Back then, fascists had the "testicular fortitude" to call themselves Fascists, and Communists persecuted Anarchists who were ostensibly on their same side. Overseas, the totalitarians, for their own reasons and in their own self-interest, openly supplied and supported one side or the other, while the democracies took the moral high ground of neutrality, electing to dither while a republic bled to death.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight the leftists of the first half of the twentieth century will be confronted with a point-blank choice between democracy and fascism – and more than a few will decide that the only acceptable option is to defy the will of their own nation's government and bear arms in Spain's civil war. You gotta admit: it makes one wonder what a member of the International Brigade would've blogged, had s/he been invited to join in a Daily Kos conversation about "moderates" and "squishiness."
From all peoples, from all races, you came to us like brothers, like sons of immortal Spain; and in the hardest days of the war, when the capital of the Spanish Republic was threatened, it was you, gallant comrades of the International Brigades, who helped save the city with your fighting enthusiasm, your heroism and your spirit of sacrifice... Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, Republicans - men of different colors, differing ideology, antagonistic religions --- yet all profoundly loving liberty and justice, they came and offered themselves to us unconditionally... Banners of Spain! Salute these many heroes! Be lowered to honor so many martyrs!
-- Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria
Farewell Address, 1 November 1938
Prólogo
Like all civil wars, Spain's was enormously complex, with dozens of factions vying to control hundreds of social, economic, military, and internecine issues based on a multitude of historical rationalizations. Trying to understand it can (and has) been the focus of entire academic careers – it certainly can't be reduced to some clichéd phrase like "a dress rehearsal for World War II" or even "the first direct conflict of fascism and democracy."
Nevertheless, this is blogging – a fast-paced milieu in which one cannot possibly have always a perfect understanding of the intricacies of issues upon which we take principled stands – and so we must make due with the information we have at hand. Since it's done all the time regarding other issues upon which we're prompted to take impassioned, righteous stances (who among us, but nyceve, of course, stays read up on all the complexities of the health care debate?), I'll go ahead and skip the longish sketch of how Spain went from the apex of colonial power to a European backwater in the span of a couple of centuries, and invite the curiouser of readers to begin more extensive investigations into the reigns of two kingdoms and two short-lived republics at a site like the Library of Congress Country Study for Spain.
El Régimen Antiguo
Author's Note: This is the history part. If you're the sort of blogger who hates long diaries and wants to get right in to the debate sans further information about why a diarist makes the assertions he does, feel free to skip ahead to the section entitled "Fascistas, Anarchistas, y Communistas."
(It'll have to) Suffice to say that by the dawn of the 20th century, Spain had squandered the American silver windfall by throwing itself a Golden Age an entire 17th century long. At one point, 5% of the national income was directed toward patronage of the arts, and great works decorated the chapels and sacristies of great, cavernous cathedrals. Though it did experience a few setbacks at the hands of a couple of Enlightenment-minded monarchs in the 18th century, and an increasingly resentful and liberalized populace during the 19th, the Church was still a powerful force in Spanish politics – with its massive land holdings and mountains of treasure, the Spanish Catholicism which had transformed what had been the most heterogeneous religious population in Europe into the most dogmatically orthodox was still as conservative as it had been back in the age of missionaries and conquistadors.
The Church was only one force that wanted no reform to the long-established way of doing things – aiding and abetting them was a network of highly conservative aristocrats known as Carlists. First formed in the 1830s in support of a throne claimant named Carlos during a succession crisis, their motto – Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey (God, Country, Regional Autonomy, King) – made their keep-Spain-feudal policy intentions clear. It should be noted that they were not, for the most part, regional separatists, and that that bit about "autonomy" should be taken to mean they wanted to protect the medieval-style landowner/peasant status quo. As the linked site notes:
Carlism never gained power, but Spain's major traditionalist movement exerted a certain influence on Spanish society as a whole and on the government in particular, especially regarding religious matters. Carlist thought was also an ideological source for a number of other Spanish parties on the right in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
During the Civil War, the Carlists were forcibly united with their natural allies on the right: by April, 1937, Franco had sent Carlist leaders into exile, commandeered the party's property assets (buildings, newspapers, etc.), and found that his reputation for having people shot led to little grumbling when Carlists were pressed into the service of the Falange. The right was thus consolidating, even as the parties on the left were finding exciting new ideological differences to fight over.
