Through The Barricades

Spain is set to have some new citizens. They are British. They are also very old. They are the few survivors of those who came to fight for the International Brigades against Franco's Nationalists during the Civil War.

The current government is intent on writing Franco's name out of history and on continuing to honour those who fought for or fell in the name of the Republic; citizenships have been conferred in the past. The small band of Britons being offered a joint citizenship are enjoying belated but greater honour in Spain than they did in their own country both during and after the Civil War. They were derided either for being communists, which many indeed were, or for being mercenaries. They were also anti-fascist. What was the greater evil in 1930s Europe - communism or fascism? It's a close call.

Yet raising that question is too simplistic when applied to Spain. Neither the country's communism nor its fascism can or should be viewed in the same way as Stalin's or Hitler and Mussolini's. The Communist Party was essentially wedded to the notion of democracy. It had connections with Stalin, as did the UGT union and the PSOE socialists (the UGT is still closely associated with PSOE in the current-day political scene). The Soviet Union came to supply the Republicans with weaponry, but the strain of communism was a more conservative phenomenon lacking, as it did, any real support among the working class. The altogether more frightening elements that were to side with the Republicans were the anarchists.

Franco was not of a same mind as either Hitler or Mussolini. One indication of this was the fact that he chose not to pursue a war tactic akin to Blitzkrieg against Republican centres, much to the amazement of both Hitler and Mussolini. His justification was that he wanted to avoid unnecessary killing, rich though that may sound. Let it not be forgotten though that it was German bombs that destroyed Guernica, not those of the Nationalists. Franco also sought and got the submission of the more extreme elements of his supporting groups, most obviously the Falangists and the Carlists. What came to be Francoism was not totalitarianism; it was authoritarian, militarist, Catholic and monarchist. Arguably, it was also not strictly fascist.

It is usual to categorise the Civil War as a fight between two competing and extreme political ideologies. The Republicans, though, were communists only in the sense that the Communist Party came to be an ally of the Socialists and the left-leaning Republicans in government at the time of the Civil War's outbreak and at the end of the Second Republic, the failure of which lay largely in the inability of the various political groupings to establish stable government and which had lurched between right and left throughout its five years. The coup of July 1936 was, in no small part, predicated upon this failure. Franco considered political parties unworkable, and after victory in 1939 he ensured that groupings that might have resembled parties were kept submissive, and these included the Falange, despite the philosophy of Francoism being largely based on its agenda of fundamentalist Catholicism. Though the Nationalists are and were portrayed as merely defenders against Communism, the prime concerns for Franco were the restoration of Spanish conservative interests (which precluded therefore such things as Catalan autonomy) and an end to the political parties.

But the story of the Civil War has required the neatness of the fascist-communist polarities. The International Brigades were communist in terms of the various bodies involved in creating them, but they also cannot be summed up quite so neatly. The motivation of those who joined them can be - a detestation of and a will to defeat fascism, whether they personally were communists or not. They failed to effect that defeat, and Spain languished for years as a consequence (and no one can tell what would have ensued had there been a Republican victory). Those who fought against fascism were denied the honour of what was an honourable cause. And now, finally, some have received it in the form of citizenship in a Spain that is doing its utmost to lay to rest the wounds of their defeat.


POLLENSA AND SOME MORE DISSENT
The main surprise regarding a touch of civil dissent in the normally serene calles and caminos of Pollensa is that it doesn't, for once, involve the town hall. This time around it is the local environment ministry which is the target in that a walk across finca land north of the old town has been denied, and it's the ministry doing the denying. This finally brought out a posse of militant ramblers the other day, determined to storm the barricade in order to gain access to the walk to the old king's castle on the camino de Ternelles (if you don't know, this runs from somewhere close to the Roman bridge). All they needed was a Janet Street-Porter; might have helped them, too, in tackling the jobsworths of the forestry wing of the ministry and the security guard who had tried to prevent the taking of photos. Needless to say, the ramblers were told to sling their hook, or something like that, and so they had to leave, dragging their tails of backpacks between their legs. I say that this doesn't involve the town hall, but the mayor was requested to order the opening of the camino, which he hasn't. Maybe because he can't.

What I would like to know though is where is GOB, the enviro pressure group, when you need it. This is a case of nature lovers versus environment overlords. How does GOB reconcile the two? We demand an answer.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Cher - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JElkPACfz_M. Today's title - before two of them became Krays.

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