Voices of the Betrayed
HERRICK, WILLIAM
Voices of the Betrayed Blood Of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War By Ronald Fraser Pantheon. 628 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by William Herrick Author, "Golcz," "Hermanos!" How, one...
...Spain today is perhaps fortunate that it was (one must be thankful for small blessings), for his death gave democracy a chance to thrive...
...The Anarchists laughed good-naturedly...
...In "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias," Federico Garcia Lorca wrote: Nobody knows you...
...What the others thought I don't know—perhaps they truly thought of themselves as an-ti-Fascists and nothing more, but I knew I was more...
...rolled over us like the roar of a thousand canons, made our eardrums pop, goose-pimpled our skin...
...The Anarcho-Syndicalists had it in their fists, but their apolitical tradition was so strong it would have been a betrayal of their principles to develop means for the revolutionary working class and peasantry to take power...
...It is my belief to this very day that when that voice was neglected, betrayed, muted, the war was lost to Franco...
...Reading this monumental book, it becomes clear that there was a serious lack of leadership in the dissident Left...
...It tells the truth...
...The following afternoon, as several comrades and I strolled through the streets of Figueros, we were greeted everywhere with "Long live the revolution...
...others, however, believed that the war and the revolution were indivisible...
...Particularly sad were the Communist tailor or peasant or worker or student who believed that because the Soviet Union supplied arms—and secret police—their efficient party would lead them to victory...
...Ronald Fraser's Blood of Spain does so as well...
...The Falange did not win, the Church did not win, the Carl-ists did not win, the Spanish working class and peasantry certainly did not win...
...I cried, and those marching with me cried...
...Up came our right fists, and the answer, "Long live the Popular Front...
...How, one wonders, can a book on the Spanish Civil War be fair to Falangists, Franquists, Right-wing conservatives, moderate conservatives, monarchists, Carlists, the Church, Communists, Right-wing Socialists, Left-wing Socialists, dissident Communists like the Partido Obrero de Unification—Marxista (pouMists) and the Trotskyists, republicans, democrats, Catalan autonomists, Basque autonomists, the apolitical...
...Long live liberty...
...Joaquin Maurin, a pouMist leader, was caught behind the Nationalist lines and imprisoned...
...to describe what civil war, revolution and counterrevolution felt like from inside both camps...
...I for one wanted to respond, "Long live the revolution...
...but I was a disciplined Communist, and the Popular Front was to be our instrument for winning the war, the primary goal...
...Dressed in our International Brigade uniforms, a little ragged I admit, we entered a "fancy" restaurant, only to be stopped at the door by a man in a tuxedo...
...No hay pan" (no bread), he said...
...He called the police...
...Blood of Spain reinforces this view...
...Anarchist leader Buenaventura Dur-ruti was killed by a sniper's bullet early in the war...
...to discover the outlook and motivations of the participants, willing or unwilling...
...What a terrible waste of passionate devotion to freedom, of very life...
...Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth...
...When the first group of American volunteers to the International Brigades, among whom I was one, entered Spain on January 2, 1937, almost six months after the beginning of the war, we were greeted by Anarchist frontier guards, left fists raised in salute, shouting "Long live the revolution...
...Federi-ca Montseny, another Anarchist leader, joined the Popular Front government and lost contact with what was happening behind the lines...
...Almost a year after I entered Spain, several comrades and I, all wounded veterans, who were on our way out, stopped in Valencia, the seat of the Popular Front government...
...I had been a Communist since birth, and what I thought was, "This is the true voice of the revolution, of Socialism, of liberty...
...With great patience, industry, knowledge, intelligence and no little imagination, he has interwoven the accounts so that what we are reading is not 300 separate oral histories but a continuing dialogue among fighters for both sides as the war progresses from beginning to end...
...Ronald Fraser has done it by presenting the oral histories of 300 eyewitnesses—adherents of the myriad political entities (he lists some 15 for the Nationalists, some 30 for the Republic), women both feminist and traditional, generals, privates, government officials, party leaders, the rich and the poor, those who were children at the time...
...If there is one binding theme throughout Fraser's book, it is an attempt to resolve this issue...
...In his Foreword, the author describes the book as "an attempt to reveal the intangible atmosphere of events...
...A more central theme is the conflict of policy in the Republic camp that created such bloody dissension...
...In Barcelona the next morning, as we and other just-arrived International volunteers marched down the Ram-bias, we were greeted by what seemed a million Catalans, a tumultuous holiday crowd...
...For the revolution was defeated not by Franco, but by the leaders of the Popular Front government, urged on and frequently led by the Communist Party, by Palmiro Togliatti (the Comintern representative in Spain), by the likes of Erno Gerd, Carlos Contreras, Enrique Lister, la Pasionaria...
...Lorca, murdered by nationalist assassins, spoke for all those who fell, for all Spain...
...Franco won, going on to rule Spain for almost 40 years...
...Yes, the revolution was lost, and so was the war, though it still had more than a year to go...
...Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety...
...They owned the streets...
...And he has succeeded admirably, in large part because of his method...
...There was no totalitarian party to replace him, as there was in Russia when Stalin died, as there would have been in Germany if Hitler had won the War and his time had come...
...Perhaps only a Rosa Luxemburg could have led a Democratic Socialist revolution in Spain—it was her kind of revolution, from the bottom up, spontaneous, voluntary...
...One of the major themes that emerges is that there was no victor—except Francisco Franco...
...Shouts of "Long live the revolution...
...Bui I sing of you...
...With the revolution defeated, it became a war between two regular armies, one well-armed and effectively led, the other a divided shambles—part well-armed under Communist and republican leadership, part always in need of a bullet under Anarchists and POUMists...
...Franco's was, in short, an old-fashioned one-man dictatorship...
...Still, one can't blame Communist perfidy or policy alone...
...We told him we knew all about no bread, we'd be satisfied to eat what those already in the restaurant were eating...
...Again we responded, "Long live the Popular Front...
...We could see the well-dressed diners and smell the succulent food...
...The red banners of Socialism, the black banners of Anarchism, the red, gold and purple banners of the Republic were vying with the Catalan sun...
...The Communist line was first the war, then the revolution...
...Other revolutionary leaders were imprisoned, harassed, killed...
...It breathes with life...
...The Spanish people didn't stand a chance...
...Whether one reads the testimony of Communist or pouMist, Libertarian or Socialist, republican or democrat, one again feels that passionate desire for Socialism and liberty, and one again becomes infuriated at how this hope was squandered by those who led the Spanish people against Franco and his allies...
...A witness in Blood of Spain puts to rest the rumor that the Communists or one of his own disgruntled comrades killed him...
...When he died, Francoism inevitably died with him...
...Andreu Nin, theoretician of the poum—and the first national leader of a party calling itself revolutionary Marxist to discard the belief in the dictatorship of one party—was killed by the Soviet GPU...
...We asked the man at the door why he was turning us back...
...Of the signal maturity of your understanding...
...For posterity I sing of your profile and grace...
Vol. 62 • October 1979 • No. 20
