Workers Vanguard No. 946
6 November 2009
From the Archives of Marxism-150th Anniversary of Harpers Ferry Raid-Honor John Brown
On the wet, moonless night of 16 October 1859, John Brown led an armed, multiracial band in a daring raid on Harpers Ferry in what was then Virginia. His objective was to procure arms from the federal arsenal there, free slaves in the nearby area, and, like Spartacus and Toussaint L’Ouverture before him, lead his army into the mountains where they could establish a liberated area and, if need be, wage war against the accursed slave masters. On that night, John Brown struck a blow for black freedom, a blow that reverberates even now for all who struggle for that cause.
On the 150th anniversary of the Harpers Ferry raid, comrades and friends of the Spartacist League went to North Elba, New York, where Brown is buried, to pay tribute to this heroic fighter. Our comrades sang “John Brown’s Body” and the “Internationale,” and laid a wreath at his gravesite, which, in the name of the Spartacist League, declared, “Finish the Civil War! For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!”
Militarily, Brown’s mission was a failure. But politically, Brown’s raid was, as one comrade stated in a speech in North Elba, a “thunderbolt” that was heard around the country, opening the road for the Civil War that smashed slavery. As black scholar W.E.B. DuBois noted, “From the day John Brown was captured to the day he died, and after, it was the South and slavery that was on trial—not John Brown.”
Brown’s heroic raid galvanized both sides for the soon-to-come Second American Revolution, the Civil War of 1861-65. His opponents vilified him as a fanatical, vindictive lunatic. One of the few to rush to Brown’s defense in the immediate aftermath of the raid was the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. In a 30 October 1859 speech, Thoreau praised those in Brown’s small army as men of “principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity,” who “alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed.” Speaking of Brown himself, Thoreau declared, “It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him.”
The Harpers Ferry raid, as much as any single act, helped to precipitate the irrepressible conflict between the industrializing bourgeoisie of the North and the agrarian-based mercantile slavocracy of the South. Karl Marx wrote to his comrade Friedrich Engels in January 1860, “In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is the slave movement—on the one hand, in America, started by the death of Brown, and in Russia, on the other…. Thus, a ‘social’ movement has been started both in the West and in the East.” Frederick Douglass, Brown’s cohort in the radical wing of the abolitionist movement, said after the Civil War:
“If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did, at least, begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places, and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry and the arsenal, not Major Anderson, but John Brown began the war that ended American slavery.”
It took the blood and iron of the Civil War, including the crucial role played by 200,000 black soldiers and sailors, to finally destroy American chattel slavery. But with the final undoing of Radical Reconstruction—a turbulent decade of interracial bourgeois democracy in the South, the most egalitarian experiment in U.S. history—the promise of black equality was betrayed by the Northern bourgeoisie. Racial oppression has always been and remains in the very marrow of American capitalism. It will take a third American revolution to burn this cancer out of the body politic and allow for the first time the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist America. As we said in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 1 (August 1983):
“We stand in the revolutionary tradition of Frederick Douglass and John Brown. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, we look to the multi-racial American working class. In this period of imperialist decay, there is no longer a radical or ‘progressive’ wing of the capitalist ruling class; the whole system stands squarely counterposed to black freedom. Forward to the third American Revolution, a proletarian revolution led by a Trotskyist vanguard party with a strong black leadership component. Finish the Civil War—For black liberation in a workers’ America!”
We reprint below an appreciation of John Brown’s life by George Novack, “Homage to John Brown,” that appeared in New International (January 1938), published by the then-revolutionary Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.
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John Brown was a revolutionary terrorist. There was nothing alien or exotic about him; he was a genuine growth of the American soil. The roots of his family tree on both sides reached back among the first English settlers of Connecticut. The generations of Browns were pious Protestant pioneers, tough and upstanding, and singularly consistent in their ideas, characters, and ways of life. John Brown was the third fighter for freedom of that name in his family and was himself the parent of a fourth. His grandfather died in service as a captain in the Revolutionary war. His father was an active abolitionist, a station-master and conductor on the underground railway.
