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."

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

Francisco Franco died in 1975, and for the most part all we knew about it in America was Chevy Chase's recurring Saturday Night Live joke about Franco remaining dead.

Obviously there's much more to it than this, because for some in Spain the generalissimo never really died, while for others he might have died far more often. I'd encourage readers to bone up on modern Spanish history. Since 1975, when Spain began its post-Franco transition to pluralism and democratic institutions (such as can be tolerated by the planet's concentrated wealth and capital), the country pursued a course akin to "don't ask, don't tell" with regard to the aftermath of the Civil War and Franco's ascendance.

For a while this was enough. Now it seems the ghosts of the victims won't stay silent.

Francisco Franco: Yes, Spain should dig Franco up. But it must not bury the horror of his regime, by Giles Tremlett (The Guardian)

... Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has declared that Franco must now also be removed from the vast underground basilica the dictator had built at El Valle de Los Caídos – a dramatic, wild valley that overlooks the northern suburbs of Madrid. The government announced on Friday a new law giving it powers to dig up the grave, situated behind the basilica’s main altar, later this year.

So far, so good. The trouble is, however, that not only have we been here before, but that this measure on its own is not enough. For even if Franco goes, this will still be an obnoxious reminder of his 36-year rule; the ghostly home to the bones of 33,000 combatants of a civil war that he provoked by helping to lead a coup d’etat against democracy. Looming high above the basilica, a massive 150-metre tall granite cross sits like a giant finger raised to the families of those assassinated by his regime, to the victims of his political courts and to the families refused permission to take their dead elsewhere. Those dead are stuffed into damp, collapsing chambers that are invisible to visitors, who can only see Franco’s well-kept tomb and that of José Antonio Primo de Rivera – the ideologue and leader of Falange Española, the violent Spanish fascist movement.

What should happen to all of that? Some have suggested that the cross is so ghastly that it should be dynamited, along with the rest of the monument. That, however, misses the point. Erasing Franco’s symbols, rather than explaining them, does nothing to teach Spaniards what went wrong. Nor does the removal of his embalmed body, though this is a positive first step.

Sánchez knows that there is a much bigger and better solution – the one proposed by a commission set up by a previous socialist government five years ago, and roundly ignored since then. That proposal was to turn this morbid, decaying monument into a proper museum of national conciliation and remembrance.

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

Valle de los Caidos.

There was a period in the 1990s when I visited Spain every second year for the purpose of watching runners with bulls and drinking deeply of the festival called San Fermin.

It's in Pamplona, in the Basque region by the Pyrenees, next to France. Spain is big, and the feel of a place like Pamplona is very different from Seville or Santiago de Compostela.

In preparation for these journeys, I read a lot, and to have studied the 20th-century history of Spain is to be overwhelmed by the cruelty and violence of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

Perhaps it was inevitable, but the destruction was heightened immeasurably by the participation of Germany, Italy and the USSR, in effect using Spain as a testing ground for weapons and tactics soon to be featured in the Second World War.

In the Spanish Civil War, the "right" -- fascists, conservatives, reactionaries; take your pick -- came out on top. Generalissimo Francisco Franco became dictator, and while Hitler and Mussolini were Franco's kind of folks, he had the good sense to keep Spain neutral during the continental conflict. Life marginally improved in Spain in the post-war era, if by "improvement" one restricts his gaze to economics alone.

Franco lived long enough to become one of Chevy Chase's first great topical jokes during the debut season of Saturday Night Live. When the dictator died without a successor or any coherent governing ideal apart from his own respiratory system, Spain morphed into a constitutional monarchy, a process that proved remarkable smooth in the main.

In order to do so, history was compromised, and this article explains how and why. In these currently turbulent times, the ghosts are returning and becoming clamorous. This should come as no surprise, because ghosts are like that.

Why Spain had to overlook its painful history, by Charlemagne (The Economist)

Its transition to democracy ignored the demands of justice. That is why it succeeded

Amid the cypresses and palms that adorn the small municipal cemetery of Paterna on the outskirts of Valencia a blue and white tarpaulin protects a two-metre deep hole from autumn rain. It is one of many unmarked mass graves scattered among the flower-decked tombs. That morning Alejandro Vila, an archaeologist, and his team exhumed a skeleton from the hole, the 266th since they began work at the cemetery in March. In an adjoining office, the bones of each are carefully arranged on a tray and a dna sample taken for matching with that of surviving relatives.

Valencia was the last bastion of the doomed Republic during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39. After their military triumph, General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces unleashed a reign of terror. At Paterna alone, some 2,000 civilians were summarily shot and their bodies dumped. Many of the relatives—mainly grandchildren now—take a close interest. “There was a long night of silence,” says Mr Vila. “They feel a burden removed.”

On December 6th Spain will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the democratic constitution that followed Franco’s death. In this period, the country has changed out of all recognition. It is more than twice as rich, socially tolerant and a vibrant democracy fully integrated into Europe. But its dark past still occasionally tugs at the present. “The tragic thing is that we went from dictatorship to a democracy with no reparations [for the victims],” says Rosa Pérez, a left-wing representative in Valencia’s provincial parliament who has promoted the Paterna exhumations.

