Stuart Christie and the Spirit of Don Quixote

by Brian Bamford

REASSESSING STUART CHRISTIE IN CONTEXT

Stuart Christie: a Scottish anarchist writer and publisher. Aged 18, Christie was arrested in Madrid while carrying explosives to assassinate the Spanish caudillo, General Francisco Franco. He was later alleged to be a member of the Angry Brigade, but was acquitted of related charges. When he died he was probably the best know anarchist in the UK.

Born: July 10, 1946, Partick, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Died: August 15, 2020

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From Shakespeare's Macbeth: "I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none." in Macbeth act 1

From Christie's 'My Granny...' on pages 32-33: 'I couldn't warm to Shakespeare in the classroom. He simply had no resonance with us. The language was remote and difficult, as was the historical period...'. (Rabbie) Burns* was my first encounter with the emotions and ideals I've since come to call socialism. Who could grow up to be anything but a class war socialist on reading Burns' clarion call to egalitarianism in "A Man's A Man For A' That".'

ON REVIEWING Don Quixote and Cervantes** in 'The LITERATURE OF THE SPANISH PEOPLE' Gerald Brenan writes: 'the KNIGHT of the DOLEFUL COUNTINANCE is mad, and that's that. But presently it dawns on us that his madness is confined to one thing - the belief, not itself irrational by the standards of that age, that the books of Chivalry were true histories. Once that is taken for granted, it was no more mad for him to attempt to revive the profession of knight-errantry than it was for a monk to imitate the Fathers of the desert.'

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WHEN CONSIDERING the role of Stuart Christie and his adventures on the Spanish peninsular in August 1964, we would do well to observe his likeness to the knight of the Doleful Countenance. We learn for instance that Don Quixote was conceived by Cervantes in a Spanish jail at a low water mark in his life. Much like, I dare say, Stuart's autobiography 'My Granny Made Me An Anarchist'.

Interestingly Gerald Brenan writes of Don Quixote: '...in so far as Cervantes intended the figure of Don Quixote to stand for anything, it was quite simply for a man who ruins himself and others by his romantic and generous illusions and by his over-confidence in the goodness of human nature.'

Moreover, Brenan claims: In the novel '...there is the contrast between the actual situation and what it appears to be to Don Quixote: there is that between his noble and exalted way of feeling and Sancho's peasant shrewdness and self-interest: and if one likes, that between the knight's wise and sane ratiocinations and his violent fantasies whenever the subject of Chiivalry enters his head.'

In all this it is hard to escape the feeling that the Stuart that I met in Paris in August 1964, already commited to carry explosive to Madrid, was so full of Rabbie Burns* and the Bonnot Gang. So wound-up was he on romance that he could have been a younger version of Lord Byron or a kind of blunt working-class Rabbie Burns; pioneer of the Romantic movement .

In El País, the historian Julián Casanova Ruiz has recently written in what I think is the best memorial of Stuart: 'Yet he was a committed anarchist using his pen and engaged in cultural aggitation, in times when the revolutionaries with "consciences" have past into history. Anarchist solidarity, that reflects on the concequences of industrial capilalism, nuclear disarmament, and abuses by the State. He was a Scot who would have loved to live in the golden epoch of Spanish anarchism.'

Julián Casanova's suggestion that Stuart Christie was steeped in the 'spirit of the older epoch of Spanish anarchism' implies that he was indeed a romantic soul. Quixote, who has gone mad owing to reading too many books about Chivalry, according to Brenan should not be regarded as 'lacking in shrewdness or being gullible by nature' because 'his delusion is a result of a long secretly sustained wish to rise above the dullness of his monotonous life, have adventures and distinguish himself.'

Any objective reading of Stuart Christie's autobiography will I think confirm that that in 1964 he was determined to escape his dreary life in Glasgow and somehow experience what he then believed the anarchist Holy Land. I felt the same about escaping Manchester and going to Spain in the winter of February 1963.

Alas, the actual Holy Land, as was shown in Don Quixote, was in reality somewhat more complex than any of us anticipated in our overwrought and vivid imaginations. Stuart was determine and he asked: 'Why did I, for the most part an unaggressive and easy-going person, commit myself to going to Spain to engage in an unspecified but violent campaign against the Franco regime?' and he continued 'I wanted to change the world because the world needed to be changed. Right in the middle of Europe, Franco was running one of the most brutal and represive regimes in modern history - he had killed more Spanish people than Hitler killed German Jews - and the Western democracies were now helping him to survive. Even now, while the civilized world was humming along to the songs of the Beatles and the Supremes.... the number of political dissidents being arrested and tortured by Franco's secret police was steadily increasing.'

Stuart's view here is clearly that of a foreigner looking at Spain in the early 1960s, and seeing it with eye of an outsider; the Spaniards I got to know between March 1963 and August 1964 both in the fishing village in Alicante where we lived and worked, and later on in La Linea de la Concepcion near Gibraltar, certainly did not have the feel of being downtrodden. The workers I worked with were mostly optimistic, cheerful and I felt they were more amiable than the workers I knew in England, we all seemed have enough money to live on, but I struggled to put something on one side for a rainy day.

