The story of the International Brigades – the men and women who read the writing on the wall and came to Spain in the hope of landing a decisive blow against fascism before World War II – naturally appeals to my idealistic side. While many were committed communists or anarchists, many others, like Orwell were, in McCarthy Era parlance, “fellow travelers” – those who sympathized with the cause of class struggle but were not necessarily committed to a particular ideology. In fact, Orwell’s experience with the Communist Party in Spain turned him into a fierce opponent of the Party, though not an opponent of class struggle.
Orwell spent most of his time in Spain in Barcelona (for training and on furlough) and on the Catalonian front. He served with the POUM, a Catalan anarchist party that opposed the Stalinists. The POUM militia units had no hierarchy and were all-volunteer units. Orwell, arriving in Spain in December of 1936, was deeply impressed by the state of affairs in Barcelona:
“I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing . . . when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming . . . There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for . . . Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes.”
The buildings were covered in political posters for the different parties and up and down the Ramblas, people were dressed modestly, singing the anthems of the different parties and listening to speeches.
The Spanish Civil War is often considered a microcosm of the history of 20th century Europe. It was – all at the same time – a struggle for democracy against feudalism, the monarchy, the Catholic Church, and a fascist military coup d’état, and a class revolution complicated by a struggle among the left as to what exactly that revolution would look like. Franco was aligned with Hitler and Mussolini, but because of the policy of “appeasement”, only the Soviet Union and Mexico supported the Republicans (thus the arrival of international volunteers, many of whom later lost their citizenship for fighting in Spain, or the case of the American volunteers, were persecuted during the McCarthy Era for being “premature anti-fascists”).
In Orwell’s account, it was the Soviet Union that ironically impeded the development of a class-based revolution in Spain. The USSR held the purse strings and military know-how, but Orwell contends that they were more interested in proving to Western Europe that their interests were not opposite. They eventually purged the anarchists after street fighting broke out between the communist and anarchist factions in Barcelona.
Because Orwell was intellectually honest, he was able to denounce the fascists, and eventually the Communist Party, with equal authority, and of course the books for which he is most famous critique totalitarianism in any form. Fundamentally, he was a humanist. The same things that attracted Orwell to anarchism as political theory and practice in Spain are what attracted me: a belief in economic and social equality, true democratic self-organization, decentralization and autonomy. In essence, it’s a much more human and democratic form of Socialism (though unfortunately it’s become more or less a fad for rebellious teenagers clad in black who don’t understand the first thing about it).
Student organized and led teach-in on anarchism as political theory in the Plaza Brazil in Santiago
Orwell was most impressed by the workers’ self-organization into collectives in Catalonia – the lack of a vanguard, the transformation of the culture and the basically democratic nature of the transformation:
“The workers’ militias, based on the trade unions and each composed of people of approximately the same political opinions, had the effect of canalizing into one place all of the most revolutionary sentiment in the country. I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory, it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it . . .”
In fact, despite all he’s suffered through and all of the disillusionments he’s experienced, he recognizes in retrospect that he has “been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug.” Strangely enough, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm writes at the very end of the book that “ . . . the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.”
Of course, despite Orwell’s optimism at the time he wrote the book, the fascists did emerge victorious in Spain and Franco remained in power until his death in 1975. As with many of the right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, Franco was an ally of the United States after the war because of his staunch opposition to communism during the Cold War.
By some strange coincidence, I happened to be sitting next to an old man who proudly told me about having met Franco in
Spain many years ago, just as I was finishing reading Orwell’s book on a long bus ride. This old man was what progressive young people refer to as “facho” or a “momio”. Facho is slang for fascist, and has a pretty broad application: anything related to Pinochet is facho, but so are bourgeois values, racism and neoliberalism. Momio has a more specific meaning – it literally means mummy and refers to the old men who seem stuck in the mindset of the Pinochet Era.
This guy on the bus, for example, was a latifundista (big landowner) from the Central Valley. He bragged to me about how he had driven out government officials during Allende’s attempts at land reform. He referred me several times to the “International Communist conspiracy” – who knew that anyone still believed in that! And he repeated all of the typical right-wing bullshit about the left: that Pinochet saved the nation from communists and that Allende was in bed with Fidel Castro and that the Russians were planning to come to his aid. He even insisted that there were no indigenous people in Chile – that that was an invention of the International Communist conspiracy. And then he told me his views on the disintegration of the family, role of women, etc.
Ironically, we had begun with an agreeable conversation about agriculture, a topic that interests me greatly since working on the Blue Diamond campaign. Because of the similarity of the land and climate, but the opposite seasons, Chile grows and exports the fruits and vegetables that Americans enjoy but can’t be grown in the US in the winter. We talked about subsidies to US grain farmers and both agreed that they were injust. And then we moved into crazy right-wing conspiracy theory territory and I just nodded my head and took advantage of the opportunity to see what these folks think.
The dictatorship in Spain ended 15 years earlier than the dictatorship in Chile, and lasted twice as long, but there are still some interesting comparisons to be made. Ideologically, they were very similar: staunch opposition to communism, a defense of the church and traditional values, and economic policies favoring the upper classes. But while the end of the dictatorship in Spain ushered in a cultural renaissance celebrating freedom and sexuality (think Pedro Almodovar and 1980s Spanish punk rock), change has been relatively slow in Chile. In fact, today Spain has perhaps the most proactively left-wing government in Western Europe, but I suppose that it’s important to remember that the PSOE came to power a long twenty-five years after democracy was restored. Perhaps in another decade, we’ll see a comparable shift in Chile.
The notion of living in a post-dictatorship society is difficult to wrap your head around if you’ve lived in a country that’s never had a break from democracy. It is a constant point of reference: what were things like then and what are they like now; how much have we really changed; how do we transcend the past. In fact, Aylwin, the first president after Pinochet had actually supported the coup d’etat, and broad swaths of the Chilean upper classes and even lower classes continue to believe that the dictatorship was necessary, in fact referring to Pinochet as the “presidente” as if he had been a legitimate leader. I heard one of the women in my collective say recently that Chileans are stuck politically because they still live with the mindset of the dictatorship. Very few of the perpetrators of the worse human rights offenses during the Pinochet era have been brought to justice, and so there is an uneasy sense of continuity with the authoritarian past.
One area in which this is particularly visible is the police, who as I’ve mentioned are strongly disliked. Sitting in the park in Barrio Brasil the other afternoon, I saw a paco driving around on a motorcycle and stopping random groups of young students, making them empty their pockets and show their ID cards. Although it has been illegal to stop people for “sospecho” (suspicion) since the end of the dictatorship, it is very common. And to give another example, I happened to be walking by the Moneda (the presidential palace) the other day during a demonstration for housing for the poor: armored vehicles sprayed the crowd indiscriminately with fire houses and police in riot gear rushed into the crowd and arrested people en masse. I found this all to be very alarming, but again, it’s very common here. It’s should be instructive for us as Americans to recognize how difficult it is regain rights and rebuild a culture of democracy once it’s gone.
Stencil in Pucon: "Against the Collective Amnesia of the Country" (the man in the picture is Salvador Allende)
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