People :
Author : Diego Abad De Santillán
Text :
The Spanish war came to an end thanks to the impressive amount of Italo-German aid granted to our enemies, in men and in materiel, and also thanks to the criminal complacency of the so-called democratic Governments, authors of the farce of nonintervention. The Spanish war is over, but the world that prevented us, under futile pretexts and false presumptions, from having any chance to really put up a fight, now has to pay the piper in a new hecatomb.
Bourgeoisie and proletarians alike, in every country, were united in sharing the comfortable interpretation that our war involved only us, the belligerents. When they were not committing the grave crime of helping our enemies—the proletarian paradise, Russia, sent the gasoline to Italy that made it possible for the fascist air force to bomb us, destroying cities and massacring civilian populations—they were imposing blockades on us to make us yield. France and England as a result had to face the reality that we had warned them so many times was inevitable. No intervention or unilateral intervention in favor of the rebels! That was the position that led to our downfall.
The defeat of fascism in Spain would have been the first step towards the destruction of fascism in Europe and in the world. We understand the tragic situation of England, which had supported Italian fascism since it began to show its true colors as an instrument for the destruction of freedom, when it was suddenly confronted by the obligation, if it were to attend to its own interest, to help the anti-fascist cause in Spain. The events we have since witnessed show us that it made its choice in favor of Italy and against our Spain, against this same Spain that it had believed it was duty-bound to help in its struggle against Napoleon, and made its choice this time against Spain to its own detriment.
If the Franco-British allies are to be victorious in the present military conflict, they will first have to satisfy in advance the debt they contracted with their stance towards our war. All debts must be paid!
The struggle in Spain did not end the way we wanted it to end, but rather the way we had foreseen that it would end if certain changes in the leadership and the policy directing the war were not made: with a military catastrophe—with the collapse of the fronts and of the home front—and with an orgy of bloodshed at the expense of the losers. Two books tell us about this final phase: one by Colonel Segismundo Casado, The Last Days of Madrid, and the other by J. García Pradas, Cómo terminó la guerra en España [How the War in Spain Ended]. Both confirm, point by point, from their vantage points in the Central theater of the war, what we have sought to depict from our position in Catalonia. The same disastrous intervention by the Russian emissaries and their Spanish allies, who were so weak and so amenable to corruption, the same crimes against the people, the same conspiracy against Spain, the same moral decomposition achieved by means of a policy that had no other goal than the predominance of a single party in the State apparatus.
Of the three causes that we declared were the fundamental causes of our defeat—a) the Franco-British policy of (unilateral) nonintervention; b) Russian intervention in our affairs; c) the pathological centralism of the itinerant Madrid-Valencia-Barcelona-Figueras Government—only with regard to this third aspect does our account differ essentially from the accounts offered by these two authors. We shall not examine these two books about the end of our war, however, with reference to the events in which we did not participate—and not because of any lack of desire to do so or interest in their outcome—or for their description of milieus with which we were not personally acquainted.
We now feel that our defeat, and the fact that we have revealed more than some people think advisable about the cloak of secrecy in which our movement has always operated, have elevated us above the heat of battle. This is why we can speak about the past and maintain that, from now on, each person will have to bear the responsibility that is due to him in the tragedy of Spain. We are doing enough now to bear our own share.
We represented the oldest political-social organization of modern Spain. The Iberian Anarchist Federation is the same Alliance for Socialist Democracy [Alianza de la Democracia Socialista] founded in 1868 in Madrid and in Barcelona and which spread throughout the Peninsula, including Portugal. A close-knit nucleus of propaganda, working class organization and struggle, the victors are still concerned with the pursuit of its liquidation, to judge by the numerous everyday indications that neither the terror nor the shootings have succeeded in making it disappear. The end of the war caused many thousands of us to be removed from the struggle. But even with our exclusion, it is not to be taken for granted that our movement will be totally uprooted. Others have already taken the places of the fallen and of the survivors who went into exile, survivors who are also final casualties, because survival outside of our geographic, political and social climate is the same thing as death. To carry on with the history of Spain there is only one suitable terrain: Spain!
It is to this clandestine movement, characterized by a strong moral and combative constitution, that the orientation, the development and the defense of the revolutionary working class organizations in Spain, their heroic struggles, their unparalleled resistance to all the methods of the political inquisitions of right and left, without interruption, since the dismal era of Sagasta, is due. How many bleak periods of bitterness have we traversed since then! How many generations of militants have been consumed in this battle! Now it is the turn of our generation to fall in battle. And it has fallen but it fought the good fight, on its own terms. That is why it will rise again, and it is already arising, the same red thread of our history, and it will carry on with the battle for justice. But what can all of this matter to those who are no longer soldiers in this crusade?
The activities in pursuit of progress and justice that have taken place for almost three quarters of a century have had a major impact on the development of modern Spanish history. On more than one occasion, when all other possible means were foreclosed, and mere propaganda and trade union methods were rendered impossible, it was necessary to resort to more energetic and expedient measures. The torturers and executioners of the people were always haunted by the shadow of anonymous vengeance. Certain individual acts of retaliation and various armed insurrections—the last ones having taken place in December and January of 1933 and in October of 1934 against the exotic Republic itself—and the invisible but constant operational presence of our groups dispersed in every walk of life, spurred a lot of talk about us, weaving a legend and a myth. This myth and this legend proved, in July 1936, to largely correspond to reality in certain respects.
Outside of the passionate cooperation of revolutionary socialism in Madrid, with which we shared the victory over the military revolt in the capital of Spain, in all the other regions where the military was defeated, we did almost all the work. And we were not victorious in all of Spain only because our people lacked weapons and the Government of the Republic warned the civil governors not to give arms to the people.