All this everyday reality in the period 1964-67 when Stuart was in jail in Madrid was outside his grasp, and he was consequently able to decieve himself about the nature of Spanish life as it was evolving for most workers in the 1960s. Clearly in 1964, I was financially better off working 5-days for the MOD at the airport in Gibraltar, earning just over £8 for a 40-hour week; than when I was working a 48-hour week in Alicante at the Casa Such for 750 Pesetas (about £5).

Among other things, Stuart seemed to have been influenced by George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia', and Orwell wrote in an essay 'The Art of Donald McGill' that 'If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?' and he wrote:

'Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with "volupuous" figures. He it is who punctures your your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth...'

It seems to me that these attitudes have been poetically displayed in the adventures of Stuart Christie and is amply demonstrated in his autobiography especially were he describes his chance meetings with many amiable fellow prisoners who he concluded to be 'champion' only to later learn that they had committed unimaginable crimes: someone he thought was a 'nice chap' turned out to be Gestapo officer awaiting extradition on charges of mass murder, or an OAS terrorist, a South American gangster, a professional assasin, an arms dealer, a rapist etc. Prison life is like that, you come across all sorts of folk, I don't know about Spain but in places like Strangways prison in Manchester there were clear hierarchies with the wife-killer and the murders at the top, and then people like debtors would be at the bottom, and in the 1960s, this last category were distinguished by having to wear brown, and these days I believe the child abuser is the lowest of the low.

Stuart had been brought up a protestant and he writes:

'Before I went to prison my world-view was black and white, a moral chessboard on which everyone was either a goody or a baddy. But the ambiguities in people I came across in prison made me uneasy and I began to question my assumptions about the nature of good and evil.'

Orwell felt that to be among Spaniards in Spain was to be in the best country in the world for a foreigner. The 10th, July 1967 was Stuart's 21st birthday, and the jefe de servicio agreed to use the infirmary dining room to organise a party for him. The menue was set-up with a kid goat cooked in wine with roast potatoes, ensalada, coffee, cheese and ice cream. Beer, wine and Spanish brandy were supplied. The cabaret was put on by a Philipino rock star who was inside for murdering his agent, together with a band of gypsies who singing and dancing flamenco. The 'do' lasted from 2pm to 11pm. Everyone ended up legless.

Anyone who has lived in Spain and worked among Spaniards in the 1960s will find this account perfect plausable. No wonder Stuart was later to favourably compare his Spanish prison experience with life in an English jail. Somehow the Spaniards conduct themselves a more human manner, sometimes it can be delightful as it was for me when I was detained in the barracks of the Civil Guards up in the province of Segovia after I'd failed to carry my passport as identification returning from a journey to report on a strike of miners in the Asturias. The Civil Guards were unbelievably kind and considerate, and their wives served me up a dinner fit for a King. Maybe a Spaniard who'd failed to carry his identity card would not have received such sympathetic treatment because, as the Gibraltarians have often noted, Spaniards can be cruel to each other; I note for example that Fernando Carballo, Stuart's contact in Madrid, was treated much more roughly in police custody: his wrists were hammered with the butt of a policeman's pistol while another 'systematically punched him in the kidneys and stomach'. (see 'Granny' page 165).

We learn from Gerald Brenan that 'Don Quixote grew out of Cervantes' long and painful experiences of frustration and failure' and he adds 'It thus deals with one of the classic themes of Spanish literature - disillusionment.' According to Brenan, who lived in Spain on and off from 1919 when he came out of the British army after the First World War, 'Spaniards who commonly set their hopes too high and expect a miracle to fulfil them, often come to feel themselves deceived by life.'

When we were in Paris in February 1963 and about to leave for Spain, Salvador Gurucharri our handler told me he was atheist who believed in the God of nature,and I've noticed this with other Spaniards over the years. Gerald Brenan in his book The Spanish Labyrinth writes about this importance of nature with regard to Bakunin: 'He (Bakunin) therefore maintains that a free society will necessarily create strong, open, outstanding men and accepts without fear a strengthening of those great conservative forces that govern societies - custom and public opinion, which are good "because they are natural".' Brenan writes 'Something must be said about this word "natural", for it is one of the keys to Bakunin's ideas.' Bakunin, rather like John Ruskin and the romantics, seems to have felt angish at the growing artificiality of modern life, Brenan claims that for Bakunin 'all artificiality in his eyes was bad, so all "nature" was good.'

Bakunin is recognised as having a great influence on Spanish anarchism.

When I set out to write this piece on Stuart Christie I had in mind a critique based on the idea that he was a romantic who had too much faith in actions like setting off small bombs that at best only got the coverage of a small column in a foreign newspaper outside Spain. Yet I've been seduced by re-reading Stuart's autobiography in conjunction with re-reading Gerald Brenan's Literature of the Spanish People.

