SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: A slippery slope all the way to ... the point of no return?

Manic Street Preachers had a hit song in 1998 with a variation on a theme of slippery slopes.

The future teaches you to be alone
The present to be afraid and cold
"So if I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists"

Bullets for your brain today
But we'll forget it all again
Monuments put from pen to paper
Turns me into a gutless wonder

And if you tolerate this then your children will be next
And if you tolerate this then your children will be next
Will be next, will be next, will be next

The song is about the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, saying in essence that if "we" tolerate fascism somewhere else by not assisting in the fight against it, as with supporting the legally elected government in Spain at the time as it was engaged in a life-or-death struggle against Franco's insurgency, fascism will be victorious, gain strength and visit our own homes.

As you probably already know, Franco won the war with the assistance of Hitler and Mussolini (the Soviet Union supplied the Republicans). Subsequently the proxy Guernica atrocity became a mere prelude to far worse elsewhere -- but does this fact alone confirm the slope's slipperiness, or were there too many other unknowable variables to be so sure?

Here is one definition of the slippery slope.

A slippery slope is an argument that suggests that a certain initial action could lead to a chain of events with a relatively extreme result, or that if we treat one case a certain way then we will have to treat more extreme cases the same way too. For example, a slippery slope argument could involve saying that if we allow a relatively minor event to take place now, then a major and tragic event will happen in the near future as a result.

The Guardian warns that usually the logic behind the slippery slope concept is fallacious.

In the field of informal logic, the slippery-slope argument is a fallacy when the endpoint does not follow necessarily from the initial step, which is especially obvious if there are many (unidentified) intervening stages involved.

However, the newspaper acknowledges a degree of attitudinal sense to the notion of a slippery slope.

The most sensible thing that can be meant by an appeal to slippery slopes is not a truth about the dynamics of public policy, but rather a worry about our moral psychology. The idea must be that, if we all get used to this one new thing being allowed, we will be less able to resist a slightly more alarming thing in the future.

Or, the way to boil a frog alive one degree at a time.

This all arises because earlier today, while writing, I contemplated the use of "slippery slope" to describe a certain situation. Before doing so, it seemed it might be useful to know more about the term, and after researching it, my understanding has improved.

However I kept "slippery slope" in the essay because I feel the context is appropriate.

To me, using "slippery slope" never implied absolute determinism -- that the initial step always would lead to an alarming outcome. Rather, my interpretation has been that by undertaking the first step, conditions for the outcome were being made possible and encouraged, as when you learn that it's hell getting the genie back in the bottle.

Wouldn't you like to think it through first, before taking a step that might be irreversible?

Never mind. The slippery slope already has brought me to the Kenny Rogers Theorem, coming tomorrow.

Remembering the Spanish Civil War: Britain's "Last Brigadista" dies at 99.

Having just now posted about George Orwell's fundamental truthfulness, it's worth recalling the classic song by Manic Street Preachers, which hit #1 in the UK in August of 1998.

'If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next' was #1 for just one week (but) not bad for a song which lifted its title from a Republican Spanish Civil War poster and which was heavily inspired by The Clash’s ‘Spanish Bombs’ and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The Manics would return to the topic of the Civil War with the song ‘My Guernica’.

Now to the point.

Britain’s Last Brigadista, by Marcus Barnett (Tribune Magazine)

Geoffrey Servante passed away earlier this week aged 99. He was almost certainly the last Briton to fight fascism in the International Brigades to Spain.

... Geoffrey Servante, who was almost certainly the last surviving British volunteer for the International Brigades, died this Sunday 21st April. He was 99 years of age – just weeks away from his 100th birthday.

Servante was to become a committed internationalist, but it began with beer.

Servante’s entanglement in the Spanish conflict began in summer 1937, when he was enjoying a beer with his father in a Soho pub. A stranger they struck up conversation with was telling them how it was impossible to join the International Brigades due to the fact that France had closed the border. “I bet I can join,” Servante told the man, who refused to believe him. “I’ll bet you a hundred quid I can do it.”

He made it to Spain.

Servante admitted that he was only eighteen, which led Brigade authorities to post him to an artillery unit in Almansa, some 70 kilometres east of Albacete. This unit, the John Brown Battery, was named after the American abolitionist, and had a battle song to the tune of a famous US Army song from World War One:

Over sea, over land
We have come to take our stand
With the fighters for Spain’s liberty;
Point that sight, lock that breech,
We have just begun to teach
The fascists the meaning of Red.

And he saw action.

In December 1937, the Battery was transferred to the Toledo front, defending Madrid from the south, where the soldiers saw slightly more action as the nationalist forces closed in. In an interview with historian Richard Baxell, Servante recalled that while he was incredibly drunk, he fired a shell which missed his target by miles, resulting in formal punishment. It was only afterwards that he realised he had directly hit the car of a senior fascist officer, blowing the officer and his aide-de-camp to smithereens.

The Spanish Civil War ended badly for the Republicans.

In an interview, Servante recalled his misery when he heard the news of Franco’s victory, saying that “We knew it was coming. It was inevitable. Once Madrid had fallen that was it.” Despite his initially apolitical stance, the struggle of the Republicans against fascism changed Servante, who became and remained a loyal Communist Party member, and is registered as a “good and disciplined comrade” in the official records of the Brigades.

By the time Servante got back home, the man who had bet him £100 had passed away. During the Second World War, he was conscripted into the Royal Army Ordinance Corps and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, where he served in north Africa. After war’s end, he took up work as an engineering worker in a Vauxhall car factory, and retired in 1977.

It's a time that should be remembered -- but I know; there's a sale at Old Navy.

Over the course of the Spanish Civil War, more than 35,000 men and women travelled to take up the call of the Spanish Republic and thronged the ranks of the International Brigades. From the fields of Cork, the ghettos of Baghdad and the slums of Sofia, from every region and continent across 53 countries, these volunteers knew that the enemy of the Spanish people was also theirs, and that the defeat of fascism in Spain would destabilise fascist regimes across the world.

The defeat of the Spanish Republic was a tragedy for millions. “It was in Spain,” Albert Camus once wrote, “where my generation learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense.”

This perhaps explains why so many felt a personal sense of loss when hearing of Geoffrey Servante’s passing: rapidly, the last partisans of the struggle against fascism are vanishing. We must do everything possible to keep their memory alive.

Previously:

"Franco's Long Shadow" over reconciliation and remembrance in Spain.

"(Spain's) transition to democracy ignored the demands of justice. That is why it succeeded."

A belated R.I.P. to Delmer Berg, who fought against fascism.

"Guernica at 75."