People :
Author : Diego Abad De Santillán
Text :
This is the first time that we have been defeated in the long struggle for the economic and social progress of Spain as a modern revolutionary movement; in order to find another comparable defeat on this scale we have to go back to the battlefields of Villalar in the first third of the 16th century. Just like the Phenix who rises from his ashes, we have always rebounded from all our disasters, overcoming terribly dramatic moments of political and religious inquisition, leaving shreds of bleeding flesh in the claws of the enemy. Hunger and persecution, jail and prison, torture and assassination, nothing could humble us, nothing could defeat us. Those who fell in battle were immediately replaced by new combatants. One generation followed another in a merciless struggle in which the best, the most generous and the most intelligent representatives of the Spanish people died with a smile on their lips, defying the powers of ignorance and slavery, trusting in the triumph of justice. This time, however, we feel defeated. Defeated! For whom, for what kind of men, for what race, for what people, does this word “defeated” have the meaning that it has for us? Happy are those who died in the struggle, because they did not have to suffer a fate that is a thousand times worse than death: a real defeat, a definitive defeat for our generation!
Our generation pledged its blood to the triumph of a great cause and has been entangled for posterity in a net of complicities that we would like to clarify so that we will be judged for our merits or our defects, for our correct actions or our mistakes, but in all events as a historic Spanish force with the same resolve and the same fortitude as the Spanish people who fought against the Roman invasion, against the absolutism of the Habsburgs in the unforgettable feats of the comuneros and the brotherhoods, against Napoleon’s hosts under the command of the invincible General No Importa [“It Doesn’t Matter”—a favorite expression of Napoleon’s], and against absolutist and anti-Spanish Bourbonism from Philip V to Alfonso XIII.
Say what you will of us.[1] Say that we are pessimists. We are motivated by the intention of being sincere, of expressing our feelings, of giving faithful testimony concerning what we have done and what we have seen, and we think it is important to make it known that, betrayed, defeated and deceived, we failed, at the side of the Spanish people, on our own terms, without having either stricken or besmirched our flag. A sinister legend has been woven around us. Politicians on the left and on the right compete in bringing fuel to the fire of all the fantasies that have been imputed to us, and it is even possible that the left is worse in this regard than the right. Our organizations were originally formed and subsequently grew under clandestine conditions, because they were not allowed a public existence, and this prevented us from addressing and responding to our traducers, because doing so would have been tantamount to informing on ourselves. The literature of the monarchy is replete with alleged discoveries of our relations with the republicans; the literature of the republicans speaks insidiously of our relations with the monarchists. In addition to the old more or less terrifying legend, we now have the new legend and they want to turn us into scapegoats to console those who agree with them, despite all the apparent differences, in order to reconstruct false virginities at our expense.
The vast literature published in foreign countries about our war and revolution is plagued with inaccuracies and malice, and paints a picture of us that borders on the ridiculous when not on the despicable, among the writers who supported the Republic as well as among those who supported Franco. There are some very honorable exceptions, but they are too few. It is almost a duty, after all the outrages that have been publicly attributed to the men of the Iberian Anarchist Federation, before and after July 1936, for the average citizen to attribute every defect to us and blame us for every misfortune. The military phase of the tragedy of Spain has concluded, the F.A.I. is no more. Isn’t it high time, now that we have been defeated, for someone who held high-level positions and performed functions of the greatest responsibility in that organization, both before and after the war, to open the curtain a little and tell the truth?
We do not want to defend ourselves, because, despite all the slanders that have come to our attention from even a brief glance at a small sample of the literature about our war, we do not feel that we are the ones who are on trial. On many occasions in the past, we called attention to our own deficiencies and mistakes, whether personal or factional. Silence, however, when those who have plenty of reasons to keep quiet are doing all the talking, and when those few survivors who are in a position to shed some light on these questions are saying nothing, is in our view culpable.[2]
These pages are intended to serve as a contribution to the history of, and an homage to, the Spanish people, the only eternal value, worthy and pure, which must reemerge despite the defeat, even if it takes years and years of martyrdom, unprecedented even in a country where martyrs are so abundant and come in so many varieties, when none of us who offered our tribute of labor and life to the great liberation movement of 1936–1939 are still standing. From the catastrophe we have suffered, we have only salvaged within ourselves our faith in the resurrection of Spain, by virtue of the same spirit and the same longing that inspired us and that inspired our ancestors for centuries. Governments, despotic regimes, tyrannies, and political systems based on privilege come and go, but a people like ours, which has not yet disappeared, is of such a unique vitality that it has been able to resist the attacks of those who have always sought to distort the meaning and direction of its history. In this resurrection it is very likely that the old parties and organizations will not survive at all; other men and other names will take up the positions on the battlefield that we have left vacant with our defeat and they will revive, with greater power and more experience, the project that was drowned in rivers of blood and terror during our generation.
