Why We Lost the War – Diego Abad de Santillán
The war in Spain, 1936-1939—The basic reasons for its outcome—Preaching in the desert—The judgment of Solomon
This is the first time that we have been defeated in the long struggle for the economic and social progress of Spain as a modern revolutionary movement; in order to find another comparable defeat on this scale we have to go back to the battlefields of Villalar in the first third of the 16th century. Just like the Phoenix who rises from his ashes, we have always rebounded from all our disasters, overcoming terribly dramatic moments of political and religious inquisition, leaving shreds of bleeding flesh in the claws of the enemy. Hunger and persecution, jail and prison, torture and assassination, nothing could humble us, nothing could defeat us. Those who fell in battle were immediately replaced by new combatants. One generation followed another in a merciless struggle in which the best, the most generous and the most intelligent representatives of the Spanish people died with a smile on their lips, defying the powers of ignorance and slavery, trusting in the triumph of justice. This time, however, we feel defeated. Defeated! For whom, for what kind of men, for what race, for what people, does this word “defeated” have the meaning that it has for us? Happy are those who died in the struggle, because they did not have to suffer a fate that is a thousand times worse than death: a real defeat, a definitive defeat for our generation!
Our generation pledged its blood to the triumph of a great cause and has been entangled for posterity in a net of complicities that we would like to clarify so that we will be judged for our merits or our defects, for our correct actions or our mistakes, but in all events as a historic Spanish force with the same resolve and the same fortitude as the Spanish people who fought against the Roman invasion, against the absolutism of the Habsburgs in the unforgettable feats of the comuneros and the brotherhoods, against Napoleon’s hosts under the command of the invincible General No Importa[“It Doesn’t Matter”—a favorite expression of Napoleon’s], and against absolutist and anti-SpanishBourbonism from Philip V to Alfonso XIII.
Say what you will of us.[1] Say that we are pessimists. We are motivated by the intention of being sincere, of expressing our feelings, of giving faithful testimony concerning what we have done and what we have seen, and we think it is important to make it known that, betrayed, defeated and deceived, we failed,at the side of the Spanish people,on our own terms, without having either stricken or besmirched our flag. A sinister legend has been woven around us. Politicians on the left and on the right compete in bringing fuel to the fire of all the fantasies that have been imputed to us, and it is even possible that the left is worse in this regard than the right. Our organizations were originally formedand subsequently grew under clandestine conditions, because they were not allowed a public existence, and this prevented us from addressing and responding to our traducers, because doing so would have been tantamount to informing on ourselves. The literature of the monarchy is replete with alleged discoveries of our relations with the republicans; the literature of the republicans speaks insidiously of our relations with the monarchists. In addition to the old more or less terrifying legend, we now have the new legend and they want to turn us into scapegoats to console those who agree with them, despite all the apparent differences, in order to reconstruct false virginities at our expense.
The vast literature published in foreign countries about our war and revolution is plagued with inaccuracies and malice, and paints a picture of us that borders on the ridiculous when not on the despicable, among the writers who supported the Republic as well as among those who supported Franco. There are some very honorable exceptions, but they are too few. It is almost a duty, after all the outrages that have been publicly attributed to the men of the Iberian Anarchist Federation, before and after July 1936, for the average citizen to attribute every defect to us and blame us for every misfortune. The military phase of the tragedy of Spain has concluded, the F.A.I. is no more. Isn’t it high time, now that we have been defeated, for someone who held high-level positions and performed functions of the greatest responsibility in that organization, both before and after the war, to open the curtain a little and tell the truth?
