{"id":82034,"date":"1986-10-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1986-10-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/aoebut-today-the-strugglea-spain-the-intellectuals\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:47:14","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:47:14","slug":"aoebut-today-the-strugglea-spain-the-intellectuals","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/aoebut-today-the-strugglea-spain-the-intellectuals\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBut today the struggle\u201d: Spain & the intellectuals"},"content":{"rendered":"

C<\/span>oming to terms with the truth about the Spanish Civil War seems more than ever to pose insurmountable difficulties for those intellectuals\u2013perhaps the majority\u2013who were brought up to believe that Spain in the Thirties was the one great cause in that \u201clow dishonest decade,\u201d as Auden called it, which need never be either reconsidered or repented. Yet the publication of two new anthologies on the fiftieth anniversary of the war\u2013Valentine Cunningham\u2019s Spanish Front<\/em> and John Miller\u2019s Voices Against Tyranny<\/em>\u2013together with the discussion they have generated come as a sober reminder that this is a subject that remains part of the unfinished business of recent intellectual history.1<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0\u201cNo episode in the 1930s,\u201d Paul Johnson has aptly observed, \u201chas been more lied about than this one, and only in recent years have historians begun to dig it out from the mountain of mendacity beneath which it was buried for a generation.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0Judging from some recent commentaries on Spain in the Thirties, there are still many intellectuals who would prefer\u2013even today\u2013to let the terrible truth remain buried rather than have their fantasies of a noble past destroyed.<\/p>\n

For most Left intellectuals, in fact, Spain in the Thirties is a cause to be reaffirmed rather than investigated. Reviewing Spanish Front<\/em> and Voices Against Tyranny<\/em> in The New York Times<\/em>, for example, Herbert Mitgang wrote that for all the doubts caused by the actions of Soviet commissars in Spain, George Orwell and other intellectuals \u201cnever regretted that they had gone to Spain\u201d in support of the Republican side.3<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0In the same vein, Christopher Hitchens, writing about Spain in Grand Street<\/em>, asserts that there is \u201csomething creepy about the \u2018compulsion\u2019 to chuck Old Left causes [like the Spanish Civil War] over the side.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0Despite all that Hitchens claims to understand about the betrayal of the Spanish Republic by the Soviets and the Communists, he cites Orwell to support his conclusion that Spain in the Thirties \u201cwas a state of affairs worth fighting for.\u201d And writing in The New Republic<\/em>, the distinguished literary critic Alfred Kazin offers the same quotation from Orwell\u2013who was talking about the libertarian-anarchist revolution of 1936\u2013and comments that \u201ctruth would always be Orwell\u2019s ace in the hole.\u201d To Kazin, the \u201ctruth\u201d is that the Civil War is simply \u201cthe wound that will not heal\u201d; hence, the \u201cdestroyers of the Spanish Republic would always be my enemies.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

For most Left intellectuals, in fact, Spain in the Thirties is a cause to be reaffirmed rather than investigated.<\/p>\n

To those like Kazin who still consider Spain \u201ctheir\u201d war, it was the one pure cause of the 1930s. \u201cIt was the passion of that small segment of my generation,\u201d Murray Kemp-ton has written, \u201cwhich felt a personal commitment to the revolution.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0The cause was easily definable\u2013support of a legally elected democratic government battling reactionary generals who fought to install a Spanish version of fascism. The democratic Republic stood alone: the Western democracies stayed neutral and refused to sell it arms, while the regimes in Germany and Italy rushed men, airplanes, and weapons to aid General Franco\u2019s rebellion. Defense of the Republic became a symbol for all that was good and decent, as the \u201cprogressive\u201d world organized against the tides of reaction and Nazism.<\/p>\n

The truth, of course, is not so simple. The Civil War took place because indecisive elections in February 1936 revealed a nation divided in half; the irresponsible militancy of sectors of the more extreme Left fed the aims of the insurgent generals. Once civil war broke out, both sides were responsible for unspeakable and equally repugnant atrocities. The foreign intervention of Germany prevented Franco\u2019s defeat, just as Soviet military aid allowed the Republic the means to beat back the initial advance of Franco\u2019s forces.<\/p>\n

The problem was that the Soviet Union exacted a harsh price from the Spanish Republic for receipt of that military aid. Stalin\u2019s involvement came rather late in the war, by way of a policy of cautious military intervention. Soviet tanks, planes, and artillery did not reach Spain until October and November of 1936, and they were of a limited caliber\u2013no match for the heavy equipment supplied by the Germans and Italians. Even so, Stalin insisted upon payment in advance; he took the valued gold reserves of the Republic out of Spain and into Russia. Fearing involvement in a war with Germany and Italy, Stalin limited his aid to bolstering the resistance of the anti-Franco forces in the hope that Britain and France might be induced to abandon their policy of non-intervention.<\/p>\n

