6 ms·

All these years later and these guys are still trying to rewrite history. There were very few good guys in this conflict, other than the ones who were duped in

All these years later and these guys are still trying to rewrite history. There were very few good guys in this conflict, other than the ones who were duped into going there, such as the Lincoln Battalion, and used. For a balanced viewpoint on this history: https://www.amazon.com/Comrades-Commissars-Lincoln-Battalion-Spanish/dp/0271029102/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524589009&sr=1-1&keywords=Cecil+D.+Eby https://www.amazon.com/Comrades-Commissars-Lincoln-Battalion...

Avshalom 9y ago
The article doesn't really try to paint them as good guys? It's mostly a list of things that happened before concluding that the anarchists were completely unprepared for partial success which caused them to fracture and ally them selves with various lesser-of-two-evil factions which further fractured them leading to their eventual irrelevance.
- mrslave 9y ago
  Is the problem with anarchists that they cannot stay together?
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    In the case of the Spanish civil war, the problem was that the communists and the fascists both wanted them killed, and so with some effort they succeeded.
    - jancsika 9y ago
      Any documentary evidence that elucidates why the communists were against the anarchists?
      - mercurial 9y ago
        The strategy of the Stalin-backed communists was to not alienate the middle class. The anarchists, on the other hand, were not about letting war get in the way if social reform, and had taken over factories and collectivised land. It was also a good opportunity for Stalin to purge communists not allied with the USSR.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - rumcajz 9y ago
        Also see the history of anarchist "Free Territory" in present-day Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory
      - coldtea 9y ago
        Loads and loads of books, historical documents, documentaries , and so on on the matter. Not just in Spain, in USSR and elsewhere too. In fact the ideological enmity between communists and anarchists starts even back at the time of Bakhunin and Marx (and they were many critiques from one to another).
        dgarceran 9y ago
        Yes, in the first years of the Federación Regional: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federaci%C3%B3n_Regional_Espa%C3%B1ola_de_la_AIT https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federaci%C3%B3n_Regional_Espa%... in fact from their separation the socialist party (PSOE, the second most voted party in SPain nowadays) was created by Pablo Iglesias.
      - hutzlibu 9y ago
        In short: communists generally wanted a central government/(controlled by he socialist party). And anarchists not.
    - m0skit0 9y ago
      Anarchists also attacked communists when it suited them. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Ses%C3%A9 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Ses%C3%A9
- paulific 9y ago
  Well its a marxist magazine, so its essentially pushing a political line that the anarchists were wrong not to pursuing socialist goals.
msrpotus 9y ago
I'll take misguided socialists and communists over fascists and Nazis any day.
- strken 9y ago
  The question at hand is not whether you would support Franco, because pretty much nobody is going to own up to that; it's who you would support out of the insanely complicated web of alliances that made up the Republic. The Russians managed to acquire millions of dollars of gold reserves from the Republic in exchange for a disappointing array of weaponry, distributed only to their cronies, and accompanied by incompetent military advisors who were more interested in looking good back home than in winning the war. The anarchist unions seem to get more respect, but there's a strong argument that they were militarily ineffective, that their resistance to the Russia-aligned PSUC was destabilising at a critical period, and that the middle of a war against ascendant fascism was not the greatest time in the world to start redistributing land and making enormous social reforms. That's not even getting into Catalan/Basque independence, all the little minor parties, the different police factions, the wave of assassinations that led up the war (though fewer in number and in response to similar assassinations), the immense difficulty of forming a stable government, etc. Reading into the war gave me a greater awareness of exactly how badly the "good guys" can behave, while in no way mitigating the horrors the Nationalist faction committed.
  - mrtree 9y ago
    Franco wasn't so bad guys.
  - m0skit0 9y ago
    Soviets, not Russians. Stalin was not Russian.
- krakatau1 9y ago
  No. I'll take Franco over socialists and communists every day. At the end of the day you have property, order and hierarchy.
frabbit 9y ago
The Lincoln Brigade/Battalion were not dupes. They were the only Americans who actually volunteered to fight fascism, while large numbers of their countrymen and corporations actively collaborated with it. They were exploited and betrayed, but the same could be said for the majority that stayed home and later were sent off to be slaughtered by the power that the USA worked with "against communism". And at the least the CPUSA volunteers had some agency. Eby's book is good though.
- markvdb 9y ago
  Makes me think of Pete Seeger[0]'s songs about "his friends who went to Spain" (example [1] ). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqe7LpBUzqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqe7LpBUzqU
- ptaipale 9y ago
  I actually think one is not very wise to go and fight fascists when it is quite obvious that if you contribute to a win, the harvest will be collected by stalinists. Of course we could say that at the time it was too hard to see, but Purges had already been going on for long, with millions dead in murders and famines, and people knew. Many just chose not to believe.
  - lsc 9y ago
    "If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the house of commons." Hitler was as involved in the Spanish civil war as Stalin. During the following great war, the allies decided that Stalin was the lessor of the two evils, and I think that history has largely judged that to not have been the wrong decision.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Of course we could say that at the time it was too hard to see, but Purges had already been going on for long, with millions dead in murders and famines, and people knew. Many just chose not to believe. There was also the fact that they didn't had many legs to stand on. What Stalin did to its own people, the western powers did the same and worse in their colonial territories. Mass executions, dictatorships, torture, forced labour, police brutality, concentration camps, state-caused famines, and the like. Just one example: "On the pretext of a slight to their consul, the French invaded Algeria in 1830. Directed by Marshall Bugeaud, who became the first Governor-General of Algeria, the conquest was violent, marked by a "scorched earth" policy designed to reduce the power of the native rulers Dey; this included massacres, mass rapes, and other atrocities. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000, from approximately 3 million Algerians, were killed within the first three decades of the conquest." It didn't continue any better than that. In fact, until the very 60s, decades after WWII ended, the police beat to death 100 demonstrators, not in some remote backwater, but in Paris itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 And that's just one example from France. There are many other examples from France, Britain, Belgium, and so on. Besides, they could not care less for the Jews. What they wanted, and fought Germany for, was not to let it rule the world (trade lines, developing nations, crucial territories and so on) -- the same thing WWI, WWII, and the Cold War happened for. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267 https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Avshalom 9y ago

