Revolutionaries (18 page)

This bias already operated against Italian fascism, even though it lacked at least two characteristics that were likely to make it unpopular among intellectuals: racism (until 1938) and hatred of modernism in the arts. Italian fascism did not lose the support of intellectuals, other than those already committed to the Left in 1922, until the Spanish Civil War. It seems that, with rare exceptions, Italian writers – very unlike German writers – did not emigrate during fascism. Therefore, 1936 forms a turning point in Italian cultural as well as political history. This may be a reason why the Civil War has left few traces in Italian
belles lettres
, except in retrospect (Vittorini). Those who wrote about it at the time were the émigré activists: the Rossellis, Pacciardi, Nenni, Longo, Togliatti.
⁶
On the other hand, against Germany intellectual anti-fascism operated from the moment Hitler took power, ritually burned the books of which Nazi ideology disapproved, and let loose a flood of ideological and racial emigrants. Willi Muenzenberg recognized its international potential immediately and exploited it brilliantly with the
Brown Book
and the campaign in defence of Dimitrov in the Reichstag Fire Trial.

The reactions of both intellectuals and the mobilized Left to the Spanish Civil War were, not surprisingly, spontaneous and massive. Here, at last, the advance of fascism was being resisted
by arms. The appeal of
armed
resistance, being able to fight and not merely to talk, was almost certainly decisive. The poet Auden, asked to go to Spain for the propaganda value of his name, wrote to a friend: ‘I shall probably be a bloody bad soldier. But how can I speak to/for them without becoming one?'
⁷
I think it is safe to say that most politically conscious British students of my age group felt they ought to fight in Spain and had a bad conscience if they did not. The extraordinary wave of volunteers who went to fight for the Republic is, I think, unique in the twentieth century. The most reliable figure for the strength of the body of foreign volunteers fighting for the Republic is around 35,000, not much less than Hugh Thomas's original estimate of 40,000.
⁸

They were a very mixed bunch, socially, culturally and by personal background. And yet, as one of them, the English poet Laurie Lee, has put it:

‘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.'
⁹

I am not claiming that the Brigades were composed of intellectuals, even though volunteering for Spain, unlike joining the French Foreign Legion, implied a level of political
consciousness and certainly of knowledge of the world that most non-political workers did not have. For most of them, apart from those from neighbouring France, Spain was
terra incognita
, at best a shape in a school atlas. Thanks to an excellent monograph (Skoutelsky, 1998), we know that the largest single body of International Brigaders, the French (just under 9000), overwhelmingly came from the working class – ninety-two per cent – and included no more than one per cent students and members of the liberal professions, virtually all of them Communists (p. 143). Given their technical qualifications, most of these were in fact employed behind the front lines.
¹⁰
There were probably more intellectuals among the political exiles who formed the cadres of the Brigades, and I hope I am not too ‘chauvinist' in suggesting that the high proportion of Jews among the volunteers implies intellectual activities. One third of the American Lincoln Brigade were Jews, as was the majority of all American women in Spain.
¹¹
According to an informed estimate, about 7000 of the International Brigaders were Jews.
¹²
However, inside or outside the Brigades, the commitment, sometimes the practical commitment, of intellectuals is not in doubt. Writers supported Spain not only with money, speech and signatures, but they wrote about it, as Hemingway, Malraux, Bernanos and virtually all the notable contemporary young British poets – Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, Macneice – did. Spain was the experience that was central to their lives between 1936 and 1939, even if they kept it out of sight later.

This was clearly so in my student days at Cambridge between 1936 and 1939. Not only was it the Spanish War that converted young men and women to the Left, but what is more we were
inspired by the specific example of those who went to fight in Spain. Anyone entering the rooms of Cambridge socialist and communist students in those days was almost certain to find in them the photograph of John Cornford, intellectual, poet, leader of the student Communist Party, who had fallen in battle in Spain on his twenty-first birthday in December 1936. Like the familiar photo of Che Guevara, it was a powerful, iconic image – but it was closer to us, and, standing on our mantelpieces, it was a daily reminder of what we were fighting for. As it happens, not many Cambridge or other students actually went to fight in Spain after the Communist Party of Great Britain decided, presumably in the autumn of 1936, to discourage students from volunteering for the International Brigades unless they had special military qualifications. Many of those who fought had joined the Republican forces before the Party established this policy. Nevertheless, the British International Brigaders contained a significant number of talented intellectuals, of whom several fell. So far as I am aware, none of those who survived has expressed regret for his decision to fight.

Among the losers, polemics about the Civil War, often bad-tempered, have never ceased since 1939. This was not so while the war was still continuing, although such incidents as the banning of the dissident Marxist
POUM
party and the murder of its leader Andrés Nin caused some international protest. Plainly a number of foreign volunteers arriving in Spain, intellectuals or not, were shocked by what they saw there, by the suffering and atrocity, by the ruthlessness of warfare, brutality and bureaucracy on their own side or, insofar as they were aware of them, the intrigues and political feuds within the Republic, by the behaviour of the Russians and much else. Again, the arguments
between the Communists and their adversaries never ceased. And yet, during the war the doubters remained silent once they left Spain. They did not want to give aid to the enemies of the great cause. After their return, Simone Weil, though patently disappointed, said not a word, while Wystan Auden wrote nothing, though he modified his great 1937 poem
Spain
in 1939 and refused to allow it to be reprinted in 1950. Faced with Stalin's terror, Louis Fischer, a journalist closely associated with Moscow, denounced his past loyalties – but he took trouble to do so only when this gesture could no longer harm the Spanish Republic. The exception proves the rule: George Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia
. It was refused by Orwell's regular publisher, Victor Gollancz, ‘believing, as did many people on the Left, that everything should be sacrificed in order to preserve a common front against the rise of Fascism,' which was also the reason given by Kingsley Martin, editor of the influential weekly
New Statesman & Nation
, for accepting a critical book review. They represented the views overwhelmingly prevalent on the left. Orwell himself admitted after his return from Spain that, ‘a number of people have said to me with varying degrees of frankness that one must not tell the truth about what is happening in Spain and the part played by the Communist Party because to do so would prejudice public opinion against the Spanish government and so aid Franco,' (Hugh Thomas, p. 817). Indeed, as Orwell himself recognized in a letter to a friendly reviewer, ‘what you say about not letting the Fascists in owing to dissensions between ourselves is very true.' More than this: the public showed no interest in the book. It was published in 1938 in 1500 copies, which sold so poorly that the stock was not yet exhausted thirteen years later when it was first reprinted.
¹³
Only in the Cold War era did Orwell cease to be an awkward, marginal figure.