Stalin\u2019s cynical goal was to steer internal developments in Spain to coincide with the foreign policy objectives of the Soviet Union. He wanted to prolong the existence of the Republic until the Western democracies joined him in supporting the Republicans. It was a strategy of stalemate: Stalin purposely never gave the Republic enough arms with which to win. At the same time, he secretly began to negotiate with Nazi Germany, hedging his bet lest the first course fail to produce results. <\/p>\n

The price paid by the Republic for the much-heralded Soviet aid was the factor that led to the ultimate betrayal. In exchange for military aid, Stalin demanded the transformation of the once free Republic into a prototype of what became the People\u2019s Democracies in the postwar world. The findings of historians have helped us to understand just how total Soviet control of the Spanish Republic had become. Indeed, the most recent contributions starkly confirm the validity of the revelations of General Walter Krivitsky, the very first defector from the NKVD<\/span> (the forerunner of the KGB<\/span>). At the time\u2013in 1938\u2013much of the left-wing world treated Krivitsky\u2019s confession as anti-Bolshevik paranoia\u2013most especially his revelation that Stalin was already dealing with the Nazis, but also his detailed accounts of the torture and police-state methods brought to Spain by the Soviets as part of their program of \u201cassistance.\u201d We know now that Krivitsky was telling the truth.<\/p>\n

When Hugh Thomas published the first edition of his now classic work, The Spanish Civil War<\/em>, in 1961, he warned readers that \u201cKrivitsky\u2019s evidence must be regarded as tainted unless corroborated.\u201d By 1966, when he brought out the second edition of his history, Thomas had revised that early judgment, and wrote that \u201cKrivitsky\u2019s evidence can generally be accepted.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0But it was left to Burnett Bolloten, author of the majestic historical study\u2013forty years in the making\u2013The Spanish Revolution<\/em> (1979), to give Krivitsky\u2019s work a close reading, and to conclude not only that this NKVD<\/span> general was telling the truth but that \u201cKrivitsky\u2019s revelations have proved to be amazingly accurate, including many of the smallest details, and they constitute a major contribution to our knowledge of Soviet foreign policy aims and Soviet intervention in the Spanish civil war.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0Regarding torture, Krivitsky had written that what the Russians brought to the Republic was unmitigated repression and terror\u2013a civil war against the Spanish Left. The regular police corps was reorganized. Communists secured the pivotal positions in the newly rebuilt police, which became a formal part of the Soviet apparatus in Spain. The NKVD<\/span>, Krivitsky wrote in his memoirs, \u201chad its own special prisons. Its units carried out assassinations and kidnappings, filled hidden dungeons and made flying raids. It functioned . . . independently of the Loyalist government . . . . The Soviet Union seemed to have a grip on Loyalist Spain, as if it were already a Soviet possession.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The Soviet Union seemed to have a grip on Loyalist Spain, as if it were already a Soviet possession.<\/p>\n

At the time, of course, these comments were treated as smears by an untrustworthy renegade who was said to be in league with the Nazis. Just how accurate Krivitsky actually was, however, can best be appreciated by looking at the conclusions reached by the dean of left-wing British historians, E. H. Carr. Carr was as sympathetic to the Soviet Union as any historian could be, yet he declared in his posthumously published book, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War<\/em>, that by 1937 Russians had brought to Spain an institution known as SIM<\/span>, \u201ca new body whose professed function was counter espionage,\u201d and that it \u201cquickly spread its tentacles to all parts of Republican Spain, occupying itself with repression and torture.\u201d Spain, Carr wrote, had become \u201cwhat its enemies called it, the puppet of Moscow.\u201d10<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Another British historian, Antony Beevor, writes in his book The Spanish Civil War <\/em>that the torture introduced was of a new and quantitatively different caliber.11<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0It went beyond \u201cbeatings with rubber piping, hot and cold water treatment, splinters inserted under nails and mock executions.\u201d Under Soviet direction, Beevor tells us, \u201ccell floors were specially constructed with the sharp corners of bricks pointing upward so that the naked prisoners were in constant pain. Strange metallic sounds, colours, lights and sloping floors were used as disorientation and sensory-deprivation techniques.\u201d12<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The evidence is unmistakable that, by 1937, the Spanish \u201cRed\u201d Republic had more in common with Franco\u2019s territories in Spain, or with the authoritarian regime after his victory, than it did with the libertarian revolt of 19 3 6 that had been heralded by the much-quoted George Orwell. As Beevor so aptly writes, the Communists were in \u201cmany ways the counterpart of Franco . . . practitioners of statecraft [who] . . . exploited the war emergency to label any opposition . . . as treasonable to the cause.\u201d As one Anarchist militant put it: for the people of Spain, \u201cwhether Negrin won with his communist cohorts, or Franco won with his Italians and Germans, the results would be the same for us.\u201d13<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

