Edward Rothstein and Ronald Radosh have reviewed, in the NY Times and NY Sun respectively, the history exhibition, Facing Fascism, which recently opened at the Museum of the City of New York. The exhibit chronicles the participation of New York City youth in that opening salvo of World War II, the Spanish Civil War.
In their reviews (Rothstein in a milder, and Radosh a more virulent form), it seems, they are attempting to refight the battles of the Civil War itself and the subsequent Cold War. Though I have not yet seen the exhibition (I will be in NYC shortly and will try to see it then), it seems that Rothstein-Radosh may have at least one valid criticism. They contend that the curators and funders of the exhibit have engaged in hagiography toward the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. They believe that making martyrs and heroes out of these fighters masks the nefarious activities of the Soviet Union during the War and its efforts to turn the Royalist forces and Spain itself into a totalitarian Soviet Republic. The evidence they present of Soviet manipulation of the International Brigade volunteers is persuasive. It may be true that the motives of the Communists were as suspect as the Francoists.
However, there is one major problem with the Radosh argument that the Soviets would have been as bad or worse than the Francoists. We’ll never know because Franco won and the Royalists didn’t. We know how evil Franco was because he had the opportunity to realize his viciousness in power. We know much less about how a Royalist government would have operated.
Rothstein seriously understates the scale of Franco’s evil in this passage:
Franco was indeed a ruthless tyrant whose victory led to wide-scale purges, cruel imprisonments and extensive constraints.
For “purges” read wholesale murder of thousands of political opponents. “Extensive constraints?” Is that all? Four decades of tyranny and the best you can muster is this?
As for Radosh, his biases are a mile wide and a mile deep. We should note that he is affiliated with the Hudson Institute, one of the leading neocon think tanks. The article is published in the Sun, the leading Neocon newspaper. And while there are serious arguments worth grappling with in his review, the fact that the Lincoln Brigade was not actually a “brigade” but a “battalion” is certainly not one of them. He is so intent on proving the perfidy of the CPUSA that he must use even this obscure angel dancing on the head of a pin to make his argument.
What is most noxious about Radosh’s perspective is the complete absence, except as a bit player, of Franco from his discussion. The evil is all on the Communist side. Royalists and Lincoln Brigade members are at best dupes and at worst malevolent bullies on the make. No mention of Franco the tyrant, fascism, the alliance with Hitler and Mussolini, Spain’s forty years of abject penury and tyranny at the hands of Spain’s fascists. This is a fatal and unforgivable omission on Radosh’s part which sullies whatever else he might have to say.
Milt Wolff during the Spanish Civil War (credit: Wolff homepage)In the rush to indict the Brigade before the bar of history, Radosh also distorts the record of a fighter I actually knew, Milt Wolff. When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, I attended a weekly writer’s workshop held at Milt’s home. He was a dynamic, funny and affable fellow with a clear spark of energy and wit about him. I knew he was a Spanish Civil War veteran and that he’d later served in the War. Only later would I learn that he’d also been an officer in the O.S.S., the WWII-era precursor to the CIA.
Knowing all this, you may put the following into better perspective than Radosh does:
Wolff gave [a speech] to the Lincoln vets’ convention in 1941, two years after the pact was signed, but before it expired:
Under the dishonest slogan of anti-fascism, [President Roosevelt] prepares the red-baiting, unionbusting, alien-hunting, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic Jingoistic road to fascism in America … he drags the American people … closer and closer to open participation in the imperialist slaughter in which the youth of our country will, if he has his way, join the … bloody and bloated corpses on the battlefields the world over; for the greater glory of foreign trade and the brutal oppression of free people at home and abroad; we accuse him, Franklin Demagogue Roosevelt. … We fight against the involvement of our country in an imperialist war. … We stubbornly oppose every move of Roosevelt and the war-mongers.
Radosh attempts to make Wolff out to be an automaton in the service of Communist propaganda. Admittedly, this speech reads pretty poorly in the light of historical events. Hopefully, it wouldn’t have been one I would’ve made or agreed with if I were alive then.
But Radosh neglects to point out that Wolff changed his mind and fought admirably for his country. The neocon historian would no doubt cynically point out that Wolff waited to fight until the German-Soviet pact collapsed and the Russians declared Hitler public enemy number 1. But the truth is that Radosh leaves out all reference to Wolff’s World War II military service. This is another unpardonable omission.
