The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Peter Wyden; Simon and Schuster; New York.

History has not been kind to the radical left, not because modern revolutions have invariably failed, but because they have frequently succeeded. So deplorable has been the record of revolutions in power that those who continue to proclaim the necessity of total political social solutions find themselves in the unenviable position of having to persuade the skeptical that the next “liberation” will not result in thought control, concentration camps, and mass murder. Even the most uncharitable among us might sympathize with the predicament of those who are called upon to say some thing flattering about Lenin, Stalin, or Mao; small wonder that contemporary enragés prefer to speak of such media heroes as Castro and the Sandinistas. But even these idols tarnish as their despotisms show no sign of withering away. Where, then, can a radical turn? Few, if any, of them would now take the trouble to defend the governments of Vietnam or North Korea, and they know full well that any attempt to extol the Eastern European regimes will meet with cynical laughter.

It is largely for this reason that the Spanish Civil War continues to excite the radical imagination. In Quixote’s somber land the left was defeated and therefore spared the painful duty of apologizing for the consequences of vic tory. Toe peddlers of revolution are thus at liberty to call attention to noble intentions, heroic gestures, and the villainy of the victors—in this case a military clique that accepted aid from Hitler and Mussolini. There is, it seems, nothing quite so awe inspiring—and so safe—as a lost cause. One thinks of the romantic aura that still surrounds the late, unlamented Salvador Allende. And always one re members Spain, which was, if not the last, certainly the most sacred cause. “The Republican causa,” Peter Wyden informs us, “stood against Hitler, the priests, the landowners, the military caste, the privileged.” What right-thinking person would not wish to make such a purpose his own?

The author of this clumsily written volume is yet another tireless, and tiresome, propagandist of the left masquerading as a historian. Throughout, he man ages to portray all who fought for the Republic, particularly the communists, as well-intentioned lovers of liberty and uncompromising opponents of “fascism.” He lionizes the famous communist leader “La Pasionaria” (“the passion flower,” Dolores Ibarruri) as well as Stalin’s ubiquitous agent Mikhail Koltzov. He speaks with reverence of Republican champions including Hemingway, Malraux, Robert Capa, and Arthur Koestler, and he lavishes praise on members of the International Brigades, especially American communists such as Alvah Bessie, Ben Leider, and Robert Merriman, the University of California economist whom Hemingway immortalized as Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

World War II was the surgery,” Wyden concludes, “Spain was the infection, and the men and women who flocked there were the committed few who could tell their children that they had been there, present at the creation of our age.” That is, the German-born Wyden maintains that the Spanish Civil War was part of a larger struggle against fascism that ended only with the Soviet Army’s capture of Berlin in 1945. Although advanced in a crude and amateurish manner, this interpretation—it is only fair to say—does not differ markedly from that offered by Hugh Thomas in his able and exhaustive study, The Spanish Civil War.

If one rereads the large and impressive literature inspired by the Spanish Civil War and pauses to consider how many intellectuals died or were prepared to die in Spain, one cannot but be impressed by the collective will to believe in an antifascist crusade. Driven by an al most religious fervor, the poet John Cornford and the Marxist aesthetician Christopher Caudwell fought and died for the Republic; so did the Hungarian writer Máté Zalka, better known by his nom de guerre “General Lukács.” Andre Malraux risked his life as commander of a Republican air squadron, the “Escuadrilla España”; Hemingway acquired an unwonted political consciousness; and Auden could write, rather thoughtlessly, of “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” (“Spain”—1937). Even the aloof Samuel Beckett took sides. ”UPTHEREPUBLlC!” he wrote in reply to the question: “Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain?” No doubt some of these intellectuals were initially aroused by the murder in rebel-held Granada of the great poet-dramatist Federico García Lorca, but most seem to have been impelled by the unexpected discovery of what appeared to be a compelling ·reason to die, and hence to live. Somehow Madrid and Barcelona were not like Verdun and the Somme.

At a distance of almost half a century, it is not difficult to forgive contemporary defenders of the Republic for their naivete—if only because they produced such splendid novels as For Whom the Bell Tolls and Man’s Hope. But the time has now come to rethink the Spanish Civil War and to begin to distinguish myth
from reality. Fortunately, it is not necessary to start from scratch. George Orwell, that most conservative of leftists, was among the first to experience and to speak the truth. Fighting with the POUM, an anti-Stalinist communist splinter group, he understood that the Soviets and their agents were far more dedicated to the liquidation of the rival left than they were to the defeat of Franco—and he said so in Homage to Catalonia. Moreover, he assailed the “pink pansy left” for its loose talk of necessary murder and pointed out that Franco “was not strictly comparable with Hitler or Mussolini.” The General, he argued, was a traditional man of the right, more a defender of feudalism than a proponent of fascism.

Nor was Orwell’s voice as isolated as we are accustomed to think. It is to be regretted that few today know, or even care, that one of Spain’s finest writers, Camilo José Cela, fought for Franco or that Evelyn Waugh, that wonderfully iconoclastic curmudgeon, expressed his preference for the Nationalists without thinking it necessary to embrace fascism. “I am not a Fascist,” he wrote at the time, “nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent.” It is to Waugh’s lasting credit that he refused to be impaled on the horns of a bogus dilemma.