What if the Republic, and not Franco, had won? In The Spanish Revolution<\/em>, the historian Stanley G. Payne judges that if one goes by left-wing policy during the Civil War, there is little reason to assume that a Communist-dominated Republic would have shown any tolerance for dissent or even led to a subsiding of brutal internal terror. Indeed, Payne writes, \u201cthere was nothing in Franco\u2019s zone to equal the almost constant interparty murder that went on under the People\u2019s Republic.\u201d This reality, Payne argues, accounted for much of the \u201cfinal collapse of morale\u201d within the Republican ranks.14<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Even one former Spanish militant in the PCE<\/span> (Spanish Communist Party), the future novelist and screenwriter Jorge Semprun (who was a leader of the Communist underground between 1959 and 1964), admits that, under Franco\u2019s authoritarian reign, Spain reached a higher level of material and social progress, along with industrial and military strength, than existed in any \u201csocialist\u201d regime under Soviet control. And, he adds, under Franco the working class in Spain had more freedom than their counterpart in any country \u201cimproperly called Socialist.\u201d In the Eastern European states, \u201cit is not allowed to strike. It can organize itself only in labor unions that are mere transmission belts of the state apparatus and the single party, compared to which the vertical unions of the Franco dictatorship were genuine democratic paradises.\u201d15<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0One can honestly agree with the judgment of Joaquin Maurin, once an intellectual activist with the Communist-syndicalist Worker Peasant Bloc, who wrote a full quarter of a century later, in 1966, that \u201cfrom the moment in which the alternative was posed, beginning in June 1937, between the Communist party, at the orders of Moscow, or the opposing military regime, reactionary but Spanish, the conclusion of the Civil War was predetermined.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

U<\/span>nderstanding some of this history is a prerequisite for evaluating the story of the Western intellectuals and their response to the Civil War. As we have seen, Alfred Kazin and others make much of Orwell\u2019s statement that though there was much he did not understand and did not even like about revolutionary Barcelona, \u201cI recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.\u201d The quotation is accurate, but those who cite Orwell tend to omit the careful distinction he made between the original revolt and the very different reality after 1937. Orwell recognized this new reality full well, and he did not like what he saw. While he heralded Spain of August 1936 as a people\u2019s revolt, he had reached the sad conclusion that by January of 1937 \u201cthe Communists were using every possible method, fair and foul, to stamp out what was left of the revolution.\u201d He went on to cite, as one of his reviews reprinted in Spanish Front <\/em>reminds us, \u201cthe ceaseless arrests, the censored newspapers and the prowling hordes of armed police,\u201d comparing the situation to a \u201cnightmare.\u201d17<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0Does anyone really think that this was the Spain that Orwell saw as worth defending and fighting for?<\/p>\n

Spain, as Mr. Kazin has so eloquently reminded us, became the central metaphor for artists, intellectuals, and writers of the 1930s. Hemingway immortalized the conflict in For Whom the Bell Tolls<\/em>, although the veterans of the International Brigades were angered by his critical portrayal of the fanatic French commissar, Andre Marty. Nicknamed \u201cthe butcher of Albacete\u201d because of his murder of at least five hundred of his own men for desertion or Trotskyism, Marty is believed to have killed, by a minimum count, one-tenth of all the volunteers who died in Spain.<\/p>\n

\u201cMadrid is the heart,\u201d of a world, a civilization and an ideal, Auden opined in his poem \u201cSpain\u201d (1937). He spoke for a generation when he said one had to put aside \u201cthe walks by the lake . . . the bicycle races.\u201d There was only one task: \u201cBut to-day the struggle.\u201d18<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0These two new anthologies devoted to writings about the Spanish Civil War remind us of just how much the attitude epitomized by Auden\u2019s poem (which he subsequently\u2013to his honor\u2013repudiated) was typical of the intellectual response at the time. They also serve to remind us, as Paul Johnson wrote, that \u201cthe intellectuals of the Left did not want to know the objective truth; they were unwilling for their illusions to be shattered. They were overwhelmed by the glamour and excitement of the cause and few had the gritty determination of Orwell to uphold absolute standards of morality.\u201d<\/p>\n

The role of Stephen Spender is particularly instructive.<\/p>\n

In this respect, the role of Stephen Spender is particularly instructive. Spender has written the introduction to John Miller\u2019s anthology, Voices Against Tyranny<\/em>, and he uses the opportunity to reflect on what Spain meant to the writers and artists of his generation. Spender now says that Auden, who had been criticized by Orwell for the poem on Spain, \u201ccame to agree with Orwell to the extent of feeling that his conscientious attempt to politicize his poetry in support of \u2018Spain\u2019 led him into very alien territory\u201d; it opened him, Auden felt, to the grave charge of \u201cusing poetry to tell lies.\u201d Hence, because of the concluding lines of \u201cSpain\u201d Auden never allowed it to be reprinted during the remainder of his lifetime. The last lines of the poem had declared that<\/p>\n

\n

History to the defeated
\nMay say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Auden commented that \u201c[T]his is a lie.\u201d As for himself, Spender now admits that \u201cthere were atrocities on the Republican side perhaps equalling those committed by the rebels.\u201d On the subject of atrocities, however, he never refers to Arthur Koestler\u2019s account, in The Invisible Writing<\/em>, of the way Comintern propagandist Otto Katz manufactured phony fascist atrocities out of his office in Paris.19<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0This is an important part of the story, for Stalinism was thus aided, as Paul Johnson writes, \u201cnot only by superb public relations but by the na\u00c3\u00afvet\u00e9, gullibility and, it must also be said, the mendacity and corruption of Western intellectuals, especially their willingness to overlook what W. H. Auden called \u2018the necessary murder.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

