The Spanish Holocaust. By Paul Preston.
Illustrated 700 pages. Harper
Press. £30 in hard-back.
PROFESSOR Preston writes: 'I thought long and hard about using the word
“holocaust” in the title of this book', and he concludes 'I could find
no word that more accurately encapsulates the Spanish experience than
“holocaust”.' To back up this
decision he says: 'I was influenced
by the fact that those who justified the slaughter of innocent of innocent
Spaniards used an anti-Semite rhetoric and frequently claimed that they had to
be exterminated because they were the instruments of a
“Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic” conspiracy.' He writes that ''my use of the word
“holocaust” is not intended to equate what happened in Spain with what happened
throughout the rest of continental Europe under German occupation but rather to
suggest that it be examined in a broadly comparative context.' The Professor says that he hopes 'thereby
to suggest parallels and resonances that will lead to a better understanding of
what happened in Spain during the Civil War and after.'
The Spanish Holocaust is a piece of rigorous
research whose author clearly operates unashamedly as both a detective and
judge: the book is moralistic history of
a high order and seeks to measure the spirit of the military sedition in July
1936 that became the Spanish Civil War alongside the rise of the national
socialists in Germany in 1933 and the cruelties of the Third Reich. Pro. Preston wants to say, more or less, that
Hitler equals Mussolini, and both of these equal General Franco, and he puts
work in to establish that during the Spanish Civil War and after under the
regime that followed that war 'nearly 200,000 men and women were murdered
extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal process' and that '(a)ll of what did happen constitutes what I
believe can legitimately be called the Spanish holocaust.' He also regrets that 'To this day,
General Franco and his regime enjoy a relatively good press.'
Against this moralist approach may be contrasted the attempt
to pose a scientific venture that as Isaiah Berlin says try to tell us that 'it
is foolish to judge Charlemagne or Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin
for their massacres which is a comment on ourselves and not upon the facts.' Isaiah Berlin writes in his essay 'Historical
Inevitability':
'We are also told that as historians it is our task to
describe, let us say, the great revolutions of our time without so much as hinting
that certain individuals involved in them not merely caused, but were
responsible for, great misery and destruction – using words according to
standards not merely of the twentieth century, which is soon over, or of our
declining capitalist society, but of all the human race at all times and in all
places in which we have known it; and are told that we should practise such
austerities out of respect for some imaginary scientific canon which
distinguishes between facts and values very sharply...' anything else would
be, according to these anti-moralists, '.,.unworthy of serious scholarship.'
Berlin strongly
disagrees, arguing: 'Those who are
concerned with human affairs are committed to the use of the moral categories
and concepts which normal language incorporates and expresses … (historians)
need not – they are certainly not obliged to – moralise: but neither can they avoid the use of normal
language with all its associations and “built in” moral categories.' For to seek to avoid to do this would be 'to
adopt another moral outlook, not none at all.'
Bearing all this in mind, I would not wish to challenge Pro.
Preston on grounds of what some may call his prejudices, that is his passionate
dissection of the atrocities associated with the regime of General Franco nor
would I desire to tackle him here at length for his broad-brush approach in
holding the anarchists of the FAI responsible for much of the killings on the
side of the Republic because Preston at least grasps the central importance and
significance of the anarchists and their huge trade union federation on the
Spanish republican side. Preston makes
his own position clear:
'There would be no end to the internal violence until the
Republican state had been rebuilt...' and 'the conduct of a modern war required
a central state.'
And he quotes approvingly:
'Companys (the Catlan President of the Generalitat) had
effectively ensured the continuity of state power and, in the long term, the
eventual taming of the revolution by manoeuvring the CNT into accepting
responsibility without long-term institutional power.'
Earlier Professor Preston rather gives the game away by
displaying his own instincts as an English municipal Fabian type liberal/
socialist when he writes:
'The victory of the working-class forces (in defeating
the military rebels in Barcelona) posed a significant problem for President
Companys, who was leader of the bourgeoisie party, the Esquerra Republicana de
Catalonya.'
My profound problem with Professor Preston's book is with
what is the 'keystone' of his whole hypothesis which is contained in
Chapter Two entitled 'Theorists of Extermination': the focus of this chapter dwells on a kind of
potted psychology, biography and anthropology of some elements of the Spanish
right most hostile to the Second Republic.
Preston in the first line of his Chapter Two writes:
'Africanista officers and Civil Guards were the most
violent exponents of right-wing hostility towards the Second Republic and its
working-class supporters.'
He then makes the allegation that:
'They insinuated the racial inferiority of their
left-wing and liberal enemies through the clichés of the theory of the
Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy.'
