SPANISH FRONT WRITERS ON THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Edited by Valentine Cunningham
Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
388 pp.
VOICES OF TYRANNY: WRITING OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Edited by John Miller
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986
231 pp.
After half a century, the Spanish Civil War remains the favorite lost cause of twentieth century intelligentsia. None of the subsequent developments of greater moment such as World War II or the Cold War or detailed revelations concerning the politics and atrocities of the wartime Spanish Republic have served to diminish overmuch the luster of the Republican cause for leftist intelligentsia, particularly. The attractiveness of that cause stemmed first of all from the particular historical circumstances of the years 1936 to 1938, when leftist and liberal forces were engaged in armed combat with rightists and fascists only in Spain, while appeasement became the order of the day elsewhere. The Spanish war thus polarized the political consciousness of the generation of the 1930s, who held it to be a true contest of principles, an international ideological civil war, to a much greater degree than the standard clash of rival egotisms between nations.
The propaganda themes generated by the wartime Republic proved ideal for attracting the intelligentsia. No other conflict has been able at one and the same time to project myths and slogans of "fascism against democracy," "elected parliamentary government against military dictatorship," "free popular participation against elite domination," "revolution versus reaction," "socialism against capitalism," "anarchism versus controlled organization," or "equality against social domination." That some of these propositions tended to be mutually contradictory is not relevant, nor is the confusion among the Republic's supporters as to whether they were applauding "democracy" (constitutional, legalistic, even "middle class") or "revolution" (violent, authoritarian, and "worker" or "peasant").
The Republican cause could never be ultimately discredited, because, unlike other major revolutionary enterprises of this century, it failed. Whereas the major revolutionary victors of our era normally communist regimes have, once in power, blackened their reputations through mass murder, the routinization of tyranny, and economic incompetence, the wartime Spanish Republic was forever spared such enduring ignominy and will always remain in the eyes of its admirers a fair maiden without wrinkle or tarnish, struck down in the flower of youth, forever inaccessible to the ravages of age or decay.
The past year, fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War has produced a number of commemorative publications by supporters and nostalgics, and the two new anthologies edited by Cunningham and Miller both present cross-sections of the writing either from or about the war by a sizable number of major literary figures of the time. There is no evidence of any intention to enlighten by means of factual study or any pretense at objective analysis, the aim in both cases being rather to provide broad and judicious samplings of the way the war was written about by
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