Yet, I am aware of that some would have liked me to contrast Stuart Christie's approach to anarchism with that of David Graeber who also died in August this year. Graeber in the USA, and for example Colin Ward in the UK, took a more considered rationalist approach. When I thought about it I remembered what George Orwell said about Tolstoy in his essay 'Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool', in it he wrote of Tolstoy: 'Clearly he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His (Tolstoy's) reaction is that of an irritable old man pestred by a noisy child. "Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?".' What Orwell concludes is that people like the pacifist Tolstoy would 'make children senile'. On reflection my worry is that those of who argue for a more cerebral approach to life and social change may simply be urging that the young should become old before their time.

It would seem, from this point of view, that the journey for all of us is bound up in an eternal pilgrimage from the madness of youth to the senility of old age.

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* Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, the National Bard, Bard of Ayrshire and the Ploughman Poet and various other names and epithets,[nb 1] was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.

He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.

As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country.

** Wikipedia on Cervantes: Aside from these, and some poems, by 1605, Cervantes had not been published for 20 years. In Don Quixote, he challenged a form of literature that had been a favourite for more than a century, explicitly stating his purpose was to undermine 'vain and empty' chivalric romances.[61] His portrayal of real life, and use of everyday speech in a literary context was considered innovative, and proved instantly popular. First published in January 1605, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza featured in masquerades held to celebrate the birth of Philip IV on 8 April.[51]

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Regarding Stuart Christie by Martin Gilbert

I ONLY met him once. It was outside the gates of Speakers Corner, Hyde Park, in 1963, Stuart had only been in London a short while. His accent was so thick I had difficulty understanding him. We were both selling papers. I had PEACE NEWS, and SANITY, (now long-gone, published by national CND). Also, we were both selling FREEDOM, a very different paper from what it has declined into. Stuart indicated that the papers were selling very well. Soon, we were were both busy chatting with different people and I never saw him again.

When he was arrested [in August 1964] reactions were very mixed. Predictabley, the media’s response was something like”….typical anarchists...”. Young CNDers and our fellow travellers showed 100% solidarity with Stuart. We had an old motor coach to aid our campaigning, so drove to Blackpool for the Labour party conference.

Readers may know that back then CND was much more establishment oriented. The line was only to approve of traditional methods of getting our messages across. This was years before national CND voted to support non violent direct action; thanks to the women at Greenham Common in 1980. So instead of following the (then) strict line we lobbied for Stuart’s release. Old campaigners were furious with us. In mitigation we claimed, incorrectly, that he was only carrying literature; which was also illegal in Franco’s Spain.

Lessons were gained from it all. One was awareness of the extent of Franco’s spies. Also, how open we and other groups were to infiltration from different kinds of Cops. But too much caution can only lead to quietism.

martin gilbert Sept. ‘20

Octavio Alberola says goodbye to Stuart Christie

Octavio Alberola, who was in charge of Defensa Interior and was a close friend of Stuart’s has left us this farewell message to his friend.

Stuart Christie, comrade and friend

by OCTAVIO ALBEROLA

THE news of Stuart Christie’s death arrived by phone halfway through yesterday afternoon from comrade René after he asked if I had heard the bad news and after I quizzed him brusquely: Who’s dead? I could tell from his tone of voice that it must have been somebody close who had passed away.

René’s answer stopped me in my tracks, because even though Stuart had told me a week before that the cancer had left him still hoarse and that the findings of his medical tests were none too encouraging, it never at any moment occurred to me that he would be taken so quickly. I am surrounded by several male and female comrades – more or less of my own age – who are in none too rude health and at my age (due to turn 93 shortly) the thought that one’s days are numbered is just “normal”.

But in Stuart’s case, how could this be when he was eighteen years my junior? Besides, we had both been working on joint projects and both had been determined to plough ahead with our battles with the world of authority and exploitation.

To me, his death represents not just the loss of a comrade and friend but an end to long years collaborating on joint actions and initiatives designed to expose the injustices of the world in which we live and the fight for a fairer, freer world. A world that is possible for all of us who have not given up on wishing and trying to work towards a consistent practice of active, internationalist revolutionary solidarity.

We have known many years of brotherly relations ever since our first meeting back in August 1964 and up until 2020, without interruption. Half a century of our lives in tandem, one way or another, working on behalf of a common cause, heedless of borders. That struggle, though centred on the Spanish people’s political and social vagaries, initially under the Franco dictatorship and later under this phoney democracy spawned by the Transition/Transaction, has at all times carried the imprint of an internationalist revolutionary outlook.

The evidence of that, in Stuart’s case, was the time he spent behind bars in Spain and England, and in the case of Brenda his partner, in Germany and, in the cases of Ariane and myself, in Belgium and France. Experiences that bear witness to struggles that knew no borders as we knew that a characteristic of freedom is that it is the right of every man and woman.

