Regarding the Spanish Civil War

“For example:  for many years I “knew” that Stalin and his damned commissars were responsible for losing the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War to the fascists. The stalinists’ violent repression of the anarchists and independent socialists there had stabbed the most militant center of the working class in the back, and thus fatally weakened the ground-breaking class war. i mean, not that i knew much or anything at all about Spanish history, but like so many others i had read George Orwell’s moving first-hand account of the war, Homage to Catalonia, and it all fit as neatly as a cherry on top of a banana split. A one-book education. i never questioned it.

By karma, back then i knew an older Maoist comrade who actually had been a young soldier with the International Brigades fighting in that Spanish Civil War. Thinking it strange that up to then we’d freely talked about our own confused 1960s movement politics, but he had never brought up his war experiences in Spain, one afternoon i asked him what he thought of Orwell’s book. My friend jumped to his feet and started cursing. He thought that Orwell was a dishonest asshole, and his self-serving version of the anti-fascist Civil War a fabric of clever novelistic half-truths and distortions. The way this older comrade described his war came from a completely different angle than any i’d thought of before then. It really took me aback.

He told me: “In the field hospital I saw wounded die for nothing, freezing to death in the cold overnight without blankets, because someone had fucked up the supply list. Do you think Stalin had blankets withheld to increase his power? ” My Maoist friend’s angry sarcasm had a sharp point:  that the whole war was fucked. To him the two sides in Spain, fascist-clericalist versus liberal and ­left Republican, unfortunately were also the militarily competent versus the idealistic but not-yet competent. He said that all the revolutionaries, the socialists and communists no less than the anarchists, were stumbling around trying to learn how to build a new kind of society there for the first time with the clock running. While with the other hand also fighting a new type of total war against an advancing, experienced mercenary colonialist army, with plenty of guns, artillery and air squadrons.

To him this was a tragic loss in a far deeper way than abstractly our team versus their team. It was his experiences in Spain, my friend said, that made him an early Maoist sympathizer. Since it was a sign of real hope to him and his comrades in Spain that while their flickering progressive Republic was being inexorably crushed by the fascists, in remote regions of China that Red Army was solving the problem of survival in combat against even the largest capitalist armies. No small thing to my friend, after losing so badly, with more real life casualties he knew than he wanted to remember.

He also said that contrary to what Orwell wrote about, anarchism was a real military problem in Spain. To my surprise, he wasn’t talking about the Durruti Column or other legendary anarchist workers’ formations. He was talking about what he considered latent or basic anarchism within the International Brigades, which was stalinist, remember.  Like most wars, that one was fought by the young, in many cases teenagers no older than fifteen or sixteen years old (the Canadian naturalist R.D. Lawrence had enlisted as a Spanish anti-fascist infantryman back then when he was only fourteen. He was so short that his rifle slung over the shoulder kept almost bumping the ground—but as he said, “no one cared how old you were if you could shoot a gun.”)

Whenever a fascist offensive somewhere would start, many of the eager young volunteers would spontaneously “desert to the Front.” Taking their rifle and hitching rides on supply trucks or trains to wherever the most intense fighting was. Abruptly leaving their own units short of soldiers. Training plans and readiness and new moves on its own front upset.

Since it is hard to successfully plan an overall war that way, “deserting to the Front” was quickly banned. Soldiers were talked to about revolutionary discipline, etc. etc. Nevertheless, just like with sex, when romanticism and adrenalin flood the heart, young dudes aren’t always thinking ahead to the larger picture. And the men who did this felt that no blame could be attached to any individual who decided to just go off more bravely by themselves into the fighting. Spontaneous soldiering just went on.

Finally, the commanders decided that a sobering line had to be drawn. The next time it happened, a pretty blameless but undisciplined young American revolutionary was selected for charges, court-martialed, and then executed by his own buddies. Their shooting was understandably bad and the condemned comrade was badly wounded, not cleanly killed. So their unit’s commissar (a young tough guy from Brooklyn, my comrade recalled) had to step up, draw his pistol and finish him. Then the commissar wrote the soldier’s parents a letter of condolence, saying that their son had died bravely fighting the fascists. But when their unit returned home, the working class stalinist commissar used his pistol once more, on himself. The whole thing was hushed up by the movement. Isn’t it always?” - J Sakai, Beginner’s Kata