Born in 1800, the pattern of John Brown’s first fifty years reproduced the life of his father. His father has married three times and had sixteen children; John Brown married twice and had twenty children, every living soul among them pledged to hate and fight black bondage. Like his father, John, too, was “very quick on the move,” shifting around ten times in the Northeastern states before his call to Kansas. He was successively—but not very successfully—a shepherd, tanner, farmer, surveyor, cattle-expert, real estate speculator, and wool-merchant. In his restlessness, his constant change of occupation and residence, John Brown was a typical middle-class American citizen of his time.
How did this ordinary farmer and business man, this pious patriarch become transformed into a border chieftain and a revolutionary terrorist? John had inherited his family’s love of liberty and his father’s abolitionism. At an early age he had sworn eternal war against slavery. His barn at Richmond, Pennsylvania, where in 1825 he set up a tannery, the first of his commercial enterprises, was a station on the underground railway. Ten years later he was discussing plans for the establishment of a Negro school. “If once the Christians in the Free States would set to work in earnest in teaching the blacks,” he wrote his brother, “the people of the slaveholding States would find themselves constitutionally driven to set about the work of emancipation immediately.”
As the slave power tightened its grip upon the government, John Brown’s views on emancipation changed radically. “A firm believer in the divine authenticity of the Bible,” he drew his inspiration and guidance from the Old Testament rather than the New. He lost sympathy with the abolitionists of the Garrison school who advocated the Christ-like doctrine of non-resistance to force. He identified himself with the shepherd Gideon who led his band against the Midianites and slew them with his own hand.
A project for carrying the war into the enemy’s camp had long been germinating in John Brown’s mind. By establishing a stronghold in the mountains bordering Southern territory from which his men could raid the plantations, he planned to free the slaves, and run them off to Canada. On a tour to Europe in 1851 he inspected fortifications with an eye to future use; he carefully studied military tactics, especially of guerrilla warfare in mountainous territory. Notebooks on his reading are still extant.
However, his first assaults upon the slave power were to be made, not from the mountains of Maryland and West Virginia, but on the plains of Kansas. In the spring of 1855 his four eldest sons had emigrated to Kansas to settle there and help win the territory for the free-soil party. In May John Brown, Jr., sent the following urgent appeal to his father. “While the interest of despotism has secured to its cause hundreds and thousands of the meanest and most desperate of men, armed to the teeth...thoroughly organized...under pay from Slave-holders,—the friends of freedom are not one fourth of them half armed, and as to Military Organization among them it no where exists in the territory...” with the result “that the people here exhibit the most abject and cowardly spirit.... We propose...that the anti-slavery portion of the inhabitants should immediately, thoroughly arm, and organize themselves in military companies. In order to effect this, some persons must begin and lead in the matter. Here are 5 men of us who are not only anxious to fully prepare, but are thoroughly determined to fight. We can see no other way to meet the case. ‘It is no longer a question of negro slavery, but it is the enslavement of ourselves.’ We want you to get for us these arms. We need them more than we do bread....”
Having already resolved to join his children in Kansas, John Brown needed no second summons. In the next few months he collected considerable supplies of arms and sums of money from various sympathetic sources, including several cases of guns belonging to the state of Ohio, which were “spirited away” for his use. In August he set out for Kansas from Chicago in a one-horse wagon loaded with guns and ammunition.
Upon arriving in Ossawatomie, John Brown became the captain of the local militia company and led it in the bloodless “Wakarusa War.” Then he plunged into the thick of the struggle for the possession of the territory that gave it the name of “Bleeding Kansas.” In retaliation for the sacking of Lawrence by the Border Ruffians, Brown’s men, including four of his sons, slaughtered five pro-slavery sympathizers in a night raid near Pottawatomie Creek. Brown took full responsibility for these killings; he fought according to the scriptural injunction: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
Reprisals on one side bred reprisals on the other. The settlement at Ossawatomie was pillaged and burned; Brown’s son, Frederick, killed; his forces beaten and scattered. Thereafter John Brown and his band were outlaws, living on the run, giving the slip to government troops, launching sudden raids upon the pro-slavery forces. John Brown became a power in Kansas. His name equaled “an army with banners” in the eyes of the militant Free-Soil colonists; the whisper of his presence sufficed to break up pro-slavery gatherings. He continued his guerrilla warfare throughout 1856 until Kansas was pacified by the Federal troops.