So how could I not feel impelled to remember it now that our fraternization with Stuart has ended with his death? As well as with the death just a few days ago of the German comrade Doris Ensinger, the partner of Luis Andrés Edo, with whom Stuart shared some of his prison experiences and with whom he rubbed shoulders in their struggles; obviously, speaking for myself, the loss of Doris in a way represented the final ending of my fraternization-in-struggle with Luis. A finale that started some years back with Luis’s own death.

The fact is that in the case of Doris’s death too I was stopped in my tracks, startled by the news of her demise communicated to me by Manel, as barely a week earlier she had sent Tomás and me an email to let us know that she had been abruptly recalled to the hospital and undergone a transplant operation … But was now back home and feeling well …

Meaning that yet again I am brought face to face with the tenuousness of our existence and the need to preserve the memory of what we strove to be and do, to the very death.

Perpignan, 17 August 2020

Octavio Alberola

From RojoyNegro_Digital el Mar, 18/08/20; 15:02 http://rojoynegro.info/articulo/memoria/octavio-alberola-se-despide-stuart-christie Translated by: Paul Sharkey & REPRINTED BY KATE SHARPLEY

Spanish Civil War talk in Ashton-under-Lyne

LAST NIGHT Dr Mercedes Penalba-Sotorrio of Manchester Metropolitan University gave an exquisite talk on the Spanish Civil War at a crowded event at Ashton-under-Lyne Central Library.   Ashton has been the scene of several such events since the unveiling of a Blue Plaque on behalf of  a local lad, James Keogh, who died in the hills of Aragon in 1938 fighting for the freedom of Spaniards on the 25th, November 2011.

Dr. Mercedes Sotorrio gave a very interesting detailed account of the struggle to defend democracy in Spain of the 1930s.  She described the contribution made by working-class volunteers such as James Keogh, a tailor and the son of a local binman.*   But James Keogh, as she showed in her talk last night was one of a vast number of northern workingmen, who were so inspired that they fought in many battles on the Spanish peninsula, throughout the war.  People went from Ireland and as she pointed out fought for both sides.

She referred particularly to the Battle of the Ebro which occurred between July and November 1938.  Fought on the banks of the Ebro; the longest river in Spain, it became a slaughter house for the republic.  It was a folly described so well by Antony Beevor the military historian in his book 'The BATTLE for SPAIN':

'To continue the battle in such circumstances had no military justification at all, especially when the Republic was so vulnerable there was no hope of achieving the original purpose of the offensive.  But instead of withdrawing with their best troops in good order to fight again, the republican command continued to send more men across the Ebro.  And all this was because Negrin believed that the eyes of Europe were upon them and he could not acknowledge a defeat.  Once again, political and propaganda considerations led to yet another self-inflicted disaster.'

Dr. Sotorrio said:  'Some 35,000 people went to Spain to fight with the volunteers, mostly, but not only,  in the International Brigades and some 10,000 died in the conflicts'.   She agreed during the question time which followed that the Soviet Union, like the Fascist Axis powers, 'had its own agenda'; which sometimes contrasted with that of the Spanish Republic.

There was some criticism during the questions about the non-intervention of the British and French governments in the Spanish Civil War, and Dr. Sotorrio said 'it seemed that some of the British public had more understanding of the likely danger presented by Fascism to Europe'.  There were also queries about the role and relevance of British Gibraltar to the conflict.  In the early stages of the war the British authorities on Gibraltar had tended to assist the supporters of General Franco rather than the legally elected Spanish Republic.  Some Spaniards who supported the Republic, who sought refuge in Gib. were sent back to Spain and imprisoned by Franco's supprters, and a Republican ship that sought British protection was threatened  by the British that if it didn't leave the port of Gibraltar the authorities would illuminate it so that it would by vulnerable to nationalist bombers at night.

Meanwhile, although it wasn't mentioned  last night, in 1937, it is worth mentioning that during the Spanish Civil War, the British Governor of Gibraltar was successful in obtaining permission from Franco to continue the Hunt.^[23] The tradition of the Royal Calpe Hunt continued for more than a century. The last Hunt took place on 4 April 1939.  It could not be resumed the following autumn due to the outbreak of the Second World War.  Although the horses and the pack were maintained in the hope that the Hunt would resume, and the Hunt Committee remained active until 1973, the Second World War brought the end of the Royal Calpe Hunt.^[4][5][7]

After the questions to Dr Mercedes Penalba-Sotorrio, the archivist who organised the event thanked the speaker and expressed his delight at the turn-out having originally worried that perhaps the subject was not sufficiently local. 


*  See more:   www.northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com › 2011/12 › james-keogh-commemoration

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Tameside Remembers The Spanish Civil War

Click on image to enlarge

 

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.

  

Memorial to Crewe's Spanish Civil War volunteers

¡No Pasaran!

A poignant event took place at Crewe Cemetery on Saturday 4th May, with the unveiling of a bench to commemorate George Fletcher and Edward McQuade, both volunteers in the 15th International Brigade fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.  Both men are buried in Crewe Cemetery just a few yards away from the bench that now bears their names.