However, it remains true that any serious rethinking of the war will depend less on citing early critics of the Republic than on reassessing the role of Soviet Russia, the changing character of the Republican government, and the essential nature of the conflict. What did Stalin hope to achieve in Spain? Was he a great antifascist leader selflessly extending his hand to beleaguered comrades in a distant land? Many observers, then and now, have portrayed him in this way. Wyden, for example, is proud of the Russians, who “stood alone to the end in their sup port of the Republic,’’ while in Washington Eleanor Roosevelt “was about to give up pressuring her husband to lift the arms embargo.” It was not the last time, he is eager to suggest, that the Russians fought for truth and justice while the Americans supported—by action or inaction—a fascist government. Stalin may have been guilty of the “cult of personality,” but he was an implacable foe of fascism.

With the considerable advantage of hindsight, however, it is perfectly clear that Stalin initially proffered aid to the Republic—for which he was handsomely paid with Spanish gold—because he wished to forestall a quick rebel victory. In such an event, he reasoned, France might full to a revolution from the right, thereby making it possible for Hitler to turn his attention toward the east. It was not long, however, before the Soviet tyrant became convinced that British and French nonintervention spelled certain doom for the Republic and from then on he was concerned only to prolong hostilities. In this way he could in crease his bargaining power in Berlin and keep Hitler occupied far from the Soviet frontier. At the same time, he declared war on all left-wing groups that refused to submit to his imperious will. According to George Kennan, who knew and understood Stalin, the Man of Steel hated those communists and fellow travelers who were inspired by a genuine—if misguided—idealism and who were devoted to communist principles. It was, we should remember, precisely during these years that he purged (murdered) Bukharin and all the other Old Bolsheviks after they made their “confessions” at the infamous Moscow Trials. Personal hatred and paranoia notwithstanding, Stalin had every reason to be wary of such true believers, since they would never accept the alliance with Hitler that he had almost certainly begun to con template seriously as early as 1934. On this matter, we have the authoritative testimony of General Krivitsky, chief of Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe before his defection in 1937. Moreover, a Nazi-Soviet alliance is perfectly consistent with the Soviet dictator’s murder of almost all of those who served in Spain and with his thorough going political nihilism. Stalin did not agree to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 reluctantly; on the contrary, he looked for ward to dividing Europe with the fuhrer.

The evolving character of the Republican government also requires re-examination. Was it a liberal democratic regime dependent upon Russian sup port but capable of true independence? Was Juan Negrín, the last premier and finance minister, a moderate socialist? Or was he, as Burnett Bolloten has argued so persuasively, the communists’ man, far more subservient to Moscow than was his predecessor largo Caballero, “the Spanish Lenin”? There is room for honest disagreement here, but surely no one can continue to maintain the fiction that the government that fell to Franco was one that reflected the essential decency and moderation of its meditative but politically irrelevant president, Manuel Azaña. Even Hugh Thomas concedes, for example, that the Republic’s communist-backed political police force, the SIM (Servicio de Investigacíon Militar) employed “all the vile torture of the NKVD.”

Finally, there is the nature of the war. Despite massive foreign intervention, it should be remembered that it was a Spanish civil war with roots deep in Spanish history. At least as far back as the Carlist War of the previous century, Spain had been torn by fundamental and irreconcilable antagonisms—regional, class, and religious. Of these, none, Gerald Brenan has written, ”was more bitter or envenomed than that between the Catholic Church and its opponents.” Enraged by the Church’s wealth and loyalty to the upper classes, “republicans” burned and despoiled churches and convents in Andalusia, Aragon, Madrid, and Catalonia.

“At no time in the history of Europe,” Hugh Thomas has observed without exaggeration, “has so passionate a hatred of religion and all its works been shown.” By the time the Republic was proclaimed in 1931, religious and antireligious hatreds were so intense that no conceivable compromise was possible. Spain would know peace only when one side or the other won an unconditional victory.

None of this had much to do with fascism or antifascism. There were, in fact, very few fascists in Spain and most of them were no more dangerous—dare one suggest they were less dangerous?—than the communists and such anarchists as Buenaventura Durutti, who was pleased to speak of the “discipline of indiscipline.” The dignified Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the military officer who ruled Spain from 1923 to 1930, was respected even by many of his enemies on the left—and was in no sense a Hitler. The Spanish Civil War as fascist/antifascist confrontation is yet another of the self-congratulatory myths of the left.

But if a study of the Spanish Civil War tells us little about the false formula of fascist vs. antifascist, it reveals much about Spain’s historical culture and the nature of the human condition. In one of the most powerful chapters of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Pilar, the revolutionary who was among Hemingway’s most successful female characters, describes in unsparing detail the murder of a town’s “fascists” by Pablo, her lover, and the revolutionary mob. It is a terrifying and unforgettable moment, a window into the heart of darkness. Yet, as Hemingway knew, the violence was not all on one side. The Caudillo was also consumed by an inordinate desire for retribution. Showing his enemies no mercy, he refused to curb the savage Moors and did not think it necessary to fault General Yagüe for making of Badajoz a city of corpses. However fortunate his victory may have been (given the alternative), Franco made himself the heir of Torque mada, the conquistadors, and the Duke of Alba.

Perhaps no one has captured the world of Spanish hatred and cruelty more completely than Camilo Jose Cela. In his classic novel, The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942), Cela hit upon the ideal metaphor for his country’s blood-drenched history: Duarte’s compulsive and multi ple murders. In the final scene, this murderous picaro kills his mother, a ritual rehearsal of a people’s war against itself: “I threw myself upon her and held her down….We fought. It was the most awful struggle you can imagine….She kicked me. She hit me and bit me. Suddenly her mouth found my nipple, my left nipple, and tore it away. That was the moment I sank the blade into her throat.” Like Picasso’s “Guernica,” Cela’s novel is a vision of unbridled violence. Together they serve to remind us that the true significance of the Spanish Civil War lies in its reenactment of the time less drama of sin and blood sacrifice.