La Derecha
The right had been in control of the government for the vast majority of the years since Spain's last short-lived republic, nearly 60 years before. The king, Alfonso XIII, who ascended to the throne in 1902, had reigned with an increasing sense of the autocratic through Spain's neutrality in the Great War, resisting calls for liberal reforms the whole way. This generated great resentment among more than just the political left: the Army, which had a tradition of meddling in political affairs going back to the Napoleonic Wars and which had grown increasingly conservative over the years (not to mention badly over-officered: perhaps as ludicrous as one general per one hundred soldiers), blamed the king for a devastating loss on the colonial battlegrounds of Morocco in 1921, and in 1923, supported a military coup led by of the their own, Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja.
Primo de Rivera's dictatorship saw little social reform, though he did reduce unemployment through government spending on public works projects. Like Mussolini, he brought organized labor on-board by joining industries and unions into 27 corporations representing various sectors of the economy, but really, this was the least he could do: prior to the coup, the parties of the left also had been growing increasingly strident, and as a whole, they were too large not to have a bone or two tossed their way. No matter how mild his center-right dictatorship may have been, however, Primo de Rivera was still a dictator, suspension of the constitution and all. He suppressed dissent through censorship and the closure of academic and literary societies, tried to stamp out regional separatism around Barcelona by forbidding the speaking of Catalan and the dancing of the Sardana, instituted martial law – and in the process undermined support for both himself and the king under whom he ostensibly operated.
Facing mounting criticism and unable to respond effectively to the economic crisis of 1929, Primo de Rivera left office on January 28 of the following year. He died a couple of months later in Paris, but the damage he had done to Alfonso's position did not dissipate with his passing: amidst a rising tide of social unrest and separatist nationalism, Alfonso was forced to abdicate on April 14, 1931. In the general election held in June, 1931, the pent-up frustration expressed itself in the form of an electoral victory for the Socialist Party.
La Izquierda
Despite winning the balloting, the left, being the left, was comprised of several competing factions that did not share the blinding regard for traditionalist, Church-supporting nationalism that permitted factions on the right to put aside differences and work together. The Socialists (PSOE) had been split since at least the early days of Primo de Rivera's regime, when two leaders disagreed over whether or not to work with the government as part of the UGT, the government's approved labor union. The UGT had been created at the expense of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union/political party CNT (est. 1911), which was banned under Primo de Rivera, and differences re-emerged between the wings of the party when they were confronted with the question of whether or not to join in a coalition government if the left-wingers won the 1931 elections. By that point, CNT's underground membership had spawned several direct-action-oriented splinter groups and was enmeshed in the leftist politics of much of the south and east of the country.
In the elections, once again the more moderate faction carried the day, which later led to far-left attacks that despite some serious strides in the areas of social reform and public works construction, the government's reforms were not radical enough. For members of the clergy, however, the reforms were too heavy a cross to bear: the Jesuits were dissolved, civil marriage and divorce were granted, and Church and State were legally separated, among other anti-clerical things. On the social-reform side, Catalans were made happy when their region was granted autonomy (the Basque region exercised this new constitutional right in 1936), but this was offset by an erosion of support in the countryside, where no meaningful land reform had taken place. As frustration with the government mounted, the concept of anarchism started to have more and more appeal among the rural peasantry.
The Republican government fended off violent, anarchist-led strikes and an attempted military coup, but with its coalition coming apart, was unable to secure victory in elections held in late 1933. These put José Maria Gil Robles and his right-wing CEDA coalition into power, and the conservatives quickly set about to undoing everything the previous administration had accomplished. Robles' inclusion of three CEDA ministers in his cabinet the following year led mine workers in the northern Asturias region to stage a general strike which quickly turned into an outright revolt. Miners took control of the Oviedo (the provincial capital) and killed clergymen, which prompted the government to dispatch General Francisco Franco to bring the area to heel. It took two weeks, the destruction of half of Oviedo, and a whole lot of bloodshed, but Franco carried out his orders while showing himself to be an excellent field commander.
The suspension of land reforms, the canceling of anti-clerical measures, the revocation of Catalan autonomy, plus the failure of the anarchists to win the Asturias Revolt, prompted a decidedly radical turn among the parties of the left. Revolutionary socialists rose to prominence over the centrists in the PSOE, and when new elections were called in January, 1936, it was they who would spearhead the leftist coalition – the Popular Front – of Socialists, Communists, and Catalan and Madrid-based left-leaning Republicans (the Anarchists boycotted the elections) that went on to defeat the National Front (FN) coalition of CEDA, Carlists, Monarchists, and a tiny percentage (0.7% of the vote) of Fascists in close elections the next month.