His experiences in Kansas completed the transformation of John Brown into a revolutionist. “John Brown is a natural production, born on the soil of Kansas, out of the germinating heats the great contest on the soil of that territory engendered,” wrote J.S. Pike, the Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune after the Harper’s Ferry raid. “Before the day of Kansas outrages and oppression no such person as Ossawatomie Brown existed. No such person could have existed. He was born of rapine and cruelty and murder.... Kansas deeds, Kansas experiences, Kansas discipline created John Brown as entirely and completely as the French Revolution created Napoleon Bonaparte. He is as much the fruit of Kansas as Washington was the fruit of our own Revolution.”
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Between 1856 and 1858, John Brown shuttled back and forth between Kansas and the East seeking support for the struggle against the Border Ruffians. He received supplies, arms, and moral encouragement from many noted abolitionists, such as Gerrit Smith, the New York philanthropist, and numerous members of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, T.W. Higginson, Theodore Parker, etc. But there was no place for John Brown in the condition of armed neutrality that reigned in Kansas after 1856.
No longer needed in Kansas, John Brown reverted to his long cherished scheme of mountain warfare. To prepare for his enterprise he called a convention of his followers and free Negroes at Chatham in Canada and outlined his plans to them. One of the members of the convention reported that, after invoking the example of Spartacus, of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and other historical heroes who had fled with their followers into the mountains and there defied and defeated the expeditions of their adversaries, Brown said that “upon the first intimation of a plan formed for the liberation of the slaves, they would immediately rise all over the Southern States. He supposed they would come into the mountains to join him...and that we should be able to establish ourselves in the fastnesses, and if any hostile action (as would be) were taken against us, either by the militia of the separate states or by the armies of the United States, we purposed to defeat first the militia, and next, if it was possible, the troops of the United States, and then organize the freed blacks under the provisional constitution, which would carve out for the locality of its jurisdiction all that mountainous region in which the blacks were to be established and in which they were to be taught the useful and mechanical arts, and to be instructed in all the business of life.... The Negroes were to constitute the soldiers.”
The revolutionary spirit of the constitution adopted by the convention for this projected Free State can be judged from this preamble: “Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion; the only conditions of which are perpetual imprisonment, and hopeless servitude or absolute extermination; in utter disregard and violation of the eternal and self-evident truths set forth in our Declaration of Independence: Therefore, we citizens of the United States, and the oppressed people, who, by a recent decision of the Supreme Court are declared to have no rights which the White Man is bound to respect; together with all other people degraded by the laws thereof, do, for the time being, ordain and establish for ourselves the following provisional Constitution and ordinances, the better to protect our persons, property, lives, and liberties; and to govern our actions.” John Brown was elected Commander-in-Chief under this Constitution.
For all its daring, John Brown’s scheme was hopeless from every point of view and predestined to fail. Its principal flaws were pointed out beforehand by Hugh Forbes, one of his critical adherents. In the first place, “no preparatory notice having been given to the slaves...the invitation to rise might, unless they were already in a state of agitation, meet with no response, or a feeble one.” Second, even if successful such a sally “would at most be a mere local explosion...and would assuredly be suppressed.” Finally, John Brown’s dream of a Northern Convention of his New England partisans which would restore tranquility and overthrow the pro-slavery administration was “a settled fallacy. Brown’s New England friends would not have the courage to show themselves so long as the issue was doubtful.” Forbes’ predictions were fulfilled to the letter.
Convinced that “God had created him to be the deliverer of slaves the same as Moses had delivered the children of Israel,” Brown overrode these objections and proceeded to mobilize his forces. Before he could put his plan into operation, however, he was compelled to return to Kansas for the last time, where, under the nom de guerre of Shubel Morgan, he led a raid upon some plantations across the Missouri border, killing a planter and setting eleven slaves at liberty. Both the Governor of Kansas and the President of the United States offered rewards for his arrest. With a price of $3,000 on his head, John Brown fled to Canada with the freedmen.
