No honour due these vets

by John Thompson

January 26, 2004

Decades have passed since the end of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict which ran from July 1936 to April 1939 and which claimed some 1.5 million lives, but its romantic allure still has the power to attract.

In March 2004, a special exhibit is being mounted in Toronto about the war — with particular focus on the Canadian volunteers who fought on one side of the war. The members of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion were a part of the International Brigades who volunteered for service, and the survivors have sought recognition for their role ever since. However, they really might not deserve it.

The Spanish Civil War was a savage ideological conflict that presaged the coming of the Second World War. On one side were the Nationalist Rebels — a mélange of traditional Spanish conservatives, ultra-Catholic Monarchists, Spain’s own homegrown Fascist Party, Muslim mercenaries from Spanish Morocco, and a substantial foreign contribution. This last included troops from Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, Hitler’s Luftwaffe, and a variety of sympathetic foreign volunteers.

For decades, the automatic assumption about the International Brigades was that, because they were fighting against Fascism, and Fascism is evil, then the "Mack-Paps" were fighting for goodness and light. This wasn’t the case. The Republican government had little to recommend it, and most of those who fought for it were the agents of some disreputable ideologies too.

For over a century before the Civil War, Spanish politics had been locked between Left and Right and both positions had become entrenched. The Left sought to drag Spain, literally kicking and screaming, in one direction, while the Right conditioned itself to oppose any change that the Left proposed. The Spanish Republic of 1936 was an elected government composed of a left-of-centre Coalition with a strong element from the extreme left — Communists, Trotskyites, Anarchists and so on. Conciliation and compromise was not a part of their agenda.

In an atmosphere of impending Leftist revolution, mob violence and assassinations increased and Spain rapidly destabilized. When the generals staged a military revolt in July 1936, it was partly out of personal survival, let alone from the desire to preserve the world they knew. Both the Republican Loyalists and the Nationalist Rebels quickly saw the advantages in war… all the normal conventions of law went out the window, and it became easy to shoot the people that annoyed you.

The Nationalists shot schoolteachers, union organizers and other dangerous subversives as their columns occupied towns and knit rebel-held positions together. Republican mobs in that frenzied summer of 1936 murdered nuns and priests, landowners, and woe betide any petty bourgeoisie who fell into the clutches of Durruti’s anarchists. Things went downhill from there.

While many people remember that Mussolini and Hitler aided the Nationalists, it is often forgotten that Stalin (whose hands were at least as bloody) came to the aid of the Republicans: sending artillery, tanks, warplanes… and political advisors.

All across the world, Radical leftists were excited by the Civil War and were eager to support the Republic. Stalin and the Soviets were eager to make sure that they could eliminate those elements of the Left that did not belong to the Comintern (the Soviet controlled international agency for conventional Marxist Leninists). Soviet advisors saw to it that Durruti’s anarchists were used as shock troops until destroyed by high casualties. Other anarchists, the Trotskyite POUM militia and Catalan nationalists were crushed in internal fighting in Barcelona, and political commissars were inserted into the International Brigades.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, the archives of the Comintern were available for foreign researchers. Among the records that came up were the reports of the commissars in the International Brigades — including political assessments of many individual members, their suitability for further ‘party work’ (including espionage), or recommendations for discipline. Some were even ‘liquidated’ for being ‘disruptive’. The Canadians in the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion were subjected to this scrutiny as well.

The Soviets were also keen to get their hands on travel documents to support their espionage activities. Incoming members of the International Brigades were expected to hand over their passports. Typically, the Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion refused to do such, but the ‘Mac-Paps’ surrendered theirs — and Canadian passports kept turning up in the hands of Soviet agents for years afterwards.

After two and a half years, the Nationalists won under the leadership of Francisco Franco (A conservative general, not a fascist per se — and one of the very few who ever said ‘No’ to Adolph Hitler’s face and got away with it). The victors used firing squads and concentration camps to eliminate tens of thousands of people, and Spain remained a stagnant backwater until Franco’s death. However, Spain stayed neutral in the Second World War, and remained stable until Franco’s chosen successor government turned it into the vibrant and prosperous nation it is today.

One wonders how things might have turned out had the Nationalists not won — especially given the growing Soviet presence in the Republican government as the war went on. Given how the Soviets behaved in those days, and what Hitler would have done to a Republican Spain, things probably would have turned out far worse.

As it was, the International Brigades were sent home as the end drew close, but they preserved their romantic illusions about their cause for years — but some illusions are simply not worth keeping.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca