The empty tomb of fascism

In 1917, US Senator Hiram Johnson noted that “the first casualty of war is the truth”. Few periods of world history have borne this out as remarkably as the Spanish Civil War.

The Spanish Civil War commenced on July 17, 1936. Spain had been under a Republican government for only a short time, having abandoned the monarchy in 1931. At that time, 67% of the land was owned by only 2% of the population. The poverty was dire and most peasants subsisted by sharecropping. There was a 40% illiteracy rate and the Catholic Church both supported the landowners and controlled public education. The Republican government had imprisoned 30,000 political dissidents in only five years. The Anarchist trade union – Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) – had grown to two million members.

In 1936, the Popular Front government was elected – a left-wing assembly of Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists. A right-wing rebellion ensued, led by fascist Francisco Franco. The rebels received aid from Mussolini, Hitler, and Salazar while Britain and France declared an arms embargo and non-intervention policy with regards to Spain. The British and American upper classes sympathized with Franco. Mexico and the Soviet Union backed the Popular Front government, largely because they didn’t want civil unrest to interfere with trade.

Franco’s forces organized four columns that moved across Spain and systematically killed supporters of the Popular Front. Government forces were able to protect Madrid from the Four Columns and banners hung in the streets of the capital city, declaring Madrid to be “the tomb of fascism."

At this time, a Brit by the name of Eric Blair went to Spain as a journalist. He was born in India in 1903 and sent to England for schooling. He graduated from Eton in 1921 and served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma until 1927. He then spent a year among the homeless, which prompted him to publish the book Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933 under the name for which he is known – George Orwell.

Recently married, Orwell went to Spain in 1936 and later published one of the most decisive accounts of the Spanish Civil War – Homage to Catalonia. He arrived in Barcelona to find an anarchist utopia where 70% of businesses were collectivized by the workers, tipping was prohibited, and class distinctions eradicated. The 1700 land collectives in Aragon, Valencia, and Madrid forbid money or employment of labor. CNT health workers made medical care available to all 2.5 million people in Catalonia.

Orwell joined the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista to defend Catalonia against the Fascists. He was sent to the Aragon front where he found a ragged military lacking in basic supplies, but nevertheless able to fight more effectively for their lack of hierarchy.

He was dispatched to Sargossa and then Huesca where he was involved in the holding attack that drew Fascist troops away from the Anarchist attack on Jaca Road. After three months on the front, he returned to Barcelona to find the class divisions returning. He wanted to join the Anarchists, but joined the Communist International Column so he could go to Madrid.

Before that could happen, Orwell was drawn into what came to be known as May Days when, on May 3rd, government assault guards tried to overtake the collectivized Telephone Exchange from the Anarchists. Days of street fighting ensued as the Communist supporters of the People’s Front government attempted to unite the Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists into one People’s Army.

The Communists were concerned primarily with thwarting the rise of Franco and, backed by the Stalinist Soviet Union, were willing to repress a workers’ uprising to do it. Uniting the People’s Army would effectively halt a revolution. The Anarchists didn’t want to unite under their terms, believing that only a working class revolution could halt the spread of both capitalism and fascism.

Orwell was shot in the throat and almost died. He was rescued by Harry Milton, an American Anarchist (among the few Americans who had not joined the Lincoln Brigade that was simultaneously fighting the Fascists and the Anarchists). Orwell was removed from combat and hospitalized in Lerida.

By the time he returned to Barcelona, the Communists had begun an effective smear campaign against the Anarchists. They accused them of siding with the Fascists and referred to them as “Franco’s Fifth Column." In reality, the Anarchists wanted a single command, but demanded that the working class retain control of an egalitarian army.

Propaganda appeared in the left-wing media decrying Anarchists for lawlessness and murder. Anarchism was made illegal and those suspected of it were arrested without charges, held incommunicado, and murdered in prison. Communist forces destroyed many of the land collectives before the Fascists could even get to them. Orwell’s frustration with the lies and their acceptance in Britain, France, and the United States shaped his sensitivity to the use of language to manipulate the masses, which later became the theme of his futuristic dystopia in 1984.

The Communists suppressed the Anarchists in order to persuade Britain, France, and the United States to drop their non-intervention policies and support the fight against Franco. But, for as much as the propaganda about the Anarchists was accepted abroad, these countries were still appeasing the Fascists by policy and were wary of Communism, equating as they still do capitalism with democracy and fear of God. Even a major attack on Catalonia and the German invasion of Austria did not change their minds.

Orwell spent his last days in Barcelona attempting to free his comrades from political imprisonment and finally fled Spain for France. He attempted to publish Homage to Catalonia through Victor Gollancz (his previous publisher), who refused it on the basis that it criticized the left-wing forces opposing Franco –the same rationale for suppressing the Anarchists. He finally published it through Harcourt in 1938. He went on to write Animal Farm in 1945 and moved to the Scottish Hebrides, where he published 1984 in 1949. He died a year later.

On Spetember 29, 1938, the Munich Accord was signed, effectively allowing Franco to take Barcelona and Madrid and ending the war on April 1, 1939. This left 300,000 dead and started a reign of fascism under Franco that would last for 35 years in Spain.

Orwell wrote his account to do just what his title suggests – to pay homage to Catalonia, which proved for a time that society can function without hierarchical authority. His balance of political analysis and frank reporting comes from a place of such obvious self-awareness that it convinces the reader he’s not engaging in propaganda simply because he has no need to.

It’s easy to either oversimplify Orwell’s politics or to discredit the extent of his radicalism just because of its complexity. He was an active socialist and anarchist who believed in the radical simplicity that all people deserved the basics of food, shelter, clothes, medical care, freedom, and employment. His identification with the values of the lower middle class keep him from the snobbishness of the left-wing intelligentsia, yet he was honest in criticizing the left even while he sympathized with it. He wasn’t a namby-pamby who criticized all sides from the sidelines and refused to take one out of a sense of moral superiority or purity.

A lot of the issues raised by Orwell are still unresolved on the left. The right is less divided because it can unite under the cause of maintaining property rights for the privileged class. The left is easier to divide because it’s inherently more democratic and anti-authoritarian. I recall hitchhiking to New York City with a group of street punks from Charlottesville.

At about 3:00 AM, to ward off exhaustion, we got into a long exchange about the current face of American anarchism. Andrew, my conversation partner and prominent Virginia rabble-rouser, maintained that the left should not oversimplify its actions and beliefs to appeal to an apathetic majority that’s more concerned with J’Lo and Ben’s love affair than with a revolution of the American working class. To do so, he argued, would be to allow the right to define our terms and set up any seeds of revolution to be quickly overtaken.

I played the devil’s advocate (though Andrew was aware of my indecisiveness on the issue) and argued that a centrist majority can’t support something they don’t understand, so clear, simple sound bytes coupled with popular actions would build a more effective movement. I remain undecided, but it’s the same basic issue Orwell talks about – should the left police and suppress its radical elements or maintain solidarity and diversity of tactics despite popular opinion?

Maybe Andrew was right. After all, the Fascists won in Barcelona. A united front doesn’t have such a history of effectiveness. Debates on that theme run all the way to relative minutiae like whether to vote for the Democrats just to get rid of Bush versus “voting your conscience” because the Democrats aren’t significantly different from Bush and the Republicans.

The Spanish Civil War (as well as Orwell’s memoir about it) raise questions about anarchism and the use of violence. Anarchism, broadly, is the belief that the state is the vehicle for upholding the interests of the ruling class above the needs of the working class majority. Seventy years ago, anarchists assumed that because the state relies on force, all revolution must be armed. Modern anarchists seem to see the inherent contradiction in that. At its core, anarchism is pacific because it opposes the violence intrinsic to hierarchical authority. Did the Spanish Anarchists in part lose because of a failure of imagination? Because the means they used of physical violence were contradictory to the ends they desired of the radically non-violent society they so briefly achieved in Catalonia? And, if so, how can modern anarchists imagine a pacific revolution?

In the end, Orwell didn’t flee to France because he was cynical or disillusioned. His story isn’t a why-Communism-won’t-work object lesson. He was just tired. And if a man like Orwell can go to Paris to take a nap, maybe it gives the rest of us permission to realize that exhaustion doesn’t mean we have given up or sold out.

But maybe he was grieving too and would still grieve were he alive today. Because the tomb of fascism remains empty and that is truly cause for grief.