Early in the summer of 1859 a farm was rented about five miles from Harper’s Ferry. There John Brown collected his men and prepared for his coup. On the night of October 16 they descended upon Harper’s Ferry; took possession of the United States armories; imprisoned a number of the inhabitants; and persuaded a few slaves to join them. By noon militia companies arrived from nearby Charlestown and blocked his only road to escape. The next night a company of United States marines commanded by Col. Robert E. Lee appeared, and, at dawn, when Brown refused to surrender, stormed the engine-house in which Brown, his surviving men, and his prisoners were barricaded. Fighting with matchless coolness and courage over the body of his dying son, he was overpowered and arrested.
Ten men had been killed or mortally wounded, among them two of Brown’s own sons, and eleven captured in the assault.
The reporter of the New York Herald describes the scene during his cross-examination: “In the midst of enemies, whose home he had invaded; wounded, a prisoner, surrounded by a small army of officials, and a more desperate army of angry men; with the gallows staring him full in the face, he lay on the floor, and, in reply to every question, gave answers that betokened the spirit that animated him.” John Brown steadfastly insisted that a single purpose was behind all his actions: to free the Negroes, “the greatest service a man can render to God.” A bystander interrogated: “Do you consider yourself an instrument in the hands of Providence?”—“I do.”—“Upon what principle do you justify your acts?”—“Upon the golden rule. I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here; not to gratify my personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you and as precious in the sight of God.”
Indicted for “treason to the Commonwealth” and “conspiring with slaves to commit treason and murder,” John Brown was promptly tried by a state court and sentenced to death.
During his stay in prison John Brown rose to the most heroic heights. His dignified bearing, his kindliness won his jailors, his captors, and his judges. His letters from the prison where he awaited execution were imbued with the same resolute determination and calm, conscious acceptance of his sacrifice in the cause of freedom, as the letters of Bartholomeo Vanzetti, his fellow revolutionist. To friends who contemplated his rescue, he answered: “I am worth infinitely more to die than to live.” To another he wrote: “I do not feel conscious of guilt in taking up arms; and had it been in behalf of the rich and powerful, the intelligent, the great—as men count greatness—of those who form enactments to suit themselves and corrupt others, or some of their friends, that I interfered, suffered, sacrificed and fell, it would have been doing very well.... These light afflictions which endure for a moment shall work out for me a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.... God will surely attend to his own cause in the best possible way and time, and he will not forget the work of his own hands.”
On December 2, 1859, a month after his sentence, fifteen hundred soldiers escorted John Brown to the scaffold in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains which had for so many years held out to him the promise of freedom for the slaves. With a single blow of the sheriff’s hatchet, he “hung between heaven and earth,” the first American executed for treason. The silence was shattered by the speech of the commander in charge. “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union. All such foes of the human race!”
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“Let those...who have reproaches to heap upon the authors of the Harper’s Ferry bloody tumult and general Southern fright, go back to the true cause of it all. Let them not blame blind and inevitable instruments in the work, nor falsely malign those who are in nowise implicated, directly or indirectly; but let them patiently investigate the true source whence this demonstration arose, and then bestow their curses and anathemas accordingly. It is childish and absurd for Governor Wise to seize and sit astride the wounded panting body of Old Brown, and think he has got the villain who set this mischief on foot. By no means. The head conspirators against the peace of Virginia are ex-President Franklin Pierce and Senator Douglas. These are the parties he should apprehend, confine, and try for causing this insurrection. Next to them he should seize upon Senators Mason and Hunter of Virginia, as accessories. Let him follow up by apprehending every supporter of the Nebraska Bill, and when he shall have brought them all to condign punishment, he will have discharged his duty, but not till then....
“Old Brown is simply a spark of a great fire kindled by shortsighted mortals.... There is no just responsibility resting anywhere, no just attribution of causes anywhere, for this violent attempt that does not fall directly upon the South itself. It has deliberately challenged and wantonly provoked the elements that have concentred and exploded.” So wrote the same journalist whose characterization of John Brown we have already quoted.
Little needs to be added to this historical judgment made in the midst of the events. The Compromisers who attempted to fasten slavery forever upon the American people against their will, and the representatives of slaveholders who prompted them were, in the last analysis, responsible for the raid upon Harper’s Ferry.
