LEFT IN SPAIN - THE OCCASIONAL RAMBLINGS OF AN OLD LEFTIE
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

Pro-Independence parties win Catalan elections
Jordi Oriola Folch    Off_Guardian , 17 February 2021
off-guardian.org/2021/02/16/pro-independence-parties-win-catalan-elections/


For the third time in a row, the Catalan pro-independence movement wins with an absolute majority in the Catalan elections. It has won resoundingly with 74 seats, more than the 68 that establishes the majority (in the previous elections it had won with 70). This time also with 51.22% of the votes, making it the majority among the voters.

The elections were due next year, but they were brought forward because the Spanish courts overthrew Catalan President Joaquim Torra for having disobeyed an electoral board that ordered him to take down a banner criticising the imprisonment of Catalan politicians. The President refused, citing freedom of expression, and the Spanish judiciary considered that the contempt was sufficient to force the removal of the President of the Parliament of Catalonia and cause the elections to be brought forward.

Furthermore, after consulting experts on the pandemic, the provisional Catalan executive decided to postpone the elections for five months until the third wave of Covid-19 had subsided. However, yet again, the Spanish judiciary interfered forcing the elections to be held on 14th February.

This is the same Spanish Justice that keeps 9 Catalan politicians and activists in prison, that has issued search and arrest warrants against 7 exiled Catalan politicians (which the German and Belgian courts rejected because they did not see the accusations as justified or because they understood that there were no guarantees of a fair trial in Spain), it is the same Spanish Justice that maintains the search and arrest warrant against a Majorcan musician –exiled in Belgium– for singing against the King of Spain and that is imminently going to imprison another Catalan musician, Pablo Hasel, for also having sung against the King.

In this context, and despite having the entire state apparatus and the Spanish press against them, independence has won again, and has done so obtaining a larger absolute majority than ever and with over 51% of the votes. In front of the pro-independence movement, we have the former Spanish socialist health minister during the pandemic, who has had the full support of the state, the press and unionism in general, and also the Spanish extreme-right of VOX, which has burst onto the Catalan Parliament with 11 seats.

Given this scenario, the Spanish state and the European Union cannot deny the right of self-determination of Catalan society, which must be expressed in a referendum with democratic guarantees, transparency and without foul play.

All in all, democracy is about allowing citizens to decide at the ballot box, not about violating their will with the application of laws that should in fact serve to guarantee there is a framework that respects what societies want for themselves.

Jordi Oriola i Folch is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Transforma Films. His work has been broadcast on television stations around the world and touches on issues of human rights, sustainability, democratic participation and community work, historical memory and the economic crisis. He has also taught audiovisual classes in the Basque Country, Catalonia, South America and Africa. He can be reached through his website or twitter.



https://english.elpais.com/society/2021-02-08/spain-approaches-end-of-phase-1-of-covid-vaccination-campaign.html

El Pais - PABLO LINDE
Madrid - 08 FEB 2021 
Spain approaches end of phase 1 of Covid vaccination campaign

Spain’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign is entering the final stages of the process of immunizing residents of senior residences, while the majority of healthcare workers have also received their first jab – many have also got the second. Meanwhile, the final part of this first phase, inoculating adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care, has begun in the Canary Islands, Murcia and Navarre. This process is expected to get going in the rest of the country before the middle of February.

EL PAÍS has collected statistics in an attempt to take a snapshot of where the vaccination process has got to in Spain and these are the principal conclusions. Despite a year having passed since the first coronavirus infections having been detected in the country, the system for collecting data on the health crisis is still deficient. The Health Ministry has not centralized the collection of information on the vaccination process and just 11 of the country’s 17 autonomous regions have supplied sufficiently detailed figures.
The process is both complex and flexible. The first three groups in phase 1 of the campaign overlap in order to optimize the process, and so that it continues without pause. Healthcare workers started receiving the vaccine before the process finished in senior residences, and adults with need for daily assistance will start being immunized before all healthcare staff have had their doses.

Along the same lines, some regions are already planning for the over-80s – who are the first group in phase 2 – to start the process before phase 1 has finished. There are around 380,000 adults with need for daily assistance, and they are a complicated group to vaccinate given that home visits are often needed. It could be more efficient to vaccinate non-dependent seniors at the same time – this group is made up of 2.8 million people and accounts for six in every 10 Covid deaths in Spain. In January of this year, more than 1,300 people over the age of 80 died every week with the disease.

