Page 298 - Culture Society and the Media

288 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
To appreciate the political logic of the Civil War, it is important to note that
the resistance to Franco came from the workers who, in Barcelona, Madrid,
Valencia and Malaga armed themselves, put down the garrisons and, through a
series of anti-fascist round-ups, established control over those provinces and thus
forced on the bourgeois-republican forces the defence of their own republic.
Furthermore, in doing so, the workers’ forces pushed the logic of events beyond
the parliamentary-democratic phase by seizing control of industry, placing it on a
war-time footing, and placing the fleet under the control of elected sailors’
committees. In the countryside, there was a mass seizure of the land by the
peasantry; property titles, mortgages and debt records were burnt and peasants’
committees formed to organize the supply of foodstuffs to the town workers. It
could be argued, then, that what was at issue in the Civil War was not merely the
defence of traditional bourgeois-democratic rights and liberties, inasmuch as
there existed in the republican camp a situation of ‘dual power’, of proletarian
forms and institutions existing side by side with bourgeois ones.
So much for the line-up of political forces in Spain. To understand the
direction and significance of the struggle for the definition of the political
realities involved in the Civil War, our analysis must shift to the international
level. For the events in Spain occupied a position of nodal political significance
inasmuch as it clearly held implications for, and offered opportunities to, the
three major political principles operative in Europe at the time—bourgeois-
democratic, communist and fascist. So far as the latter were concerned, it was
clear to Hitler and Mussolini that Franco’s victory, especially if procured through
the assistance of German and Italian arms, would offer them an important
extension in the sphere of their influence and significantly alter the balance of
power in Europe. They accordingly offered Franco, quite openly, military,
financial and diplomatic assistance on a large scale.
The situation for France and Britain was more delicate. On the one hand, the
victory of Franco was clearly not in their interests if it would give Hitler a
footing in the Iberian peninsula. On the other hand, the successful pursuit of the
Civil War in a revolutionary proletarian direction could hardly be expected to
recruit their support either. For it, too, especially if achieved with Russian
assistance, would have altered the balance of power in Europe. Equally
important, it would have offered the working classes of England and France a
revolutionary example which, in the appropriate circumstances, they might have
wished to imitate. The western press, so Orwell alleges, accordingly pursued a
combination of three strategies with regard to the definitions it imposed on
events in Spain.
First, it significantly overplayed the extent of Russian involvement on the side
of the republican forces, thereby suggesting that the struggle in Spain was not a
struggle waged by the toiling masses for their own interests but one in which the
Spanish people were being used to further the global political objectives of the
USSR. This interpretation, Orwell argued, significantly limited support for the
republican forces among both working-class and bourgeois-humanist forces in