Finally, whether or not the idealism of those who fought in the Brigades was attenuated by the behavior of the Soviet Union I believe these young men who fought and died to stop fascism deserve our admiration. Certainly, we ought to know about the background to their sacrifice and service and use it to place everything else in proper perspective. But no belittling historian like Radosh can succeed at tarnishing their record using such deeply ideologically tainted and tendentious arguments.
Ronny Radosh is stuck in an ancient debate. It’s not an idiotic debate, but he’s obsessed. Asking him to review something about the Spanish Civil War, is like asking a person who believes Oxford wrote Shakespeare to review a play. Radosh doesn’t see the exhibit. He sees the single point he’s — rightly or wrongly — stuck on. Don’t yourself get sucked in.
As the RR criticism, I suggest you review the full title of the exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York: Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War. Neither the museum nor the exhibit is set up to tell the full story of Spain — which, so far, has occupied many volumes.For those of us who grew up in New York long after the war, the exhibit is interesting and shows a New York I didn’t have a clear sense of. If you think of the exhibit’s limited mission, it’s wonderful. It doesn’t cure cancer and it doesn’t solve the problems of Stalinism — but those may to much to ask of any exhibit.
There are too many competing economic models, religions, political dogmas…etc, and too few continents in which they can each exist without competing against each other, so they battle it out for supremacy and continnue to experiment their wisdom on the peoples of the earth. Why do these ideologies fight to govern regions and peoples? I always marvelled at how a foreign ideology like soviet bolshevism of the leninist or stalinist kind would introduce itself in latin american societies and proceed to subjugate a nation under the worst oppression and hopelesness imaginable to man, and all this would be done after they had promised to bring equality and justice to the people on whom these systems would later turn and devour. After their experiment fails they are reduced to rewriting history, and create the fantasy (myth) that things were worse before they arrived, to console themselves thusly for their abject failure.
The very selfish nature of humanity impedes it from trying to establish a government wherein the leaders would not try to keep the power once they rule, priviledge and power seek to protect its own as we have seen throught history, whether a capitalist trying to transfer his capital to his sons or daughters or whether a communist ensuring that their sons and daughters get the best education in the system so they can have a position of power and priviledge within the system. This is an inviolable principle of human nature; that man prefers the interests of their progeny over others. It’s a survalist instinct born out of love for its decendants. Of course the leninist would argue that true leninism has never been tried and the the leninist bolshevik model was adulterized and thus ought to be given a real opportunity but the facts seem to bear that communism or socialism goes directly against the grain within human nature to self preserve and to self promote. How can self preservation or self promotion be in the interests of all?
the world gets smaller and the wars will get bigger as these ideologies try to appropriate the entire earth under a singular governance.
Daniel: Excellent points all. Thanks for putting the exhibit in proper perspective. And everything you say about Radosh rings true. I don’t follow this debate that closely & last knew of Radosh when he brought out his first book about the Rosenbergs. I think if I recall correctly he had a much more open mind back in those days. “The Closing of the American Mind” is an apt description of his transformation.
Richard,
The fact is that Stalin totally screwed the Spanish Loyalists and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade anyway. They lost because he wanted them to lose. I base this statement onone of the most fascinating books I have read in a long time, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, WIlli Münzenberg and the Sedction of the Intellectuals. With lots of new research, Koch brings a balanced perspective to the whole history of the left/right battle in America. It’s very timely, because people like Radosh, as well as the neocons through a somewhat different route, are the distorted products of those conflicts.
“Facing Fascism” With Your Eyes Closed
In “Glamorizing History” (New York Sun, March 22, 2007), Ronald Radosh trots out some of the same provocative arguments he has been making for many years now about the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades. Professor Radosh’s research and his polemical stances vis-à-vis the Spanish Civil War have done a lot to shake up a somewhat complacent field, which has often adopted a simplistic and romantic view of the war in Spain, rife with myths and platitudes.
But some of the claims of “Glamorizing History” are downright comical: eg: that any use of the commonly accepted shorthand expression “Abraham Lincoln Brigade” is an attempt to deceive people about the size of the American contingent of the International Brigades. (This charge is all the more ironic because Professor Radosh himself uses the shorthand term “brigade” –or is it CP phony propaganda?—a couple of paragraphs later in his own article.) Other claims are grotesque distortions: eg: “The kind of republic the volunteers [in the International Brigades] sought [all of them? In 1936-37?] was a prototype of what the Soviet Union created at the end of World War II, when it built ‘people’s democracies’ in Central and Eastern Europe.” Still others of his claims are contradictory and self-cancelling; eg, that these same sinister volunteers who went to Spain to install a soviet-style people’s republic –avant la letttre– were “innocents” who were duped by Stalin and the Comintern.. Finally, some of Radosh’s claims are demonstrably false: eg, that the International Brigades did not function as part of the Republic’s official army.