To complicate the situation further, not all of the approved vaccines are going to be administered to everyone. The AstraZeneca vaccines, which will start arriving in Spain this week, will only be given to people aged between 18 and 55, given that this is the group where clinical trials have proved it to be effective. For now, the Health Ministry has decided that it will be used to immunize healthcare workers who are not on the front line, and next week a decision will be made on which section of the population to prioritize – it could be essential workers or young people with underlying health conditions.
This, in effect, is what some regions are already doing. It is not completely clear which healthcare workers are being immunized in phase 1, and in many cases, the authorities have opted to give all staff in hospitals their doses, independently of their role. In Madrid, for example, a higher percentage of healthcare workers have received the second dose of the vaccine than among seniors who live in residences. This is despite the fact that senior residences – where more than half of official Covid deaths took place in Spain, according to the Health Ministry’s figures – were the absolute priority of the central government’s vaccination plan.

That said, the available data suggests that immunity is not far off for residents of the country’s senior residences. With the information supplied by the regions, nearly all residents and staff have got their first dose, and the majority of regions have administered the second dose to more than half of the recipients.

The process in residences is being delayed due to outbreaks in some of these centers. According to regional health departments consulted by EL PAÍS, this is not presenting a problem given that the process is simply being postponed where there is a high number of people infected.
Data supplied last week by the Catalan regional authorities show that the vaccines are starting to have an effect, and that number of new infections is rising less inside such residences compared to outside. Fernando Simón, the director of the Health Ministry’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts (CCAES), also said on Thursday that outbreaks in these centers are falling and that comparisons made by the ministry between the over-65s who live in residences and those who do not show a lower infection rate among the former.

The full protection offered by the vaccines, however, does not arrive until a week after the second dose. With the extreme levels of transmission that are currently being seen in Spain – the 14-day cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants is around 750 – it is no surprise that the virus is finding its way into senior residences during this process, infecting inhabitants, and even claiming the lives of those who have been inoculated. The risk after the first shot is low, but it still exists.
The latest data from the Health Ministry shows that all regions have administered more than 70% of the doses that they have received. The authorities insist that the problem now will not be the capacity to deliver the vaccines, but rather the number that Spain will receive. From this weekend onward, that number will rise, with, for example, AstraZeneca sending 1.8 million doses this month. And it will go up even more in March, which is when a new vaccine – from Janssen – may be added to the list. The vaccination process for adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care will be a good means to measure the agility of the system.
With reporting by María Sosa, Isabel Valdés and Lucía Bohórquez.
English version by Simon Hunter.









Leftinspain
I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view.

Spain in our hearts

28/12/2016

2 Comments

 

From the London Review of Books
Neil Ascherson reviews four new books about the Spanish Civil War

