A lot of spin occludes a complicated record. I find myself rather curious still about the true story.
Was there repression of the Trots and anarchists by the police? I don’t see any point in denying it, Lincoln brigade vets never did. The operative question was whether or not the anarchists and Trots had become detrimental to the Spanish war economy or not. The reality is that, no matter how fanciful and romantic the claims to the contrary, you cannot run a successful military apparatus on the basis of direct democracy, it is simply impossible. So when it comes to the field of combat, the claim of “Stalinist repression” is a little bit absurd. In terms of the domestic polity, there is however no denying that the Stalin purge of Trotskyism was seeping across borders and leading to the sorts of demonization that ended up being disproved. (Even Du Bois reiterated the anti-Trotsky line multiple times in his writings.) But that is not equivalent to Passionaria having some kind of knowing malicious intent, nobody truly understood how deeply Stalin had manipulated the public via the purge and show trial news reporting for another two decades after the Khrushchev secret speech. The American Trot and anarchist groups were relatively miniscule and marginal at this point. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4774): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4774 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79195367/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
