WAS THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR "OUR CAUSE"?
Howe, Irving
The October 1986 issue of the neoconservative magazine the New Criterion carried an article, "Spain and the Intellectuals," by Ronald Radosh, a member of the Dissent editorial board. All of us...
...And this, ultimately, is why Spain is so important: because it shows what happens to revolutionary causes that ally themselves with the Communists and are dependent on their Soviet patron...
...households received 42.3 percent of all after-tax income in the country in 1984...
...Years later Octavio Paz, who fought in Spain and has long been a staunch anti-Communist, would write in The Labyrinth of Solitude that he had found in Spain "a desperate hopefulness...
...But this was an early view that Paz later changed in the light of events...
...Howe asks me accusingly...
...The basic thrust of Radosh's piece, if not its explicit or clear conclusion, is to question the political-moral rightness of having supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War...
...He did so because past history permitted only one conclusion: Communist "liberation" meant horrible oppression for the very people it pretended to serve...
...And true to their record in the past, the Communists crushed not only their enemies, but all their partners in the liberation struggle as well...
...Speaking in 1947 from Soviet Russia, which had become her adopted nation, she said: "Spain was the first example of a `people's democracy...
...A chastened veteran of Spain, Paz turns today to Nicaragua where in his words "a popular uprising, . . . national in scope," was taken over by "an elite of revolutionary cadres" whose aim was to set up "a bureauacratic-military dictatorship modeled on the one in Havana...
...As the war continued, writes Radosh, the Spanish Communists and their Soviet masters came increasingly to dominate the Republican side and introduced a terror against leftist dissidents...
...Franco took aid from Hitler, but in contrast, only gave the Germans mining rights...
...That is why we "still respond to the Spanish Civil War as ...`our cause,'" though neither now nor then "simply" so...
...In this century nothing is "simply"—except perhaps a certain kind of antiCommunism which in its intellectual style too closely resembles that which it opposes...
...To speak of "liberation" in this way, without specifying agencies or agendas, is to debase the political language in exactly the way Irving Howe once condemned the New Left for doing during the Vietnam War...
...The Republic's error was not that it took military aid from Moscow, but that it allowed the Soviets to take over the Republic...
...and Radosh is no more than half a century behind in saying this...
...For Howe, Franco's ends seem to justify the left's means: "Franco and his generals represented the growing power of European fascism," writes Howe, and their victory meant "an opening to world war...
...Unfortunately, history has been unkind to the illusions that Howe wants to revive...
...Long regarded as a clash between an antifascist Republic democratically elected and an insurgent military fascism, the war according to Radosh was actually one between two camps more or less equally repressive and equally guilty of atrocities...
...Yet the anti-Stalinist left, including the POUM (a Spanish left-socialist party) and the Spanish anarchists, both of whom suffered from the Stalinist repression, still felt that, even as they struggled for civil freedoms within the Republic, it was necessary to support and join the military campaign against Franco...
...In that struggle Howe took a stance on the left that required immense political courage, refusing to support the demonstrations and movements that promoted Hanoi- and NLF-defined "liberation" for Vietnam...
...Howe argues that black liberation, supposedly a different case, is unreservedly our cause...
...and we accept differences among ourselves as normal...
...Indeed, he writes, Republican practices revealed that "a similar atmosphere reigned in both camps...
...Because Hitler and Mussolini rushed to Franco's aid...
...Radosh criticizes those who cite Orwell's statement "that there was much he did not understand and did not even like about revolutionary Barcelona, yet 'I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.'" But this, notes Radosh, was written early in the Spanish war...
...Paz rejects what he calls the "simplistic nonsense" spoken by supporters of the Sandinistas, nonsense that apparently is wisdom to a majority of the editors of Dissent...
...Howe counters Weil's pessimism with a quote from Octavio Paz, who fought for the Republic and later wrote that he had found "hopefulness" in Spain...
...Why...
...All of us at Dissent speak and write as individuals...
...The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps and what not would in itself be enough to show how the land lay...
...The ends we seek, Paz reminds the left, "however lofty they may be, cannot be separated from the means we employ...
...From which Radosh concludes: Those brave men who gave their lives [fighting for the Republican side] had allowed themselves to be part of an ideological and propaganda instrument forged by the Comintern [Communist International...
...This is the highest level recorded since the Census Bureau began collecting these data in 1980...
...Do you support black liberation in South Africa...
...Anyone who has looked Hope in the face will never forget it...
...Here he writes in 1942: When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war—and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings— there is always the temptation to say: "One side is as bad as the other...
...No wonder that Maurin, founder of the Worker-Peasant Bloc, wrote twenty-five years after the war that "from the moment in which the alternative was posed...
...Without a "simply...
...It is also the weakest...
...To be sure...
...Consider H.R...
...Radosh concludes with a polemic against an Englishman who fought in Spain, later came to recognize the destructive role of the Communists, but still "does not regret his own part in the fight...
...FOR THOSE WILLING TO CONFRONT the historical facts, the news can only be disquieting...