Into the NetNeal Ascherson
  • BUYSpain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 by Adam Hochschild
    Macmillan, 438 pp, £25.00, April, ISBN 978 1 5098 1054 3
  • BUY¡No Pasarán! Writings from the Spanish Civil War edited by Pete Ayrton
    Serpent’s Tail, 393 pp, £20.00, April, ISBN 978 1 84668 997 0
  • BUYThe Last Days of the Spanish Republic by Paul Preston
    William Collins, 390 pp, £25.00, February, ISBN 978 0 00 816340 2
  • BUYA Distant Heartbeat: A War, a Disappearance and a Family’s Secrets by Eunice Lipton
    New Mexico, 165 pp, £18.50, April, ISBN 978 0 8263 5658 1
Eighty years have gone by. But there’s still no agreement on how the Spanish Civil War should be remembered. Nor should there be. The real tribute to the force of that human firestorm is the contest of judgments and feelings which still smoulders and still causes pain.
Where should the focus be? For many, simply on the stories: the recounting of sacrificial courage and suffering. For others, on the war’s presentation as history, with a dangling fringe of what ifs. Or on its ‘lessons’, learned in one way by Hitler and Mussolini, in a second way by the surviving defenders of the Republic, in a third manner by Stalin. If there was an English translation of the lessons, no democratic leader – certainly neither Churchill nor Roosevelt – bothered to read it. What remains is the bleak lesson drawn by Camus. ‘It was there that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit …’
Or the Spanish War can be remembered for its epiphanies. What happened in and around Barcelona in the first years of the war did not last, did not happen in most of Spain, ended in tragedy and a viciously disputed memory and made little difference to the war’s outcome. Adam Hochschild, in Spain in Our Hearts, suggests that the foreign journalists covering the war were so obsessed with the military struggle and the Republican leadership in Madrid that they hardly noticed the revolution going on outside their hotels. And yet Barcelona in those years, rather than what was done on the battlefields, was a brief revelation of something latent but dazzling in humanity: the hope to fly like angels.
It was one of those moments only Europe seems to do. The granite mountains of government and wealth, the ravines of class and the dark forests of the law, suddenly turn out to be cardboard stage scenery. Ordinary people kick them down and fall into one another’s arms. Everything is to be held and done in common; nobody is to be unwillingly obeyed; in the sunlight of what Robert Burns called ‘social love’, human beings return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our children, will see it again.
In Barcelona and Catalonia, this epiphany was released (they wouldn’t have liked the word ‘led’) by anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. Orwell arrived there in December 1936 to ‘fight fascism’ and walked about the streets in a daze, trying to adjust to a place where waiters and shop assistants spoke to him as an equal and where he was denounced for trying to give a lift-boy a tip. He wrote, with touching Englishness: ‘All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some way I did not even like it, but I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.’
Others recognised it as a state of affairs worth fighting against, and they were not only on the rebel side with Franco. Most of the political coalition defending the Republic – liberals, many socialists and above all the huge and well-organised Spanish Communist Party – feared that the anarchist eruption in Catalonia would weaken the war effort and frighten off the ‘bourgeois democracies’ which might be persuaded to arm and aid the Republican cause. Hochschild records the chilling words of a communist woman in Barcelona to an American visitor: ‘There is no revolution … This is a people’s war against fascism.’
Hochschild’s book – intelligent, luminously well written and researched – is constructed around the experiences of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Some 2800 American volunteers fought or served as medics and nurses with the International Brigades, and 750 of them were killed. Hochschild says that his book doesn’t pretend to be ‘a full history of the war, or even of American involvement in it. It is, rather, the story of a collection of people whose paths took them an ocean away from home during a violent time.’ But this is too modest. His account – rather than history – of the war reaches far beyond the American fighters to recover its impact, month by month, on foreign visitors and journalists and on their governments.
This is very much a post-Cold War book, which can afford to take a calm view of the world communist movement and of the Communist Party of the United States in the Stalinist years. ‘Most of the Americans who went to Spain considered themselves communists, and we cannot understand them without understanding why communism then had such a powerful appeal and why the Soviet Union seemed a beacon of hope to so many.’ About three-quarters of the American volunteers were party members. Ninety of them were black. A third of them came from the New York area and a great many were Jewish. The ‘prototype’ volunteer, according to Hochschild, was ‘a New Yorker, a communist, an immigrant or the son of immigrants, a trade unionist and a member of a group that has almost vanished from the United States today: working-class Jews’. As Hochschild says, none of them had the social and intellectual distinctionof some famous Brigadiers from elsewhere: Julian Bell, John Cornford or André Malraux. But their motives for fighting were large – larger than Spain. As one old volunteer told Hochschild, ‘For us it wasn’t Franco … it was always Hitler.’ Before the populations of the democracies woke up to what was at stake, these few had understood and named the beast now slouching towards them. When the survivors returned, envious or guilty voices dismissed them as ‘premature anti-fascists’.
The stalwart figure of Robert Merriman marches through Hochschild’s story. Big, stubborn and calm, he was a natural leader to whom everyone turned in times of horror and confusion, and a militant whose faith in the Soviet Union never wavered. And he had lived there. A working-class graduate from Berkeley, Bob moved with his wife, Marion, to Moscow in the 1930s, at a time when thousands of young Americans accepted the USSR’s invitation to find jobs in its colossal industrialisation drive. Ominous rumours – the Ukrainian famine, for instance – went round the American expat community, but Bob loyally ignored them.