One might hope that, fifty years later, Western intellectuals would have more perspective on the events that once moved them into such tight corners. Yet, judging from Spender\u2019s introduction to Voices Against Tyranny<\/em>, Spain still appears to be what Spender calls a simple \u201cdirect confrontation between good and evil, right and wrong, freedom and tyranny.\u201d In this view, there was only one bad side\u2013that of Franco. Spender does observe that Auden and he too curbed their true shock over things like the destruction of the churches. Looking back, he reflects, there was an authentic Wordsworthian recognition of the joys of rebellion, but he bemoans the fact \u201cthat we could not see any of the terrible murders happening behind this scene of revolution.\u201d He now acknowledges \u201cthat there is no trust to be placed in travellers\u2019 impressions of popular rejoicing soon after revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spender, however, is still being disingenuous. His own career is a salutary reminder of how total identification with the \u201cright\u201d side corrupts intellectual integrity. One of the documents reprinted in Valentine Cunningham\u2019s Spanish Front<\/em> is Spender\u2019s \u201cI Join the Communist Party\u201d\u2013printed in the London Daily Worker<\/em> in 1937 \u2013in which Spender apologized for first doubting that the Moscow trials were anything but honest, and explained that he now understood the nature \u201cof the gigantic plot against the Soviet Government.\u201d This early heresy, Spender told his new comrades, occurred because he was then only \u201ca liberal approaching communism.\u201d Now that Spender understood that Stalin was right, he was ready to join the Party, evidently a necessity if one desired to go to Valencia to engage in anti-Fascist propaganda.20<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Having joined the Party, Spender became an ardent spokesman for it. In that capacity, he took part in the International Writers\u2019 Congress held in Madrid in 1937. This was the prototype of those events that were later to occur with regularity in Havana during the 1960s and Nicaragua in the 1980s\u2013events in which Western intellectuals reaffirm their closeness to the revolutionary struggle by partying in its midst. In Spain, Spender recorded, he and other delegates were \u201ctreated like princes or ministers . . . riding in Rolls Royces, banqueted, f\u00c3\u00aated, sung and danced to,\u201d all while the battle raged around them. The same Writers\u2019 Congress was noted for its conclusion, which consisted of a massive attack on Andr\u00e9 Gide, who was excoriated as a \u201cfascist monster\u201d for the book he had recently published criticizing the USSR<\/span>.21<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Spender\u2019s 1937 account tells how they were \u201cwoken up at 4 a.m. by the air-raid alarms,\u201d as the reality of the war intruded upon the Congress. Evidently, it did not intrude too much for Spender to proclaim that the Spanish writer Jose Bergamin was the right man to rebuke Gide, because Bergamin had a \u201cmind which sees not merely the truth of isolated facts which Gide observed in the USSR<\/span>, but the far more important truth of the effect which Gide\u2019s book is going to have.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Spender bought the classic rationale of the Stalinized intellectual, it was this affair that caused another participant in the Congress, the Dutch Communist Jef Last, to suffer a severe disillusionment. Proud that the Congress condemned the murder of writers by Franco and other Fascists, Last asked, \u201cwhy this conspiracy of silence around the cultural reaction in Russia . . . ?\u201d Last could not accept the argument, presented to him by Egon Erwin Kisch, that when you hear of a Fascist bombing of a school you have \u201cto defend everything that has been done on our side, even the trials!<\/em>\u201d Acting alone, Last protested against the Soviet delegates\u2019 demands that Gide be attacked by the Congress. Indeed, he pointed out, few in attendance had even read the book they were being asked to condemn. Gide had not been translated into Spanish and his book was not available anywhere in Spain.22<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Spender then stood with the regular Communists. Later, of course, he broke with them, and today he writes that there is a \u201c\u2018truth\u2019 of\u2018 Spain\u2019 that remained independent of, and survived the mold of, Communism into which successive Republican governments were forced.\u201d Even anti-Communists who supported the Republic, Spender writes, \u201cnevertheless retained their belief in the justice of the Republican cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when Spender was in Spain\u2013at the very time he was attending the 1937 Congress and spoke in Britain on behalf of aid for the International Brigades\u2013he privately held to a different \u201ctruth.\u201d It is to the credit of Valentine Cunningham that he includes the remarkable letter which Spender wrote to Virginia Woolf on April 2, 1937, in which the poet reflects that \u201cpoliticians are detestable anywhere,\u201d and that Spain has shown him \u201cthe lies and unscrupulousness of some of the people who are recruiting at home\u201d for the International Brigades, including those \u201cof the Daily Worker<\/em>.\u201d He had not seen the poet Julian Bell, her nephew, Spender wrote to Woolf, and he assumed that \u201che has not joined the Brigade.\u201d While Spender himself spoke in England in favor of the volunteers, he told Woolf that he hoped Bell \u201cwill not do so,\u201d since participating in the Brigades called for \u201cterrific narrowness and a religious dogmatism about the Communist Party line,\u201d as well as \u201ctoughness, cynicism and insensibility.\u201d23<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Since Spender never said anything similar in public\u2013and does not say anything like this in print even today\u2013his letter is riveting. \u201cThe sensitive, the weak, the romantic, the enthusiastic, the truthful live in Hell,\u201d he wrote to Woolf, \u201cand cannot get away.\u201d The Hell he spoke of was not that of Franco. \u201cThe political commissars . . . bully so much that even people who were quite enthusiastic Party Members have been driven into hating the whole thing.\u201d Spender told the story of one veteran he spoke with, who \u201ccomplained to me bitterly about the inquisitional methods of the Party.\u201d Noting that it was a lie that the men were volunteers who could leave when they liked, Spender wrote Woolf that actually they were \u201ctrapped there,\u201d and wounds or mental collapse were not considered grounds for leaving, \u201cunless one belongs to the Party elite and is sent home as a propagandist to show one\u2019s arm in a sling to audiences.\u201d Bitterly, Spender revealed that his closest friend fought in an offensive in which the men were sent to be slaughtered, with only olive groves for protection. After his friend\u2019s mental collapse, Spender tried to hire him as his personal secretary. The Party refused, and sent the man back to battle. He sought to escape, and was then put in a labor camp. Spender asked that nothing he had written be repeated, particularly \u201cthe more unpleasant truths about the Brigade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Privately, Spender sought to help such men leave Spain, and he condemned the total fanaticism of the Party leaders who were really \u201cunconcerned with Spain\u201d and were intolerant of any dissent. But such truths had to be carefully guarded. Thus, Spender asked Woolf to quote his letter anonymously \u201cto any pacifist or democrat who wants to fight.\u201d Privately, he hoped they would refrain from enlistment with the International Brigades. Publicly, Spender towed the line, and his published poems supported the cause. Of the martyred John Cornford, he said, in a review written in September of 1938, that he exemplified \u201cthe potentialities of a generation\u201d that was fighting \u201cfor a form of society for which [it] was also willing to die.\u201d24<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0When Spender wrote the letter to Virginia Woolf, was he secretly hoping that she would show it to Cornford before he made the fatal decision to join the battle, as Cornford wrote, \u201cwhether I like it or not\u201d?<\/p>\n

How are we to judge a writer who says one thing to a friend in private and quite the opposite to an innocent and credulous public on such a momentous issue? It is no wonder that Richard Gott was recently moved to observe that, the more we gain some historical perspective on Spain, \u201cthe more blurred becomes the morality.\u201d25<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0It is worth remembering, however, that there were<\/em> some writers who grasped the morality of the situation at the time, and showed an exemplary bravery and candor in acknowledging the villainy of their chosen side. The Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, once a supporter of the rightist and anti-Semitic Action Fran\u00c3\u00a7aise, saw firsthand the horror of the atrocities perpetrated by the Franco forces and sanctified by the Catholic priests. In his searing account from A Diary of My Times<\/em> (1938), which appears in the Cunningham anthology, Bernanos tells of \u201cthe organizing of Terrorism\u201d by the Italian Black Shirts brought to Majorca by Franco.26<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0Bernanos recoiled in horror at the figure of three thousand killed by right-wing death squads, as we would call them today, in a brief seven-month period. On that small island, he wrote, one could \u201cwitness the blowing-out of fifteen wrong-thinking brains per day.\u201d Hating \u201cthe sound and sight of it,\u201d Bernanos told the world the truth, despite the fact that it meant he was criticizing his own side. Bernanos saw that civil war meant \u201cthere is no longer any justice,\u201d and he pointed out that even moderate Republicans were shot \u201clike dogs just the same,\u201d even though they had nothing to do with the Red Terror of Barcelona. To this Catholic intellectual, civil war meant terrorism had become \u201cthe order of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bernanos saw that civil war meant \u201cthere is no longer any justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the Left, Simone Weil was Bernanos\u2019s counterpart. \u201c[H]oping every day,\u201d she wrote in a letter to Bernanos, \u201c. . . for the victory of one side and the defeat of the other,\u201d Weil went to Spain in August 1936.27<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0After two months there, Weil no longer saw the war as one \u201cof starving peasants against landed proprietors and a clergy in league\u201d with them, but instead she viewed it as \u201ca war between Russia, Germany and Italy.\u201d Almost witnessing an unjustified execution of a priest by Republican militants was enough to push Weil toward pacifism. Seeing the famed anarchist Durruti execute a young Falangist soldier, who had been conscripted against his will, never stopped weighing on her conscience. What Weil objected to was the relentless pleasure in murder that occurred on all sides. Killing \u201cFascists\u201d and seeing them as beasts made the Republicans, in Weil\u2019s view, no better than the enemy; they too were excluding \u201ca category of human beings from among those whose lives have worth.\u201d Such behavior, she wrote in her letter to Bernanos in 1938, soon obscured \u201cthe very purpose of the struggle.\u201d She had her sympathies with the anarchists and their cause, but Weil put her finger on what made the soldiers\u2013as it made the Marxist guerrillas of the 1960s\u2013a new elite. \u201cAn abyss separated the men with the weapons,\u201d Weil wrote, \u201cfrom the unarmed population,\u201d an abyss Weil saw as similar to that which separated \u201cthe rich from the poor.\u201d Hence Weil felt that Bernanos, a monarchist, was closer to her than the proletarian comrades of the Aragon militia she had come to Spain to support.<\/p>\n