Of course the posthumous polemics about the Spanish War are legitimate, and indeed essential – but only if we separate out debate on real issues from the
parti pris
of political sectarianism, Cold War propaganda and pure ignorance of a forgotten past. The major question at issue in the Spanish Civil War was and remains how social revolution and war were related on the Republican side. The Spanish Civil War was, or began as, both. It was both a war born of the resistance of a legitimate government, with the help of a popular mobilization, against a partially successful military coup, and, in important parts of Spain, the spontaneous transformation of the mobilization into a social revolution. A serious war conducted by a government requires structure, discipline and a degree of centralization. What characterizes social revolutions like that of 1936 was local initiative, spontaneity, independence of or even resistance to higher authority, especially given the unique strength of Anarchism in that country. In short, what was and remains at issue in these debates is what divided Marx and Bakunin. The polemics about the dissident Marxist
POUM
are irrelevant to this issue and, given the small size and marginal role of that party in the Civil War, barely significant. They belong to the history of ideological struggles within the international communist movement or, if one prefers, of Stalin's ruthless war against Trotskyism with which his agents (wrongly) identified it. The conflict between libertarian enthusiasm and disciplined organization, between social revolution and winning a war, remains real in the Spanish Civil War, even if we suppose that the
USSR
and the Communist Party wanted the war to end in revolution and that the parts of the economy socialized by the Anarchists (i.e. handed over to local workers' control) worked well enough. Wars, however flexible the chains of command, cannot be fought, or war economies run, in a libertarian fashion. The Spanish Civil War could not have been waged, let alone won, along Orwellian lines.

However, in a more general sense, the conflict between revolution as the aspiration to freedom and winning war is not purely Spanish. It emerges fully after the victory of revolutions in wars of liberation: in Algeria, probably in Vietnam, certainly in Yugoslavia. Since the Left lost in the Spanish Civil War, in this case the debate is posthumous and increasingly remote from the realities of the time, like Ken Loach's film
¹⁴
, inspiring and moving as it is. Moral revulsion against Stalinism and the behaviour of its agents in Spain is justified. It is right to criticize the Communist conviction that the only revolution that counted was one that brought the Party a monopoly of power. And yet these considerations are not central to the problem of the Civil War. Marx would have had to confront Bakunin even if all on the Republican side had been angels. But it must be said that, among those who actually fought for the Republic as soldiers, most found Marx more relevant than Bakunin. Even though among the survivors there are some who recall the spontaneous but inefficient euphoria of the Anarchist phase of liberation with tenderness as well as exasperation.

Today it is possible to see the Civil War, Spain's contribution to the tragic history of that most brutal of centuries, the twentieth, in its historical context. It was not, as the neo-liberal François Furet argues it should have been, a war both against the ultra-right and the Comintern, a view shared, from a Trotskyist sectarian angle, by Loach's powerful film. It was a war against Franco, that is to say against the forces of Fascism with which Franco, though not a fascist himself, was aligned. Unlike in World War II, in the Spanish Civil War the wrong side won. But it is largely due to the intellectuals, the artists and writers who had mobilized so overwhelmingly in favour of the Republic, that in this instance history has not been written by the victors. In
creating the world's memory of the Spanish Civil War, the pen, the brush and the camera wielded on behalf of the defeated have proved mightier than the sword and than the power of those who won.

¹
Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1914–1991)
, (Abacus), London, 1995.

²
Cited in Enrique Moradiellos,
La perfidia de Albión: el gobierno británico y la Guerra civil española
, Siglo XX, Madrid, 1996, p.51.

³
Speech in the Chamber of Deputies of 6 December 1936.

⁴
Frederick R. Benson,
Writers in Arms: The Impact of the Spanish Civil War
, London and New York, 1968, p.26.

⁵
Hugh Thomas,
The Spanish Civil War
(paperback edition), p. 347.

⁶
Aldo Garosci,
Gli intelletuali e la Guerra di Spagna
, Torino, 1959, 433ff.

⁷
Carpenter,
Life of W. H. Auden
, p. 207.

⁸
Rémi Skoutelsky,
L'Espoir guidait leur pas: les volontaires français dans les Brigades internationales
, Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1998, pp. 327–331.

⁹
Laurie Lee,
A Moment of War
, London, 1991, p.46.

¹⁰
Skoutelsky,
ibid
.

¹¹
N. Carroll,
The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War
, Stanford, 1994.

¹²
Arnold Paucker,
Deutsche Juden im Kampf um Recht und Freiheit
, Schriften d. Leo Baeck Instituts, 2nd edition, Teetz, 2004, p. 254.