A great many shells and skulls of churches
I have this collection of letters by Sylvia Townsend Warner and I started rather randomly re-reading it yesterday. She’s a demon with words – I’d forgotten.
She went to Barcelona in 1936 to help with the resistance to Franco’s coup, working in a Red Cross office.
Heard of it by wire, sprang into the car, and drove across France at a rate which would have been intolerable if we had not been on our way to Spain.
I don’t think I have ever met so many congenial people in the whole of my life.
She describes how the workers are running everything, and how terrific it all is.
There are a great many shells and skulls of churches. It seemed quite natural that churches should have been used as machine gun nests, I have never seen churches so heavy and bulky and bullying, one can see at a glance that they have always been reactionary fortresses.
She met no one who resented the gutting of the churches, though she did meet two women who were a little uneasy that bastard god might punish them.
And you cannot imagine, after this mealy-mouthed country, the pleasure of seeing an office with a large painted sign, Organisation for the Persecution of Fascists. Anarchists, of course. That beautiful directness is typical of anarchism, a most engaging type of thought, though I do not want to be an anarchist myself. The world is not yet worthy of it, but it ought to be the political theory of heaven.
P.S. It is only the papers which call the Spanish Communists. They are nearly all anarchists…
That’s a nice Xmas present, don’t you think?
Beautiful, thank you! I had to slowly abandon my dreams of anarchy, though it remains the ideal.
Alas, Franco was almost completely defeated in the first weeks of his coup. And it is worth re-asserting that he was in charge of an attempted coup, not any kind of ‘rebellion.’ Through 90% of Spain, the unions, anarchists, etc. seized control and drove the Army/Church/Landowners out. Without the intervention of Moroccan mercenaries, ferried to Spain by Lufthansa, and the open tolerance of intervention by Hitler and Mussolini, there would have been no opportunity for the Spanish left to be crushed by the Comintern, no opportunity for a Civil War that only Franco could win.
Plus the embargo on selling arms to both sides – which of course was a gift to Franco.
I’ve no sympathy with Communists, Anarchists or Fascists or any other of these horrible ghosts from the 20th century. All are equally ignoble and disdainful of human life.
The only thing the opponents of Franco have (had) going for their side is (was) the fact they didn’t win, and were, thus, deprived of an opportunity to show the world just how repressive, murderous and Stalinist they could be.
A *curse* on all of them.
We should also decry the wholesale cultural destruction wrought by these ideologies. The destruction of historical buildings, be they of a religious or secular nature, is an abomination.
The only thing church walls bully, like those of Rome’s Colosseum, or indeed any other monumental structure, is the tyrannical pull of earth’s gravity. In fact, the word ‘defy’ would be far more apt.
You must be joking. All the opponents of Franco? So you’re saying it’s a great thing that Franco won?
The Stalinist CP certainly did muscle in on the anti-Franco side, but they didn’t and don’t stand for all the opponents of Franco.
There were some reasonable (ie, moderate) factions on the anti-Franco side, but there were none on Franco’s side.
All of the beguiling ‘Isms’ of the 20th century that promised emancipation were repulsive, authoritarian, murderous and anti-human. All left piles of corpses stacked like cord-wood.
We should instead admire the century’s reformers; the unions, the suffragettes and the grunt workers who rolled up their sleeves and who worked within the system to bring about real change. How about limiting our ambitions to reform instead of revolution?
There were some reasonable (ie, moderate) factions on the anti-Franco side, but there were none on Franco’s side.
Absolutely. However had the anti-Franco side won, those moderates would have suffered the same fate as the moderates opposing the Shah of Iran back in the late 70s. When push comes to shove, the Bolsheviks have no use for Mensheviks
And no, that’s neither an endorsement of the Shah nor Franco.
Maybe; or maybe things would have gone differently. Maybe the non-Stalinist left would have prevailed over the Stalinist. Maybe the Nazi-Soviet pact would have fatally weakened the Stalinists…or maybe not.
When it comes to revolutions, the hard cores always prevail over the moderates. There are very few exceptions to that.
The Suffragettes in no way worked ‘within the system’. Nail bombs, arson, rioting were all used by the WSPU, (Their own description of themselves was suffragists by the way – I believe it was the Mail who coined suffragette as a derogatory term.)
As for Spain, about 60,000 people died at the hands of the Republicans. The Nationalists murdered some 200,000 during the Civil War and another 200,000 afterwards.