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[Previous entry: "Whitewash roundup"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Sod nukes; old-fashioned high explosive kills too"] 06 January 2004: "Left-wing, right-wing and the Spanish civil war"
Via normblog I came across a new blog, The Lion and the Unicorn, titled after a book by George Orwell. Norm addresses the first post written by its author, Daniel LNU*, which is titled "Iraq... still," in which Daniel remarks on the preponderance of left-wing bloggers who supported the invasion of Iraq, and their continued fixation regarding the subject.
High-minded talk of 'solidarity', trying to evoke memories of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, often sounds unconvincing [...]Speaking for myself, evoking the International Brigades is just about the last thing on my mind! Don't get me wrong, I don't seek to impugn the motives of most of the 35,000-odd volunteers who rotated through the Brigades between 1936 and 1939. A certain measure of thrill-seeking may have motivated some, even many of them, but overall, the Brigaders sincerely believed that fascism was an international threat which had to be fought, and Spain was the place where they could fight it. As Nick Cohen put it in a book review in the Observer last month, Whatever other crimes it committed or covered up in the twentieth century, the Left could be relied upon to fight fascism.More so, certainly, than the Right of the time. There's an unpleasant meme going around these days that the policy of appeasement towards the Nazis was primarily a left-wing European one. Any student of the Spanish civil war knows that this is unadulterated bullshit. Appeasement was a policy of two successive Tory governments. Baldwin's foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, formulated the policy of not doing—and also dissuading the French from doing—anything which might upset the Italian or German governments, and this policy was continued under Chamberlain, first by Eden and later by his successor, Lord Halifax. In addition, the Royal Navy allowed the Nationalists the use of the communications facilities at Gibraltar, and the German chargé d'affaires Hans Voelcker reported to Berlin that the Royal Navy was supplying the Nationalists with ammunition and intelligence concerning Soviet arms shipments to the Republican side. Private industry in the United States, meanwhile, did everything in its power to support the Nationalists, the Neutrality Act of 1935 notwithstanding. The Texas Oil Company (Texaco) and Standard Oil of New Jersay, among others, supplied 3.5 million tons of oil to Franco on credit. Ford, Studebaker and GM supplied 1,200 trucks. Dupont of Nemours provided 40,000 bombs, shipped via Germany to circumvent the Neutrality Act. In 1947, the under-secretary at the Spanish foreign ministry stated that "without American petroleum and American trucks and American credit, we would have never won the civil war." Both the British government and the international business community were motivated primarily by fear of communism. However, in a textbook example of a self-fulfilling prophecy, by depriving the Republic of support from any other source, it was their own actions which forced the Republic to turn to the Soviet Union for help. This reliance on the Soviet Union is one of the main factors which allowed the Partido Communista de España (PCE) to gain a disproportionate amount of power in the Republic. The International Brigades, organised by the Comintern and under the control of French veteran communist André Marty, were meant to be another. Recruiters abroad emphasised the "non-sectarian" nature of the Brigades, declaring them to be a broad grouping of spontaneous, democratic, anti-fascist volunteers which, to a certain extent, they were. The Comintern assigned recruitment targets to national Communist Parties, but of the 2,000 British volunteers, for example, almost half were non-communists. Once the recruits got to Spain, things were a little different. At Albacete barracks, recruits were subjected to extensive lectures by battalion commissars on "why we are fighting," followed by group discussions in which the commissars would introduce "ideas" which were then "discussed and voted upon democratically." If you knew what was good for you, you didn't vote against a commissar's idea. At least 500 Brigaders—10% of total International Brigade fatalities in the war—were shot on Marty's orders for having "fascist-Trotskyite leanings," i.e. questioning the Communist Party line or criticising the Brigade leadership. Marty's paranoia reportedly rivalled Stalin's. Towards the population of the Republic, the Brigades were portrayed as being an entirely communist force, as well as the last, best hope of the Republic. Training emphasised parade ground drill, which isn't much use in combat but looks awfully impressive to civilians. Certainly, when the XI and XII International Brigades marched through Madrid on November 8th 1936, they looked more martial than the various socialist and libertarian† trade union militias. They were also a day late, since the Nationalist attack on the capital had started that morning, but this was entirely according to plan. The Communists intended for the Republican forces to be worn down in the first day of fighting, whereupon the International Brigades could be thrown into action, tipping the balance and thus allowing the Communists to claim that they had "saved Madrid." This pretty much set the pattern for the deployment of the International Brigades for the rest of the war. The Brigaders might have volunteered to fight fascism, but they were used as a tool for the Communists to gain influence in the Republic. About the only good thing that can be said about the Brigades' contribution to the Republican war effort was that they demonstrated to the rest of the Republican forces that digging in really is a good idea if you don't want to get shot. While I'm on the topic of unpleasant memes, there seems to be a misperception, particularly among Americans, that any person or organisation which calls itself "socialist" must, by definition, feel some affinity for communists. My primary explanation for this phenomenon is the tendency of communists to refer to themselves as "socialists" to make themselves more palatable. But it is telling that in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a "Party member" was someone who was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Be that as it may, you only have to look at the Spanish civil war to conclude that actual socialists—be they of the libertarian or the Marxist variety—can't trust communists not to stab them in the back. This may explain why quite a few socialist defence ministers in NATO countries during the Cold War advocated a strong defence against the Warsaw Pact. * - "Last Name Unknown" † - "Libertarian" in the pre-1950s sense of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. |
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