John Brown expected the shock of his assault to electrify the slaves and frighten the slaveholders into freeing their chattels. His experiment in emancipation ended in complete catastrophe. Instead of weakening slavery, his raid temporarily fortified the pro-slavery forces by consolidating their ranks, intensifying their repression, and stiffening their resistance.
John Brown was misled by the apparent effectiveness of his terrorist activities in Kansas. He did not understand that there his raids and reprisals were an integral part of the open struggle of the Free-Soil settlers against the invasion of the slaveholder’s Hessians, and were accessory and subordinate factors in deciding that protracted contest. That violence alone was impotent to determine its outcome was demonstrated by the failure of the Border Ruffians to impose slavery upon the territory.
John Brown’s attempt to impose emancipation upon the South by an exclusive reliance upon terrorist methods met with equal failure. Other ways and means were necessary to release, amplify, and control the revolutionary forces capable of overthrowing the slave power and abolishing slavery.
Yet John Brown’s raid was not wholly reactionary in its effects. His blow against slavery reverberated throughout the land and inspired those who were to follow him. The news of his bold deed rang like a fire-bell in the night, arousing the nation and setting its nerves on edge. Through John Brown the coming civil war entered into the nerves of the people many months before it was exhibited in their ideas and actions.
The South took alarm. The “acts of the assassin” confirmed their fears of slave-insurrection provoked by the Northern abolitionists and Black Republicans. Brown’s personal connections with many prominent abolitionists were undeniable, and their disclaimers of connivance and their disapprobation of his actions did not make them any less guilty in the slaveowner’s eyes, but only more cowardly and hypocritical. The slaveholders were convinced that their enemies were now taking the offensive in a direct armed attack upon their lives, their homes, their property. “The conviction became common in the South,” says Frederic Bancroft, the biographer of Seward, “that John Brown differed from the majority of the Northerners merely in the boldness and desperateness of his methods.”
The majority of official opinion in the North condemned John Brown’s “criminal enterprise” and justified his execution. Big Unionist meetings exploited the incident for the benefit of the Democratic Party. The Richmond Enquirer of October 25, 1859, noted with satisfaction that the conservative pro-slavery press of the North “evinces a determination to make the moral of the Harper’s invasion an effective weapon to rally all men not fanatics against the party whose leaders have been implicated directly with the midnight murder of Virginia citizens and the destruction of government property.” The Republican leaders, a little less directly but no less decisively, hastened to denounce the deed and throw holy water over the execution. Said Lincoln: “We cannot object to the execution,” and Seward echoed, “it was necessary and just.”
But many thousands rallied to John Brown’s side, hailing him as a martyr in the cause of emancipation. The radical abolitionists spoke up most boldly in his behalf and most correctly assayed the significance of his life and death. At John Brown’s funeral service, Wendell Phillips spoke these words: “Marvelous old man!... He has abolished slavery in Virginia.... True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes—it does not live—hereafter.” Longfellow wrote in his diary on the day of the hanging: “This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new Revolution—quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will come soon.”
Finally, Frank P. Stearns, a Boston merchant who had contributed generously to John Brown’s Kansas campaign, declared before the Senatorial Investigating Committee: “I should have disapproved of it [the raid] if I had known of it; but I have since changed my opinion; I believe John Brown to be the representative man of the century, as Washington was of the last—the Harper’s Ferry affair, and the capacity shown by the Italians for self-government, the great events of this age. One will free Europe and the other America.”
On his way to the scaffold John Brown handed this last testament to a friend. “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed: it might be done.” His prophetic previsions were soon to be realized.
A year and a half after his execution, John Brown’s revolutionary spirit was resurrected in the Massachusetts volunteers, who marched through the streets of Boston, singing the battle hymn that four of them had just improvised: “John Brown’s body.” Their movements were open and legal; John Brown’s actions had been hidden and treasonable. Yet the marching men proudly acknowledged their communion with him, as they left for Virginia.
There the recent defenders of the Union had become disrupters of the Union; the punishers of treason themselves traitors; the hangmen of rebels themselves in open rebellion. John Brown’s captor, Robert E. Lee, had already joined the Confederate army he was to command. Ex-Governor Wise, who had authorized Brown’s hanging, was conspiring, like him, to seize Harper’s Ferry arsenal, and, as a crowning irony, exhorted his neighbors at Richmond to emulate John Brown. “Take a lesson from John Brown, manufacture your blades from old iron, even though it be the ties of your cart-wheels.”