We do not want to defend ourselves, because, despite all the slanders that have come to our attention from even a brief glance at a small sample of the literature about our war, we do not feel that we are the ones who are on trial. On many occasions in the past, we called attention to our own deficiencies and mistakes, whether personal or factional. Silence, however, when those who have plenty of reasons to keep quiet are doing all the talking, and when those few survivors who are in a position to shed some light on these questions are saying nothing, is in our view culpable.[2]
These pages are intended to serve as a contribution to the history of, and an homage to, the Spanish people, the only eternal value, worthy and pure, which must re-emerge despite the defeat, even if it takes years and years of martyrdom, unprecedented even in a country where martyrs are so abundant and come in so many varieties, when none of us who offered our tribute of labor and life to the great liberation movement of 1936-1939 are still standing. From the catastrophe we have suffered, we have only salvaged within ourselves our faith in the resurrection of Spain, by virtue of the same spirit and the same longing that inspired us and that inspired our ancestors for centuries. Governments, despotic regimes, tyrannies, and political systems based on privilege come and go, but a people like ours, which has not yet disappeared, is of such a unique vitality that it has been able to resist the attacks of those who have always sought to distort the meaning and direction of its history. In this resurrection it is very likely that the old parties and organizations will not survive at all; other men and other names will take up the positions on the battlefield that we have left vacant with our defeat and they will revive, with greater power and more experience, the project that was drowned in rivers of blood and terror during our generation.
If the military uprising of the generals triggered a major war, this was entirely due to our violent intervention. The Republic did not know how to defend itself,nor was it even capable of defending itself, against the attack; we were the ones who, in defense of the people, made the survival of the Republic, and organizing for the war, possible. And we were not, nor were we ever, republicans. Just like the war for independence, which brought the despicable Bourbons back to the Spanish Throne, the restoration of the Republic was not our goal; our goal was instead to recover the historical rhythm of our poor country, so we crushed the military revolt across a huge expanse of the Peninsula; our goal was not the consolidation of a Republic that did not deserve to live, either, but the defense of a great people, who returned to claim their rightful place and wanted to take the reins of their fate in their own hands. Has the Republic paid us back the way Ferdinand VII repaid those who restored him to his throne with his cowardly surrender to Napoleon? Even in this respect we see our identification with the cause of the real Spain verified.
If we were to have remained idle in July 1936, if we had obeyed the directives of the republican government, the idiotic recommendations of someone like Casares Quiroga, the Minister of War, we would have handed ourselves over to the execution squads, along with the republican and socialist leaders of every variety, but the war would not have been possible, because the Republic did not have the forces to defend itself, and the military, clerical and monarchist revolt would have been totallysuccessful throughout Spain and its colonies.
In this account we shall review three of the basic reasons for the anti-popular and anti-Spanish course taken by our war, from which all the other secondary causesof our defeat are derived, and we shall attempt to discover what practical measures we should have taken to avoid the tragedy that unfolded on such a vast scale.
The republican idiocy embodied, in the governmental spheres of Madrid, the same lack of understanding exhibited by the Habsburg and Bourbon monarchies in the face of the realities of popular sentiment and legitimate regionalist interests, like that of Catalonia, against whose violent social initiatives the entire apparatus of the central State was mobilized, until the immense possibilities of this region were decimated and it was handed over, broken and embittered, to fascism. Catalonia could have won the war on its own, during the first few months, with a little help from the Madrid government, but the latter was always more afraid that Spain might escape the prescriptions of a scrap of paper called the constitution and experiment with new political and economic projects, than it was afraid of the total victory of the enemy.
The policy of non-intervention, proposed and implemented by the socialist-republican government of France from the very first moments of the war, and then supported by England, became the best weapon for suffocating us, while the enemy was openly supplied with the men and the war materiel that were needed to ensure victory. This sinister farce of non-intervention, in which the unlamented League of Nations finally expired, was certainly effective in mercilessly sacrificing us, but it was not capable of preventing France and England, the main proponents of that bloody joke, from having to pay the consequences in the current war, with millions of their sons and the sacrifice of all their economic and financial reserves.
Just as disastrous as non-intervention for so-called Loyalist Spain was Russian intervention, which began a few months after the outbreak of hostilities; Russia promised to sell us war materiel and, despite the fact that we paid for it in advance with gold, whether or not it was actually delivered to our ports depended on whether or not we abided by the condition that this alleged aid would also be paid for by our complete submission to Russia’s orders with regard to military affairs, domestic policies, and international diplomacy, so that republican Spain was turned into a kind of Soviet colony. Russian intervention, which, from the point of view of the materiel it provided—in paltry amounts, of dismal quality, arbitrarily distributed, giving irritating preference to the toadies of Russia—did not solve a single crucial problem, corrupted the republican bureaucracy, starting with the highest levels of the government, seized control of the army, and so completely demoralized the population that the latter eventually lost all interest in the war, a war that had been started by the incontrovertible decision of the only legitimate, sovereign power: popular sovereignty.