The result of a long and determined campaign by Councillor Joy Bratherton, the ceremony was attended by relatives of the two men, representatives of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, and local civic figures including Laura Smith MP and Cllr. Brian Roberts, Mayor of Crewe and representatives from Unite the Union, Crewe No.1 RMT Branch and ASLEF.

A big shout out has to be made to: Unite (NW region), NW/64 Wharton and Salmesbury, NW/1400/5 Wigan, NW0269 and NW/0270,Crewe and NE/0604 Manchester Central.  All of whom made financial contributions towards the purchase and future maintenance of the memorial.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 is largely eclipsed by the two monumental struggles that went before and immediately after it, and yet it represents a crucial episode in the fight against fascism, militarism and dictatorship.  It is all the more remarkable in that those who fought - some 2,500 of whom came from Britain and Ireland - were volunteers.  They were fighting to uphold democracy and social justice, at a time when Governments (including that of the UK) were actively appeasing fascist dictators in Europe.  Many of them died for the cause and lie to this day in Spanish soil.

Delores Ibárruri, the republican heroine of the Civil War, said of the International Brigades' volunteers - "You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of the solidarity and universality of democracy."

George and Edward finally have a proper and fitting recognition of their bravery.

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Quien es el último?:

WHO IS THE LAST ONE?

 The last shall be first. A saying of Jesus; in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus declares that in the world to come, “The last shall be first and the first last.”

by Brian Bamford

A MONTH ago I was Bavaria with some women discussing the English art of queueing and I introduced the Spanish solution to the problem by saying that the Spaniards avoid queueing in an orderly way by standing in a crowd and when someone new turns up they simply ask:  'Quien es el ultimo?'  To which the Germans said:  'No German would ever admit to being the last one!'

I was put in mind of this discussion when I recently had occasion to point out to a lady councillor from Crewe involved with the International Brigade Memorial Trust that the International Brigades had left Spain on the 28th, October 1938 not 1939 as she had proposed on an inscription to commemorate two local volunteers.  Perhaps with justification she quickly argued:  'I would suggest that there were those who remained fighting alongside their Spanish comrades right up to the end after the IB had marched out of Barcelona.'

On their official departure the in October 1939 the International Brigaders had left behind 9,934 dead, 7,686 missing and had suffered 37,541 wounded.  But more than that it was later discovered by the international commission of the League of Nations overseeing the withdrawal of foreign volunteers, were to find about 400 International Brigaders in prisons in and around Barcelona, including Montjuich and the 'Carlos Marx' prison'.  Colonel Ribbing. the Swedish member of the international commission reported:  'As regards the international volunteers, they had sometimes been convicted for pure trifles, sometimes for definite and serious undisciplined behaviour.  Many stated they were accused of espionage and sabotage; most of them protested their complete innocence.'

To any decent person it must have seemed quite shocking that even though the Negrin republican government had agreed to the repatriation of the International Brigade prisoners, the international commission was to find some 400 had been left behind as late as January 1939 just as the nationalist troops were advancing on Barcelona.  

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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'. 

 ***********

Cllr. Rowbotham, Big Cyril & Single Issue Politics

by Brian Bamford

ON the 5th, December Carl Faulkner, an independent analyst and investigator concerned about the decline of common decency in local political life, published a video skillfully outlining the attitude of most Rochdale councillors to the importance of democratic procedures in local politics.  The video entitled 'Birds of a feather:  Protecting the Guilty' * and commenting on the Rochdale  full council meeting of Oct. 2018, that  describes in detail how councillors of a Labour complexion gave spirited support to one of their brethren who is a self-confessed fraudster using postal ballots to vote more than once in the last municipal elections in Rochdale.

This artfully designed video superbly captures the depth to which Rochdale politics has sunk, with the now disgraced Council leader Allen Brett calling on the Council to let the culprit fraudster, councillor Faisal Rana, be 'allowed to continue his good work'.  Councillor Brett was responding to a formal motion from the Tory leader of the opposition inviting Councillor Rana to 'just reflect on the positon that he's in and the position that he's put the Borough in'.

The Rochdale Labour councillors are by now well immune to controversy and scandal having endured pantomime politics for decades under the tutelage of such tacticians as Simon Danczuk, Richard Farnell, and now Allen Brett.  Perhaps we ought to mention that at the time the tragedy of Cambridge House was in being as a going concern in the 1960s, Cyril Smith was a big noise in the Rochdale Labour Party.

The now disgraced Council leader Allen Brett is merely the ultimate conclusion of a rather bad bunch.  Alongside him Sara Rowbotham cuts a curious figure as his deputy, it was she who rose to fame when Maxine Peak portrayed her in the 'Three Girls' dramatisation on TV.  She is interesting because she has a following among a campaign group called 'Parents Against Grooming' or PAG.**

PAG supporters were out in force at the Council meeting at which Allen Brett defended the self-confessed fraud Faisal Rana.  But they were clearly less interest on electoral swindling than on the exploits of a dead man in the last century at Cambridge House etc.  Historical memory is not to be ignored, as we know that even today that Spaniards are anxious to unearth the bones of victims of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.  If the supporters of PAG want to explore and campaign for what they call the 'survivors' of Cyril Smith they are entitled to do so.

