RSN Fundraising Banner
FB Share
Email This Page
add comment

writing for godot

Forgetting Guernica

Print
Written by John Wallcraft   
Sunday, 12 January 2014 16:28
In 1931 the Spanish people peacefully deposed their monarch who, in collusion with the Catholic church and colonialist forces within their military, was forcibly maintaining an archaic and anti-democratic feudalist state. The new Republican government instigated a program of democratic reforms including the legalization of trade unions, introducing women’s suffrage, secularizing the state, encouraging regional autonomy for the Basques and Catalans and welfare reforms which included the introduction of comprehensive public education for the first time.

The deep nature of these reforms and the speed with which Spain transitioned from a medieval mindset to a modernist one unintentionally split the country into two incompatible and fundamentally ideological factions. The world watched intently as Spain became its political microcosm.

On the left were urban liberals, trade unions, industrial and agricultural workers movements, women’s movements, regional autonomists, anti-colonialists, anarchists and a small but significant cadre of Communists strongly linked with but not yet fully under the command of Soviet Russia.

On the Right were reactionary conservatives, religious conservatives, landowners, conservative peasant farmers, bourgeois reactionaries, monarchists, colonialists and a small but significant cadre of Fascists strongly linked with but not yet fully under the command of Nazi Germany.

At this time the Nazis had been in power for three years and German rearmament was in full swing. Its territorial claim to the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia was being diplomatically pushed and links had been forged between Germany and Fascist Italy. Stalinist Russia, aware that a fascist bloc in Europe would be expansionist and bound to launch an attack against it, was attempting to form an anti-fascist coalition with the western European democracies, especially with the military and territorial power houses of France and England.

England and France meanwhile, still recovering economically from the first world war, still clutching on to their colonial empires and facing real political opposition from their unionized industrial working classes were equally aware of the dangers of Fascism but were unwilling to risk military involvement and deeply suspicious of allowing Russian Communism a foothold in their own countries.

When Spain’s agrarian and industrial reforms were halted by right wing pressure, the lines were drawn. It was clear that Spain was not in agreement as to the direction it should take and that the different camps were diametrically opposed. Ostensibly this disagreement was cultural; churches, seminaries and nunneries had been openly and widely attacked by left wing agitators and the right fiercely objected to this. In reality the fight was about land.

The rural landowners, some (though not by any means a majority) barely a step up from enfranchised serfs, were having their lands, crops, properties and livestock collectivized, often forcibly, by ad hoc local comities. While industrial workers saw their pay and conditions immediately improved the rural poor saw intrusive state control and cultural dislocation. The rural landowners who had the power virtually of life and death over their tenants were simply being dispossessed.

Also, Basque and Catalan separatists saw the Republic as a staging post towards regional autonomy and the government openly supported their ambitions. The ultra nationalists saw this as a threat to the very idea of Spain itself and also felt certain that, if the liberal government was left in place, it would risk losing its last remaining colonial possession; Spanish Morocco.

The Left saw no choice but to see through its program of radical social change to its conclusion. The Right knew that such a program would end their control over Spanish society for good. When the liberal government attempted to keep the opposed sides in check the extreme factions of both turned against it.

In 1936 elections were held which became a virtual referendum on the future direction of Spain. The liberal bourgeoisie, the Socialists and the Communists formed a popular front which won the elections with a healthy mandate. Conservative reactionaries and off-brand domestic Fascist parties, who apparently weren’t that interested in democratic formalities, formed a united opposition and Fascist membership soared. Moderate centrist politics melted away like a blob of ice cream on a hot pavement.

Shortly thereafter Jose Castillo, a prominent anti-fascist military leader, was assassinated. The next day some low rent, addle minded, no-account fascist shit-stirrer whose name I can’t be bothered to write down also got bumped off. Both funerals were held on the same day in the same cemetery in Madrid and, would you believe it, disorder broke out. This gave the military Right the theatrical opening it needed to launch the coup they had been planning for months and that the left had been expecting for just as long. The military attempted to annex power within the country and were swiftly beaten down, with trade union organized militias confining thousands of rebel troops to their barracks in Madrid and elsewhere.