Guerra Civil
The 1936 elections, in which centrist parties pretty much disappeared, drew a line that hardliners on both sides were unwilling to respect. If the right won, the trip to fascism would be swift and nigh on irrevocable; ditto if the left won and instituted its revolutionary socialist ("Bolshevik") agenda. Violence, as well as membership in the fascist party, increased rapidly after the voting, culminating in the tit-for-tat assassinations of leading far-right and far-left figures in mid-July – and when their respective funerals were held in the same Madrid cemetery on the same day, the fighting that ensued claimed four more lives. Three days later, on July 17th, right-wingers launched a rebellion against the government, beginning with Moroccan and Spanish Foreign Legion troops in North Africa.
As Franco, now commander of the Army of Africa, brought his mercenary troops (the most professional force available to either side, as well as bloodied veterans of the Asturias miner's revolt) to the mainland, and regular army garrisons took control of the cities in which they were stationed, the Republican government scrambled to defend itself. Initially, about half the army chose not to bolt with Franco, and loyal units were supplemented by hastily-assembled peasant and worker militias, which allowed the loyalists to retain control of Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, and the Basque Country. Making a clear case that the legitimately elected government of Spain was under attack by fascists, the Republican government issued calls for aid from the international community. In the end, only the Soviet Union responded with more than words of anguished, principled neutrality.
Neither Benito Mussolini nor Adolph Hitler was beholden to any such Prime Directive vis-à-vis intervention, and they poured in resources to aid the cause of their fellow fascists. Italy sent as many as 75,000 troops to Spain, while Germany committed 17,000 men and a whole lot of new, needing-to-be-tested equipment. Stalin, for his part, compelled the Spanish government to hand over most of its gold reserves (the 4th largest in the world) in exchange for a few tanks, a bunch of political and military advisors, antiquated firearms, and a great deal of party sovereignty. In September, 1936, Stalin also gave his consent to utilize the Comintern to assist the French Communist Party in the organization of brigades of international volunteers. At first, the French government under Leon Blum looked the other way at the stream of foreigners heading through Paris to border towns like Perpignan, but when in 1937 he tried to walk a tightrope to appease his coalition partners (nonintervention to keep the center-right on board caused him to lose support among the Communists), Blum's government fell. His successors, including himself for a month in 1938, backed away from even lip-service support.
Fascistas, Anarchistas, y Communistas
Author's Note – Welcome back, background-skippers! Here's the situation: It's autumn, 1936, a few months into an armed revolt launched by Fascist rebels against the narrowly-elected leftist coalition of Socialists and Communists. The usurper's appeals for foreign aid have been met by Europe's other fascist powers, but the Republican (the good guys, in this case) government has been all but abandoned by the U.S., U.K., and France; only the USSR has stepped up in any meaningful way – and we all know that Comrade Stalin never does anything out of the kindness of his heart...
Regrettably, my innate Luddism leaves me incapable of importing or constructing an html chart, but for those who dig having a cheat sheet, there's a handy one at A Web of English History that shows some of the main factions in the Spanish Civil War.
Francisco Franco was only one of several high-ranking generals who had plotted the coup, but by November he had consolidated power under the Falange Española ("Spanish Phalanx"). The Falange, Spain's take on Italian Fascism, had been established three years before the outbreak of the Civil War by the son of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, the country's center-right dictator during the 1920s, but only attracted large numbers of supporters as the country polarized in the wake of narrow elections in early 1936. By November, Franco was head of the Falange, under whose banner he forcibly united other right-wing allies, and he did not hesitate to use all the tools available to a leader of a police state in keeping both allies and captured territories under control. His propaganda explained that his Nationalist Front was protecting Spain's traditional values and culture from the evils of Bolshevism and Anarchism.
The Anarchist movement in Spain, whose propaganda tended more toward worker's liberation and explanations of how to be a good anarchist, was the strongest of any nation in Europe. Though they'd seen some doctrinal divides and the splintering-off of the hardline-radical FAI, the anarchist CNT was the largest labor union in the country at the outbreak of war, and the first thing the two feuding groups did was bury the hatchet and reunite in common defense. They were especially powerful in Valencia, Malaga, and Barcelona, and for almost a year of disintegrating partnership with the Communists, controlled Barcelona itself.