What is worrying is that in doing so, and pursuing a single issue, the PAG campaigners  may be overlooking what is now under their own noses:  that is that they themselves may be being used as 'useful idiots' by an ambitious politician to feather her own nest.  I can't say this for certain, but their own heroine Sara Rowbotham has gone on record of making allegations against other Rochdale councillors, yet at the meeting PAG attended Sara had no qualms about joining the 'Roll of Shame' and backing the electoral fraud, Faisal Rana.

In this respect by getting carried away with the virtue signals and grandstanding of these half-baked ambitious politicians aren't you being a bit myopic?   Before you start to 'Look Back in Anger', just consider that I was one of those folding RAP in the cellar on Spotland Road, when in May 1979 the allegations against Cyril Smith at Cambridge House were first about to be put into the public domain.  Also, this Northern Voices Blog together with John Walker former joint editor of RAP; the Westminster Blogger, Paul Waugh; and the much lamented former Rochdale MP, Simon Danczuk,   created the conditions for PAG to exist after Danczuk made his speech in Parliament in 2012 (see the excerpt from the Northern Voices Blog archive in November 2012 below).***

***********

*    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFFKrkQaKqw&feature=youtu.be

** See the video link in which Sara Rowbotham denounces Councillor Allen Brett entitled

'3 BOYS , A GIRL AND A GROOMER ROCHDALE COUNCIL PART 5': 
PART 5 OF SURVIVORS MATTERS EXPLANATION AS TO WHY ROCHDALE BOROUGH COUNCIL HAVE REPEATEDLY MADE PROMISES TO THEM ONLY TO LEAD SURVIVORS ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE , WHILST ROCHDALE COUNCIL TRYING TO PORTRAY ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND CHANGE

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9gXUO6bK0qRQxCqmjKBenQ

***   Monday, 19 November 2012

It Was The Voices That Did It!

Cyril Smith - the Legend Falls

LAST WEEK, Northern Voices was party with others to the opening up of a story that has lied in the shadows for decades.   We cannot claim all the credit as we did not do the original research into Cyril Smith:  that was performed by the editors of the Rochdale Alternative Paper (RAP) in May 1979, when they first published the story and were threatened by Cyril Smith's solicitors at the time with a 'gagging writ'.  Private Eye and the New Statesman followed through with reports but the case against 'Smith the Man' was killed before it reached the mainstream media.  Later attempts to resurrect the story also failed because those giving evidence against Sir Cyril Smith lacked the confidence to put their names in the public domain. 

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George Orwell's Politics on libcom: Socialism

by Brian Bamford

A FEW days ago someone put a thread on the anarchist website libcom* entitled 'The Orwell quotes right-wingers never mention'.  It tries to show the breadth of George Orwell's ideas goes beyond his books '1984' and 'Animal Farm', in so far as they are perceived as attacks on state socialism and revolution.  The thread correctly attempts to show that Orwell was in fact a socialist who participated in a revolution in Spain.  There is a mountain of evidence that demonstrates this in his essays and letters, not to mention his book 'Homage to Catalonia', which Noam Chomsky describes as his best book.

In an essay reviewing Charles Dickens book Tale of Two Cities on the French revolution, Orwell chastises him for his exaggerations:

'The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors; Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them — and from a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated.  Even the Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear.  Though he quotes no figures, he gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives and the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of readers.  Thanks to Dickens, the very word ‘tumbril’ has a murderous sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart.  To this day, to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads.  It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression.'

Now the approach of the libcom thread is sound in that it tries to stress the authentic Orwell, who clearly favoured a form of socialism, and who sides with the working class based on his experiences in Spain.

Sitting in the trenches in Aragon in 1937 at the time of what some call the Spanish Revolution, Orwell wrote:
'...those first three or four months that I spent in the line...formed a kind of interregnum in my life, quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to come, they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.

'... I had dropped more or less 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. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality.  In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it.  There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the the mental atmosphere was one of Socialism.  Many of the normal motives of civilized life - snobbishness, money-grubbing fear of the boss, etc. - had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone one as his master; ' (Homage to Catalonia; pages 101 and 102 of the Penguin edition)

It seems to me that Orwell's time on the Aragon front brought about a transformation in his thinking that led to him shifting to a belief in the possibility of socialism.  And yet, equally it established in his mind a mental state which also blended with what he had to say in his own critique of Dickens when describes him thus:  ' [as] the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry - in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.' 

Those who despise Orwell today would have us drop this liberal aspect of both Orwell and Dickens, and have us embrace a form of modern totalitarianism which seeks to stiffle what Orwell calls the free intelligence of the old fashioned 19th century liberal.