Thus the opposing forces in the historical process, that John Brown called God, each in their own way, paid homage to the father of the Second American Revolution
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STRIKE THE BLOW-THE LEGEND OF CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN
Book Review
Reclaiming John Brown for the Left
JOHN BROWN, ABOLITIONIST, DAVID S. REYNOLDS, ALFRED A. KNOPF, NEW YORK, 2005
FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH
From fairly early in my youth I knew the name John Brown and was swept up by the romance surrounding his exploits at Harper’s Ferry. For example, I knew that the great anthem of the Civil War -The Battle Hymn of the Republic- had a prior existence as a tribute to John Brown and that Union soldiers marched to that song as they bravely headed south. I was then, however, neither familiar with the import of his exploits for the black liberation struggle nor knew much about the specifics of the politics of the various tendencies in the struggle against slavery. I certainly knew nothing then of Brown’s (and his sons) prior military exploits in the Kansas ‘proxy’ wars against the expansion of slavery. Later study filled in some of those gaps and has only strengthened my strong bond with his memory. Know this, as I reach the age at which John Brown was executed I still retain my youthful admiration for him. In the context of the turmoil of the times he was the most courageous and audacious revolutionary in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in America. Almost 150 years after his death this writer is proud to stand in the tradition of John Brown.
That said, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I can recommend Mr. Reynolds’s book detailing the life, times and exploits of John Brown, warts and all. Published in 2005, this is an important source (including helpful endnotes) for updating various controversies surrounding the John Brown saga. While I may disagree with some of Mr. Reynolds’s conclusions concerning the impact of John Brown’s exploits on later black liberation struggles and to a lesser extent his position on Brown’s impact on his contemporaries, particularly the Transcendentalists, nevertheless on the key point of the central place of John Brown in American revolutionary history there is no dispute. Furthermore, Mr. Reynolds has taken pains to provide substantial detail about the ups and downs of John Brown’s posthumous reputation. Most importantly, he defends the memory of John Brown against all-comers-that is partisan history on behalf of the ‘losers’ of history at its best. He has reclaimed John Brown as an icon for the left against the erroneous and outrageous efforts of modern day religious and secular terrorists to lay any claim to his memory or his work. Below I make a few comments on some of controversies surrounding John Brown developed in Mr. Reynolds’s study.
If one understands the ongoing nature, from his early youth, of John Brown’s commitment to the active struggle against slavery, the scourge of the American Republic in the first half of the 19th century, one can only conclude that he was indeed a man on a mission. As Mr. Reynolds’s points out Brown took every opportunity to fight against slavery including early service as an agent of the Underground Railroad spiriting escaped slaves northward, participation as an extreme radical in all the key anti-slavery propaganda battles of the time as well as challenging other anti-slavery elements to be more militant and in the 1850’s, arms in hand, fighting in the ‘proxy’ wars in Kansas and, of course, the culmination of his life- the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Those exploits alone render absurd a very convenient myth by those who supported slavery or turned a blind eye to it and their latter-day apologists for it about his so-called ‘madness’. This is a political man and to these eyes a very worthy one.
For those who like their political heroes ‘pure’, frankly, it is better to look elsewhere than the life of John Brown. His personal and family life as a failed rural capitalist would hardly lead one to think that this man was to become a key historical figure in any struggle, much less the great struggle against slavery. Some of his actions in Kansas (concerning the murder of some pro-slavery elements under his direction) also cloud his image. However, when the deal went down in the late 1850’s and it was apparent for all to see that there was no other way to end slavery than a fight to the death-John Brown rose to the occasion. And did not cry about it. And did not expect others to cry about it. Call him a ‘monomaniac’ if you like but even a slight acquaintance with great historical figures shows that they all have this ‘disease’- that is why they make the history books. No, the ‘madness’ argument will not do.