Early reports about the morale and competency of administration in Barcelona are almost universally positive – granted, of course, that many of the people doing the reporting were foreign intellectuals and adventurers reporting for duty with the International Brigade, and so were probably predisposed to approving of a decentralized government, a ban on tipping (and virtually anything else deemed "bourgeois"), and the fact that young women were wearing trousers and going out without male escorts for the first time in their lives. Reports regarding anarchist behavior toward clerics and churches are less uniformly glowing: churches were looted and torched as part of a program to rid Barcelona of the last vestiges of the Old Order, though some works of art were rescued for their artistic value.
The Popular Front government, which moved to Valencia after Madrid was besieged by the Nationalists in late 1936, was led by the more radical of the Socialist Party old guard, but these men found it difficult to maintain a social revolution while fighting off a military one, and so chose to focus on the war effort. Government propaganda tried to keep the focus on the war and away from leftist infighting - "We are not fighting for socialism, but for democracy and constitutional rule" was the motto.
True believers – Trotskyite "world revolution" types and their foreign sympathizers in the P.O.U.M. (Workers Party of Marxist Unification; the link is to a fascinating anti-POUM rant from the February, 1937 edition of Class Warfare) – were unwilling to wait, and sought to construct their truly socialist state even as they helped to fend off the fascists. For a while, it worked, until a surging Communist Party swept away all other left-wing power bases.
The Communists were not a powerful force in the early days of the war, though they did declare support for the bourgeois republican government as opposed to taking the opportunity to try to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. The party's stock increased dramatically when it became apparent that the USSR was to be the only country to toss the Republic a lifeline – as hinted at above, Comrade Stalin never did nothin' for nobody without getting' something better in return. From the start, it had fallen to the Communists to organize the brigades, and to maintain their control, each unit was assigned a communist political officer. By the spring of 1937, the Communists were conducting anti-Anarchist purges in Barcelona, and were attacking their own ranks in search of dissenting fellow travelers. International Brigade members of the POUM who had been welcomed in Anarchist-held Barcelona only a few months before, George Orwell among them, now found themselves regarded as counter-revolutionaries and Trotskyite spies.
¡Salud!
When the call went out for the organization of an International Brigade, European intellectuals were suddenly, and somewhat unexpectedly, compelled to put their money where their anti-fascist mouths were. If one truly could not bear the thought of right-wing totalitarianism gaining one more inch of ground, or if one was to be the communist one had always claimed to be, then one's choice was clear: make your way to Paris, then a port like Marseilles or (more likely) the rail border at Perpignan, and from there the Communists guide you to Anarchist-held Barcelona. Those of your coffee shop buddies who you didn't see with you under the olive trees during an artillery bombardment were presumably obligated to explain to everyone they met how they were both a diehard leftie and walking around safe in England.
Predictably, not every leftist in Europe dropped everything and shipped off for Spain; many remained behind "doing what they could to end the war," while others felt they had a better grasp of the big picture simply by virtue of not being too close to it. These tended to opine exhaustively about who should be doing this or that in order to defeat the fascists once and for all. For the dedicated anti-fascist (most of the International Brigade was made up of German and Italian anti-fascists, and French Communists), however, seeing that early, cooperative phase of the war must have been cynicism-dispelling indeed:
Spain was one of those very rare countries where problems of modernization helped inspire a real social revolution rather than a reaction or adaptation to Western and Eastern Europe's economic and social development. This seemingly "Third World" feature of the Spanish Civil War and, above all, the extraordinary alternatives it posed to capitalism and authoritarian forms of socialism make the revolution hauntingly relevant to liberation movements today. In modernizing the country, the Spanish working class and peasantry literally took over much of its economy and managed it directly in the form of collectives, cooperatives, and union-networked syndicalist structures. Democratically-run militias, free of all ranking distinctions and organized around a joint decision-making process that involved the soldiers as well as their elected "commanders," moved rapidly to the military fronts.
After Fifty Years: The Spanish Civil War
In the end, around 59,000 people volunteered for service in the International Brigades before they were withdrawn (unilaterally, as it turned out) in 1938. Of these, 16% were killed, and another 13% badly wounded. About 3000 Americans fought as part of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion - incidentally, the first integrated American force to be led by a black man - and the smaller George Washington Battalion, the two units having been merged after both were decimated by casualties in fighting at Brunete in July 1937.