At the end of 1937 we had 154,000 members. It is true that they were fewer than they were before the war, but their influence reached millions of industrial workers and peasants. On many occasions left wing parties and organizations believed they were the determining elements of events when in fact they were nothing but puppets dominated by an environment that we had prepared in order to take one more step along the path of the economic, political and social progress of the country. We have mentioned, for example, why we had evicted the left from power in 1933, and why we decided to return it to power in February 1936.
Now we can speak of many things for which we were senselessly held responsible, and of those for which we were not held responsible because their sources and determining factors were unknown at the time.
None of the Parties that sought power in the Government or the legislature had an organization as strong as ours, nor did any of them possess the numerical forces that were so deeply rooted in the people, to whose interests and aspirations we always remained, and still remain, faithful. Due to our loyalty to the people, rather than to their Government, we sought to the very last moment to fully deploy our forces, in our own way, but we were not allowed to do so.
We never had any contacts or links with any organized force besides the National Confederation of Labor, a new name, dating only from 1911, of the old working class organization that was supported since 1869 by our movement. When the war began as a result of our victories against a succession of rebel army garrisons, we thought it was necessary to publicly show our face and to coordinate as many willing individuals as possible around the conflict. We are accused by some of having been more concerned with the war than with the revolution. The only way we could have established and consolidated a new economic and social organization was if we were victorious in the war. Where did they want us to carry out a revolution if most of the territory was in enemy hands? Are social revolutions made in the clouds? We were not victorious, we lost the terrain upon which a great social and economic transformation might have been carried out, because the workers and bourgeoisie of every country converged in a common policy to destroy us, standing by without doing anything or else working for our enemies. And the hoped-for revolution in Spain, which conformed to the climate and the preparation of the people called upon to carry it out, rather than to the dogmatic blueprints of parties, was liquidated for who knows how many years.
The final results of the conflict that began on July 19, 1936 and which ended as a real international war of Spain against the most aggressive military powers in Europe, in April 1939, cannot be forgotten or belittled. Only those who are ready to emulate that heroic saga and to pay the same price for their ideals that was paid by the Spanish revolutionaries for their own ideals have the right to accuse us of anything, to demand explanations or to lecture us. No fewer than two million people died on both sides, and more than one hundred thousand people were shot and murdered in Spain after the fascist victory. And then we have to add to these numbers a million prisoners in the Spanish concentration camps and a half million refugees in the concentration camps in France and North Africa, 60,000 of whom are estimated to have died during their exodus and in exile of starvation, exposure and despair.
These figures tell us something about the greatest outburst of popular heroism in modern times. Not even its defeat diminished its glory and its historical transcendence. These corpses will be fertilizer for the vitality of eternal Spain, that will arise from its ashes, stronger and more invincible than ever.
The brave Government of Victory, that creature of Moscow, possesses enormous financial resources in foreign countries that could be used to meet the needs of the victims of the vast exodus. But just as we were unable in Spain, by means of the Popular Front, to obtain information about the situation of our treasury, we were also unable to obtain from the opportunist thieves who robbed our national treasury, in our requests directed to the institution of the Permanent Delegation of the Cortes, based in Paris, to provide even the least explanation of their profligacies. Some facts have come to light outside of certain circles of insiders, due to the sensational defection of Prieto and Negrín, each of whom claims to have the right to administer the loot from the war for their own benefit and for that of their friends and accomplices. For the most part, however, the matter remains obscure.
As for the reasons for our defeat, one of which was the policy of Russian intervention in Spain, perhaps even in close cooperation with Hitler’s Germany, we should also add, for the masses, the proof of the deception they experienced and fought under and the discovery of the moral quality of the leaders and beneficiaries of our war. The myth of resistance with or without bread, with or without weapons, was merely an artifice so that those leaders could ensure their exclusive enjoyment after the disaster of the loot they acquired with our defeat, which was their victory.
And with those millions drained from an impoverished and disgraced Spain, consciences and pens will be purchased that, high above so much tragedy and so much ignominy, will raise the lucky ones up onto a pedestal of heroes. And that is just what they want, too. Someone once wrote, and we hope that this is the case: “They want to pass into history in marble and bronze but they will have to be satisfied with a dungheap.”
There is but one pure, martyred hero, now and always: the Spanish people. We can no longer stand at its side, except with our sympathy and our affection. It is the only greatness before which we bow with respect. The only thing that puzzles us and embarrasses us is the fact that so many traitors have been able to emerge from this great people, in the name of the most diverse ideals.
The Iberian spirit lay crushed for almost three centuries after the defeat of the comuneros of Castille and of the brotherhoods of Valencia by the Emperor Charles V, and after the liquidation of the liberties of Aragon by Philip II. Who would have thought that the spirit of our people would still be alive in 1808? In that glorious heroic epic lasting six years Spain once again entered the rolls of History. But in 1823, the abject tyrant Ferdinand VII, who founded the bullfighting schools, once again succeeded in imposing his despotism with rivers of blood and countless martyrs. Between that era and July 1936, interspersed with civil wars, popular uprisings and periods of exhaustion and demoralization, an interval of a little more than a century, how many prophets had heralded the death of Spain? In 1936 our people once again showed themselves for what they really are, heroic in struggle and brilliant in economic and social reconstruction, recovering their own rhythm within a few months of liberty. The defeat of 1939 will last for a shorter or a longer period of time; but only at the cost of the total extermination of the Spanish people will it be possible to definitively change the spirit of this great people and succeed in suppressing its hope for a new life, for a new dawn.
Buenos Aires
April 5, 1940
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 04, 2021 : Chapter 14 -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Chapter 14 -- Updated.
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