Read more:  

https://libcom.org/

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Tameside TUC joins THE ORWELL SOCIETY

North West trade unionists merge with poet of common decency
by Brian Bamford

THIS year, Tameside Trade Union Council [TUC] in Greater Manchester became the first corporate affiliate of the ORWELL SOCIETY.  This SOCIETY is dedicated to the understanding and appreciation of George Orwell's life and work as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

The Society is a registered charity in the UK and it aims to keep the study of Orwell alive through its educational activities.  The Orwell Society is without political affiliation,and was founded in 2011, and though it is based in the UK its membership is worldwide.  George Orwell (the pen-name for Eric Blair; 1903-1950), was the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Society's intention is to embrace a grasp of Orwell's life and writings, from his literary criticism to his diaries, and from his political writings to his poetry. . 

Last Friday, the President of Tameside, Derek Pattison, announcing this said:  'In an Age of Post Truth, Fake News, and Alternative Facts, we need George Orwell's guidance more than ever.'  

When I attended the Annual General Meeting of the Orwell Society on the 28th, April this year, I spoke to Richard Blair, the son of George Orwell, and to Quintin Kopp, the son of George Kopp Orwell's commander as captain in the general staff of the 45th Mixed Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army.  Both were anxious to get more participation in the Society from trade unionists such as ourselves.

Since Tameside TUC  first published our booklet commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War in 2006, and followed this up with the unveiling of a blue plaque for James Keogh in 2011 who died fighting with the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, this trade union council has had a special interest in both George Orwell and his experiences of the Spanish Civil War.

Malcolm Muggeridge in his essay 'A Knight of the Woeful Countenance' wrote about this:
'I FIRST became aware of the existence of George Orwell in the middle thirties when I read some articles of his on the Spanish Civil War which appeared in the New English Weekly, a publication founded by A.R. Orage to expound the principles of Social Credit.  They provided the basis for Homage to Catalonia, one of his best books.  These articles made a great impression on me.  I liked their clear, simple style, and the obvious honesty of purpose which informed them,  They touched a chord of personal sympathy, too.  I saw in Orwell's strong reaction to the villainies of Communist apparat in Spain a compatible experience to my own disgust some years previously with the Soviet regime and its fawning admirers among the intelligentsia of the West as a result of a stint as Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian....'

When we at Tameside TUC began to produce and publish a balanced account of the Spanish Civil War  in 2006, we were confronted with resistance from some elements within the more narrow-minded political left of the trade union movement in Greater Manchester.   These people deliberately tried to stiffle our efforts and those of other local trade unionists to bring about publication.  Both Orwell and Muggeridge had had difficultes getting their articles published by the so-called progressive publishers like Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman and C.P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian, and perhaps even more absurd, was the Victor Gollancz rejection of Animal Farm.

Muggeridge relates how when Orwell and he were lunching together in a Greek restaurant in Percy Street, Orwell asked if he would mind changing places?  When Muggeridge asked him why?  Orwell just said 'he just couldn't bear to look at Kingsley Martin's corrupt face, which, as Kingsley was lunching at an adjoining table, was unavoidable from where he had been sitting before.'

I feel much the same when I am forced to gaze into the faces of Ronald Marsden and his friend Mike Luft of the International Brigade Memorial Trust:  two people who did their utmost to undermine the production of the Tameside TUC memorial booklet about the Spanish Civil War.

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Homage to Bob Smillie in Year of Orwell?

N,V. Editor:  A few days ago Quentin Kopp, son of George Kopp the commander of the POUM military unit in the Spanish civil war, mentioned the contraversial death of Bob Smillie at the the hands of the communists when he wrote to  Tameside Trade Union Council, which is now affiliated to The ORWELL SOCIETY, to relate the following news:

'We have been informed that Barcelona wants to make 2018 the year of Orwell and will be arranging a special series of plaques, which will comemorate his time there.  Despite the political uproar in Catalonia it appears to be still going ahead. Since we received this invitation we have learned that a Spanish researcher has found the graves and a lot of the records relating to the death of Bob Smillie. We plan to incorporate taking a small scuplture to Valencia to put in the Cemetry at the same time, which will be between the 14^th and 18^th April.'

Below is a report in THE SCOTSMAN in 2003 about Bob Smillie and George Orwell:

THE SCOTSMAN

It's time the Left faced up to the truth about Orwell

 Published: 01:00 Monday 23 June 2003

Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/news/it-is-time-left-faced-up-to-the-truth-about-orwell-1-653034

FEW people in Scotland today remember Bob Smillie, but there was a time when his political murder by Communist Party agents during the Spanish Civil War was a cause célèbre.  During his lifetime, Orwell - otherwise Eric Blair, hence the silly Guardian pun - was vilified and lied about by the left-wing establishment for denouncing communism and its British fellow travellers as totalitarian enemies.  He came in for personal attack for two reasons.  First, he had been a leftist himself and had put his life on the line fighting against Franco in Spain: he was wounded and nearly killed.  If there is one thing the Marxist left can’t abide it’s one of their own exposing where the dead bodies are buried - literally, in Smillie’s case.  Second, Orwell’s brilliant prose - spare, honest, gripping - is some of the best anti-totalitarian propaganda ever written, be it the satire of Animal Farm or the Blade Runner world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.  So much so, that his works remain permanently in print and, more importantly, read.  That’s why I think Orwell, from the grave, will be proud that he is still upsetting the unthinking left.

