Spanish Fury, by Clough

[p044] Spanish Fury. By James Cleugh. George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 21s. The author of this book says that to have supported the republic was to have backed ‘the morally-wrong horse’. The fascists were the ‘catholic gentlemen’ who upheld decent values and law and order by their butchery, torture, executions and white terror, Franco was ‘a counter- 161 balance’ to Marxism, he represented the ‘old ideals’ of the West, he gave labour an ‘absolute guarantee against exploitation’, his government has been a great success in reconciling the Spanish people. Dellano the butcher ‘was ‘an amusing chatterbox’, ‘an extraordinary figure’. Cleugh gives us a touching picture of Jose Antonio (founder of Spanish fascism), facing the firing squad with his crucifix—Antonio was a ‘socialist’, but said first we must establish religion, traditional values, moral decency, and Cleugh nods in agree- ment. All decent citizens, asserts Cleugh, supported the Fifth Column of the gangs of armed thugs which machine-gunned the Madrid bread- lines. Cleugh supports Franco because the ‘ideals’ of Franco are the ‘ideals’ of the Catholic Church. Liberalism is too weak to fight communism. The Spanish Catholic Church is ‘well known’ for its ‘commonsense’ and ‘freedom from prejudice’. Too many people overlook ‘the poverty, simpli- city and unselfish devotion’ of the clergy and exaggerate ‘the mere in- discretions of the few’. Likewise, he asserts, are the crimes of fascism exaggerated. Too much propaganda was made of the bombing of Guernica. The Moorish tribesmen (who fought for Franco) were not savages, they fought like the Gurkhas in the old Indian Army (?). The mass executions they carried out were due to the heat. The atrocities of the native Spanish fascists were because of the fact that ‘African blood still runs high’ among Spaniards. Cleugh claims that Franco suffered defeat only because he was _ too humane. He could have taken Madrid if he hadn’t decided (for moral reasons, of course) to save the Alcazar, if he hadn’t been reluctant to use his bombers and if he hadn’t allowed Madrid an escape route. Likewise the whole history of the Alcazar is distorted. We are treated to the old tear-jerker about Colonel Moscardé6, who allowed his son to be shot rather than surrender. It is admitted that the son died a couple of months later, but it is not admitted that he died fighting in Madrid. Many other facts are treated in a similar fashion. The gallant Coionel Moscardé6 held about 600 women hostages in the Alcazar. Cleugh talks of them as 16 women of ‘more

[p045] 162 doubiful affiliations’. He assures us that Moscard6 said they decided ‘unanimously’ to remain to the last. In a brief history of Spain Cleugh explains the downfall of the Moorish civilisation in a couple of lines: it ‘lacked spiritual depth and stability. It soon became very mixed in blood. The Eur-Africans tended to grow frivolous and materialistically minded.’ Many such explanations are given in terms of ‘blood’ (it appears that Spaniards have ‘African blood’). Also a great play is made of the ‘Spanish character’ and also the ‘typical Spaniard’ (who is born, conveniently enough, with an innate love of Franco, a respect for the Church and hatred of Marxism). Finally, there are ‘the extremists’ who with a touch of the wand can turn the country upside down. The taking of power by the workers of Barcelona was the responsibility of a ‘most formidable. and completely organised body of professional anarchists’ (if this has any meaning). Like most fascists Cleugh has the tendency to describe capitalists and right-wingers as red devils and agents of the Comintern. Just as Colin Jordan might describe Macmillan as a communist fellow traveller, so Cleugh talks of the bourgeois Republic notorious for its anti- labour legislation, passing ‘a series of drastic socialist laws’. Azafia, the liberal president, is a ‘doctrinaire socialist’. We are also pleased to learn about ‘semi-com- munist France’ before the war, and America and all Europe except Spain ‘dominated by the left’ since the war. (It is interesting after these examples to note that he goes into raptures over the ‘socialists’ Negrin and Prieto.) Although absurd The Spanish Fury is not a funny book to read. It carries the most shameful abuse of one of the most heroic working classes in the world, a class which feared nothing and did not spare itself in the fight against the monsters who drowned their revolution in blood. One day the working class will render accounts with Mr. Cleugh, along with the class before which he crawls. The Spanish workers who rallied without hesitation to the banners of socialism were ‘the vomit of an over- taxed stomach’, dominated by ‘an uncontrollable herd instinct’. They were a ‘sweating, swearing, singing mob’. The International Brigades had among their members ‘mere roving adventurers’, drawn by the high pay, as well as ‘rascals only interested in plunder’. Finally, he writes of refugees who fled to France from the fascist terror, sick, dying and defeated, and who were left to sleep on the sand—‘they rioted like beasts, and were fed like beasts’. Mr. Cleugh also has a sense of humour. He talks of the ‘comedy’ of the workers ‘lounging’ in luxury hotels, and driving around in ‘stolen cars’ and he laughs at Caballero (a trade union leader) with his ‘not too brilliant brain’ and his quaint ‘out- moded phrase’ of ‘doing his duty by the working class’. Nevertheless, even this book can- not altogether hide the truth. It shows the defeatism of the liberals and ‘minister socialists’, their resig- nations in face of the fascist revolt counterposed to the viciousness they showed towards the working class. It describes the ‘white collar’, ‘Fabian’ Communist Party. And through all the distortions the work- ing class appears in its true heroism. The workers of Barcelona, men, women and children, fought weapon- less against the fascists, teenage girls seized their guns with their bare hands as they were shot down. The working women freed themselves from their centuries-old subjection and stood shoulder to shoulder with the working men. _ There was no sexual violence, says Cleugh. Former prostitutes appeared as nurses and canteen workers. Cleugh writes cynically of the ‘crimson lipstick, vermilion nails, rouge .. . of their former trade’. He describes this as ‘license’-—presumably prostitution is ‘morality’. In Madrid beggars and police had disappeared. There was also a tre- mendous feeling of solidarity with the USSR. The Spanish working class had very few weapons and no military skill, their ‘unexpectedly tenacious defence’ against fascism sprang from the historic achievements they were making and the fact that these achievements were liberating and revolutionary. At one point Cleugh comments that ‘ordinary quiet people’ (he means people like Cleugh) thought that something was wrong when they saw ‘brocaded armchairs were occupied LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 by ragged and dirty loungers with rifles between their knees’. Exactly; what shocked and horrified Cleugh was a revolution! C.HLS., Spencer and Mond The