To the Editors:
I write as an occasional contributor to The New Criterion and recognized authority on Catalonia in the Spanish civil war of 1936–1939. I was coauthor with the Catalan historian Víctor Alba of the 1988 book Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism, the only volume in English on the Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista or POUM, in the ranks of whose militia George Orwell served. I was also a special fact-checker of the 2001 Yale University Press volume Spain Betrayed, comprising documents on the Spanish war from the Soviet archives. I am completely fluent in Spanish and Catalan, read Russian and other relevant languages such as Croatian and Albanian (important in researching the role of the Soviet-controlled International Brigades). My original research in the role of Balkan and particularly Jewish victims of Stalin in the mentioned Brigades was published in my 2005 book Sarajevo Rose, which appeared in Bosnian as well as English. I have studied this topic for forty years, and have lectured on it at the University of Barcelona, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and elsewhere.
Based on this background I was fully prepared to compose a detailed refutation of the illogical leaps, distortions, and other absurdities in Anthony Daniels’s assault on Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, (“Orwell’s ‘Catalonia’ Revisited”) in your February issue.
However, Mr. Daniels has saved me the trouble with a single line in his concoction: “[I]n Spain, at least, Stalin was a freedom fighter