I<\/span>f the Spanish War was a \u201cPeople\u2019s War,\u201d as Valentine Cunningham claims, \u201cthe most potent and emotionally engaging focus of thirties democratic struggles and progressive working-class ambitions,\u201d it was also a writers\u2019 war, in which almost all writers felt the need to take sides. It is true that most writers of merit were on the Republican side. But can one say with a clear conscience that the forces of the Republic were fighting, as Cunningham suggests, for the survival of art and culture in free societies, when, had the Red side won, such a free society would have been just as much at risk as it was after the Franco victory?<\/p>\n

Orwell had warned, in the concluding pages of Homage to Catalonia<\/em>, that one should beware of partisanship, and of the distortion caused by his having seen only one corner of events. And he warned that readers should \u201cbeware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period.\u201d What happened, of course, was that writers went to Spain and, on the basis of brief tours, committed themselves and their art to the cause. Weil noted that it was \u201cin fashion to go on a tour down there, to take in a spot of revolution, and to come back with articles bursting out of your pen.\u201d She noted such endeavors had to be superficial, especially since in the gale of civil war and revolution \u201cprinciples get completely out of phase with realities,\u201d and the criterion for judging events disappears. How, she queried, could one \u201creport something coherently on the strength of a short stay and some fragmentary observations?\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem continues into our own day. As Paul Hollander has lately reminded us, scores of modern-day political pilgrims continue the journeys to \u201csocialist\u201d countries and bring back their enthusiastic accounts of revolution, despite the realities that somehow evade their notice.28<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0As even Cunningham acknowledges, Spain does not \u201csustain the earliest lyrical and romantic readings of the war as the zone where the necessary evils and terrors of revolution and war might after a temporary outing prove the gateway to happy conclusions.\u201d<\/p>\n

We need to be especially alert to the accounts of the International Brigades in Spain, for on this subject particularly a great deal of emotion has been invested and a great many lies told. When, some years ago, Orwell condemned a memoir by the International Brigidista John Sommerfield as \u201csentimental tripe,\u201d he wrote that \u201cwe shall almost certainly get some good books from members of the International Brigade, but we shall have to wait for them until the war is over.\u201d29<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0Such a book was in fact written, and k is far more powerful, honest, and moving than many of the didactic excerpts to be found in either of the new anthologies. William Herrick\u2019s novel Hermanos!<\/em>, first published in 1969, is again available from Second Chance Press.30<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0Herrick has given us what is perhaps the first honest portrayal of the war from within the Brigades in Spain, a searing, tough indictment, filled with the bitter reality of youthful bravery and idealism crushed by the agenda of the Comintern and its decision to allow so many thousands to die for nothing. Given that Herrick\u2019s novel is virtually the only critical account of the Civil War experience from the inside, an excerpt from it would have strengthened both of the new anthologies immeasurably. And another, younger novelist, David Evanier, continues the tradition with his forthcoming novel of the Old Left; a recently published excerpt pertaining to the International Brigades traces one veteran\u2019s destruction as part of his experience with the Soviet tank corps.31<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

R<\/span>eading the committed partisans of the Left so many years later cannot but leave one with a bitter taste. How weak seem the partisans, and how prescient seem those who had doubts and expressed them. Indeed, one is struck by the intellectual courage it took to give anything but the expected answer, particularly when the question was framed, as it was in 1937 in a declaration \u201cTo the Writers and Poets of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales\u201d by Auden, Spender, Neruda, and Aragon: \u201cAre you for or against . . . the People of Republican Spain? . . . it is impossible any longer to take no side.\u201d Those who answered by insisting that no side be taken must be given high marks for intellectual fortitude, and for refusing to ride with the herd.<\/p>\n