Whether or not John Brown knew that his military strategy for the Harper’s Ferry raid would, in the short term, be defeated is a matter of dispute. Reams of paper have been spent proving the military foolhardiness of his scheme at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s plan, however, was essentially a combination of slave revolt modeled after the maroon experiences in Haiti, Nat Turner’s earlier Virginia slave rebellion and rural guerilla warfare of the ‘third world’ type that we have become more familiar with since that time. 150 years later this strategy does not look so foolhardy in an America of the 1850’s that had no real standing army, fairly weak lines of communications, virtually uninhabited mountains to flee to and the North at their backs. The execution of the plan is another matter. Brown seemingly made about every mistake in the book in that regard. However, this is missing the essential political point that militant action not continuing parliamentary maneuvering advocated by other abolitionists had become necessary. A few more fighting abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, and better propaganda work among freedman with connections to the plantations would not have hurt the chances for success at Harper’s Ferry.
What is not in dispute is that Brown considered himself a true Calvinist avenging angel in the struggle against slavery and more importantly acted on that belief. In short, he was committed to bring justice to the black masses. This is why his exploits and memory stay alive after over 150 years. It is possible that if Brown did not have this, by 19th century standards as well as our own, old-fashioned Calvinist determination that he would not been capable of militant action. Certainly other anti-slavery elements never came close to his militancy, including the key Transcendentalist movement led by Emerson and Thoreau and the Concord ‘crowd’ who supported him and kept his memory alive in hard times. In their eyes he had the heroic manner of the Old Testament prophet. Now this animating spirit is not one that animates modern revolutionaries and so it is hard to understand the depths of his religious convictions on his actions but they were understood, if not fully appreciated, by others in those days. It is better today to look at Brown more politically through his hero (and mine, as well) Oliver Cromwell-a combination of Calvinist avenger and militant warrior. Yes, I can get behind that picture of him.
By all accounts Brown and his small integrated band of brothers fought bravely and coolly against great odds. Ten of Brown's men were killed including two of his sons. Five were captured, tried and executed, including Brown. These results are almost inevitable when one takes up a revolutionary struggle against the old order and one is not victorious. One need only think of, for example, the fate of the defenders of the Paris Commune in 1871. One can fault Brown on this or that tactical maneuver. Nevertheless he and the others bore themselves bravely in defeat. As we are all too painfully familiar there are defeats of the oppressed that lead nowhere. One thinks of the defeat of the German Revolution in the 1920’s. There other defeats that galvanize others into action. This is how Brown’s actions should be measured by history.
Militarily defeated at Harpers Ferry, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms nevertheless continued to galvanize important elements in the North at the expense of the pacifistic non-resistant Garrisonian political program for struggle against slavery. Many writers on Brown who reduce his actions to that of a ‘madman’ still cannot believe that his road proved more appropriate to end slavery than either non-resistance or gradualism. That alone makes short shrift of such theories. Historians and others have also misinterpreted later events such as the Bolshevik strategy that led to Russian Revolution in October 1917. More recently, we saw this same incomprehension concerning the victory of the Vietnamese against overwhelming American military superiority. Needless to say, all these events continue to be revised by some historians to take the sting out of there proper political implications.
From a modern prospective Brown’s strategy for black liberation, even if the abolitionist goal he aspired to was immediately successful reached the outer limits within the confines of capitalism. Brown’s actions were meant to make black people free. Beyond that goal he had no program except the Chatham Charter which seems to have replicated the American constitution but with racial and gender equality as a cornerstone. Unfortunately the Civil War did not provide fundamental economic and political freedom. That is still our fight. Moreover, the Civil War, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the reign of ‘Jim Crow’ and the subsequent waves of black migration to the cities changed the character of black oppression in the U.S. from Brown’s time. Black people are now a part of "free labor," and the key to their liberation is in the integrated fight of labor against the current seemingly one-sided class war and establishing a government of workers and their allies. Nevertheless, we can stand proudly in the revolutionary tradition of John Brown (and of his friend Frederick Douglass). We need to complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, not by emulating Brown’s exemplary actions but to moving the multi-racial American working class to power. Finish the Civil War.
Saturday, August 04, 2012
From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Working Class! Take The Offensive! - A Five Point Program For Discussion
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will occasionally post important updates in this space if they appear on that site.
************
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to the 2012 presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the- back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer (2011) when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya and other proxy wars) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
************
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
************
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.