If the military uprising of the generals triggered a major war, this was entirely due to our violent intervention. The Republic did not know how to defend itself, nor was it even capable of defending itself, against the attack; we were the ones who, in defense of the people, made the survival of the Republic, and organizing for the war, possible. And we were not, nor were we ever, republicans. Just like the war for independence, which brought the despicable Bourbons back to the Spanish Throne, the restoration of the Republic was not our goal; our goal was instead to recover the historical rhythm of our poor country, so we crushed the military revolt across a huge expanse of the Peninsula; our goal was not the consolidation of a Republic that did not deserve to live, either, but the defense of a great people, who returned to claim their rightful place and wanted to take the reins of their fate in their own hands. Has the Republic paid us back the way Ferdinand VII repaid those who restored him to his throne with his cowardly surrender to Napoleon? Even in this respect we see our identification with the cause of the real Spain verified.
If we were to have remained idle in July 1936, if we had obeyed the directives of the republican government, the idiotic recommendations of someone like Casares Quiroga, the Minister of War, we would have handed ourselves over to the execution squads, along with the republican and socialist leaders of every variety, but the war would not have been possible, because the Republic did not have the forces to defend itself, and the military, clerical and monarchist revolt would have been totally successful throughout Spain and its colonies.
In this account we shall review three of the basic reasons for the anti-popular and anti-Spanish course taken by our war, from which all the other secondary causes of our defeat are derived, and we shall attempt to discover what practical measures we should have taken to avoid the tragedy that unfolded on such a vast scale.
The republican idiocy embodied, in the governmental spheres of Madrid, the same lack of understanding exhibited by the Habsburg and Bourbon monarchies in the face of the realities of popular sentiment and legitimate regionalist interests, like that of Catalonia, against whose violent social initiatives the entire apparatus of the central State was mobilized, until the immense possibilities of this region were decimated and it was handed over, broken and embittered, to fascism. Catalonia could have won the war on its own, during the first few months, with a little help from the Madrid government, but the latter was always more afraid that Spain might escape the prescriptions of a scrap of paper called the constitution and experiment with new political and economic projects, than it was afraid of the total victory of the enemy.
The policy of nonintervention, proposed and implemented by the socialist-republican government of France from the very first moments of the war, and then supported by England, became the best weapon for suffocating us, while the enemy was openly supplied with the men and the war materiel that were needed to ensure victory. This sinister farce of nonintervention, in which the unlamented League of Nations finally expired, was certainly effective in mercilessly sacrificing us, but it was not capable of preventing France and England, the main proponents of that bloody joke, from having to pay the consequences in the current war, with millions of their sons and the sacrifice of all their economic and financial reserves.
Just as disastrous as nonintervention for so-called Loyalist Spain was Russian intervention, which began a few months after the outbreak of hostilities; Russia promised to sell us war materiel and, despite the fact that we paid for it in advance with gold, whether or not it was actually delivered to our ports depended on whether or not we abided by the condition that this alleged aid would also be paid for by our complete submission to Russia’s orders with regard to military affairs, domestic policies, and international diplomacy, so that republican Spain was turned into a kind of Soviet colony. Russian intervention, which, from the point of view of the materiel it provided—in paltry amounts, of dismal quality, arbitrarily distributed, giving irritating preference to the toadies of Russia—did not solve a single crucial problem, corrupted the republican bureaucracy, starting with the highest levels of the government, seized control of the army, and so completely demoralized the population that the latter eventually lost all interest in the war, a war that had been started by the incontrovertible decision of the only legitimate, sovereign power: popular sovereignty.
These three causes stood out in high relief from the very first moments of the war; we immediately recognized them and fought to overcome them; we fought to overcome the lack of understanding of Catalonian affairs by the men who held power in Madrid; we called for an honorable decision against the farce of nonintervention; we appealed for defensive actions against the usurpations of the Russians, but achieved nothing but hostility and isolation. We stood alone as we were systematically isolated from any direct role in the war, after having been its first combatants; but we are proud to feel that we are free of any personal and organizational responsibility for the catastrophe and for the policy that led us to disaster, and we cannot accuse ourselves of having refrained from expressing our views for even one single moment. And now, in exile, we who survived the great shipwreck are saying almost exactly the same things we said then, when we tried to remedy the evils we denounced, and not only by way of publications, magazines, books, and pamphlets, but directly, by entering the government itself and its institutions.
