> > Chris Doss wrote: > "He wrote a hilarious book review in the eXile recently saying that the > left should just admit that the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War were > a bunch of loons and that the only one who was looking at the big > picture was Stalin." > > Yes, hilarious is just the right word.
This is the review, from the eXile: New Cant for Old By John Dolan "The Spanish civil war, the Soviet Union, and Communism" - by Stanley Payne Most academic writing--most writing, in fact--can be classified as updating of the literate world's stock of what Byron liked to call "cant": facile explanations of the world which fit nicely into the prevailing received ideas. Payne's book is a fine example of the genre: a well-researched, reasonably well-written, convincing demolition of the old stock of cant on the Spanish Civil War--in the name of a more up-to-date cant, which replaces Leftist myth with equally doctrinaire free-market orthodoxy. Payne deserves credit for the first part of his task: destroying the sentimental and self-serving lies the Left has been telling about Spain for so many years. The Left won the propaganda war by losing the military struggle before getting a chance to show how nightmarish they could be once in power. As Payne says, "The twentieth century was a great generator and destroyer of myths. By its end nearly all the great new political and ideological myths of the first half of the century had been discredited. Of them all, however, probably none has been more enduring than the myth of the Spanish Republic." In this sense, the romanticization of the Stalinist volunteers who swarmed to the Republic is an excellent demonstration of the wisdom of the proverb, "Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse." The corpse of the Spanish Left looked marvelous for decades. Leftists who'd learned that it was no longer acceptable in polite society to romanticize Stalin would still get moist-eyed at the thought of all the comrades from Brooklyn, Croydon and Dusseldorf fighting together in the trenches of Madrid. You can still hear echoes here and there, in more enduring literature, of the enthusiasm these amateur soldiers' Spanish crusade generated a half-century ago. These echoes even reached politically innocent science-fiction nerds in California, like me. Reading Philip K. Dick's late novel Radio Free Albemuth, which is among many other things his memoir of growing up in Berkeley, he mentions that even in the late 1940s, years before student activism was even imagined by most Americans, gangs of Communist students at UC Berkeley, dressed in Levi's, used to march down Telegraph Avenue shoving people out of their way and singing a war anthem of the German contingent of the International Brigade. I don't speak German, but there was something so exciting about Dick's description that I somehow memorized a garbled version of the song. If I remember, it goes something like: Vor Madrid im Schutzengraben, In der Stunde der Gefahr, Mit den eisernen Brigaden Sein Herz voll hass geladen, Stand Hans, der Komissar-- Hans Beimler, unser Komissar. I'm quoting from memory, so the spelling and grammar of the song are probably absurd. But I got the point. My favorite line, the crucial line, is "His heart full of hate." Meant, you understand, as a compliment. Oh yes, I and hundreds of thousands of other mass-produced bohemians got the message. We could easily imagine the joy of bullying passers-by with a Crusader song like that. That's the sort of glamor Spain retained, long after every other Left myth had crumbled. Even WWII got pretty depressing after everybody read Solzhenitsyn--the Eastern Front dwindled to what one Russian called "a struggle to decide whether the concentration camps of the future would be red or brown"--but Spain, those cool guys doing their Junior Year Abroad in the trenches of Madrid, kept its appeal. That cant sucked in even Hemingway, whose novel For Whom the Bell Tolls was a sad attempt to get hip with the Commies about the cool Spanish War. I tried to reread it a few years ago, after being impressed anew with Hemingway's war scenes in Farewell to Arms. I was shocked by the sheer badness of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway actually did his best to suppress the sour envy that drove his books, settling for an inadvertently comic Sergio Leone western with red stars, the tale of a Commie Clint Eastwood blowing up bridges and awing the native girls. It was the third-worst novel I've read in the last decade, surpassed only by A Million Little Pieces and another shocking re-read, Brothers Karamazov. Orwell's Spanish memoir, Homage to Catalonia, was