Spanish Lessons

The Spanish Civil War has always split Old Labour into its constituent subcultures. It did at the time.

The Hard Left is as ardently pro-Republican as ever, because of its myopia, even now, about Stalinism, because of its anti-Catholicism, and because of the general overrating of Orwell and because it oddly supposes that he was one of its own. The ILP Contingent fell at the hands of those for whom the International Brigades were fighting.

Meanwhile, Catholics, at least if pushed or if they know anything at all about it (as almost no younger Spaniards do, either), will still back the Falangists, whose ostensible Catholicism was a perversion defined by its reaction against other things, although there have been worse such before, at the same time, and since. Are there any Social Catholic who sought to fight Stalinism and ended up being killed by the Falangists, as the ILP Contingent sought to fight Falangism and ended up being killed by the Stalinists?

No one else will have much, if any, view on the matter. But we need to face facts. Even if Franco was no Hitler, neither side deserves our historical sympathy. Franco, as much as anything else, maintained, and occasionally tried to press, a territorial claim to staunchly Catholic and staunchly British Gibraltar.

Since Soviet archives were opened up, all sorts of information has come to light. It is invaluably set out in Stanley G. Payne's The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Invaluable.

The entire Republican cause was Comintern-directed, and the Soviet intervention was in no sense parasitic as has traditionally been supposed or asserted. For example, far from being commanded by a Canadian volunteer, the International Brigade was in fact commanded by Manfred Stern, a Soviet Commissar.

Or take Francisco Largo Cabellero, Socialist Party Leader and Popular Front Prime Minister. Entirely typically of his party, he defined it as a revolutionary force wholly distinct from British Labour or the French Socialists, and differing "only in words" from the Communists.

The Socialist Party's 10-point programme of 1934 was wholly Leninist in form and substance, calling, among other things, for the replacement of the Army and the Civil Guard with a workers' militia, and for the dissolution of the religious orders and the expropriation of their property. One could go on, and on, and on.

Stalin only loosened his grip once the Civil War was clearly lost, long after the Republicans themselves had given up what little commitment to democracy that they might ever have had.

None of that is to express any sympathy for Franco and his perversion of the Faith. Never was there a war more deserving of Henry Kissinger's observation relating to the conflict between Iran and Iraq: "It's a pity that only one of them can lose."