In August 1937 the situation was clear, and we could no longer allow ourselves to be deceived. The Prieto-Negrín government, a creature of the Russians, manufactured in order to respond to Russia’s commercial and diplomatic interests, rather than to the interests of Spain, traced, with its military, diplomatic and domestic policies, the course that led us to the pointless sacrifice of our great people. We could not remain silent, so we wrote a polemical tract, The Revolution and the War in Spain: Preliminary Historical Notes, a small volume that even proved worthy of the honors of autos da fé. A relentless war has been waged against this book, from which only a few fragments have appeared in the working class press of various countries, and some unauthorized editions have also been published. The book was denounced, yet widely read, but as for us, we are not interested in finding explanations for all this hatred, despite the fact that the same accusations have been reiterated in other publications, and always more insistently. Why were we not arrested and put on trial? It is true that, as for the contents of that desperate call to return to the right track, very few rectifications of minor details were possible. We were expecting to be put on trial so that we could speak even more openly, since, after all, we were not unaware of the fact that we were at war and that it would not be advantageous to give aid and comfort to the enemy; in a trial, we would have been able to say out loud what we had previously kept to ourselves. No charges were brought against us, despite the fact that we did not hold any official positions and that we did not even spare the leaders of our own organizations from our critical barbs. A few generous voices dared to call for our heads in the press, parroting what was being demanded in the conclaves of the worshipers of Muscovitism. But that was all.
In the introduction to our book, we said the following:
This is not a history, it is not a chronicle of the events of the revolution and the anti-fascist war; it is an internal analysis, a kind of examination of our conscience, now that we have arrived at a fork in the road and have taken advantage of this moment of respite. Nonetheless, we believe that these pages can be a contribution to history and that some of the reflections and interpretations that the events we have experienced suggest to us might be able to be of service to the movement for freedom in the world.
Right now, the offensive of international fascism in Spain is gaining momentum and the maneuvers of European diplomacy—English, French and Russian, on the one side, and German and Italian, on the other—are accelerating to strangle our movement. It is necessary to reflect upon all of this and to choose, with open eyes and a calm state of mind, the right road to take. The world proletariat is committing suicide with its passivity towards our war and the treasonous democracies are digging their own graves with their irresolution and cowardice in the face of the fascist powers.
We can no longer be responsible, as we were up until now, for the future of Spain, nor can we offer our own blood with the same generous spirit that we did in the past. The sinister game is unmasked and the Spanish people are being led to catastrophe. We do not know whether or not it is still in our power to prevent the collapse of the illusions that arose all over the world with regard to our war and our revolution. It is true that we still have some cards to play, and our friends will know how to play them with resolution and for the right stakes; but the present outlook is not the same as it was several months ago, and if we were to remain silent, we would become accomplices of the crime that is in the making and in which we have played no part at all.
The following pages will serve to clarify, for our friends and comrades in various countries, a few aspects of our efforts, and also to indicate, for those who do not have a clear view of the situation, the obstacles that surround us on all sides. Silence would be conceivable for us only if we were members of a party or an organization; but the destiny of Spain, and the future of humanity, is at stake, for many years and perhaps for centuries. And the right to speak out becomes, under these circumstances, a duty.
Too much of the blood of our brothers and sisters has been shed since July 19 to consent, with our hands in our pockets, to allow the infamy that is being prepared to come to a good end. Many positions have been lost in our war and almost all the positions we conquered in our revolution have also been lost. If we resign ourselves and do not react in time, we will return to worse conditions than those that prevailed before the epic events of July; whoever is capable of tolerating this, of accepting it with equanimity, is worthy of nothing but the chains of every kind of slavery.
Amid the betrayal that surrounds us on every side, it is necessary for the Spanish people and our friends from all over the world to know the fate that lies in store for us, and our position and our attitude in the face of this dark prospect….
That is what we wrote, on September 1, when Franco’s offensive against Northern Spain began, before the fall of Bilbao, in the hope of inspiring a movement in favor of a political transformation that would emancipate us from the tutelage of Moscow, so fatal for our war effort, without having achieved anything but an even more blind, more unconditional affirmation of the Russian myth on the part of the leaders of our government and of the parties of the so-called anti-fascist alliance.
