Topic: Decline of the West
Let it never be said that San Francisco’s progressive establishment doesn’t support the military. For there’s one group of veterans that the commissars of the city by the bay do admire: the men of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And no, these guys didn’t serve in the American Civil War. They fought, rather, in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and their supreme commander was Joseph Stalin. Now that San Francisco is dedicating a memorial to the men of the Brigade, a quick review of the historical record seems in order.
When Spain’s democratically elected government was threatened by a military coup led by General Francisco Franco, the international Left quickly rallied to the side of the Republicans, as the government side came to be called. Franco, though not much of an ideologue, soon identified himself and his movement with fascism—perhaps in the hope, quickly to be realized, of attracting Italian and German support. Thus was the stage set for a grand confrontation between the forces of darkness and light.
It was all baloney, of course. For while Franco had Mussolini and Hitler on his side, the Republic was supported—if that is the word—by Stalin. The foreign volunteers of the International Brigades, of which the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was one, were made up almost entirely of Communist Party members. In one way and another, Stalin and his henchmen gradually extended their control over the government of the Spanish Republic. Purges and liquidations of “deviationists,” “Trotskyites,” “wreckers,” etc. soon ensued. In short, the anti-fascist crusade fell under the control of a worse murderer and tyrant than Franco ever dreamed of being. “Anti-fascism” came to mean no more than serving the interests of the Soviet Union. And the men of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades were, with a few exceptions, Stalin’s willing accomplices.
Among the foreign volunteers who streamed into Spain to fight for the Republic was George Orwell. He happened to join not the International Brigades but the POUM (anarchist) militia. After service at the front in the course of which he was badly wounded in the throat, Orwell and his wife found themselves denounced as enemies of the people, earmarked for liquidation at the hands of the Stalinist secret police. They barely managed to escape from Spain with their lives.
The Spanish Civil War provided Orwell with an up-close and personal experience of life under a totalitarian regime that shaped his subsequent political outlook. His memoir of the war, Homage to Catalonia, is a bracing antidote to the myth-making of the Left, of which the San Francisco memorial to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade is a particularly disgraceful example.