Aldous Huxley spoke a simple truth when he replied, to those who demanded he side with the Reds, that dictatorial Communism would produce \u201cresults with which history has made us only too sickeningly familiar.\u201d T. S. Eliot replied that, while he was sympathetic to the Republicans, \u201cit is best that at least a few men of letters should remain isolated.\u201d Condemned as a fascist for these sentiments, Eliot at least was able to stay aloof from the foolish chorus of Stalinist hosannas in which the rest of the intellectuals joined. Was he not correct, then, to claim that, were the Left to win, it would \u201cbe the victory of the worst rather than of the best features . . . a travesty of the humanitarian ideals which have led so many people\u201d to work for the Republic?32<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0Eliot was wrong, I think, to have opposed lifting the embargo on arms. Despite the tragedy of the conflict\u2013and the evils of Communism\u2013the main threat to the world in the Thirties was that of the menace of aggressive Hitlerism. But Eliot was right, after all, on the moral issue involved, that democracy had little to do with supporting either \u201cBerlin or Moscow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who argued that the Fascists killed Lorca\u2013and therefore all writers must stand with the Republic\u2013would be hard pressed to refute the argument of Salvador Dali that Lorca\u2019s \u201cdeath was exploited for propaganda purposes,\u201d and that personally the poet was \u201cthe most a-political person on earth.\u201d33<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Undoubtedly, some did side with the Republic because of a valid opposition to Fascism, and because the Republic had the support of the populace. But who can question the accuracy of Vita Sackville-West, who addressed the hypocrisy of the call to support \u201cthe legal <\/em>Government of Spain”? \u201cIs this because it is the legal <\/em>Government,\u201d she asked, \u201cor because it is a Communist Government?\u201d34<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0(One is reminded of the pro-Sandinista writers today who ask that we not oppose the \u201clegal\u201d government of Nicaragua\u2013something they did not hesitate to do when Somoza represented its legitimacy.) Noting that, if legality were the issue, these writers would have to support the existing regimes in Italy and Germany if rebellion broke out against them, Sackville-West identified the real issue: \u201c. . . you want to see Communism established in Spain as well as in Russia, and you do not care a snap of the fingers whether a Government is \u2018legal\u2019 or not.\u201d Demanding frankness, Sackville-West challenged what she called the \u201csubterranean forms of propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was apparent that defenders of the Republic would use almost any argument to gather support. Virtually all honest observers knew about the brutal assassinations ordered by the Comintern for socialists, anarchists, and POUM<\/span> revolutionaries after 1937. Yet Ernst Toller, whose propagandist appeal to Americans started the campaign on behalf of Spain in the United States, emphasized the humanity of the Republic\u2019s troops toward its worst enemies. He had seen with his own eyes, Toller wrote, \u201cthe humane treatment of war prisoners, of Nazi pilots and Italian Fascist flyers who have killed dozens of children, dozens of women.\u201d35<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0How false was the picture painted by Toller, of a free society in which Syndicalist, Communist, and parliamentary liberal were totally free and cooperated in word and deed for one aim\u2013the destruction of the armed rebellion. It was Toller who orchestrated the false defense of Spain, and assured the worried liberals in the United States that \u201cit is a lie that the fight is going on between Communism and Fascism.\u201d After all, he assured American liberals, Negrin had said that \u201cprivate property is protected in Spain,\u201d and was simply trying to do \u201cthe same things that President Roosevelt strives to do: free the country from the power of economic Royalists.\u201d It was precisely these directives, forced upon Negrin by the Comintern, as Bolloten writes, that antagonized \u201cother parties of the left and eventually\u201d undermined the war effort \u201cand the will to fight.\u201d36<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0Having lost its reason and inspiration to fight, the Republic found itself with low morale among its would-be defenders and dependent upon the most treacherous of allies, Joseph Stalin and the Comintern apparatus.<\/p>\n