These three causes stood out in high relief from the very first moments of the war; we immediately recognized them and fought to overcome them; we fought to overcome the lack of understanding of Catalonian affairs by the men who held power in Madrid; we called for an honorable decision against the farce of non-intervention; we appealed for defensive actions against the usurpations of the Russians, but achieved nothing but hostility and isolation. We stood aloneas we were systematically isolated from any direct role in the war, after having been its first combatants; but we are proud to feel that we are free of any personal and organizational responsibility for the catastrophe and for the policy that led us to disaster, and we cannot accuse ourselves of having refrained from expressing our views for even one single moment. And now, in exile, we who survived the great shipwreck are saying almost exactly the same things we said then, when we tried to remedy the evils we denounced, and not only by way of publications, magazines, books, and pamphlets, but directly, by entering the government itself and its institutions.
In August 1937 the situation was clear, and we could no longer allow ourselves to be deceived. The Prieto-Negrín government, a creature of the Russians, manufactured in order to respond to Russia’s commercial and diplomatic interests, rather than to the interests of Spain, traced, with its military, diplomatic and domestic policies, the course that led us to the pointless sacrifice of our great people. We could not remain silent, so we wrote a polemical tract, The Revolution and the War in Spain: Preliminary Historical Notes, a small volume that even provedworthy of the honors of autos da fé. A relentless war has been waged against this book, from which only a few fragments have appeared in the working class press of various countries, and some unauthorized editions have also been published. The book was denounced,yet widely read, but as for us, we are not interested in finding explanations for all this hatred, despite the fact that the same accusations have been reiterated in other publications, and always more insistently. Why were we not arrested and put on trial? It is true that, as for the contents of that desperate call to return to the right track, very few rectifications of minor details were possible. We were expecting to be put on trial so that we could speak even more openly, since, after all, we were not unaware of the fact that we were at war and that it would not be advantageous to give aid and comfort to the enemy; in a trial, we would have been able to say out loud what we had previously kept to ourselves. No charges were brought against us, despite the fact that we did not hold any official positions and that we did not even spare the leaders of our own organizations from our critical barbs. A few generous voices dared to call for our heads in the press, parroting what was being demanded in the conclaves of the worshippers of Muscovitism. But that was all.
In the introduction to our book, we said the following:
This is not a history, it is not a chronicle of the events of the revolution and the anti-fascist war; it is an internal analysis, a kind of examination of our conscience, now that we have arrived at a fork in the road and have taken advantage of this moment of respite. Nonetheless, we believe that these pages can be a contribution to history and that some of the reflections and interpretations that the events we have experienced suggest to us might be able to be of service to the movement for freedom in the world.
Right now, the offensive of international fascism in Spain is gaining momentum and the maneuvers of European diplomacy—English, French and Russian, on the one side, and German and Italian, on the other—are accelerating to strangle our movement. It is necessary to reflect upon all of this and to choose, with open eyes and a calm state of mind, the right road to take. The world proletariat is committing suicide with its passivity towards our war and the treasonous democracies are digging their own graves with their irresolution and cowardice in the face of the fascist powers.
We can no longer be responsible, as we were up until now, for the future of Spain, nor can we offer our own blood with the same generous spirit that we did in the past. The sinister game is unmasked and the Spanish people are being led to catastrophe. We do not know whether or not it is still in our power to prevent the collapse of the illusions that arose all over the world with regard to our war and our revolution. It is true that we still have some cards to play, and our friends will know how to play them with resolution and for the right stakes; but the present outlook is not the same as it was several months ago, and if we were to remain silent, we would become accomplices of the crime that is in the making and in which we have played no part at all.
The following pages will serve to clarify, for our friends and comrades in various countries, a few aspects of our efforts, and also to indicate, for those who do not have a clear view of the situation, the obstacles that surround us on all sides. Silence would be conceivable for us only if we were members of a party or an organization; but the destiny of Spain, and the future of humanity, is at stake, for many years and perhaps for centuries. And the right to speak out becomes, under these circumstances, a duty.