The book we wrote in September 1937 will be re-conceived in this volume. Now we can give it a new title: Why We Lost the War. In 1940 we must speak in retrospect and, therefore, the title cannot be anything but Why We Lost the War. We shall merely add some new arguments and call attention to some aspects that, in the book’s first edition, could not yet be publicly disclosed.
During the Spanish war, we were often reminded of one of the famous rulings of Solomon: Who is not familiar with it? Two women were involved in a dispute over which of them was the mother of a child. Solomon placidly listened to both of their testimonies and proposed to cut the child into two equal parts and give one part to each woman. One agreed to the sacrifice of the creature that was the cause of the dispute, while the other implored Solomon to allow her to withdraw her petition, preferring that the child should live, even in the hands of a stranger. Because of this woman’s plea, Solomon recognized the child’s true mother and gave the child to her.
The object of our dispute was Spain, as in other periods of our history. On the one side we found ourselves under the flag of a Republic with which we had nothing in common, alongside men and parties that were just as much our enemies as those on the other side of the trenches. And we said so as straightforwardly as possible, loudly and clearly, and in our writings, at every opportunity: For us, the social vanguard of Spain, the result would be the same if Negrín were to be victorious with his communist cohorts, or if Franco were to be victorious, with his Italians and Germans. Why did we go to war? Why did we fight?
This state of mind was no longer a matter of personal opinion, but was characteristic of vast masses of people, and of the best combatants from the very first moment of the war. The war lacked any progressive social goal. Did we fight the war to restore the conditions of existence that prevailed before July 19, or even worse ones? Or did we go to war because we did not see that the final result of the contest, if either side were to be victorious, would be our extermination as individuals and as a movement?
Nonetheless, if we look at the question from a vantage point situated above partisan interests, individual or factional aspirations, the loser in the war would have to be Spain, whose economy would be destroyed, along with millions of its inhabitants, killed in the prime of life and of labor, with ruins everywhere, and with a seed of hatred planted in the blood of its people that would poison everyone for many generations, in a state of political and economic servitude.
Convinced that we were right and of the nobility of the cause to which we devoted the best years of our lives, conscious that only with the solution that we advocated for the problems of Spain could our people have a better future, one that would be worthy of their past and their spirit, and seeing the defeat of Spain at the hands of both sides: why did we not possess the heroic valor to yield, as the true mother yielded in the judgment of Solomon?
The continuation of the war was at most an act of cowardice, not an act of courage or valor.[3] They fought because they were afraid of reprisals, not because they had the least doubt, among those who had no right to lose their heads, concerning the disastrous end of the war for the so-called republican sector. There is no doubt that the victors on Franco’s side would not have inflicted such extreme repression if the hostilities were to have ended much sooner. Furthermore, are the individual fears of a larger or smaller number of people a good enough reason to sacrifice Spain? The most heroic and self-sacrificing act would have consisted in yielding, even though we were in the right. But the environment skillfully created by government propaganda and by the acts of terror made it impossible for such ideas to penetrate beyond the intimate circle of a few friends, perhaps those who had given the most to the cause of the revolution and the war.
Our repeated attempts to bring about a change in the government, to provoke a crisis and to compel a sober review of the real situation, in the economic, financial, and military fields, etc., failed on every occasion. The policy that we were at first openly advocating became increasingly more clandestine and individual. We knew nothing about the particular details, although we grasped the general trend. The mission of the government whose formation we sought would be to inspire a little faith in the people, put an end to abuses and extra-judicial terror, liquidate the Russian dominance in the army, examine the financial situation and enforce the necessary sanctions on those who were most responsible for the widespread embezzlement and waste; such were our recommendations with respect to domestic policy; in the domain of foreign policy, we wanted to present an ultimatum to the so-called democratic powers, calling on them to make a definitive declaration, without beating around the bush, concerning their support for Spain and the crime of unilateral nonintervention. If France and Britain would not commit to providing effective aid, then the war would be liquidated. The question of how to end the war would still remain, but the continued prosecution of the massacre with its attendant destruction was an unforgivable crime, which could only benefit the enemies of our people and of their future.
And that is what we thought, we who were the only ones who could not be accused of avoiding the sacrifices of the struggle or of having evaded them in the past.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 04, 2021 : Chapter 1 -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Chapter 1 -- Updated.
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