Veteran left wing journalist John Pilger says we should learn from the International Brigade of the Spanish Civil War

IT was the International Brigades’ Memorial Day in Jubilee Park beside the Thames. It was a hot day with no breeze, “a Spanish day”, one of the Brigaders said. Like the others, all in their 80s and older, he took shelter in the shade and rested on his walking stick.
He wore his red beret. Between 1936 and 1939, the International Brigade fought in Spain for the Republican government against the fascist General Franco. There were British, Americans, Irish, Canadians, Australians and others. They were young and all volunteers, determined to stop fascism. They made a difference.
Although the government eventually fell, in February 1937, the 600-strong British Battalion of the XVth International Brigade stopped Franco’s advance on Madrid. Four hundred were killed, wounded or captured in four days’ bloody battle, Madrid was spared. There were many battles like that. Sam Russell, a Brigader, described how on the Sierra de Pàndols, “there was not enough soil to bury the dead, so we covered them with stones”. The poet Martin Green who had written of his father, George Green, stood at the edge of the crowd. George was killed when Martin was four years old. For his father, he wrote:
You had no funeral nor hearse
No grave except the place you fell
No dirge but a soldier’s curse
And an explosion tolled your knell
…I was a boy too young
To take the blow that felled
The tree that was your man.
And we stood and remembered them. I first understood the importance of the struggle in Spain from Martha Gellhorn. Martha was one of my oldest friends. She was one of the greatest war correspondents and is remembered for her dispatches from Spain during the Civil War. In November 1938, she wrote: “In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink: a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out, enjoying the cold afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come for at least two hours. The flower stalls look bright and pretty along the promenade.
“The flowers are all sold, for the funerals of those killed in the 11am bombing, poor souls. It had been a clear and cold day all yesterday. ‘What beautiful weather,’ a woman said, and she stood, holding her shawl around her, staring at the sky. ‘And the nights are as fine as the days. A catastrophe,’ she said. Everyone listened for the sirens all the time, and when we saw the bombers, they were like tiny silver bullets, moving forever up, across the sky.”
How familiar that sounds. Barcelona. Guernica. Hiroshima. Vietnam. Cambodia. Palestine. Afghanistan. Iraq.
Martha never tired of explaining why people fought for the Republic, “the Causa”, and why going to Spain was so important. She wrote of the Brigade: “Whatever their nationality, whether they were communists, anarchists, socialists, poets, plumbers, middle-class professional men, or the one Abyssinian prince…they were fighting for us all in Spain.”
The enemy then was fascism – armband wearing, strutting, ranting fascism.
The enemy then was a great world power, rapacious, with plans of domination, of capturing the oil fields of the Caspian and the Middle East, the mineral riches of Africa. They seemed invincible.
The enemy then was also lies. Deceit. A large section of the British establishment saw fascism as its friend. Their voice was a section of the British press: The Times, the Daily Mail.
The “historical legacy” of the Brigade, as Martha Gellhorn wrote, is that they were fighting for us all. For me, that means a legacy of truth – a way of seeing through the smokescreen of propaganda, including and especially the propaganda of our governments: a legacy of confronting great and rapacious power in whatever form it appears.
That legacy is needed today more than ever. Impeccable gentlemen now invade defenceless countries in our name.
They speak of freedom and democracy, and our way of life and our values. They don’t wear armbands and they don’t strut. They are different from fascists. But their goals are not different – conquest, domination, the control of vital resources.
When the judges at Nuremberg laid down the ground rules of international law following World War II, they described an unprovoked, violent invasion of a defenceless country as “a crime against humanity, the paramount war crime”.
The world is a very different place from Barcelona in 1938, and from the Sierra de Pàndols and all the battlefields of Spain, but the legacy of those who confronted fascism then endures as a warning to us all today.
It is a warning about sinister power behind democratic facades that uses the battle cries of democracy. It is a warning about messianic politicians, apparently touched by God, and about appeasement and truth.
And it is about moral courage: about speaking out, breaking a silence. I salute the Brigaders who did more than speak out. I thank them and their fallen comrades for what they did for us all, and for their legacy of truth and moral courage.
La Lucha continua!