smarter, and has lasted longer. Orwell understood Leftist cant very well, and navigated carefully through the mass of acronumic factions on the Spanish Left: PCE, POUM, PCC, PCOE... Orwell's Spartan trenches made generations of readers drool, powerfully evoking what we all wanted: a clean fascism, a just war, a valid license to kill. And maybe, if you were lucky, get a book out of it. There were an awful lot of notes taken in those Republican trenches, and writers have never been shy about mixing ideological devotion with careerism. In fact Orwell's narrative has become the standard one: the Spanish Republic was a glorious, doomed (they always go together) moment in which the People rose up and made their own democratic, humane revolution, only to be betrayed and subverted by evil Soviet agents, who were willing to facilitate the victory of Fascism rather than lose their control over the Revolution. Payne demonstrates that this version is simply wrong on all counts. The Spanish Left was, as one would expect, far more bloodthirsty and stupid than usually depicted; the Comintern was, again as one would expect, doctrinaire and callous, willing to spend the lives of thousands of loyal followers rather than admit its "line" might have been wrong; and Stalin was not a counterrevolutionary, but simply thinking about a bigger playing field and a longer term than the hotheads in Barcelona. Payne seems to avoid taking Orwell on directly in this book, perhaps because his core audience is academic, with a social-science tilt or because he didn't want to get involved in a fight with a literary/ideological hero. When he does mention Homage to Catalonia, Payne's allusions to it are distinctly odd, ranging from the classic academic faint-praise epithet "widely-read" to this odd paraphrase: "George Orwell made the atmosphere of revolutionary Barcelona famous through his wartime memoir, but similar conditions existed in many other cities. The former Radical Deputy Clara Campoamor wrote, 'The appearance of Madrid was incredible: the bourgeoisie giving the clenched fist salute...men in overalls and rope sandals, imitating the uniform adopted by the militia; women bareheaded; clothes, old and threadbare; an absolute invasion of ugliness and squalor, more apparent than real, of people who humbly begged permission to remain alive." As those who have read Homage to Catalonia will be thinking, these are not "similar conditions" to those celebrated by Orwell. One of the finest scenes in Orwell's story is his description of the way waiters, porters and other workers accustomed to cringing and groveling suddenly stood upright, looked their customers in the eye, and--the ultimate display of ardor--refused all tips. Campoamor's description completely contradicts Orwell's. It exudes contempt for the transformation; what she saw was rich people trying to look poor, putting on a display of "ugliness and squalor" in order "to remain alive." The fact that Payne seems to see the two portraits of urban Revolutionary Spain as "similar" makes you wonder how careful a reader he really is. As Payne demonstrates, the wealthy Spaniards' sudden impulse to dress down was a wise one, because the popular uprising Orwell romanticized was in fact a bloody, vengeful purge: "The first business of the worker revolution was the Red Terror--organized mass executions in most of the Republican zone." Payne's documentation of the Terror should do nicely in squelching the last few Commie dotards who talk about the greatness of the Spanish people's soul. But then you knew that was coming, didn't you? If you read this sort of book, you know that the cant of the moment is that the peasants--any peasants, anywhere, anytime--weren't heroes, they were murderous, ignorant thugs. Applying the truism to revolutionary Spain merits a shrug...except for one thing: the fact that Payne's revisionist account will discomfit the last few living members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. These comrades from the US have grown old strutting about their youthful exploits in the Marx-crusade of Spain. They've tried to bend with the times, turning their war into a struggle for "democracy" against "fascism," when they were simply good CPUSA zombies. Payne's quick sketch of their activities circa 1940 is devastating: "The American communist volunteers who had formed the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Association and later liked to style themselves "premature anti-Fascists," mocking the straight-faced charge of the Cold-War congressional witch-hunters, in fact gave up antifascism altogether, marching in New York to oppose the United States' entry into the war, as