Gad! Ack! Is there anything so tedious as the self-righteousness of a Stalinist?
Yes, the self-righteousness of a Trotskyist.
Especially when enshrined in a gallery.
"Facing Fascism" is the catalogue of an exhibition (which I did not see) at the Museum of the City of New York, which was sponsored by -- surprise! surprise! -- Abraham Lincoln Battalion admirers and the government of Spain. It was an interesting, but depressing, show.
The 16 academic contributors try, not very successfully, to show an even hand. Their problem is that they are all committed to the view that the show is about, in Eric Smith's words, "the obvious struggle between democracy and fascism." Spanish democracy was a fleeting thing, and by the time the Americans -- under the lash of the Popular Front (that is, Stalin) -- got organized to "help," the democrats were on the way out.
The struggle was between two totalitarianisms.
Nor was it a "prelude to World War II," as several of the essayists aver. The Spanish tragedy was a postlude, not a prelude, the second-to-the-last war of the European 19th century (the war among the South Slavs in the 1990s being the last, I hope).
Some naifs may have fallen for the claptrap about fighting for Spanish democracy, but few of the hard-bitten veterans of New York's savage infighting among Stalinists, Trotskyists, Lovestoneites etc. were under any delusions about being on the side of democracy, on either side of the ocean.
The exhibit is a paean to New York's lively leftism -- the area provided up to half of the American contributions of soldiers, money and aid workers to Republican Spain. And, since it was New York, where you can get anything you want, also the source of most of the support for Franco and his buddies Mussolini and Hitler.
The story of the brigadistas has been often told before. One would have liked a bit more about the anti-Republican side, the Catholic Church and the newspapers, who were anticommunist without being antifascist.
The Catholics, except the group around William Buckley and his National Review, would like us to forget how cozy they (many of them, and all the bishops) were with Franco, Mussolini and Hitler back in the day. Here was an opportunity for the curators to make hay out of real grass, and they, surprisingly, took only modest advantage of it.
The biggest single section -- obviously because it is the most graphic -- is devoted to the "response" of the visual and, to a slightly lesser extent, textual artists. The curators, of course, want us to see this as the voice of the conscience of freedom, as presented to us hoi polloi by the noble creative artists.
Well, as compared with the same moral imbeciles offering up the same fetid lessons today about Iraq, at least some of the 1930s artists had the courage to go fight and (in too many cases) get killed. But to my eye, page after page of drawings of suffering Spanish peasants demonstrates not the flaming concern for freedom and humanity of these creeps, but the absence of any similar collection of drawings of Ukrainian peasants who had had the bad luck to own a cow.
The exhibit carries the Spanish tragedy down through the years, where it still resonates, ever more weakly, with "progressive" (that is, antidemocratic) thought in New York City today. Steven Jaffe quotes socialist Michael Harrington, too young to have been there, as saying in 1977, "I had read and internalized my Orwell, I knew the crimes committed by the GPU in the name of antifascism in Spain; and yet, I never cease to thrill at the songs of the International Brigade."
So do I. "La Quinta Brigada" stirs the blood. But after 70 years, it should have cooled enough to allow a more grown-up assessment of what editor Peter Carroll calls "the complexities and nuances of the years leading up to World War II."
"Facing Fascism" offers all too much nuance, all too little realism.
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