The Anarchists at this time were in the process of establishing the largest experiment in worker control of industry that Europe had ever seen. Over two thousand factories had been turned over from private ownership to public control and in the anarchists province of Catalonia most of the land had been collectivized. The Anarchists were openly antipathetic to the first republican government who they regarded as compromised bourgeois mediocrities and had little better to say about the newly elected socialistic coalition who were making overtures to Stalinist Russia for protection.

The Anarchists knew what Soviet domination of Spain would mean for them and their reforms, they knew in fact that the Soviets were likely to try and have them wiped out as they had done to their own Anarchist fringe. But the danger of the Fascist coup was an imminent threat, so they cast their lot in with the popular front and hoped for the best.

General Francisco Franco was at that time in charge of the Spanish colonial troops in Morocco, amongst who were many conscripted Moors. These troops were amongst the best trained and equipped in the Spanish army. The Luftwaffe organized an airlift that landed the bulk of the Spanish Army of Africa in mainland Spain. Mussolini’s Italy tagged along, partly because Mussolini was a bellicose, expansionist Pavlovian dog on a chain and partly to cement relationships with Hitler who, by this point, was quite obviously megalomaniacally insane.

At this point the world turned its back on Republican Spain. Chamberlin did not want to ally with Stalin and was nervous of provoking Hitler, by now very much the unchallenged, fully militarized, playground bully of Europe, into open conflict. Stalin, still hoping to woo the western democracies into military coalition, did not want a Soviet backed revolution on their doorstep (and at the gateway to the Mediterranean) to spook the delicate sensibilities of the old colonialists, so he sent food but not arms.

Within weeks the Army rebels were at the gates of Madrid, Spain’s administrative capital, and wave after wave of German bombers were reducing it to rubble. The Anarchist columns were at the front but the government was slow to release its stock of arms for fear of being deposed. There were Italian tank divisions on the mainland. The soviets were refusing to commit troops and France and Brittan were refusing to be drawn in at all. It was left to the people of Spain to defend their own democratic freedoms against the reactionary feudalists and their Fascist allies. The call for volunteers went up throughout Spain and was heard throughout the rest of the world.

The well armed, well trained, militarily supported army rebels won victory after victory until they had marched almost clear across Spain. The hotch potch resistance of Anarchist, Socialist, Trade Unionist, Communist and Republican militias held Madrid, the Basque country and the anarchist stronghold of Catalonia but the line got steadily forced back. The Army, everyone agreed, needed reorganization.

The Fifth International Brigade, an international volunteer force (including some two thousand five hundred English and Irish volunteers) under the aegis of the Communist trickled in. The terror bombing of the undefended and strategically insignificant village of Guernica by German planes shocked the world, but it did not galvanize it into action.

W.H.Auden and Earnest Hemingway dropped in as did Stephen Spender and others, mostly under the auspices of the Communists. George Orwell, much to his initial confusion and annoyance, found himself posted far from Madrid manning trenches with the P.O.U.M, an unreconstructed Anarchist unit who often made tactical decisions by committee. The Communists, under the direction of Moscow, began to instill military discipline and central control over the army and to engage the rebels in conventional warfare with major counter offensives further up the line from Madrid in the intent of thinning out the rebel forces, which it did.

But the communist tactics were a mistake. Without a major injection of troops and material the counter offensives simply bled Republican forces white and only temporarily discombobulated the rebels who had plenty of road worthy transport and could redeploy its coherent units along the line at will. And still Fascist aid was pouring in. The Madrid government pinned its hopes on the fact that Hitler’s European expansionism would soon result in all out war in Europe which, they assumed, would bring France and England into the war on their side.

One option at this point might have been to engage in a mass campaign of guerrilla style resistance, splitting the militias into smaller operational units and arming them with explosives, revolvers and grenades for covert raids and sabotage. This would, of course, have empowered the Anarchists and put even more armaments into the field beyond the control of Madrid and Moscow. And we couldn’t have that now could we?

Finally, it was the Munich agreement that did for Spain. By September of 1938 the rebel forces were in occupation of the heart of Spain and had cut the Republican forces in half. They were besieging Madrid, which was in ruins, on three sides. Hitler had annexed the Sudetenland so a European war seemed imminent, but in Brittan, the logical bastion of Anti-fascist resistance in Europe since it was territorially separate, militarily capable and controlled the Atlantic seaboard, Chamberlin wobbled in an ecstasy of late Imperial cognitive dissonance and balefully eyed the working class militants who, he knew, meant to take whatever power they could, whenever they could.