...And so it was...
...But there were also liberals and anti-Stalinist leftists who supported the Republican side not at all "simply...
...Recently, Conor Cruise O'Brien has pointed out how the African National Congress Leninists at the universities seek "rigid ideological control, by people like themselves, both now and after apartheid is gone...
...q once the fascist threat had been removed and thereby the need for military aid from the Soviet Union lessened, democratically minded Spaniards might well have been able to reassert themselves...
...Their indiscriminate violence obscured "the very purposes of the struggle...
...His remarks appeared, appropriately, in an anthology titled 1984 Revisited, edited by Irving Howe: Let us give rein to our fantasy and imagine a day when the Soviet political system is roughly similar to that of Spain in the last ten years of Franco's rule...
...The Sandinista elite has created a "regime that is transforming itself day by day, before our very eyes, into a Communist dictatorship...
...Kolakowski had been the leading intellectual figure of Poland's first abortive attempt to gain a fraction of the freedom that Spain and its working classes eventually came to enjoy...
...Radosh's argument has its implications...
...In essence it was a class war...
...Had they looked closer, they could have discerned the truth at the time...
...He praises T.S...
...Stalin's cynical goal," writes Radosh, "was to steer internal developments in Spain to coincide with the foreign policy objectives of the Soviet Union...
...But the great majority of Spanish Republicans were not Communists and After-Tax Gap Widens The gap in after-tax income between the richest 20 percent of American households and the rest of the nation hit its widest point in 1984, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of the Census Bureau's aftertax income data for 1984...
...The lesson of Spain is a lesson for Central America and South Africa too...
...But Radosh's piece is so disturbing that I feel obliged to say a few words about it...
...But when Vietnam was actually liberated by a coalition controlled by the Communists and supplied by the Soviets, Howe was vindicated...
...q 99 In my original article I had written that Spain remains for most intellectuals on the left "a cause to be reaffirmed rather than investigated...
...What we do know, and what they certainly knew then, is that a Franco victory meant decades of fascism and an opening to world war...
...Can we be certain...
...Paz then invokes the same Simone Weil to refute leftist apologists for the guerrillas who claim that similar acts committed in Spain were not regarded as a "blot on the Republican cause...
...between the Communist Party, at the orders of Moscow, and the opposing military regime, reactionary but Spanish, the conclusion of the Civil War was predetermined...
...What else could account for his misrepresentation of my article as an argument against Republican Spain...
...98 cism...
...Turning to El Salvador he writes that "the terrorism of the military and of the ultraright is repeated, mirror-fashion, in the terrorism of the guerrillas...
...That is a possibility, of course...
...What do our readers think...
...For over a decade, the New Left denounced Howe as a traitor to the cause of Vietnamese liberation...
...More Indochinese were killed in the first three years of the Communist "liberations" of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, than on all sides in the thirteen years of the Vietnam War...
...there is no "party line...
...Irving Howe Adds For my part, the cause of Republican Spain, which even in the late 1930s my friends and I knew to be alloyed, is not "discredited...
...The clear implication of all this is that it was wrong or foolish to have supported the Republican side—though by inserting "simply" before "'our cause"' Radosh may be trying to leave himself a way out.* There were people who did "simply" cheer the Republic, and by now they should know it wasn't all that simple...
...Because the whole of progressive Spain— the democrats, the unions, the left, most intellectuals— had rallied to the Republic and been inspired by its promise.** Because Franco and his generals represented the growing power of European fas*In a passing remark Radosh seems again either to be backing away from the logic of his article or to be uneasy at the thought of facing it...
...It is a risk which in the modern world besets any struggle against fascism or military dictatorship...
...The Census data show that since 1980, the share of national after-tax income has dropped for households in every income fifth except for those in the top 20 percent...
...Does he go along with Winnie Mandela's statement that "with our matches and our necklaces we will liberate South Africa," in which she heralds the barbarism of the "comrades" in the ghettoes as her own program...
...One always thought Irving Howe had been among those who rejected such logic...
...Friendly to Hitler and hostile to the West, Stalin might have provided the Germans with the transit through Spain that Franco refused, allowing them to cut off Britain's vital access to the Mediterranean...
...later Orwell exposed "the new reality" of Stalinist terror in Spain...
...In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins...
...Stalin's subsequent alliance with Hitler, Franco's neutrality in the war, and Spain's gradual liberalization and eventual evolution into a democracy administered by Socialists has made the old myths comforting only to diehards...
...In fact, I clearly stated that I thought the Western embargo should have been lifted and that "the main threat to the world in the Thirties was that of . . . aggressive Hitlerism...
...What in these sordid histories provides Irving Howe with any basis for supposing that the path of Spain would have been different...
...But the most bitter commentary on the double standards of commentators on the left, like Howe, was made by Leszek Kolakowski...
...This takes for granted what cannot be demonstrated: that a Republican victory would necessarily have meant Communist domination...
...Howe thinks it foolish to acknowledge that both camps were "equally repressive and equally guilty of atrocities...
