.

Invites you to

GEORGE ORWELL & SOCIALISM

Speakers:

Brian Bamford*:

(Secretary of Tameside TUC & Secretary of Unite Bury Commercial NW 353 Branch).

Alan Stewart:

(Convenor of  Wakefield Socialist Hisoty Group).

Robin Stocks:

(Author of 'Hidden Heros of Easter Week')

FREE ADMISION.

FREE LIGHT BUFFET

ALL WELCOME. 

*****
 Les Hurst of the George Orwell Society, and Quentin Kopp (the son of George Kopp, George Orwell's POUM commander in Spain) will be attending the GEORGE ORWELL AND SOCIALISM event at the Red Shed. 

Comrades,

*  Brian Bamford (Sec of Tameside TUC and Sec of Bury Unite Commercial Branch) will be one of several speakers at the GEORGE ORWELL AND SOCIALISM event at the Red Shed, Vicarage Street, Wakefield WF1 on Saturday 16th September.   The event starts at 1pm.

The area Brian will be covering in his talk is outlined below.

Fraternally

Alan Stewart

Convenor, Wakefield Socialist History Group

---

Prof. Preston and George Orwell: The varieties of historical investigation and experience

A couple of years ago, at a gathering of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, Professor Paul Preston, describing George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, said: ‘It is not a bad book but the trouble is, it is the only book many people read on the Spanish Civil War’ or words to that effect. Pro. Preston suggested that ‘Homage to Catalonia’ was a book written about the Spanish War from the narrow perspective of someone who had only spent six or seven months involved in the conflict on a quiet front in the North of Spain – Aragon & Catalonia – and, that it left out much which the professional historian could now encompass supported, as he is, by the enriched ‘body of scholarship which has been published in Spanish, Catalan, English … since 1996’ (see Preface to Preston’s The Spanish Civil War [2006]). Is a modern history, written in a library by a professional historian such as that of Professor Preston’s, to be preferred to a first-hand account of the conflict written almost in the heat of battle, or shortly afterwards? Will not the professional historian and scholar’s account be more objective than that written by the former combatant and novelist? Is not the one clearly superior to the other? If not, how do we judge and value these differing contributions?

Brian Bamford is an ethno-methodologist/sociologist, who formerly worked as a maintenance electrician. He is at present Secretary of Tameside Trade Union Council and Secretary of Bury Unite the Union. He helped to edit the Tameside TUC booklet on the 75th Anniversary of the Spanish Civil War [3rd Edition],...

*****

Professor Paul Preston: 'Holocaust Denier'?

Is Paul Preston a soft core 'holocaust denier'?

THE academic, Professor Paul Preston , described in his book ‘THE SPANISH HOLOCAUST’ as ‘the world’s foremost historian of twentieth-century Spain’; in 2012 published an account of what he called ‘inquisition and extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain’.  By the standards of today, as spelled out by the holocaust expert Deborah Lipstadt this week, this comparison of the holocaust now amounts to what she calls 'soft core holocaust denial'. 

In view of recent developments with regard to the Trump administration’s skirmishes with the Jewish community’s claim to ownership of the term ‘Holocaust’, ought we now to be revisiting Pro. Preston’s employment of the word in the context of the Spanish Civil War? 

Deborah Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, who wrote 'Denying the Holocaust’ (1993), this week in responding to the recent blunders of the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, she stated in The Alantic journal:

‘The Holocaust was something entirely different. It was an organized program with the goal of wiping out a specific people. Jews did not have to do anything to be perceived as worthy of being murdered. Old people who had to be wheeled to the deportation trains and babies who had to be carried were all to be killed. The point was not, as in occupied countries, to get rid of people because they might mount a resistance to Nazism, but to get rid of Jews because they were Jews...’

What we have here from Deborah Lipstadt is a claim to Jewish exceptionalism, which specifically excludes claims like that of Prof. Preston about the Spanish tragedy in the 1930s. 