The republication of these claims in the pages of The Sun is not, in itself, surprising or objectionable. What is surprising –and terribly disappointing—is the fact that Radosh and The Sun have repackaged these soundbytes as if they were a reaction to an exhibition he could not have seen (“Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War” didn’t open at the Museum of the City of New York until March 23) and a “review” of a book of the same title which he seems not to have read with any kind of serious attention.
The book and the exhibition are attempts to reconstruct the extraordinarily complex social, cultural and ideological milieux of New York in the late 1930s. By studying the diverse reactions to the outbreak and the conduct of the Spanish Civil War in the city, the book and exhibition shed new light on the history of New York: at the same time, the catalog and the show have turned up important new information and perspectives about the international dimensions of the war in Spain. In both cases, the emphasis is clearly on complexity, diversity and strife within the city which mirrored the crisis experienced throughout the world.
This is why Professor Radosh’s attack on this book and exhibition seems unfortunate, unfair, and misplaced. These projects aim precisely to reaffirm complexity and to challenge received ideas, to abandon simplistic paradigms. There is no question that professor Radosh’s oft-repeated question –“How can we reconcile the alleged ‘antifascism’ of the Lincoln volunteers with the fact that many of them toed the Party line when Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact”—is indeed a crucial one. But surely the curators and editors are not obliged to try to answer such a vexed question, especially in a catalog and exhibition focused primarily on the mobilization of tens of thousands of New Yorkers in the late 1930s,. In the end, all we can ask –of readers, museum-goers, citizens and even reviewers—is that you read the book, and visit the museum, preferably before you come to your own conclusions.
Submitted to the New York Sun
James D. Fernández, is Chair of Spanish and Portuguese, NYU, and Director of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. He coedited (with Peter Carroll) the book “Facing Fasicsm: New York and the Spanish Civil War” (NYU Press/Museum of the City of New York, 2007) and served as an adviser to the museum on the exhibition “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War” at the Museum of the City of New York, March-August, 2007.
Mr Fernandez, why were so many of those mobilized, from new york city? what made these brigades so anti fascist? was their anti fascism due to so many of them being jewish ameircans ? i also am curious as to why is the name of abraham lincoln used to name their brigades when their political inclination was communist? was ithe name abraham lincoln picked as a cover for their communistic bent? also, were many communists recalled from their assignments in latin america to go and support this last stand in spain? i have read that the hitler/stalin pact confounded many communists who were in latin america and many supposedly walked away from the party due to this pact, is there any truth to this?
you said ” focused primarily on the mobilization of tens of thousands of New Yorkers in the late 1930s,”
paul johnson who wrote “modern times” and “intellectuals” has this to say
…we are now at an end of our inquiry it is just about 200 years since the secular intellectuals began to replace the old clericy (clerics) as the guides and mentors of mankind….
one of the principal lessons of our tragic century which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity is this, beware intellectuals, not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advise, beware committees, conferences, and leagues of intellectuals, distrust their public statements issued from their serried ranks, discount their verdicts on political leaders and important events. For intellectuals far from being highly individualistic and non conformist people follow certain regular patterns of behavior, taken as a group they are often ultra conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value, that is what makes them en masse so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxes which themselves often generate irrational and destructive causes of action. Above all we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget that people matter more than concepts and must come first, the worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.
Dear Mr. Burke,
Thanks for your excellent questions. I’ll respond to the best of my ability.
why were so many of those mobilized, from new york city?
My understanding is that there were mobilizations all over the US, indeed, all over the world, particularly in the big cities. But New York seems to have been a particularly active site for pro-Republican, anti-fascist mobilization.
what made these brigades so anti fascist? was their anti fascism due to so many of them being jewish ameircans ?
