On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 3:43 PM Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: . . . > I am not closing the thread on the Spanish Civil War but I am urging > comrades to have their final say... . . .
*my one comment*: Because Spain was in a revolutionary situation the basic historical question was whether revolutionary workers and peasants would make a socialist revolution or capitalism would be stabilized under fascist rule. Stalin intervened to help temporarily prop up Spain's popular front capitalist government partly to demonstrate - by repressing revolutionary forces in Spain - to the governments of Britain, France and the U.S. that his government could be a reliable ally. But the British, French and U.S. capitalist governments refused to ally with Spain's 'Republican' government and with Stalin. They preferred definitive fascist rule in Spain. Stalin did get the consolation prize of 510 tonnes of gold, 72.6% of the Bank of Spain's substantial gold reserves. Dayne On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 2:21 PM David Walters <[email protected]> wrote: > > like many educated in Trotskyist history, I've read my share of Anarchist-Trotsky-Stalinist histories of the Spanish Revolution. Note, I say "Revolution" and almost all Stalinist historians use "Civil War" as they've tried to remove the facts that was going on in Spain since the founding of the (Second) Spanish Republic in 1931 to it's demise was a workers revolution. But that is a political semantic difference with little interest to most here I suspect. > > In all my readings by Trotskyists on Ibárruri, she is hardly noted at all as a polemical target. Yes she was popular generally among the Spanish working class regardless of affiliation (with the Stalinist PCE) as having been a participant in the 1934 miners rebellion in the Asturias region of Spain by rescuing a few hundred orphans and bringing them to Madrid. It was this that brought her to the attention of many not only in the region but all of the Spanish Republic. She came up, supposedly, with the now famous slogan of "¡No Pasaran!" during the battle for Madrid. Her fame was one of marketing not that it was not deserved from the "good things" she did. There were far more famous people in the Spanish Revolution than her especially since she was on the side that wanted to return land to the land owners opposed factory occupations within the lines of the Republic. The PCE was always the smallest of the groups fighting for the republic among workers. > > After the victory of Fascism, the article itself notes it gets very murky. She was basically on a permanent speaking tour against Fascism (and for Stalinism) after Operation Barbarossa (the Comintern virtually hid all the Spanish refugees and ceased anti-Fanco, anti-Fascist agitation. There were some exceptions, but that's my take on all this. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#4794): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4794 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