In the last century the linguistic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, critising dictionary definitions, argued that the meaning of a word is in its use.  

Having seen the recent film 'Denial' portraying Deborah Lipstadt's defence in the defamation case brought against her by the historian David Irving, it would seem that Ms. Lipstad wants to control the meaning of certain words in a totalitarian manner, which would put the words like holocaust in a kind of sacred category which demands an iron law defence of the meaning 'holocaust' that would have offended Wittgenstein. 

Thus, Deborah Lipstadt told the New York Times this week:

‘The de-Judaization of the Holocaust, as exemplified by the White House statement, is what I term softcore Holocaust denial. Hardcore denial is the kind of thing I encountered in the courtroom. In an outright and forceful fashion, (David) Irving [another historian] denied the facts of the Holocaust.’

As a conversational analyst I would view this as an attempt by Ms. Lipstadt and others to seize control of certain words like 'holocaust' and to deny use of the use of words to other groups like the gypsies etc. and even to poor Professor Preston's depiction of 'The Spanish Holocaust', as a form of intellectual totalitarianism or bullying..

What we are getting here from Professor Lipstadt and others in the 'holocaust industry', is a kind of tyranny of words, dictated and developed by an ideological group with political vested interests.

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)

The Value of Eye-Witness Accounts

By Brian Bamford CENTRAL to Colin Ward's critique of anarchist analysis and practice in the 1960s, was his belief that it was too obsessed with history and historical accounts.  That is too focused on the historical narrative of what had transpired in earlier times, and lacking an awareness of the here and now, and what people like me who have been brought up in anthropological study or ethnomethodology may call 'the missing what-ness'.  In May 2011, I gave paper at the Bristol Anarchist Bookfair entitled:  'Pro. Preston and George Orwell: The varieties of historical investigation and experience'.  It was an attempt to access the qualitative value differing accounts such as that of the academic historian Professor Paul Preston and George Orwell's more ethnographic eye-witness studies and descriptions.  At that event a young lad asked me to define the meaning of 'ethnography' and, as I recall, at the time I fancy I gave a rather poor and unsatisfactory description. The cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, and author Brian A. Hoey has defined the term thus: 'The term ethnography has come to be equated with virtually any qualitative research project where the intent is to provide a detailed, in-depth description of everyday life and practice. This is sometimes referred to as “thick description” — a term attributed to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz writing on the idea of an interpretive theory of culture in the early 1970s (e.g., see The Interpretation of Cultures, first published as a collection in 1973). The use of the term “qualitative” is meant to distinguish this kind of social science research from more “quantitative” or statistically oriented research.'  That quote represents a rather overly technical explanation for what I wanted to deal with at my talk at the Bristol Anarchist Bookfair in 2011.  What I was asking was more straight forward: 'Is a modern history, written in a library by a professional historian such as that of Professor Preston's, to be preferred to a first-hand account of the conflict written almost in the heat of battle, or shortly afterwards? Will not the professional historian and scholar's account be more objective than that written by the former combatant and novelist? Is not the one clearly superior to the other? If not, how do we judge and value these differing contributions? '  These questions are important and not just to anarchists.  Pro. Preston himself has openly attempted to rubbish the work of George Orwell when some years ago at a gathering of the International Brigade Memorial Trust he declared George Orwell's  'Homage to Catalonia' , and said: 'It is not a bad book but the trouble is, it is the only book many people read on the Spanish Civil War' or words to that effect. Pro. Preston suggested that 'Homage to Catalonia' was a book written about the Spanish War from the narrow perspective of someone who had only spent six or seven months involved in the conflict on a quiet front in the North of Spain - Aragon & Catalonia - and, that it left out much which the professional historian could now encompass supported, as he is, by the enriched 'body of scholarship which has been published in Spanish, Catalan, English ... since 1996' (see Preface to Preston's ‘The Spanish Civil War’ [2006]).  Can the professional historian have a better insight into the nature of a conflict like the Spanish Civil War than a combatant who was actually there like George Orwell?  