Many of the volunteers were Jewish Americans, and in their testimonies, they cite the rise of Hitler as the primary cause of their willingness to go to war in Spain. But there were many other groups as well that figured prominently in the US contingent of the International Brigades: African Americans, many of whom wanted to “take a whack” at Mussolini who had invaded and bombed Ethiopia; Hispanic and Hispanic-Americans who wanted to defend the Republic; antifascist Germans and Italians, etc.
i also am curious as to why is the name of abraham lincoln used to name their brigades when their political inclination was communist? was ithe name abraham lincoln picked as a cover for their communistic bent?
I understand that during the period of the Popular Front, there was an attempt on the part of the CP to reconcile communism and Americanism –some call this a ruse, others a strategy. I think that “Abraham Lincoln” was chosen as the name of the first American Batallion to emphasize its American-ness, and also to allude to a US President that commanded the “loyalist” side during a Civil War. There was also a George Washington Batallion, which later was merged with the Lincolns.
also, were many communists recalled from their assignments in latin america to go and support this last stand in spain? i have read that the hitler/stalin pact confounded many communists who were in latin america and many supposedly walked away from the party due to this pact, is there any truth to this?
I don’t know anything about this kind of “redeployment.” I imagine that many communists all over the world must have been confounded by the Hitler/Stalin pact.
Best regards,
jim
Thanks for the excellent questions, Mr. Burke. I’ll respond to the best of my ability.
why were so many of those mobilized, from new york city? what made these brigades so anti fascist? was their anti fascism due to so many of them being jewish ameircans ?
There were mass mobilizations in large cities throughout the world. Many of the Jewish volunteers have said that their willingness to go to Spain was clearly linked to the rise of Hitler, and to the obvious ties between Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. But there were also African-American volunteers, Italian American, Spanish American, etc.
i also am curious as to why is the name of abraham lincoln used to name their brigades when their political inclination was communist? was ithe name abraham lincoln picked as a cover for their communistic bent?
My understanding is that, in 1935, the CP began pursuing a Popular Front strategy, striving to make common cause with all those opposed to Fascism. In the US, there was an attempt to reconcile communism and americanism. The “Abraham Lincoln Batallion” was so named, I think, to signal its American-ness, and to evoke the figure of an American president who commanded the “loyalist” side in another civil war. There was also a George Washington Batallion, which eventually merged with the Lincolns.
also, were many communists recalled from their assignments in latin america to go and support this last stand in spain? i have read that the hitler/stalin pact confounded many communists who were in latin america and many supposedly walked away from the party due to this pact, is there any truth to this?
I’m not aware of these reassignments. I don’t think communists in 1936 would have seen Spain as “the last stand.” I think the Hitler/Stalin pact must have confounded many, communist and non-communist alike. It’s hard to reconcile the antifascism of the American volunteers, with the willingness of many of them to go along with the Hitler/Stalin pact. But some veterans have spoken articularely about this issue, most recently in the ALBA listserv.
Whoa! That’s a tad extreme don’t you think? If what he says were true then I should warn all my readers away fr. this blog, because gosh darnit I’m one of those nasty intellectuals you’ve been taught to suspect of harboring downright altruistic thoughts.
richard, i believe the “beware” refers to be aware of the ideology being peddled, examine it closely. History when examined closely certainly leads us to conclude that the tyrany of ideas have led many to promote ideology over humanity.
To the author:
I think you meant to say “Loyalists” when you said “Royalists”
To samuel burke:
Most of the Communists I’ve met (Trotskyists) consider the U.S. Civil War to have been the “Second American Revolution” which smashed the slaveocracy in favor of capitalist liberal democracy. Presumably this was the CPUSA’s line at the time as well, hence the name “Abraham Lincoln Brigade”
In general:
The critics also fail to note that not only Communists joined the International Brigades, but socialists, anarchists and anti-fascists of all stripes. Also, as another person here already correctly noted, the International Brigades failed because Stalin wanted them to fail. At the time, Stalin was trying to cozy up to the US and UK and was determined to smash the developing social revolution in Spain to prove he could be a reliable ally of liberal democracy. To this end the International Brigades, along with the Popular Army were used to liquidate the anarchist and Trotskyist militias– which led to the eventual defeat of the Republican forces at the hands of Franco.
Although I’m not a big Orwell fan, his “Homage to Catalonia” got it about right. If anyone wants an easy, quick read on the Spanish Civil War, check out that book, then for more comprehensive analysis pick up some anarchist or Trotskyist books on the subject (available from AK Press and Pathfinder Press respectively). A good movie in the “Homage to Catalonia” vein is Ken Loach’s “Land and Freedom”