Last night, I got to watch the movie Land and Freedom, by the brilliant director Ken Loach.
Check out this scene, where anti-Fascist fighters bury their dead, singing the Internationale in Spanish:
I loved roughly the first half, which is about a British industrial worker in the 30s, who decides to go to Spain, defend the Republic and fight the Fascists.
There are some truly inspiring scenes, and the depiction of the social revolution sweeping the country is magnificent.
I was disappointed, however, by the second half of the movie. Ken Loach launches into a typical inter-Leftist sectarian mud-slinging match, and in doing so, he forgets all about actual history.
The movie shows an industrial worker going to Spain and fighting alongside the Marxists of POUM, who were bitterly opposed to the Moscow-supported Spanish Communist Party. Loach makes it seem as if most international volunteers joined the POUM, and the POUM were then brutally suppressed by the pro-Moscow Communists in the Rebpulican government.
Someone who isn’t familiar with the history of the Spanish Civil War might buy into that distortion. But in actual fact, tens of thousands of pro-Moscow communists from all over the world went to Spain to fight in the International Brigades and defend the Republic. These volunteers had nothing to do with the POUM. They were affiliated with communist parties all over Europe, and were loyal to the Spanish Communists. POUM had at best a few dozen international volunteers.
Furthermore, the depiction of the International Brigades as evil Stalinist bureaucratic authoritarian power-junkies is simply ridiculous. Instead of depicting the heroic fight of the International Brigades against the Fascists, Ken Loach depicts them only when they are crushing the anarchists and POUM and CNT-FAI trade-unionists who rebelled in Barcelona against the very Republic which they were supposed to be defending.
In my humble opinion, the ultra-leftist idiocy of the rebels in Barcelona diverted the resources of the Republic towards dealing with an internal rebellion, instead of countering the Fascists in the Nationalist camp, led by General Franco. I wish the rebellion in Barcelona didn’t have to be crushed, but what else could the Republican leaders do? Didn’t the POUM and the CNT-FAI realize that the biggest enemy at that moment was the Fascists, and not fellow revolutionaries in the Republic?
Furthermore, it was Soviet assistance which allowed the Republic to stand for as long as it did. On the one hand, the Fascists were getting open support from Hitler and Mussolini. On the other hand, the Republic was essentially boycotted and left alone by the liberal-bourgeois governments of Western Europe. Only Mexico and the Soviet Union openly supported the Republic with arms, vehicles and thousands of communist volunteers from all over the world.
The Spanish Rebublic and the International Brigades are, for me, some of the most inspiring items in history. To slander them like this in an otherwise brilliant movie is to do a grave injustice to the thousands of international communist volunteers who laid down their lives in a foreign land, with nothing to show for it except a tale of courage and sacrifice.
I recommend that people watch the movie and enjoy it, but please take it with a grain of salt.
