Communists (OT)

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any
size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism.

Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness,
money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The
ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money--tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.

Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug

One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.

And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me.

A historical milestone was passed on Sunday, with the death of Delmer Berg at the age of 100. Berg, who lived in Columbia, Calif., in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, was the last known survivor of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as the several units of American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War came to be called.

World War II has largely pushed that conflict out of our collective memory, but it was momentous for the people of Spain, and for the 40,000 volunteers from more than 50 countries, 2,800 of them American, who fought in it. Eighty years ago this July, a large group of right-wing army officers staged a coup against the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic. They called themselves Nationalists and were soon led by Francisco Franco, a tough-talking young general who quickly outmaneuvered all of his rivals. The Nationalists hoped to seize power swiftly, but their efforts stalled and the war dragged on for nearly three years of brutal fighting and political massacres that left well more than 400,000 people dead.

No one can say exactly how the [Spanish] Republic might have evolved had it won the civil war. But ... [Spain] would have been spared the 36 years of Franco's harsh dictatorship.

Foreign volunteers eager to help the Republic began arriving in late 1936. In January 1937 an American battalion was formed and hastily thrown into combat the next month. Americans fought in most of the major battles that followed. About 750 of them died and a majority of the remainder were wounded, including Delmer Berg, who carried shrapnel in his liver for the rest of his life.

Who were they? They came from 46 states and every conceivable walk of life: the grandchildren of slaves (about 90 volunteers were African American), coal miners, a vaudeville acrobat, a rabbi, longshoremen, factory workers, college instructors, the son of a former governor of Ohio. The first American casualty — he arrived before the American battalion was organized and fought beside British volunteers — was Joseph Selligman Jr., a Swarthmore College student fatally wounded in the battle for Madrid. One of the last, killed a year and a half later, was James Lardner, a 24-year-old from a famous literary family, who traveled to Spain as a New York Herald Tribune correspondent and then decided to fight.

Britain, France and the United States all wanted to keep the Spanish conflict at arm's length. The only major nation willing to sell weapons to the beleaguered Spanish Republic was not another democracy — it was Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. It was also Stalin who asked the world's Communist parties to support the Spanish Republic by recruiting volunteer soldiers.
The women who fought to be war correspondents
The women who fought to be war correspondents

Roughly three-quarters of the American volunteers were members of the Communist Party or its affiliated groups. In their illusions about the Soviet Union they were of course profoundly naive. But they were not fighting for the Soviet Union, they were fighting for Spain. And almost all of these men and women (about 75 American women went to Spain, mostly as nurses) felt that the conflict might be the opening battle of another world war. And in this they were right: Four years before the U.S. entered World War II, Americans were bombed by Nazi pilots in Spain.

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini had immediately come to the aid of their ideological ally, Franco, sending aircraft, tanks, artillery, pilots, technicians and military advisors. Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well. Hitler used the Spanish war to test out in combat the new weapons for the larger war he was planning: the Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88-millimeter artillery piece and more.

The Spanish Civil War was bewilderingly complicated. Within the republic were tensions between the Communists and the mainstream parties on one hand and, on the other, the Spanish anarchists and their allies, who largely controlled the northeastern corner of the country. George Orwell wrote about that conflict in his memoir, “Homage to Catalonia.” American volunteers were there too. One of them, Harry Milton of New York, fought in the same militia unit as Orwell, and was standing next to him in the trenches when the novelist received a bullet through his neck. Lois Orr, a remarkably observant 19-year-old from Louisville, Ky. (also Selligman's hometown), left the most extensive eyewitness account by any foreigner of daily life in anarchist Barcelona.

The Spain of the 1930s was hobbled by vast disparities of wealth, and no one can say exactly how the republic might have evolved had it won the civil war. But one thing is certain: The country would have been spared the 36 years of Franco's harsh dictatorship. His was a regime that packed huge numbers of people into crowded prisons and labor camps, branded the Nationalist symbol on the breasts of dissident women, practiced torture for decades and in World War II provided Nazi Germany with important submarine bases, crucial minerals for weapons manufacturing and 45,000 volunteer soldiers.

The Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War are not usually considered part of the “greatest generation,” but they were. As Ernest Hemingway, who covered the war as a correspondent and later wrote about it in his novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” put it: “No men ever entered the earth more honorably than those who died in Spain.”

American progressives distressed about the prospect of being offered a choice this fall between a right-wing billionaire and a one-time corporate lawyer on the board of Wal-Mart, might look to Spain for a reminder that left-wing leaders with principles and charisma do still exist.

George Orwell became a staunch critic of authoritarian-style Communism, he never abandoned his commitment to democratic socialism. After the Civil War, Orwell wrote "No one who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that strange and moving experience. It has left something behind that no dictatorship, not even Franco's, will be able to efface."

In his Letter to Cyril Connolly, 8 June 1937, Orwell wrote "At last I really believe in Socialism which I never did before." A decade later he wrote: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."

Orwell attacked sections of the left wing press for suppressing the truth about Spain, indicting the Communists for instigating a "reign of terror"; and he never forgave Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman who turned down his articles on the Spanish Civil War on the grounds that they "could cause trouble." Malcolm Muggeridge remembered: "Once when we were lunching at a Greek restaurant in Percy Street he asked me if I would mind changing places. I readily agreed but asked him why. He said that he just couldn't bear to look at Kingsley Martin's corrupt face, which, as Kingsley was lunching at an adjoining table, was unavoidable from where he had been sitting before."