That was because of the circumstances of the transition to democracy. Unlike Hitler or Mussolini, to whom he is often compared, Franco was a winner who died in his bed. Nasty though it was, his regime eventually presided over Spain’s economic development and the creation of a middle class. When he died in 1975, there was no rupture, as with the contemporaneous demise of dictatorships in Portugal or Greece. The transition was negotiated between reformers in the regime and moderates in the opposition, pushed along from above by King Juan Carlos, and from below by popular pressure. Conventional wisdom holds that it involved an enduring “pact of forgetting” about the civil war and the dictatorship, and that this was a bad thing.

Both halves of that statement are questionable. Rather than a “pact of forgetting” there was a sweeping amnesty (a long-standing demand of both Socialists and Communists) and a tacit political consensus not to use the past as a partisan political weapon in the present. There were two reasons for that. Unlike Portugal or Greece (or indeed Nazi Germany), Spain suffered a civil war. Because Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union all intervened, and because it proved to be a dress rehearsal for the second world war, the civil war was often portrayed as a purely anti-fascist or purely anti-communist struggle between good and bad.

In fact, although Fascists played a part in Franco’s regime at the outset, its defining character was a Catholic, nationalist and military authoritarianism, as Santos Juliá, a historian, explains. By the 1960s Spaniards had come to view the war as a fratricidal catastrophe in which both sides committed atrocities (though Franco, the victor, committed more). The transition involved “a consensus of ‘never again a civil war’, not a pact of forgetting”, as Enrique Moradiellos, a younger historian, says. Indeed, Spanish society has “remembered” copiously, in a flood of publications and commemorations. The other reason is that the transition involved a political bargain in which the regime accepted democracy in return for no reprisals. That outcome was favourable to the opposition. There was nothing inevitable about it: largely thanks to eta, the Basque terrorist group, and franquista diehards in the army the Spanish transition saw more violence than others in southern Europe. It could easily have been reversed, at least temporarily.

In giving priority to peace and democracy rather than holding the past to account, Spain flouted the demands of what is now called transitional justice. This sees a failure to confront the past, through trials and/or a “truth commission”, as denying the rights of victims and as inimical to consolidating the rule of law and democratic values. Its handmaiden is a cult of “historical memory”, which is at best an oxymoron (memory is subjective and personal) and at worst a pretext for rewriting history.

Time for a reckoning?

These views have gained ground in Spain among the civil war’s grandchildren, in part justifiably so. A law of 2007 required the state to support relatives’ searches for disappeared bodies and the removal of public monuments to the dictatorship. Pedro Sánchez, a Socialist who became prime minister in June, has issued a decree to remove Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen, the grandiose monument that he erected to his victory in the mountains outside Madrid. It is proving complicated: the dictator’s descendants want to rebury him in a family tomb in the crypt of Madrid’s cathedral, in the heart of the capital. The government is now searching for ways to insist on a more obscure resting place.

For a democracy to honour a dictator in a public monument is indeed an aberration. Franco’s exhumation commands widespread support. So does the demand to recover the missing bodies. Some want to go further. Ms Pérez in Valencia favours legal cases against police who tortured in Franco’s later years. Others want a truth commission into the civil war and the dictatorship.

An “official truth” is neither possible nor desirable, retorts José Álvarez Junco, another historian. Rather than undo the transition, Spain needs to find a way to honour all its dead and to teach its children the lessons of its history. Transitional justice has much to commend it. But it should not become a categorical imperative that prevents the greater good of the establishment of democracies that respect human rights. That applies to the Spain of the 1970s, and to many other troubled places around the world today.

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

The decidedly anti-communist Senator John McCain was moved to reflect on Delmer Berg's generation, his thoughts filtered through memories of a Hemingway novel.

John McCain: Salute to a Communist, by John McCain (New York Times)

... You might consider them romantics, fighting in a doomed cause for something greater than their self-interest. And even though men like Mr. Berg would identify with a cause, Communism, that inflicted far more misery than it ever alleviated — and rendered human dignity subservient to the state — I have always harbored admiration for their courage and sacrifice in Spain.

Berg died several weeks ago, even as Bernie Sanders continued his campaign for president as a democratic socialist. I wonder what Berg thought about that? I'll close the loop and think about Berg when I cast my primary ballot for Sanders.

Delmer Berg, last Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran, dies (SF Gate)

Delmer Berg, the last known living veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which vainly fought against fascism’s advance into Spain in the late 1930s, died last Sunday Feb. 28 at his home in Columbia (Tuolumne County). He was 100.

His death was confirmed by Marina Garde, the executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives in New York, who said Mr. Berg was believed to have been the only survivor left of the nearly 3,000 quixotic young Americans who volunteered for the Spanish Civil War in a bloody prelude to World War II. About 800 of those who volunteered were believed to have been killed.

Mr. Berg, an unreconstructed Communist, was a 21-year-old union-card-carrying hotel dishwasher in 1937 when he spotted a billboard for the brigade and, through the Young Communist League, enlisted. After cobbling together bus fare to New York, he boarded the French luxury liner Champlain for France.

“I was a worker,” Mr. Berg told the Modesto Bee in November. “I was a farmer. I was in support of the Spanish working people, and I wanted to go to Spain to help them.”