The Communists forcibly dissolved the Anarchists columns causing internal fighting in Madrid followed by mass imprisonment of Anarchist activists, commanders and soldiers. Anarchists troops still at the front were kept in the dark about this development until they returned to barracks at which point they were promptly arrested. Orwell, recovering from a serious injury sustained just ten days after his second deployment to the front, was in Madrid at the time and caught wind just in time. He and his wife went into hiding and eventually escaped to France posing as complacent British tourists.

In July the Republic rolled the dice and launched an all out offensive along the same old lines, up the line from Madrid on a strategically null position to erm… pin down Franco’s forces and delay the wars conclusion; The Battle of the Ebro. In September Chamberlin flew to Munich where he signed a piece of paper with a magnanimous Hitler who was gentlemanly enough to wait until Chamberlin had left the room before dissolving into hysterics and picking a spot on the wall on which to hang Chamberlains empty fucking head.

Stalin realized that until a European war started an anti fascist bloc was a pipe dream and lost interest in Spain altogether. By November the Ebro offensive had been repulsed with great loss of life. Shortly after that the Republican government was internally ousted without a whimper and the new command immediately began negotiating surrender. Within weeks Franco was in control of Spain and his death squads were executing dissidents en masse.

Just before the Second World War finally broke out nearly a year later, Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet pact and left the western democracies to their fate. Throughout the war Franco remained loyal to his Fascist sponsors supplying them with economic, military and material aid, while maintaining an official position of neutrality that, after the Axis powers defeat, allowed him to cling on to power until the fucking scumbag finally had the decency to die in 1975.

***

In 1937 Spanish expat Pablo Picasso was commissioned by the Republican government to paint them a mural celebrating the freedom and vitality of the new, modern Spain. Whilst he was making preliminary sketches for the piece he read George Steer’s eyewitness account of the Fascist bombing of Guernica. What emerged from this commission was a visceral response to the nature of a new kind of war.

In Guernica there is recorded some sort of basic truth. In the photos of the blitz or Dresden the fire is out, the body parts are cleared away and the sky is clear. They are like dull abstract paintings, all grey cubist planes and white void. But Guernica records the moment of terror; dismemberment and chaos, humans, animals and buildings thrown into a whirlwind. At the heart of this maelstrom is a lightbulb shining, but the light it is emmiting is black. It’s said that in moments of extreme stress the brain often switches off color vision to focus on more pressing concerns so that survivors of crashes and such like often remember them in monochrome. This is the moment captured in Guernica, the experience of someone seeing the world ripped apart moments before they themselves are engulfed.

Guernica was painted in Paris and did not travel to Spain itself until 1981, Picasso had stipulated in his will that it was not to be shown there until democracy was restored. In 1955 Nelson Rockerfeller, a liberal Republican and former advisor to President Ford tried to buy Guernica but was rebuffed by Picasso so he commissioned a full sized tapestry of the painting instead. In 1985 this tapestry was placed in the United Nations at the entrance to the Security Council room, where it often formed the backdrop to press conferences.

The exhibition of the painting at the heart of the UN’s public image was significant. It was displayed to commemorate and protest the moment in modern history when the line between combatant and non combatant, which had been tacitly recognized since prehistory, was officially abrogated. But like it or not it evoked Spain, and the moment of collision between the forces of greater freedom and their absolute negation whose struggle shaped the rest of the century.

In 2003 when Colin Powel made his speech from the UN announcing the Iraq war Guernica was obscured behind a discreet blue curtain. In 2009 it was removed because of ‘building maintenance’ and never returned. People soon forgot it had ever been there.

Guernica I suppose, was deemed to be out of step with modern political reality. The United Nations no longer sees itself as an ideological body but more as a discreet bureaucracy, dispatching humanitarian aid and politely assisting with the negotiations between its members like the staff of a very exclusive gentleman’s club; ironing the morning’s papers and tabulating the dead.

e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
Email This Page

 

THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.

RSNRSN