In one of his 'As I please' essays Orwell comments on Sir Walter Raleigh:  'who when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent enquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about; whereupon, so it is said -- and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be -- he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.'   Orwell took the view that Sir Walter Raleigh was wrong to abandon the project.  I think that the two approaches to historical analysis are best described by Pro. Hoey below.  Pro. Hoey distinguishes the two approaches:  'Ethnographers generate understandings of culture through representation of what we call an emic perspective, or what might be described as the “‘insider’s point of view.” The emphasis in this representation is thus on allowing critical categories and meanings to emerge from the ethnographic encounter rather than imposing these from existing models. An etic perspective, by contrast, refers to a more distant, analytical orientation to experience.' and he continues:  'While an ethnographic approach to social research is no longer purely that of the cultural anthropologist, a more precise definition must be rooted in ethnography’s disciplinary home of anthropology. Thus, ethnography may be defined as both a qualitative research process or method (one conducts an ethnography) and product (the outcome of this process is an ethnography) whose aim is cultural interpretation. The ethnographer goes beyond reporting events and details of experience. Specifically, he or she attempts to explain how these represent what we might call “webs of meaning” (Geertz again), the cultural constructions, in which we live.'  Following another talk commemoration the anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, that I and the Anarchist Federation comrade Luis Mates gave in Newcastle at an event organised by Dave Douglass together with the International Brigade Memorial Trust up there, also in 2011,  one questioner pointed out that he had been to the spot in Barcelona where George Orwell had been confronted with the street fighting in Barcelona, and this questioner claimed that Orwell, from where he was standing, was not in a position to witness the events as he had claimed to do.  This represents another problem.  What can the eye-witness actually see?  Is the witness on the spot claiming too much in his account?  A recent example of this would seem to be Mr. Jason Holdway's comment on the post 'PENSIONER ATTACKED at ANARCHIST HQ!':  'I was there and frankly Brian's behavior was bizarre and completely counter productive. He caused his injuries when he tried to shoulder barge his way back in to the building, rebounding off someone half his age and fell sprawling onto the pebbled floor. I can only conclude that Brian's provocative behaviour was precisely designed to create a situation where he could make some claim to victimhood. on PENSIONER ATTACKED at ANARCHIST HQ!'  This above  is an eye-witness account of the events in Angel Alley on the 22nd, June this year.  Jason Holdway was indeed there in Angel Alley at the time, as he had been nominated for a place on the Friends of Freedom Press by the Secretary Steve Sorba, who was himself at the time of the attack on me presiding over the Annual General Meeting of the Friends of Freedom Press in an upstairs room at 84B, Whitechapel High Street.  Mr. Holdway makes some preliminary observations about my behaviour before going on to claim ' He caused his injuries when he tried to shoulder barge his way back in to the building, rebounding off someone half his age and fell sprawling onto the pebbled floor'.   How can he know that?  Did he see the blood begin to flow at that moment?  Perhaps he saw a fountain of blood smeared across the 'pebbled floor' in Angel Alley?  I have been witness to number of these kind of events - in sit-in strikes and sit-downs - and afterwards it is not so easy for the actual participant or 'victim' to say precisely when the damage occurred.  But Mr Holdway goes further to make an even more remarkable conclusion:  'I can only conclude that Brian's provocative behaviour was precisely designed to create a situation where he could make some claim to victimhood.'  What Mr. Holdway is doing here is claiming to have solved 'the problem of other minds'!   He is claiming effectively not only that the injuries were self-inflicted because of my 'behaviour [which] was bizarre',  but also that he has the insight to know my full intentions or what the solicitor's call the mens rea.  The notion of mens rea or intention is a problem for lawyers and the courts, but it is also a problem for social scientists.  Clearly the ethnographer has many problems no less than the professional historian, and slipshod treatment of the subject can always occur in our accounts.  But as has been pointed out it is probable that an ethnographic eye-witness account such as that of George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' will probably survive better that many of the histories of the Spanish Civil War that are currently being written.  In short it possesses the 'missing what-ness'!

Controversial review by Sam King

NOBODY has written about the Spanish Civil War quite like Paul Preston. He is the 'go to' historian in both English and Spanish.  Preston’s ‘The Spanish Civil War’ is already the definitive book for any antifascist who wants to understand the tragedy that was the fall of Spanish Republic. Throughout his substantial cannon of work he has eloquently portrayed the sacrifices that men and women from across the world made to fight Franco’s brutal fascist regime and the shadowy and sinister support he received from Hitler and Mussolini, that was criminally ignored by the rest of Europe.





‘The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain’ is Preston’s tour de force and possibly even surpasses his unparalleled biography of Franco to become his most important contribution to our understanding of 20th century Spain. As ever, Preston has sought to re tell the events, massacres and heroism through the eyes and memories of the lives of those who suffered most. The tragic tales of men and women who took up arms against a military machine that wanted to crush all vestiges of democracy, humanity and secularism.





The primary premise of this 700 page work is that Franco’s belief in a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy resulted in a conscious and systematic attempt to eradicate all Republicans. Preston places the figure of murdered Republicans as high as 200,000 which certainly justifies his use of the term Holocaust. Franco’s fanaticism even allowed the Nazis to test drop their bombs on the Spanish people. To its shame, the outside world refused to come to their aid.





Over the many years that Preston has written on Spain, he was always drawn the conclusion that those that followed the ‘Popular Front’, an undertaking to defeat fascism before undertaking a revolution was the correct line.  Perhaps because of this Anarchists will enjoy this book the least as Preston makes it clear that the Anarchist CNT were as anti the Republic as the fascists, viewing it as a bourgeoisie government.  Their continual attempts to destabilise the Republic played right into the hands of the right wing.





A large section of the book is given over to Preston’s meticulous research, testament that he has laboured harder and more thoroughly than others that may draw their own or different conclusions. It is often said that in wars, the victors get to write the history. It is the case that of the Spanish Civil War, the victors’ have nothing palatable worth remembering, celebrating or commemorating.  Preston has often said that he has spent his life fighting Franco.  Those who continue to try and apologise for Franco now have their work really cut out as The Spanish Holocaust unquestionably delivers a blow to Franco’s reputation that it will be hard to overcome.

Taking Sides. Artists and Writers on the Spanish Civil War. (2)

WITH reference to the previous post 'Taking Sides:  Artists and Writers on the Spanish Civil War', George Orwell's comments in appendices 1 and 2 in 'Homage to Catalonia' are of especial significance.    Orwell writes:  'One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the left wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right'.  Orwell  singles out for particular criticism Frank Pitcairn (Claud Cockburn) of the Daily Worker and John Langdon Davies of the News Chronicle for their reportage of the May Days of 1937 in Barcelona, where the CNT (anarcho-syndicalist trade union confederation) occupation of the Telefonica was crushed by Republican statist forces.

Orwell contended that British newspapers of the Right and Left 'dived simultaneously into the same cesspit of abuse'.   In a footnote, however, he wrote:  'I should like to make an exception of the Manchester Guardian... Of our larger papers the Manchester Guardian is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty.'

Orwells devastating critique of the Communist press is cogently presented in great factual detail and condemns unequivocally those fellow travelling jounalists who engage in 'pure fabrication and serious misrepresentation' in their reports on the Spanish Civil War.

See Review: Historian as Judge & Detective  Professor Preston's Parochial Anglo-Saxon Account Tuesday 10th, September 2013. 

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/taking-sides-artists-and-writers-on.html

Considering the Spanish Civil War

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'.