It wasn’t the Great Purge or the Moscow trials that made Bob Merriman leave the Soviet Union, but the outbreak of war in Spain and the Comintern’s call for volunteers. There he was to lead the Lincoln men in combat: wounded in the Jarama battles in 1937, rallying his men as the Ebro front collapsed in March 1938, missing – presumed killed – as he crossed the Ebro again to rescue American soldiers trapped by the fascist offensive. Hochschild is sure that Merriman was a model for ‘Jordan’, hero and martyr of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Through the memoirs and letters of other American and British survivors, Hochschild recalls the dogged courage of the International Brigades, flung into ill-fated offensives and counter-offensives at Brunete or Teruel, Belchite or the Ebro, equipped at first with museum-worthy Russian rifles or pre-1914 French mitrailleuses which jammed. The Republic was initially far richer than the rebels, but the only power willing to sell them arms was the Soviet Union. The democracies stood back. ‘If there is somewhere where fascist and Bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better,’ Stanley Baldwin observed. Roosevelt called for ‘a moral embargo’ on selling weapons to either side. But as the Third Reich and Mussolini’s Italy continued to pour men, tanks and aircraft into Franco’s camp, ‘non-intervention’ became a slow death sentence on the Republic.
This was obvious to the foreign journalists covering the war from Madrid. With unexpected anger, Hochschild protests that ‘not one [journalist] showed much interest in the revolution that for months surrounded them.’ But he knows how a travelling press corps operates, and shows empathy with the talented mob working out of the Hotel Florida in Madrid during the siege. Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn and Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and Virginia Cowles were among that crew, most of them hotly committed to the anti-fascist cause. Gellhorn, with mounting desperation, used her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt to warn of the consequences of non-intervention and plead for American help. Hemingway, braggart though he was, put enormous energy and initiative into organising the escape of soldiers and civilians as the Republic foundered. Matthews fought the Catholic editors of the New York Times who kept changing his stories to favour Franco’s propaganda, and yet lost contact with reality as he wrote crazily upbeat articles about the Republic’s ‘excellent’ morale as Franco prepared his final breakthrough.
In Barcelona, the young Americans living in the ecstasy of an anarchist ‘new world’ were appalled when the communists and their government allies struck to restore an older kind of order. Hochschild tells this wretched story carefully and pretty fairly. He doesn’t buy the argument that the war was lost because the revolution was suppressed, reluctantly concluding that one element of the communist case was valid: to win that sort of war, ‘a disciplined army responsible to a central command is far more effective.’ Years earlier, Orwell had come round to the same opinion: the belief that ‘the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false,’ he wrote. But both writers – Orwell especially, who only just got away with his life from the Barcelona purge – find the communist putsch detestable in its brutality, mendacity and servility to instructions from Moscow. Hochschild mourns what was lost: ‘doomed though the Spanish Revolution may have been, for a matter of months a stunningly different kind of society grew and flourished in a way it never has since.’
The British volunteers defending Madrid University found that a book had to be 350 pages long to stop a bullet. They barricaded themselves behind Kant, Voltaire, Goethe and Pascal. John Cornford and his comrades would have been equally safe behind Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts, which is long enough to feature scores of American and British fighters. These volunteers were both men and women, and Republican Spain was the first place on earth where an African-American woman – Salaria Kea – headed a team of white nurses. It was also the first place where a black officer – Oliver Law – commanded an integrated American brigade in battle.
Hochschild returns again and again to American non-intervention – the policy Roosevelt himself afterwards called ‘a grave mistake’. Roosevelt had instinctive sympathy for the Republican cause, understood as the working people of Spain defending themselves against fascism. But his inclinations were clouded by devious political calculations, in particular the effect that ‘arms for Spain’ might have on the Catholic vote in the United States. And Hochschild makes clear the massive and possibly decisive support of some American business leaders for Franco. ‘Without American petroleum and American trucks and American credits, we could never have won the civil war,’ a Franquist diplomat observed years later. The petroleum was supplied by Texaco and its gravelly-voiced boss Torkild Rieber all through the conflict. Rieber went on to refunction Texaco’s global port presence into a fascist intelligence network, warning Franco’s staff of oil-tanker movements destined for the Republic so that the ships could be hunted down and sunk by Italian submarines. Roosevelt had a good idea of what Rieber was up to, but took no action to stop him. So much for that ‘moral embargo’. Rieber went on to ship 325 million dollars’ worth of oil (at present prices) to Franco. He became a Knight of the Grand Cross of Isabela la Católica and an enthusiast for Nazi Germany. A pal of Hermann Goering’s, he traded busily with the Third Reich until Hitler declared war on the US in 1941. ‘Rieber died in 1968, at the age of 86, a wealthy man.’