The article doesn't really try to paint them as good guys? It's mostly a list of things that happened before concluding that the anarchists were completely unprepared for partial success which caused them to fracture and ally them selves with various lesser-of-two-evil factions which further fractured them leading to their eventual irrelevance.

mrslave 9y ago
Is the problem with anarchists that they cannot stay together?
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  In the case of the Spanish civil war, the problem was that the communists and the fascists both wanted them killed, and so with some effort they succeeded.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    Any documentary evidence that elucidates why the communists were against the anarchists?
    - mercurial 9y ago
      The strategy of the Stalin-backed communists was to not alienate the middle class. The anarchists, on the other hand, were not about letting war get in the way if social reform, and had taken over factories and collectivised land. It was also a good opportunity for Stalin to purge communists not allied with the USSR.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - rumcajz 9y ago
      Also see the history of anarchist "Free Territory" in present-day Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Loads and loads of books, historical documents, documentaries , and so on on the matter. Not just in Spain, in USSR and elsewhere too. In fact the ideological enmity between communists and anarchists starts even back at the time of Bakhunin and Marx (and they were many critiques from one to another).
      - dgarceran 9y ago
        Yes, in the first years of the Federación Regional: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federaci%C3%B3n_Regional_Espa%C3%B1ola_de_la_AIT https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federaci%C3%B3n_Regional_Espa%... in fact from their separation the socialist party (PSOE, the second most voted party in SPain nowadays) was created by Pablo Iglesias.
    - hutzlibu 9y ago
      In short: communists generally wanted a central government/(controlled by he socialist party). And anarchists not.
  - m0skit0 9y ago
    Anarchists also attacked communists when it suited them. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Ses%C3%A9 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Ses%C3%A9
paulific 9y ago
Well its a marxist magazine, so its essentially pushing a political line that the anarchists were wrong not to pursuing socialist goals.