However, it is ironic that today’s character assassination is being led by the Guardian, which Orwell singled out for praise in his Spanish Civil War memoir, Homage to Catalonia, for its exposure of the lies being spread about the democratic Spanish left during the war (they were accused of being fascists) by the manipulative communists.  Sixty-five years later, the Guardian is claiming that Orwell secretly informed on fellow writers and academics, including the Scots poet Hugh McDiarmid, whom he thought might be communist sympathisers.  And all because he was besotted by a woman called Celia Kirwan, who worked for the shady information research department at the Foreign Office.  Thus, says the Guardian, did the inventor of Big Brother turn into the monster he created (much like the liberal, free-market Manchester Guardian of Orwell’s day has become a public-sector advertising sheet).

The Guardian’s innuendo is false - which brings us back to murdered Bob Smillie.  He was the 22-year-old grandson of Robert Smillie, the leader of the Scottish miners.  The younger Smillie was a member of the radical Independent Labour Party (ILP).  Under its charismatic leader James Maxton (a hero of Gordon Brown), the ILP was resolutely pacifist.  But Franco’s attempt to overthrow the democratically elected left-wing government in Spain in 1936 changed all that.  Thousands of idealistic foreign volunteers, including Orwell and Smillie (then a student at Glasgow University), went to Spain to join the International Brigades to fight fascism.  There was only one problem - the communists.  While Stalin was prepared to arm the Spanish republican government against Franco, he was not in favour of a radical Spain, lest it got in the way of his plans for an anti-Hitler alliance with France and Britain.  The Soviet secret service (NKVD), including in its ranks many foreign communist militants, effectively took over republican Spain.  Anyone on their own side who got in the way was labelled a fascist, arrested, then shot.  That included supporters of the largest left-wing party in Spain, the Anarchist CNT.  But it also included the Catalan nationalists and ordinary social democrats, whose party was forcibly merged with the communists.  When, in May 1937, the Anarchists and the POUM - the Spanish partners of the ILP - objected to all this, the communists concocted the lie that these organisations were in league with Franco, and used military force in Barcelona to suppress them.  Orwell, who had been recovering from a bullet wound in the neck, escaped to France.  But Smillie was arrested by the NKVD at the border while on his way home to conduct an anti-fascist speaking tour. He was taken to a prison in Valencia and held incommunicado despite protests from the ILP in Britain. Subsequently, the communists announced Smillie had died on 13 June, 1937, from peritonitis. His body was immediately buried before anyone could see it.

Leading ILPers, such as John McNair, who was the party’s general secretary for 20 years, believed he had been deliberately shot (as were many POUM leaders).  Maxton went to Valencia to try to find out, but to no avail - the local communist press called him a fascist too.  Whether Smillie was executed, or died of deliberate neglect, he was the first foreigner associated with the International Brigades to become a mortal victim of Stalinist repression.  He should be a Scottish hero, but decades of Stalinist propaganda in the Scottish Labour movement have buried his memory.  Smillie’s death led Orwell to break with the romantic left of his day and denounce Stalinism, and with it the closed, self-certain mentality that supports such false utopias.  As a result, he was excoriated by the left. Even today, the Guardian is happy to run a front-page story implying that one of the 20th century’s greatest writers was merely a British equivalent of Senator McCarthy, and only then because he wanted to get his leg over.  The truth is that Orwell had seen his friends murdered and, unlike lazy, middle-class intellectuals in Britain, he was prepared to defend democracy in a typically robust way. By the way, that supposedly shady Foreign Office unit was actually set up in 1948 by the Labour foreign minister Ernest Bevin to counter Soviet propaganda - there were numerous communist agents inside the Parliamentary Labour Party. Orwell was advising on who would make a poor choice as a counter-propagandist. As to his assessments, consider McDiarmid, whom Orwell calls "reliably pro-Russian". Orwell died in 1950. In 1956, as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising and there were mass defections from the British Communist Party, McDiarmid rejoined it. Is this not all ancient history?  No: Orwell’s warning that "totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere" is still in force as long as there are those happily inventing utopias to impose on the rest of us. We need to remain robust in defending freedom, and that is done best by remembering people such as Bob Smillie.

In Spain in the past few years, there has emerged a popular movement to uncover the true facts about those who disappeared during the civil war.  The Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory wants the Spanish government to dig up and identify the corpses of the 30,000 people believed to have been executed by the fascists.  Why stop there? What about the executions in Spain by the communist secret police?  The time has come to solve the mystery of Bob Smillie’s death.  Where is he buried? Was he shot in the back of the head with a Mauser machine pistol, the method of choice of the NKVD?  Or was he just allowed to die in agony of peritonitis?  And who were the Scottish Comintern agents who informed on him?  Perhaps the Guardian has started a trend.

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