...Eliot for staying "aloof from the foolish chorus of Stalinist hosannas" about Republican Spain, but adds that Eliot was wrong to have opposed lifting the embargo on arms imposed by the Western powers...
...This is exactly the view held at the time by the "premature anti-fascists" of the left (whose "anti-fascism," be it remembered, previously directed at social democrats, had resulted in bringing Hitler to power...
...The top fifth's gain from 1983 to 1984 came largely at the expense of middle-income households...
...This is what liberation under Communist auspices means, whether in Spain, or Poland, or Vietnam, or South Africa, or Central America...
...Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side for reaction...
...But Orwell continued to believe that the Spanish Republic, with all its faults and failures, was "worth fighting for...
...HAD REPUBLICAN SPAIN WON THE WAR, writes Radosh, "there is little reason to assume that a Communist-dominated Republic would have shown any tolerance for dissent or even led to a subsiding of brutal internal terror...
...If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened...
...This seems quite in opposition to the bulk of his article—after all, one can hardly suppose that he took all that trouble just to convince the neocon readers of the New Criterion that Stalinism in Spain was bad...
...In 1986, those who still respond to the Spanish Civil War as simply "our cause" have no excuse...
...He will search for it wherever he goes...
...The next-to-the-bottom fifth received 11 percent, also a new low...
...In his most recent book he applies the lessons he has learned from the past to the present Central American conflicts (which are the hidden source of the emotions in this whole debate...
...households received 17.2 percent of the national income in 1984, the lowest level that has been recorded for this group...
...One would like to think, were he alive today, that George Orwell would have looked over the experience of revolutionary regimes, and, like Paz, rejected the attitude of those whose arguments are "no different from that of the Stalinists of thirty years ago...
...And this is what concerns those of us on the left who have not surrendered our memories of the past to the political opportunism of the present...
...The poorest fifth of all households received 4.7 percent of the national income in 1984, the same level as in the previous year but lower than in 1980...
...I am neutral...
...From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, the Communists had begun creating a series of "People's Democracies," exploiting left-wing coalitions and Soviet "aid" in a pattern similar to the tactics first developed in Republican Spain, and resulting in Communist police states totally dominated by the Soviet Union...
...But what needs to be stressed is that the Soviet intervention could be effective in good part because of the cynicism and cowardice of the Western democracies, all of which, in the name of neutrality, allowed the antifascist side to go down in defeat...
...That did in fact happen, but it was not sufficient reason not to work for the military defeat of the Nazis...
...Does Howe join him in that plea—or does he persist in simply supporting the struggle for liberation without reservations...
...Yet it has surfaced inexplicably, but unmistakably, in his insistence on loyalty to a discredited past...
...His reply to me follows...
...101...
...Like Octavio Paz...
...Rather than dispassionately addressing the historical issues, Howe seems intent on confronting me with a political gut check: Which side are you on...
...After 1936, the Communists dominated the Defense Ministry, the police, the propaganda, and the foreign policy of Spain...
...The top fifth of U.S...
...Or you might argue—does Radosh?—that it is wrong or futile to support the struggle for black liberation in South Africa since it could lead to Communist domination...
...Apparently yes...
...So he did...
...Simone Well thought otherwise...
...You might say—some people did—that it was hardly worth the trouble to defeat Hitler in the Second World War since one result would be Stalinist domination of large parts of Europe...
...The meaning of this was succinctly explained by the very symbol of the "good fight," La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri...
...The middle fifth of all U.S...
...100 This would be hailed by enlightened and liberal opinion of the West as the greatest triumph of democracy since Pericles and would ultimately prove the infinite superiority of the "Socialist democracy" over the bourgeois order...
...The memory will never leave me...
...Irving Howe's extraordinary attack on me confirms this assessment...
...She came to Spain to support a revolution "of starving peasants against landed proprietors and a clergy in league with them," but concluded that the tactics of the left—including those of the anarchists— made them no better than the Fascist enemy...
...Does Irving Howe—once the leading American spokesman for a democratic socialism—really need to be reminded of the connection between political means and ends...
...Rejecting their demands that he not teach in South Africa, O'Brien holds aloft the standard of democracy against the program of what "some on the left want to urge upon the society as a whole...
...This is the most crucial of his arguments...
...They did not lie or romanticize, they knew there were atrocities on both sides (civil wars are brutal), and they denounced publicly the role of the Stalinists in Spain...
...Howe avoids such perplexities by contending that a Republican victory would not have meant Communist domination...
...Trevor-Roper's suggestion in the New York Review of Books that Hitler's chances of achieving victory in the war might well have been strengthened had the Spanish Republic controlled by Stalin won...
...Franco, moreover, turned to Britain and not Germany for economic aid, and he refused to enter the war on Hitler's side, which Hugh Thomas calls a "remarkable achievement...
...But that's no reason to decide that black liberation in South Africa isn't "our cause...
...While after-tax household income grew between 1983 and 1984, typical black, Hispanic, and female-headed households still had less after-tax income than in 1980...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