msrpotus 9y ago

I'll take misguided socialists and communists over fascists and Nazis any day.

strken 9y ago
The question at hand is not whether you would support Franco, because pretty much nobody is going to own up to that; it's who you would support out of the insanely complicated web of alliances that made up the Republic. The Russians managed to acquire millions of dollars of gold reserves from the Republic in exchange for a disappointing array of weaponry, distributed only to their cronies, and accompanied by incompetent military advisors who were more interested in looking good back home than in winning the war. The anarchist unions seem to get more respect, but there's a strong argument that they were militarily ineffective, that their resistance to the Russia-aligned PSUC was destabilising at a critical period, and that the middle of a war against ascendant fascism was not the greatest time in the world to start redistributing land and making enormous social reforms. That's not even getting into Catalan/Basque independence, all the little minor parties, the different police factions, the wave of assassinations that led up the war (though fewer in number and in response to similar assassinations), the immense difficulty of forming a stable government, etc. Reading into the war gave me a greater awareness of exactly how badly the "good guys" can behave, while in no way mitigating the horrors the Nationalist faction committed.
- mrtree 9y ago
  Franco wasn't so bad guys.
- m0skit0 9y ago
  Soviets, not Russians. Stalin was not Russian.
krakatau1 9y ago
No. I'll take Franco over socialists and communists every day. At the end of the day you have property, order and hierarchy.

frabbit 9y ago

The Lincoln Brigade/Battalion were not dupes. They were the only Americans who actually volunteered to fight fascism, while large numbers of their countrymen and corporations actively collaborated with it. They were exploited and betrayed, but the same could be said for the majority that stayed home and later were sent off to be slaughtered by the power that the USA worked with "against communism". And at the least the CPUSA volunteers had some agency. Eby's book is good though.

markvdb 9y ago
Makes me think of Pete Seeger[0]'s songs about "his friends who went to Spain" (example [1] ). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqe7LpBUzqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqe7LpBUzqU
ptaipale 9y ago
I actually think one is not very wise to go and fight fascists when it is quite obvious that if you contribute to a win, the harvest will be collected by stalinists. Of course we could say that at the time it was too hard to see, but Purges had already been going on for long, with millions dead in murders and famines, and people knew. Many just chose not to believe.
- lsc 9y ago
  "If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the house of commons." Hitler was as involved in the Spanish civil war as Stalin. During the following great war, the allies decided that Stalin was the lessor of the two evils, and I think that history has largely judged that to not have been the wrong decision.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Of course we could say that at the time it was too hard to see, but Purges had already been going on for long, with millions dead in murders and famines, and people knew. Many just chose not to believe. There was also the fact that they didn't had many legs to stand on. What Stalin did to its own people, the western powers did the same and worse in their colonial territories. Mass executions, dictatorships, torture, forced labour, police brutality, concentration camps, state-caused famines, and the like. Just one example: "On the pretext of a slight to their consul, the French invaded Algeria in 1830. Directed by Marshall Bugeaud, who became the first Governor-General of Algeria, the conquest was violent, marked by a "scorched earth" policy designed to reduce the power of the native rulers Dey; this included massacres, mass rapes, and other atrocities. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000, from approximately 3 million Algerians, were killed within the first three decades of the conquest." It didn't continue any better than that. In fact, until the very 60s, decades after WWII ended, the police beat to death 100 demonstrators, not in some remote backwater, but in Paris itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 And that's just one example from France. There are many other examples from France, Britain, Belgium, and so on. Besides, they could not care less for the Jews. What they wanted, and fought Germany for, was not to let it rule the world (trade lines, developing nations, crucial territories and so on) -- the same thing WWI, WWII, and the Cold War happened for. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267 https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]