Not every one, of course, was an intellectual (though signing up does imply a greater class-consciousness than one might find in a person who, say, joined the French Foreign Legion instead), but for at least a few of them – the kind who'd probably be bloggers today – it was a chance to make a difference, at least at first:
"I believe we shared something else, unique to us at that time - the chance to make one grand and uncomplicated gesture of personal sacrifice and faith, which might never occur again ... few of us yet knew that we had come to a war of antique muskets and jamming machine-guns, to be led by brave but bewildered amateurs. But for the moment there were no half-truths and hesitations, we had found a new freedom, almost a new morality, and discovered a new Satan- fascism."
English poet Laurie Lee, quoted in War of ideas, Guardian, 2007
¿Usted no dijo algo sobre blogging?
So what's all this got to do with blogging? Well, it's because the writing that was getting published by and about small leftist publications with grandiose (not that that's always bad) goals back then is really similar to what can be seen in the blogosphere on any given meta-day now. Okay, yeah, the stakes are a little lower for us – even our health care system takes more time to kill you than a war – but much of the reasoning, rationale, and tone of 1930s rhetoric fights (seems inappropriate to call them "flame wars") are exactly the same as the ones still in use today.
So are some of the tactics. In 1937, a group of British authors sent their peers a letter accompanied by a brief questionnaire, the answers to which were compiled and published in what amounts to a blog poll with comments - and it's classic push-polling at that, even if it is coming down biased in favor of the good guys:
Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain?
Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?
For it is impossible any longer to take no side.
Writers and poets, we wish to print your answers. We wish the world to know what you, writers and poets, who are among the most sensitive instruments of a nation, feel.
Nevertheless, many of the respondents came back with what might, under certain circumstances, be termed "cheerleading" today. They could also bloviate and hyperbolize as well as anyone the left blogosphere has ever seen (as judged by the number of "of courses" in the responses):
¡UPTHEREPUBLIC! -- Samuel Beckett
Of course I am for the legal government of and the people of Republican Spain. Of course I am against Franco and Fascism. Fascism is culturally and intellectually a species of dementia praecox – a refusal any longer to carry the burden of being human, and a slipping back, happy sometimes but always disgusting, into the primeval slime. The writer, poet, or artist who says the whole thing is no concern of his is either a knave or a fool, or more probably both. -- Victor Gollancz
Of course I am for the legal Government and the People of Spain. No writer who is trying to create for the future, and not merely dabbling in outworn forms and sentiments, can be on any other side. -- John Lehmann
I endorse every word of your letter but one: "unavenged." That the signatories should still, in 1937, be speaking of vengeance is a nightmare: a return to Carthage, or Versailles. -- Helen Waddell
I am, of course, for a phalanx unbreakable round those think and work for all men, and I am with the determined faces firing at the steel-clad slug of Fascism from the smoke and the flames of the barricades. -- Sean O'Casey
...though as always, there was a contingent of moderate neutrals, and even an author or two who might've been troll-rated right out of the book, had readers of books in the 1930s had the power to do so:
One point in your questionnaire strikes me as ambiguous. You stress 'the legal government' of Spain as the Government you wish to support. Is this because it is the legal government, or because it is a Communist Government? If because it is the legal government, then you ought to be prepared to support Hitler or Mussolini in the event of a rebellion against them. -- Vita Stackville-West
While I am naturally sympathetic, I still feel convinced that it is best that at least a few men of letters should remain isolated, and take no part in these collective activities. -- T.S. Elliott
Questionnaire an escape mechanism for young fools who are too cowardly to think; too lazy to investigate the nature of money, its mode of control, the control of such issue by the Banque de France and the state of England. You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes. -- Ezra Pound
If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent. -- Evelyn Waugh
Other luminaries, such as E.M. Forster and Bernard Shaw, played the lurker role and declined to provide a response, but perhaps the most scathing reply to the author's questions, the one from George Orwell, went unpublished – cast off to the hidden comments column, as it were:
"Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody. Moreover, I know what is happening and has been happening on the Government side for months past, i.e. that Fascism is being riveted on to the Spanish workers under the pretext of resisting Fascism...
But the chances are that you--whoever you are who keep sending me this thing-have money and are well-informed: so no doubt you know something about the inner history of the war and have deliberately joined in the defence of "democracy" (i.e. capitalism) racket in order to aid in crushing the Spanish working class and thus indirectly defend your dirty little dividends...
By the way, tell your pansy friend Spender that I am preserving specimens of his war-heroics and that when the time comes when he squirms for shame at having written it, as the people who wrote the war propaganda in the Great War are squirming now, I shall rub it in good and hard."
