People :
Author : Stuart Christie
Text :
The militians’ distrust of the motives for imposing militarization was not unfounded. Vivaldo Fagundes, a Portuguese anarchist who participated in the Spanish Revolution has this to say:
“I have an extract from a letter of Indalecio Prieto, a minister, to Fernando de los Rios, then ambassador in Washington, in which Prieto gives an account of the work he was doing to finish anarchism off. He told him that already he had managed to win over its finest militants by interesting them in governmental politics and that the most stubborn ones, “the uncontrollables”, would be annihilated by militarization — an anti-revolutionary ploy clearly anti-libertarian in its objectives — by means of their being dispatched to the fronts where they would be liquidated, by incorporation into shock brigades or battalions. He closed the letter by stating with cynical frankness that those of them who escape the bullets of his thugs and the communists would not escape the fascists’ bullets.“
This document was published in Buenos Aires in the journal of the La Batalla group…’
Interview with Vivaldo Fagundes published in Edgar Rodrigues A resistencia anarco sindicalista a ditadura. Portugal 1922 — 1939.
“ … I have been in a barracks and there I learned to hate. I have been in a prison and there, amid the tears and the suffering, I have, curiously, learned to love and to love intensely.
In barracks I have been on the verge of losing my personality, such was the rigor to which I was subject, since they wanted to impose a stupid discipline on me. In jail, through a variety of struggles, I rediscovered my personality, which turned more and more insubordinate with every imposition. There I learned to despise all hierarchs, from the lowest to the highest: in prison, amid the most distressing pain, I learned to love the wretched, my brothers, preserving pure and untainted my hatred for the hierarchs, a hatred spawned in the barracks. Jails and barracks are one and the same: despotism and free play for the malice of some and suffering for all …
Whenever I heard up there in the mountains that the order for militarization was in the air, I felt my whole being collapse for a moment, because I saw clearly that the warrior daring of the revolution in me would perish, only to leave me to survive as a being bereft of any personality in barrack or prison confines and to lapse anew into the chasm of obedience, into the animal somnambulism to which the discipline of barrack or prison — for they are one — lead … They have not understood us, and being unable to understand have not loved us. We have fought — no need for false modesty now, for it is futile — we have fought, I say again, like few others have fought …
Not for us has there ever been any leave, nor and this is worse still, a kind word. Everyone, fascist and antifascist and even our own people — what shame we have experienced! — have treated us with hostility.
They have not understood us. Or — and this is the greater tragedy amid the tragedy in which we live — maybe we have not made ourselves understood. Because we, having had heaped upon our backs all of the contempt and harsh words of those who, in life, were on the side of the hierarchs, have sought to live a libertarian lifestyle even in the midst of war, while others, to their and our shame, have continued to latch on to the chariot of state…
History, which embraces all of the good and all of the evil which men do, shall speak some day.
And history will say that the Iron Column was, perhaps, the only column in Spain to have a clear perception of what our revolution should have been. It will say, too, that it was the Column which put up the best fight against militarization. And record, furthermore, that on account of this resistance, there were times when it was abandoned utterly to its fate on the battlefront, as if 6,000 battle hardened men, ready to triumph or perish, should have surrendered themselves to the enemy to be devoured by him…
Our resistance to militarization was based on what we knew of the military. Our present resistance on what we presently know of the military.
Here and always, the professional military have constituted, as they do in Russia, a caste apart. It is they who command: the obligation to obey should alone be reserved for the rest of us. With all of his might the professional military man despises everything which the proletariat is, holding it to be inferior…
The proletarian army does not demand discipline that, in essence, might be summed up as adherence to campaign orders; it demands submission, blind obedience and the annihilation of the human personality…
The delegate of our group or centuria, was not foisted upon us, but elected by us and felt himself to be not a lieutenant, nor a captain, but our comrade. The delegates of the Column’s Committees have not been colonels nor generals, but comrades. We ate together, campaigned together, laughed and swore together. For a time we had received no pay; nor had they. Then we received ten pesetas and they received, and still receive, ten pesetas.
The only thing which we accept is their proven competence; for that we elect them: and also, by virtue of their proven courage, we chose them as our delegates. They are not hierarchs, there is no superiority of rank, and no harsh orders; there is sympathy, goodness, comradeship; a joyful existence in the midst of war’s disasters. And so, with our comrades at our sides, and imagining that there was some purpose to our struggle, we went willingly to war and even accepted death with pleasure. But when you are among the military where there are only orders and ranks; you see in your hands the miserable pay with which you can scarcely sustain your family in the rear and you see your lieutenant, captain, colonel earning three times as much: four times as much, ten times as much as you, though possessed of neither enthusiasm, nor of greater acumen or greater courage than you, life turns sour because you see that this is no revolution, but profit for a few from a wretched situation which merely works to the detriment of the people…
We believed we were fighting to redeem and save ourselves and now we are lapsing into the very thing we are fighting against: into despotism, casteocracy, into more brutal, more alienating authority…
The militarists, all militarists — there are wrathful ones on our side — have surrounded us. Yesterday we were the masters of everything. Today, they are. The Popular Army, popular only inasmuch as it consists of people, belongs to the government and the government commands, the government ordains. The people have leave to obey and constant obedience is required of them.
Caught in the snares of the militarists, we have two options; the first leads to dissociation from those who hitherto have been our comrades in arms, by disbanding the Iron Column; the second leads to militarization…
The column, this Iron Column which has set the bourgeoisie and the fascists between Valencia and Teruel shaking in their boots, should not disband but press right on to the end…
Having to accept orders from those whom we have not elected will be the lesser evil, but a great evil nonetheless. But…
Should we remain together, the same individuals as now, it should be all one to us whether we form a Column or a Battalion. In the fray we will not need anyone to encourage us, and during our time of repose, no one will prevent us from resting, because we will not permit him.
Corporal, sergeant, captain… either they will be our own people, in which case we will all be comrades, or they will be enemies in which case they will have to be treated as enemies…
Our future depends on ourselves, depends upon the cohesion between us. Nobody is going to force us to dance to his tune; we shall impose our tune upon those who may be around us, so that we may keep our personality alive.
Let us take one thing into consideration, comrades. The struggle demands that we do not deny the war either our participation or our enthusiasm. In a column of our own, or in a battalion of our own, or in a division or battalion not of our own, fight we must.
If we disband the Column, if we disintegrate, then, as conscript soldiers we shall have to go, not with whom we may choose but with whom we are ordered to go. And since we are not, nor do we wish to be domestic animals, the likelihood is that we shall find ourselves alongside people whom we should not wish to be alongside; with the ones who are, for good or ill, our allies.
The Revolution, our Revolution, the proletarian anarchist Revolution, to which, from the earliest days we gave pages of glory, calls upon us not to abandon our weapons, nor to abandon that compact group which we have thus far constituted, whether it go under the name of Column, Division or Battalion.’
Taken from Protesta davanti ai libertari del presente e del futuro di un ′incontrolado′ della Colonna di Ferro′sulle capitulazioni del 1937, Turin, 1981.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 03, 2021 : Chapter 24 -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Chapter 24 -- Updated.
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