Page 300 - Culture Society and the Media

290 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
conspiracy that was maintained by such tricks of the trade as simply not
mentioning the fact that the planes which bombed Guernica had been supplied by
the Luftwaffe (although The Times had printed this information—see Aldgate,
1979, pp. 159–60). Similarly, Aldgate records that the existence of the
International Brigade was scarcely ever acknowledged and that, when it was—as
in a 1937 Paramount newsreel—it was only to suggest that such Brigades
consisted wholly of the unemployed, thereby suggesting that the volunteers who
went to Spain did so out of necessity rather than out of principle, and that, once
in Spain, they were used for road making rather than for fighting, none of which
was true. Perhaps more important, however, was the way in which—quite
contrary to historical record—several newsreels insinuated that it was the
republican rather than the insurgent forces which were responsible for the
disorder in Spain. Commenting on the contrasting ways in which the republican
and insurgent forces were typically represented—the former as un-uniformed,
apparently ill-disciplined and, not infrequently, engaged in church burnings (some
of which were clearly stage-manged) or other acts of desecration; the latter as
neat, orderly, professional and disciplined, usually associated with symbols of
traditional Spain—Aldgate remarks:

All in all, despite the fact that the Nationalists constituted a rebel,
Insurgent army, it takes little effort to conclude that the imagery
surrounding it is that of traditional, conservative Spain, fighting to preserve
its heritage. While the duly elected Republican Government is presented as
maintaining an undisciplined army bent upon destruction and upheaval.
(Aldgate, 1979, pp. 116–17)

To return to Orwell, his concern—and his indignation—were more particularly
exercised by the role played by the Communist Party press in mediating the
Spanish Civil War to the international labour movement, and this, in turn, can
only be understood in terms of the opposition between Stalinist and Trotskyist
policies at the time. Trotsky’s prognosis of the situation in Spain was clear (see
Trotsky, 1973). He recommended that the workers’ committees in the army and
industry should be built on so as to create Soldiers and Workers’ Councils
capable of posing a serious alternative to the Cortes (or parliament) as a form for
the organization of state power. He further urged that the war should be pursued
as a revolutionary war, waged both to defend and extend the socialist ground
already won in the republican camp, and that such socialist gains—particularly
the virtual abolition of land ownership—should be extensively publicized in a
propaganda war aimed at both undercutting Franco’s support among the
peasantry in the territory he occupied and deepening, extending and developing
the support offered Spanish workers by the international labour movement.
Above all, whilst advocating that communists should co-operate with bourgeois,
anarchist and socialist forces in defence of the Republic, Trotsky recommended
that the communist forces in Spain should at all times retain their organizational,