Hochschild’s wide-ranging and imaginative treatment of the Spanish war is the right preparation for ¡No Pasarán! – an anthology of personal experiences remembered or (lightly) fictionalised. Pete Ayrton has selected from work by 38 writers, only some of whom are famous and not all of whom were on the side of the Republic. There are translations not only from Spanish but also from Basque, Catalan, French, Italian and Polish. Most contributors are or were on the left, but Drieu la Rochelle – French fascist and collaborator with the Nazi occupation – is given space, and there are terrible accounts of peasant and anarchist atrocities to set against memories of Franco’s much deeper and broader bloodbath. Malraux, Sartre, Jorge Semprun, Laurie Lee, Victor Serge, Luis Buñuel and of course Orwell have their pages, but for a change – almost welcome – Hemingway and Gellhorn are absent. Instead, the American witnesses chosen by Ayrton are John Dos Passos and Muriel Rukeyser.
Ayrton’s selections don’t only tell of the killing, in battle or – more often – behind the lines, as victors avenged themselves on helpless civilians. Victor Serge and Pierre Herbart evoke devious communist manoeuvres to destroy ideological opponents in the middle of a desperate war of survival. And Jordi Soler, born a quarter-century after the Civil War ended, writes about the camp at Argelès-sur-Mer, part of France’s foul Gulag archipelago into which half a million soldiers and refugees from the defeated Republic were herded – Soler’s grandfather among them.
The most memorable of these extracts or sketches are about time – the draining of one kind of significance from that war and its replacement by others. For some writers, that past has been completely cut off by what followed, becoming a private place reserved for its survivors. Laurie Lee remembers ‘the chance to make one grand, uncomplicated gesture of personal sacrifice and faith which might never occur again. Certainly it was the last time this century that a generation had such an opportunity before the fog of nationalism and mass slaughter closed in.’
Others feel an imperative to keep the tunnel of connection open. Soler gets into his car in Barcelona and in two hours has crossed a now invisible French frontier to reach Argelès, the journey that had taken his grandfather and the mass of Republican fugitives so many agonising weeks. The beach where the detention camp stood is now covered with ‘a crowd of tourists who, smothered in cream, expose their bodies to the sun’. And yet Soler says: ‘Very little can be done to ward off oblivion, but it is essential we do so, otherwise we will end up without foundations or perspective.’
*
The world has watched, without making much effort to understand, Spain’s miserable struggles and disputes over exhumations, monuments, hidden atrocities. In Spain, at least, the Civil War refuses to stay dead. Bernardo Atxaga was living in a Castilian village when, in 1981, mad Colonel Tejero burst into the Parliament with guns and tried to restore the Franco regime. The very same day, the village priest went straight to the military barracks with a list of socialists and liberals to be arrested. That was many years after Brecht wrote: ‘The womb from whence That crept/Is fertile yet.’ He was thinking of Germany. Is that womb still fertile in Spain, even in the 21st century? Or in the European nations now threatened with authoritarian, racialist populism?
The Spanish Civil War began with a coup d’état: Franco’s rebellion in Morocco. It’s less well known that it ended in another one. This was the putsch – or mutiny – on the Republican side on 5 March 1939, which effectively overthrew the government of Juan Negrín and sought an ‘honourable’ surrender. The two men heading the coup were Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republic’s ‘army of the centre’, and Julián Besteiro, an elderly and disaffected socialist who had been the party’s president. In the last few weeks, millions of web-users have been putting round Mencken’s 1920 prophecy that the White House would one day be ‘adorned’ by ‘a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron’. This also happens to fit the plotters in 1939 Spain quite neatly. Besteiro was the dreamy idiot. Casado, who pulled him into the conspiracy, was the self-dramatising, self-obsessed moron.
Paul Preston, author of The Last Days of the Spanish Republic, hits hard from his first page. ‘This is the story of an avoidable humanitarian tragedy that cost many thousands of lives and ruined tens of thousands more.’ He explains that the tragedy ‘centres on three individuals. One, Dr Juan Negrín, the victim of what might be called a conspiracy of dunces, tried to prevent it. Two bore responsibility for what transpired. One of these, Julián Besteiro, behaved with culpable naivety. The other, Segismundo Casado, behaved with a remarkable combination of cynicism, arrogance and selfishness.’
By early 1939, it was obvious that the Republic was going to lose the war. The Republican offensive on the Ebro had been driven back with terrible slaughter, and the Nationalist drive in Catalonia had broken through in early January 1939. Negrín was well aware of what was taking place. Hochschild, for some reason, dismisses him as ‘a portly, multilingual physiologist famous for his gargantuan appetite’; Preston’s book shows him to have been a man of desperate courage and energy. He had few illusions, but never ceased to put forward bold schemes which were undermined by disobedient or treacherous underlings, or simply by the democracies’ reluctance to challenge fascism.
Negrín’s first hope, as defeat loomed, was that the struggle in Spain could be prolonged until the inevitable European war broke out. Then, France and Britain might recognise Republican Spain as their ally in the fight against Hitler and European fascism, and with their support the tide could be turned against Franco. But the Munich settlement in the autumn of 1938, followed by Hitler’s unopposed seizure of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, told Negrín that the West was not yet ready to fight. On the contrary, the British in particular were pressing him to surrender. Chamberlain’s cabinet was impatient to recognise Franco’s government; Halifax, as foreign secretary, had declared that ‘the sooner this country got on terms with General Franco and made up lost ground, the better.’ Both Britain and France urged Negrín to declare a ceasefire in return for a Franco guarantee of ‘no reprisals’.
