Monday, July 16, 2001

Yesterday the LA Times had a very interesting book section devoted to the Spanish Civil War. I love the LA Times Sunday book section. Even when it is weak, it displays an editorial personality absent from the NY Times Sunday book section.
Of particular note are the two essays by Bernard Knox and Christopher Hitchens. Knox writes as an old veteran of the International brigades, and would no doubt be jeered at as a dupe by the New Republic crowd. Hitchens has a nice piece on Orwell, prompted by a collection of Orwell�s pieces on the Civil War � which, of course, Orwell fought in. By accident, Orwell was able to experience the hunting down of the POUM, Andres Nin�s party � for which Serge tried, vainly, to get Trotsky to speak up � and which was defeated partly because Nin was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Stalinists. I�ve always thought Neruda�s part in these events was particularly dirty. Last year I read a biography of the photographer, Tina Modotti, and I was surprised to discover that she and her husband, a Soviet agent, played a part in this business � in fact, her husband might have been one of Nin�s torturers.
But I�m getting off topic � what is nice about Hitchens� piece is that he touches on a tension in his own perception of his intellectual forebears by contrasting Orwell and Auden. This is nice, since Hitchens too often lets Orwell off all the hooks. I admire Orwell, but there is a distinct streak in him of Puritanism � in a sense, it is this streak that made him such a bad prophet. Over and over again in the forties, Orwell took the lesson of the thirties to be that hedonistic societies had no chance against societies with strong anhedonistic ideologies � like fascism and communism. There had to be more steel in the liberal mix, in other words, for the democracies to survive. That lesson, though, was precisely wrong. An argument can be made that it was just the disgust with steel, its obsolescence as a motivation for collective action, that eventually undid the Soviet Union. The Russians wanted stuff. While the hedonistic West experienced, after Orwell, an explosion of hedonism. Orwell was very uncomfortable with that kind of thing, which is one reason he mistrusted the U.S. � there�s a very (unintentionally) funny essay Orwell wrote in the forties about American fashion magazines, which filled him with despair and disgust. That austerity was naturally not going to respond to Auden�s sensibility.
Finally, the lead review, of Radosh et. al.�s edition of documents relating to the Spanish Civil War culled from the Soviet Military Archives, is by Stanley Payne. Payne seems to bring a conservative p.o.v. to his reading of Radosh�s work � the point of which seems to be something like: the model of the Stalinist takeover of governments in Eastern Europe was developed in the 30s in Spain; projecting from that takeover, the better course was that Franco win, as he did. I think that the first thesis is partly true, and that the conclusion is nonsense. Payne thinks

Calendar Live - For Whom the Bell Tolls
The truth is that each of the Spanish leftist parties desired its own form of "People's Republic" or all-left republic, with all conservative political and economic interests liquidated. This was the root cause of the Civil War.

That, of course, is nonsense, like saying that the �root cause� of the American Civil war was Northern industrialism or something. It sets up the idea that Franco�s aggression, his invasion of the Republic, was some surface cause � some negligible event. It also divorces the Spanish Civil War from the history of Spain, a history in which, for the most part, the right had ruled � from the end of the Napoleonic wars all the way up to the early thirties. And that rule had been marked by the most ignorant, anti-semitic, anti-labor clericalism � by the wholesale oppression of unions, anarchists, and regionalists � and by the insufferable maneuvers of a dying ruling class to maintain an economically disastrous colonial system, with a swollen military. What Payne and Radosh are doing, actually, is quietly reviving the appeasement view of the thirties � it is a view that ignores the Nazi recognition that Franco was an ideological ally, and, further, surreptitiously, urges the Oswald Mosley line of 20th century history � if only Chamberlain had allied with Hitler and driven back the red menace. If only the democracies hadn�t provoked the fascists with that distressing pact with Poland. Of course, Payne would probably protest that this is not what he meant at all, but historic judgment doesn�t necessarily work better backwards � it works by having some notion of what the imminent effect of one�s judgments are. Orwell had it right � the failure of the democracies to support the Republic was vicious, stupid, and ultimately counter-productive.




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