they supported the policies of Stalin and Hitler." All very true...but I can't help remembering that an outright fascist, Ann Coulter, has just made a bundle from her mad book rehabilitating Joe McCarthy. Payne's book is a very useful bit of ballast for the Ann Coulters of the world; Payne does the drudgery, sifting through decades of Soviet and Spanish documentation, to supply academic armor for evil cant-spewing ideologues of his own time, as they struggle to supplant the equally evil, earlier Marxist cant. Payne all too often supplies the cant implications of his research on his own, in bizarre sententia like this: "Democracy is incapable of provoking a ferocious civil war." This is simply nonsense. The American Civil War comes immediately to mind; it was enormously popular with voters everywhere. The civil wars that broke out on the breakup of Yugoslavia were deeply democratic. In short, this is cant. And the Thirty Years War, the most savage in the history of Europe, was, at least in Germany, a civil war. Payne argues this anti-revolutionary cant at length, as here: "Massive executions have characterized most of the revolutionary/ counterrevolutionary civil wars of the twentieth century, from Russia and Finland in the early years to Afghanistan in the final years of the century. The blood lust [!] derives in considerable measure from the apocalyptic nature of such conflicts and the attempt to create a new society purged of antagonistic elements, combined with the widespread perception that the enemy is not merely wrong but the metaphysical incarnation of evil and must be eradicated before he imposes the same terror against one's own side. A revolutionary civil war is not just a political conflict but a contest of ultimates demanding an uncompromising solution." I'm amazed that an academic press could publish this sort of drivel. Compared to what norm of war does Payne classify "revolutionary civil wars" as uniquely savage? One obvious exception to this silly claim is embedded in Payne's own prose: he says that the "blood lust" comes from the "apocalyptic" context and "metaphysical" dimension. Both of these terms come from Christianity; both apply far better to the Thirty Years War than to the civil wars of the last century. Then there's WW I, fought by European states who were completely agreed on an anti-revolutionary agenda. They didn't seem to pursue their war any more humanely because it lacked a revolutionary/counterrevolutionary dimension. Then there's bush war, Balkan war, religious war; none are particularly humane. In fact, as Sherman memorably pointed out, humane wars are oddly scarce. So, in claiming that there's something uniquely savage about revolutionary war, Payne willingly throws away years of hard and careful work in the service of indefensible, faddish cant. Of course, cant always has its built-in escape clauses. I suspect that, called on this nonsensical claim, a well-trained academic like Payne would simply say that slavery meant the US circa 1860 wasn't truly a "democracy." Oh, and monarchism meant that Europe in the time of the Thirty Years War wasn't either. In fact, he would end up saying that no country which experienced a "ferocious civil war" was actually a "democracy." In short, he'd be defending a tautology, exactly like the Marxists who said endlessly that any supposedly socialist regime that killed dissidents wasn't "true socialism." This is why I remember being so depressed and frustrated by the whole academic enterprise: hardworking people devoting decades of their lives to produce evidence which they were eager to throw away in the service of some nonsensical, faddish cant. He doesn't seem to realize that the cheating Marxist historians he rightly despises devoted the same decades of study to equivalent cant, i.e. "When the people rule, war is a thing of the past." Hell, it's not just "equivalent," now that I've written it down--it's the same damn assertion. Only the cant-subject has changed, with "people" giving way to "Democracy." My synonym can beat your synonym. God, it's not even NEW cant! They're cannon-fodder, the Paynes of the world, and don't realize it. But they're privileged cannon-fodder, tenured and respected. They keep their lives and limbs. They send the real cannon fodder out on their word; all in all, you don't want to waste too much time pitying them. Instead, try to imagine their consciousness. I know I am. I'm trying to figure out how a well-educated and careful scholar like Payne could actually say something like "Democracy is incapable of provoking a ferocious civil war." If you're reading this, Professor Payne, write me a note. I'd really like to know.