Negrín knew well that Franco had not the slightest intention of sticking to any such guarantee. But he still felt that there were ways to avoid the worst. ‘A negotiated peace, always,’ he said. ‘Unconditional surrender to let them shoot half a million Spaniards, never!’ His strategy now became just to fight on, without any prospect of victory but in the hope of forcing concessions from Franco as the price of a settlement.
Behind him, the Republic and its leadership were falling apart. President Azaña, greenish with fear, had removed himself to France, where much of the Republic’s ‘northern army’ had already found refuge. The core of military resistance was now the Communist Party and its forces; hatred of the communists drove the anarchists and their militias into an unlikely alliance with socialists and conservative army officers to prevent what they imagined would be an imminent seizure of power. Negrín, absurdly, was thought to be a communist puppet in Moscow’s pay. The truth was that the mounting disloyalty and disobedience of his government meant that the Communist Party was the only formation he could rely on to carry on the war.
General Casado, thin, bespectacled, fanatically convinced of his own correctness in everything, had been secretly in touch with the Nationalists for a long time. He was far from the only member of the Republican leadership to have clandestine contact with Franco’s Fifth Column in Madrid. (It’s a weakness of Preston’s book that he never explains the extraordinary fact that Franco’s intelligence services were able to maintain an almost public presence in the Republican capital during the war. Who were they, we are left wondering, and how were they organised?) Juan Besteiro, socialist intellectual and professor, was another leading figure whose disappointed ambitions and suspicion of Negrín led him into the Fifth Column’s net. Gradually, the outlines of a plot ‘to save Spain from communism’ began to form. Well aware of what was going on in Madrid, Franco was able to hold back his advance and wait for Casado and Besteiro to do his work for him.
Casado convinced his followers that Franco would understand his high motives and – with Negrín and the communists out of the way – offer the Republic an ‘honourable peace’. Did he convince himself? From the outset, he secretly arranged to leave ‘reds’ – anarchists as well as communists – to the vengeance of the fascists after the surrender and promised the Fifth Column that he would make sure they couldn’t escape. He lied abundantly, asserting that Franco had promised him he would show mercy and restraint and that the British had persuaded Franco to pardon all professional officers (both totally untrue). Besteiro developed the fantasy that the war would end in a magnificent final parade and a ceremonial embrace, as a sword of victory was presented to Franco.
When Negrín realised what was brewing, it was too late. The coup detonated on 5 March 1939. Its outcome was ghastly and predictable. Franco had no interest in any negotiated peace; by suppressing the Communist Party and its troops, the plotters had removed the one element which might have made him hold off long enough for the Republic to organise the evacuation of its supporters. The anarchists made splendid speeches about ‘Numantine resistance’ (fighting to the death) and scorched earth, but did nothing much. The socialist leaders sent out a final message: ‘More than anti-fascist, it is necessary to be anti-Bolshevik.’ Then they bolted to Algeria, with suitcases crammed with saffron to sell in France. Admiral Buiza, the naval commander supposed to cover the evacuation by sea, sailed off with his ships to Tunisia.
The exodus began, unplanned and frantic. Negrín left for France, Casado on a British destroyer for London, where he worked for many years for the BBC. Besteiro sat chain-smoking in Madrid, waiting for Franco to arrive and treat him with gratitude and chivalry (he was soon worked to death in prison). Hordes of Republicans and their families fled towards the south-eastern coast. Casado had claimed he had ships for ten thousand evacuees. It was his final lie: he had none. A British tramp steamer, loaded to the gunwales with nearly three thousand human beings, was the last vessel to leave Alicante. Then Franco’s troops arrived, and the slaughter began.
For historians, far from the passions of those years, the war left fascinating what ifs. Hochschild summarises them well, but none now seems convincing. Could the Republic have won, and would that have changed European history? Yes and no. If the democracies had armed Spain against Franco, he could have been defeated, and yet this would scarcely have deterred Hitler from his programme of aggression. Spain was only a sideshow to him. Would a Republican victory have ended in a communist Spain, a puppet of the Soviet Union? Almost certainly not. It’s unthinkable that Spain would ever have become anyone’s colony, even if Stalin had wanted it. And Spanish communism would soon have been driven down very un-Soviet paths, if only to survive in its own country.
When the International Brigades marched away through weeping crowds, Dolores Ibárruri (‘la Pasionaria’) told them that they were history, they were legend: ‘We shall not forget you.’ When a group of survivors came back to a free Spain almost sixty years later, the crowds wept again and applauded and shouted ‘Gracias!’ Eunice Lipton was one of those who came back, but representing the dead. Her uncle David was killed on Hill 666, in the Ebro offensive; her book is a memoir about her search for him. He came from just that New York Jewish working-class background which Hochschild mourns. It was a hotly disputatious family, in which Lipton’s brash father, Louis, mocked his gentle brother for his political idealism (‘Nothing is worth dying for! He threw his life away!’) and deliberately hid his Spanish letters from the family. Louis’s daughter soon understood that this brutal mask hid grief and guilt, and she set out to penetrate the silence, to seek out old Brigade survivors who served with David, and found him so ‘sweet tempered … He didn’t have any sharp edges.’ ‘Without him and his friends,’ Lipton ends, ‘people like me would never have poured out into the street against the war in Vietnam, ridden the buses and marched for civil rights, created the women’s movement.’
2 Comments