Preston here needs to show
a link between Hitler and the German Nazis, and the mentality of the of the
Spanish right-wing in the 1930s, and he claims:
'The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the
Christian world was given a modern spin in Spain by the dissemination from 1932
onwards of one of the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion.'
Preston finds that
the leader of the military rising against the Second Republic, General Mola,
had read The Protocols and praised Hitler in his book The
Past, Azaná and the Future. Gil
Robles, leader of the Catholic party, the CEDA, Preston tries to show as being
a closet Fascist and he quotes from El Socialista as describing
one of his speeches as an 'authentic fascist harangue'. Preston also puts work in to show that Franco
was influenced by the anti- Jewish-Masonic tendency on the Spanish right. In his anxiety to show that the Spanish right
is indistinguishable from what was happening in northern Europe, Preston is
ignoring the culture and anthropology of Spain which if he examined the roots of
what he is talking about he may be forced to arrive at different
conclusions.
In fact, Freemasonry was brought to Spain by the English, and
the first lodge was founded in Madrid in 1728 and, even though it was forbidden
by the Inquisition, it was popular among the enlightened aristocracy and
ministers of Charles III. When the
Second Republic was founded in the 1930s most of the most senior Army officers
were masons, and it is said that the King was a mason. On this point Gerald Brenan in footnote in his
book The Spanish Labyrinth is worth quoting at length:
'A great deal has been made of the freemasonry of the
Republican parties. As a matter of fact
nearly all the Monarchist politicians and most of the Army generals before 1931
were masons. The King himself is said to
have been one and practising Catholics often occupied high positions in the
lodges. That is to say, freemasonry had
ceased to have any political or anti-clerical connotations and had become a mere
friendly society as it is in England. Then towards 1930 the Republicans began to
invade the lodges and made their business to restore them to their old
function. During the first years of the
Republic the Madrid lodges formed a convenient meeting-place for Republican
politicians and link between the radicals and the groups that followed Azaña.'
Preston has none of
Brenan's sophistication when considering the Freemasons in Spain and he writes:
'In this paranoid fantasy [of an
evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christian Europe], Freemasons were smeared as
tools of the Jews (of whom there were virtually none) in a sinister plot to
establish Jewish tyranny over the Christian world.'
Here Preston is trying to place a phenomena which has its
origins in a particular Spanish context and struggle going back to before the
Spanish Inquisition, into the realm of the politics and ideology of Mein
Kampf and the Third Reich, while Brenan simply traces the foundation of
the Spanish Liberal Party to Freemasonry.
It is his frantic search for symmetry to a historical
narrative that fits a parochial cookbook for his English readers that disturbs
me about Professor Preston's book. The
Conservative politician and architect of what in 1874 of what was to become
known as The Restoration, Antonio Cánovas said: 'Son
espanoles los que no pueden ser otra cosa'
['Spaniards are those people who can't be anything else'}. It seems to me that the danger of the
kind of top-down moralistic historical narrative of the Spanish Civil War used by Preston is that
it can be pushed so far that it begins to border on the grotesque. Too many of the English historical critics,
both professional and amateur, in their analysis of the war tend to neglect
anthropological nature of Spanish condition:
they seem to end up arguing that the Spaniards should be more like the
Germans or the English. Often these
criticism are disguised by blaming the Spanish anarchists or the Catalan
nationalists for being instinctively in favour of decentralisation and against
a centralised state, when as Pro. Preston says 'the conduct of a modern war required a
central state'.
It's as if Preston has never read Richard Ford, or George
Borrow's 'Bible in Spain' or even Gerald Brenan, and that he
hasn't yet grasped what Brenan wrote in 1943:
'The Catalan question is, to begin with, merely one
rather special instance of the general problem of Spanish regionalism.'
Unless the commentators on Spain, whether it be Professor
Preston or Bill Alexander of the International Brigade, understand that, they will never come close to
grasping what is going on in Spain and the reluctance of Spaniards fighting in
the Civil War to move far from their own regions. This regionalism has the effect of the kind
of transferred 'racism' or 'xenophobia' that Preston alludes to
when he writes:
'Conservative intellectuals argued that through
various subversive devices the Jews had enslaved the Spanish working class'
and an 'alleged consequence of this subjugation was that the Spanish
workers themselves came to posses oriental qualities' .
Not just the conservative intellectuals, but the ordinary
Spaniards I worked with in the 1960s as an electrician in the fishing village
of Denia in Alicante, would accuse the inhabitants of the rival town of Pego as
being the historical descendants or 'los Moros', and he would
even condemned another village Pedruguer for having 'the character of the
Jew' because they, unlike the inhabitants of another pueblo Ondra who
like good Spanish Christians spent their spare money eating tapas and drinking
vino in bars, were miserable and miserly and bought land. Much more can be understood about these
village attitudes and customs in Spain by reading anthropological accounts
given in Brenan's own description of the two years he spent in Yegen in South
from Granada or Julian Pit-Rivers' book The People of the Sierras
about the Cadiz village of Grazelema.
Preston writes of the Jews in Spain in the 1930s 'of
whom there were virtually none', but in so far as there were Moors on
the Spanish mainland in the Civil War they were bought in as mercenary fighters
by General Franco in his army in the south.
There are several strong words of insult in Spain – 'cabrón' (cuckhold),
'bastardo' (bastard), and 'Moro' (Moor).- but 'Moro'
for the Spaniard becomes like a
bogey-man; thus the popularity of ham and pork dishes in Spanish cuisine born
of a people who wanted to historically prove their Christianity by hanging legs
of pork outside their houses for curing in the sun. It may be as Preston writes that some on the
right were suggesting that members of the Spanish working-class were the
descendants of 'Moros', but it is equally probable that the left
was accusing the right of being 'amigos de Moros'. Certainly, I seem to remember that Arthur
Koistler (then a member of the Communist Party) in his book The Spanish
Testament condemned Franco and the rebel generals for bringing 'black
troops' (Moors) to fight in Europe;
racism and xenophobia is not confined to the right.
When one understands this anthropological background of
Spanish customs and culture the whole architectural model of Professor
Preston's book as built up in his Chapter Two Theorists of Extermination
begins to crumble. Significantly Preston
writes:
'The identification of the working class with foreign
enemies was based on a convoluted logic whereby Bolshevism was a Jewish
invention and the Jews were indistinguishable from Muslims and thus leftists
were bent on subjecting Spain to domination by African elements.'
Preston keeps mentioning 'Bolshevism', 'Marxism' and
'communists', but apart from there being few if any Jews or Muslims in
Spain in 1936 there wasn't that many communists either and their influence in
the big trade union confederations UGT (Socialist) and CNT
(anarcho-syndicalist) was minimal Gerald Brenan writes: 'During the Dictatorship the Communist Party
was so insignificant that that Primo de Rivera did not think it worth while
suppressing it and the Communist press continued to appear as usual.' All Spaniards use the
rhetoric of insults and abuse with great aplomb and the Spanish film maker Luis
Bunuel said in his autobiography My Last Breath that they are
world masters of the art of blasphemy, thus because Spaniards throw around
words and phrases like 'Moros' and 'character of the Jew' that
has its roots in Spanish antiquity and the Inquisition, against people they
don't like it tends to weaken Preston's 'Holocaust' model. Preston's claim that Franco 'was a
subscriber to Acción Española...' or that both he and General
Mola, who became director of the military rising in 1936, were 'avid
readers of the anti-Communist journal …, the Bulletin de
l'Entente Internationale contra la Troisième Internationale', hardly stands up as strong evidence that what
was happening in Spain was anything other than another pronunciamiento, of
which at one time in 19th century Spain, according to Brenan, there
was an average of one every twenty
months.
I would
expect anarchist and libertarian critics, and those who sympathise with the
position of the POUM, to suggest that Preston is bias in his presentation, and
that others would challenge his broad- brush use of the term 'Holocaust'. For me it is the architecture of the whole
edifice of the Preston historical model of Franco being a little Hitler
that is built on an anglo-centric account that is dodgy, and ignores the
anthropology of Spanish society: it is
one that will however appeal to his liberal-leftist readers in north Europe. Clearly Nazi Germany was a more scientific
than England, as Orwell wrote 'The order, the planning, the State encouragement
of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there...'
and Mussolini's Fascists had the Futurists, whereas the
Spanish regime under Franco was not modern, and was more a product of a
medieval mentality going back to El Cid and the Spanish Inquisition. The problem with Professor Preston's book is
not that he is being judgemental as well as employing his undoubted skills as a
detective, but that in The Spanish Holocaust he slips into
polemics and journalism to such a degree that makes his
model not just false, but absurd, and perhaps even grotesque. As Isaiah Berlin wrote in another context: '… the culture of the Renaissance is not
merely different from, but represents a more mature phase of human growth than,
that of Outer Mongolia two thousand years ago (at the time of Genghis Khan)'; in
the same way the totalitarianism of the Third Reich differs from the
authoritarianism of the Spanish Inquisition and those in modern times like
Franco and Mola who were its legitimate children. Preston may well be a great historian both as a detective and judge, but unlike Brenan who lived in Spain for most of his life, he somehow lacks a feel for Spanish civilisation and society.
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