How appropriate, then, that Cunningham ends his collection with \u201cCrusade in Spain\u201d by Jason Gurney,37<\/a><\/sup>\u00c2\u00a0who speaks the clear truth when he writes that \u201cnobody, from either side, came out of it with clean hands.\u201d A member of the British section of the International Brigades, Gurney noted that he and his comrades \u201chad wilfully deluded ourselves into the belief that we were fighting a noble Crusade because we needed a crusade\u2013the opportunity to fight against the manifest evils of Fascism . . . which seemed then as if it would overwhelm every value of Western civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gurney felt, writing in the mid-1970s, that \u201c[W]e were wrong, we deceived ourselves and were deceived by others.\u201d But he argues as well that their fight was not in vain, and he does not regret his own part in that fight. \u201cThe situation,\u201d he says, \u201cis not to be judged by what we now know of it, but only as it appeared in the context of the period.\u201d But much was <\/em>known then, and suppressed by those who knew. Gurney would have it both ways. History has taught him the truth about Communism. But he still insists that because \u201cothers took advantage of our idealism in order to destroy it does not in any way invalidate the decision which we made.\u201d And this man who claims to understand history gives his last word to the blabbering of \u201cLa Pasionaria,\u201d Dolores Ibarruri. This famous Communist deputy, who sang the praises of the departing brigidistas as they were suffering the consequences of her betrayal, went immediately thereafter to Moscow, where she remained in exile until Franco\u2019s death. Those brave men who gave their lives had allowed themselves to be part of an ideological and propaganda instrument forged by the Comintern for its own purposes. Had they looked closer, they could have discerned the truth at the time. In 1986, those who still respond to the Spanish Civil War as simply \u201cour cause\u201d have no excuse.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
    \n
  1. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War<\/em>, edited by Valentine Cunningham, Oxford University Press, 388 pages, $7.95; and Voices Against Tyranny: Writing of the Spanish Civil War<\/em>, edited by John Miller, Charles Scribner\u2019s Sons, 227 pages, $7.95. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties<\/em>. Harper & Row, 1983, pages 321-340. Other citations from Paul Johnson are from these pages. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times<\/em>, August 18, 1986, page C18. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  4. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Christopher Hitchens, \u201cRe-Bunking,\u201d Grand Street<\/em>, Summer 1986, pages 228-231. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  5. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Alfred Kazin, \u201cThe Wound That Will Not Heal,\u201d The New Republic<\/em>, August 25, 1986, pages 39-41. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  6. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time<\/em>. Dell, 1955, page 317. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  7. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War<\/em>. Eyer and Spottiswood, 1961, page 263; revised edition, Penguin, 1965, page 337. A third edition was published by Harper & Row last month. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  8. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Revolution<\/em>, page 173. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  9. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Walter G. Krivitsky, In Stalin\u2019s Secret Service<\/em>. Harper, 1939, pages 102-107, 291. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  10. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>E. H. Carr, The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War<\/em>. Pantheon, 1984, page 44; page 31. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  11. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Antony Beevor, The Spanish Civil War<\/em>. Orbis Publishing, 1982, pages 211-212. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  12. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Beevor, page 281. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  13. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>The anarchist militant is Abad de Santillan, quoted in Beevor, page 194. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  14. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Revolution<\/em>. Norton, 1970, page 313. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  15. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Jorge Semprun, The Autobiography of Federico Sanchez and the Communist Underground in Spain<\/em>. Karz, 1979, page 133. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  16. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Cited in Payne, page 374. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  17. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>George Orwell, from Time & Tide<\/em>, July 31, 1937; reprinted in Cunningham, pages 316-317. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  18. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>W.H. Auden, \u201cSpain,\u201d from The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939<\/em>, reprinted in Miller, page 211. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  19. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing<\/em>. Macmillan, 1954, page 327. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  20. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Stephen Spender, \u201cI Join the Communist Party,\u201d London Daily Worker<\/em>, February 19, 1937, in Cunningham, pages 7-9. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  21. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Stephen Spender, \u201cSpain Invites the World\u2019s Writers,\u201d from Notes on the International Congress<\/em>, Summer 1937 from New Writing<\/em>, Autumn 1937, in Cunningham, pages 85-91. Gide\u2019s book, Retour de l\u2019U.R.S.S.<\/em>, was published in 1936. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  22. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Jef Last, from The Spanish Tragedy<\/em>. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1939; in Cunningham, pages 94-100. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  23. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Stephen Spender to Virginia Woolf, April 2, 1937, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tuden Foundations, in Cunningham, pages 307-309. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  24. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Review of John Cornford: A Memoir<\/em>; New Statesman & Nation<\/em>, November 12, 1938, in Cunningham, pages 328-330. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  25. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Richard Gott, \u201cThe Spanish Tragedy,\u201d Manchester Guardian Weekly<\/em>, July 27, 1986, page 22. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  26. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Georges Bernanos, A Diary of My Times<\/em>. The Bodley Head, 1938; in Cunningham, pages 145-152. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  27. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Simone Weil, \u201cLettre \u00c3\u00a0 Georges Bernanos,\u201d \u00c3\u2030crits Historiques et Politiques<\/em>. Editions Gallimard, 1960, in Cunningham, pages 253-257. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  28. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba.<\/em> Oxford University Press, 1981. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  29. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>George Orwell, review of John Sommerfield\u2019s Volunteer in Spain<\/em>, from Time & Tide<\/em>, July 31, 1937, in Cunningham, page 19. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  30. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>William Herrick, Hermanos!<\/em> Second Chance Press, 1983. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  31. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>David Evanier, \u201cHow Sammy Klarfeld Became a Vacillating Element in Spain,\u201d The Journal of Contemporary Studies<\/em>, Summer\/Fall 1985, pages 89-106. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  32. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Quotations from Aidous Huxley and T. S. Eliot are from Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, 1937<\/em>. Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., 1937, in Cunningham, pages 51-57. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  33. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali<\/em>. Dasa Ediciones, 1942, in Miller, pages 203-210. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  34. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Vita Sackville-West\u2019s comment is also from Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War<\/em>, in Cunningham, page 229 Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  35. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Ernst Toller, \u201cTranscript of Broadcast to the USA,\u201d New Statesman & Nation<\/em>, October 8, 1938, in Cunningham, pages 72-75. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  36. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Revolution<\/em>, page 173. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  37. \u00c2\u00a0<\/a> <\/sup>Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain<\/em>. Faber and Faber Ltd., 1974, in Cunningham, pages 379-380. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    On anthologies of writing on the Spanish Civil War.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1481,"featured_media":130529,"template":"","tags":[635],"department_id":[563],"issue":[3244],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":5,"value_formatted":5,"value":"5","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"Gen. 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