The CIA, Russia and Donald Trump

11/12/2016

0 Comments

 
​

​Craig Murray  writes on 11 December 2016

I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.
A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt.
As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.
The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.
I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:
The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government. Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.” “I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things. “If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States. “America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”
But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the KGB.
It is terrible that the prime conduit for this paranoid nonsense is a once great newspaper, the Washington Post, which far from investigating executive power, now is a sounding board for totally evidence free anonymous source briefing of utter bullshit from the executive.
In the UK, one single article sums up the total abnegation of all journalistic standards. The truly execrable Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian writes “Few credible sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was timed to cause maximum pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump.” Does he produce any evidence at all for this assertion? No, none whatsoever. What does a journalist mean by a “credible source”? Well, any journalist worth their salt in considering the credibility of a source will first consider access. Do they credibly have access to the information they claim to have?
Now both Julian Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia. Do we credibly have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access. After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for inconvenient truth telling.
Contrast this to the “credible sources” Freedland relies on. What access do they have to the whistleblower? Zero. They have not the faintest idea who the whistleblower is. Otherwise they would have arrested them. What reputation do they have for truthfulness? It’s the Clinton gang and the US government, for goodness sake.
In fact, the sources any serious journalist would view as “credible” give the opposite answer to the one Freedland wants. But in what passes for Freedland’s mind, “credible” is 100% synonymous with “establishment”. When he says “credible sources” he means “establishment sources”. That is the truth of the “fake news” meme. You are not to read anything unless it is officially approved by the elite and their disgusting, crawling whores of stenographers like Freedland.
The worst thing about all this is that it is aimed at promoting further conflict with Russia. This puts everyone in danger for the sake of more profits for the arms and security industries – including of course bigger budgets for the CIA. As thankfully the four year agony of Aleppo comes swiftly to a close today, the Saudi and US armed and trained ISIS forces counter by moving to retake Palmyra. This game kills people, on a massive scale, and goes on and on.
0 Comments

Helen Yaffe on BBC World News following the death of Fidel Castro

1/12/2016

0 Comments

 
0 Comments
    Picture
    I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view. 

    Archives

    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly