Today it is possible to see the
civil war, Spain's contribution to
the tragic history of that most
brutal of centuries, the 20th, in
its historical context. It was not,
as the neoliberal François Furet
argued it should have been, a war
against both the ultra-right and the
Comintern - a view shared, from a
Trotskyist sectarian angle, by Ken
Loach's powerful film Land and
Freedom (1995). The only choice was
between two sides, and
liberal-democratic opinion
overwhelmingly chose anti-fascism.
Hence, asked in early 1939 who they
wanted to win in a war between
Russia and Germany, 83 per cent of
Americans wanted a Russian victory.
Spain was a war against Franco -
that is to say, against the forces
of fascism with which Franco was
aligned - and 87 per cent of
Americans favoured the republic.
Alas, unlike in the second world
war, the wrong side won. But it is
largely due to the intellectuals,
the artists and writers who
mobilised so overwhelmingly in
favour of the republic, that in this
instance history has not been
written by the victors.
The Spanish civil war was both at
the centre and on the margin of the
era of anti-fascism. It was central,
since it was immediately seen as a
European war between fascism and
anti-fascism, almost as the first
battle in the coming world war, some
of the characteristic aspects of
which - for example, air raids
against civilian populations - it
anticipated. But Spain took no part
in the second world war. Franco's
victory was to have no bearing on
the collapse of France in 1940, and
the experience of the republican
armed forces was not relevant to the
subsequent wartime resistance
movements, even though in France
these were largely composed of
refugee Spanish republicans, and
former international brigaders
played a major role in those of
other countries.
To situate the Spanish civil war
within the general framework of the
anti-fascist era, we have to bear in
mind both the failure to resist
fascism and the disproportionate
success of anti-fascist mobilisation
among Europe's intellectuals. I am
referring not only to the success of
fascist expansionism and the failure
of the forces favouring peace to
halt the apparently inevitable
approach of another world war. I am
also remembering the failure of its
opponents to change public opinion.
The only regions that saw a genuine
political shift to the left after
the Great Depression were
Scandinavia and North America. Much
of central and southern Europe was
already under authoritarian
governments or was to fall into
their hands, but insofar as we can
judge from the scattered electoral
data, the drift in Hungary and
Russia, not to mention among the
German diaspora, was sharply to the
right. On the other hand, the
Popular Front's victory in France
was a shift within the French left,
not a shift of opinion to the left.
The 1936 election gave the combined
radicals, socialists and communists
barely 1 per cent more votes than in
1932.
And yet, if I can reconstruct the
feelings of that generation from
personal memory, my generation of
the left, whether we were
intellectuals or not, did not see
ourselves as a retreating minority.
We did not think that fascism would
inevitably continue to advance. We
were sure that a new world would
come. Given the logic of
anti-fascist unity, only the failure
of governments and progressive
parties to unite against fascism
accounted for our series of defeats.
This helps to explain the
disproportionate shift towards the
communists among those already on
the left. But it also helps to
explain our confidence as young
intellectuals, for this social group
was most easily, and
disproportionately, mobilised
against fascism. The reason is
obvious. Fascism - even Italian
fascism - was opposed in principle
to the causes that defined and
mobilised intellectuals as such,
namely the values of the
Enlightenment and the American and
French revolutions. Except in
Germany, with its powerful schools
of theory critical of liberalism,
there was no significant body of
secular intellectuals who did not
belong to this tradition. The Roman
Catholic church had very few eminent
intellectuals known and respected as
such outside its own ranks. I am not
denying that in some fields, notably
literature, some of the most
distinguished figures were clearly
on the right - TS Eliot, Knut
Hamsun, Ezra Pound, WB Yeats, Paul
Claudel, Céline, Evelyn Waugh - but
even in the armies of literature,
the politically conscious right
formed a modest regiment in the
1930s, except perhaps in France.
Once again, this became evident in
1936. American writers, whether or
not they accepted American
neutrality, were overwhelmingly
opposed to Franco, and Hollywood
even more so. Of the British writers
asked, five (Waugh, Eleanor Smith
and Edmund Blunden among them)
favoured the Nationalists, 16 were
neutral (including Eliot, Charles
Morgan, Pound, Alec Waugh, Sean
O'Faolain, HG Wells and Vita
Sackville-West) and 106 were for the
republic, many of them passionately.
As for Spain, there is no doubt
where the poets of the Spanish
language - those who are now
remembered - stood: García Lorca,
the brothers Machado, Alberti,
Miguel Hernández, Neruda, Vallejo,
Guillén.
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. 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.
The reactions of both
intellectuals and the mobilised left
to the Spanish civil war were
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. WH 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?" 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 20th century.
The most reliable figure for the
strength of the body of foreign
volunteers fighting for the republic
is around 35,000.
They were a very mixed bunch,
socially, culturally and by personal
background. And yet, as one of them,
the English poet Laurie Lee, 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."
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
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. We know that the
largest single body of international
brigaders, the French (just under
9,000), overwhelmingly came from the
working class - 92 per cent - and
included no more than 1 per cent
students and members of the liberal
professions, virtually all of them
communists. Given their technical
qualifications, most of these were
in fact employed behind the front
lines. 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 later
kept it out of sight.
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 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 and leader of the
student Communist Party, who had
fallen in battle in Spain on his
21st 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
went to fight in Spain after the
Communist Party of Great Britain
decided 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 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. 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". The
same reason was 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".
Indeed, as Orwell himself recognised
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 a run of 1,500
copies, which sold so poorly that
the stock was not yet exhausted 13
years later when it was first
reprinted. 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 a war born of the resistance of
a legitimate government, with the
help of a popular mobilisation,
against a partially successful
military coup; and, in important
parts of Spain, the spontaneous
transformation of the mobilisation
into a social revolution. A serious
war conducted by a government
requires structure, discipline and a
degree of centralisation. What
characterises social revolutions
like that of 1936 is local
initiative, spontaneity,
independence of, or even resistance
to, higher authority - this was
especially so given the unique
strength of anarchism in Spain.
In short, what was and remains at
issue in these debates is what
divided Marx and Bakunin. Polemics
about the dissident Marxist Poum are
irrelevant here and, given that
party's small size and marginal role
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
organisation, 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
socialised by the anarchists (ie
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 has emerged 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,
inspiring and moving as it is. Moral
revulsion against Stalinism and the
behaviour of its agents in Spain is
justified. It is right to criticise
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 fought for the republic as
soldiers, most found Marx more
relevant than Bakunin - even though
some survivors may recall the
spontaneous but inefficient euphoria
of the anarchist phase of liberation
with tenderness as well as
exasperation.
After its brief moment at the
centre of world history, Spain
returned to its position on its
margin. Outside Spain, the civil war
lived on, as it still does among the
rapidly diminishing number of its
non-Spanish contemporaries. It
became and has remained something
remembered by those who were young
at the time like the heart-rending
and indestructible memory of a first
great and lost love. This is not the
case in Spain itself, where all
experienced the tragic, murderous
and complex impact of civil war,
obscured as it was by the mythology
and manipulation of the regime of
the victors. Nonetheless, 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 the
power of those who won.