The Awkward Squaddie
Orwell later elaborated on his experience with the POUM (and the fascist bullet that went through his neck) in Homage to Catalonia. His story was distinctly different from that of Ernest Hemingway, who served four stints as a war correspondent and documentary film maker. His best-known take on the Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), bears little resemblance to Orwell's recollections, but Hemingway remained an important fundraiser and supporter of the Loyalist cause throughout the war.
Examines de Puridad
The frustration of American and British leftists at the inaction of their own governments led to some pretty strong recriminations, some of which sound like they come straight from the pits of despair during the darkest days of the Bush administration, others like they were about Iran last month. Here's one from W.E. Johns (Editor's Cockpit, Popular Flying, March 1939):
Of all the foul and craven hypocrisy of which those in power in Britain have been guilty during the last decade – and nowhere in history will you find such a sequence of faint-hearted perfidiousness – this Spanish business is the worst. Regarding it to-day I can find only one crumb of comfort. We can sink no lower. We have touched the very bottom of the slough of baseness into which the short-sightedness and personal ambitions of our leaders have thrown us. For evermore, every Spaniard who survives the massacre, be he Franconian or Republican, will spit at the very name of England. And well he might. I could myself spit at this farce, this lie called non-intervention. What infamy! What does of Government of governesses think we are? A nation of fools? If this is the wages of democracy then let us for God's sake change our tune and be Fascist – Bolshevist – anything as long as we can be men again, instead of the mob of bleating sheep that the Government would have us be.
Other leftists were, being leftists, tragically, cynically hip from the start. Some of their criticisms (in this case coming from the mouth of a fascist character in a play) could hit bloggers a little close to home:
You poor fish, so cock-a-hoop in your little hour of comradeship and hope! I'm really sorry for you. You don't know what you're letting yourselves in for, trying to beat us on our own ground! You will take to machine guns without having enough. You will imagine that, in a People's Army, it is against your principles to obey orders – and then wonder why it is that, in spite of your superior numbers, your are always beaten. You will count on foreign support, and be disappointed, because the international working-class does not read your mosquito journals. It prefers our larger and livelier organs of entertainment, which can afford snappier sports news, smarter features, and bigger photographs of bathing lovelies. We shall expose your lies and exaggerate your atrocities, and you will be unable to expose or exaggerate ours. The churches will be against you. The world of money and influence will say of us: "After all, they are the decent people, our sort. The others are a rabble."
W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Valerian's speech, On the Frontier, 1938, Act III sc.ii
Epílogo
There's a lot more to the Spanish Civil War, of course – and even a great deal more in Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War, edited by Valentine Cunningham (Oxford, 1986), from which the author-quotes in this diary were derived – than I can get into here. I didn't mention Picasso, the Condor Legion, and Guernica, nor the several pages of back-and forth letters regarding a Spectator review that didn't exactly bow down before the artist's genius (it was a lot like reading a flame war, except the comments were several paragraphs long, very well-developed, and spaced a week apart). I didn't explore the role played by speakers and motivators like La Pasionaria, and only here at the end mention how recognizable and valued were her gifts, especially to those of us who knew Avila back in the Daily Kos of yore.
I didn't go into detail about the fighting or horrid conditions faced by the undersupplied Republican forces, the brutal atrocities, or the political violence that ensued whenever a town fell to an opposing side. I also didn't mention that the fascists won, nor talk about how they did it – such is the stuff of another diary, I'm afraid. This one I'd like to keep focused on the idea of modern progressives facing the choices of the international Left of the 1930s, and how these reactions might inform our understanding of the community we're together developing.
In a way, engaging in the spirited blog-fights of the early 21st century is not wholly unlike some young, idealistic Brit in 1936, hungry for alternative sources of information on the global struggles of the oppressed, who finds himself being heavily propagandized by both sides – but only recognizing it as such when it's coming from the fascists. Like that young Brit, though, it seems like we'd benefit by knowing a bit about our own movement before we headed off to man a machine gun on behalf of somebody else's. How narrow and how deep is our echo chamber? Can we ever break the cycle of left-wing factionalization, or will we inevitably turn on- and purge one another? Are there some political fights that really are worth putting it all on the line for, and if so, what makes them different from a run-of-the-mill principled stand?
And finally: how would you, as a blogger and a poet (you sensitive instrument you) respond to the Authors Take Sides questionnaire?