The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.
Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to the 2012 presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the- back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer (2011) when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya and other proxy wars) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
************
As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):
“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.”
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
From The Archives Of The“West Coast Port Shutdown” Website-This Is Class War, We Say No More!-
Click on the headline to link to the West Coast Port Shutdown website.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings about who our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings about who our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc, From Afghanistan! Hands Off Iran-Hands Off Syria!
Click on the headline to link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.
Markin comment:
Every once in a while it is necessary, if for not other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. While, as I have mentioned many times in this space, endless marches are not going to end any war the street opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as protests against other imperialist adventures has been under the radar of late. It is time for anti-warriors to get back where we belong in the struggle against Obama’s wars. The UNAC appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise but the key one is enough to take to the streets. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc, From Afghanistan and Iraq!
BostonUNAC.org | 781-285-8622 | BostonUNAC(S)gmail.com
ANTI-IMPERIALISM, anti-militarism, anti-war, opposition to afghan war, opposition to iraq war
Markin comment:
Every once in a while it is necessary, if for not other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. While, as I have mentioned many times in this space, endless marches are not going to end any war the street opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as protests against other imperialist adventures has been under the radar of late. It is time for anti-warriors to get back where we belong in the struggle against Obama’s wars. The UNAC appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise but the key one is enough to take to the streets. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc, From Afghanistan and Iraq!
BostonUNAC.org | 781-285-8622 | BostonUNAC(S)gmail.com
ANTI-IMPERIALISM, anti-militarism, anti-war, opposition to afghan war, opposition to iraq war
The Latest From “The International Marxist Tendency” Website-Remembering a Lincoln Veteran: on the Life of Harry Fisher – An Interview with Ulrich Kolbe
Click on to the headline to link to the latest from the International Marxist Tendency website.
Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
***********
Remembering a Lincoln Veteran: on the Life of Harry Fisher – An Interview with Ulrich Kolbe
Written by Karl Belin Tuesday, 10 July 2012
The following interview with Ulrich Kolbe is centered on his friend and comrade, Harry Fisher. Ulrich played a major role in promoting Harry's story worldwide by translating his books Comrades – Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War and Legacy into German.
The Abraham Lincoln BrigadeHarry was a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, an all-volunteer force made up of more than 2,000 American workers and students who went to Spain during that country's Civil War, in order to fight fascism. The ALB was originally established by the Communist Party USA in their small office on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Although the party had already undergone the process of Stalinist degeneration, the workers who made up its ranks were convinced that they were fighting for socialism. Due to the authority of the Russian Revolution, many thousands had entered the Communist Party and Young Communist League on the basis of their loyalty to the original program of Lenin and the Revolution.
Harry FisherThe best of those members in the 1930's were to be found in the Spanish trenches. Since Stalin and his bureaucracy had zig-zagged from their earlier "Third Period" ultra-leftism to the so-called "Popular Front" alliances with the bourgeois radicals and republicans, the American fighters in Spain knew that the goal of the International Brigades was not to establish socialism in Spain, but to stop the march of fascism across Europe. Here, Ulrich recalls Harry, who died at the ripe old age of 92 in 2003, after participating in an anti-war demonstration in New York City.
KB: Tell us how you first heard of Harry and what prompted you to get in touch with him.
UK: Well, like many others, I had read his 1997 book Comrades – Tales of a Brigadiasta in the Spanish Civil War. Having always been interested in the International Brigades, I knew quite a few other books on that topic. Interestingly, Steve Nelson’s The Volunteers was published in my country, the GDR, in English and German, at about the same time he was being tried in Pennsylvania under the Sedition and Smith Acts.
Back in 2000, the annual Reunion of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade organization in New York City featured a program by Pete Seeger, his grandson Tao, and Arlo Guthrie. East German students had learned 'We Shall Overcome' and 'If I had A Hammer' in our English classes, so it was time for me to go there.
Eleven years after the defeat of the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe, we had to fly halfway across the world to hear, in what we had always considered the world’s center of imperialism – New York City, antifascist German labor songs and to witness an auditorium of seven hundred people standing up to sing the Internationale together. We met Milt Wolff, the last Commander of the Lincolns, and Moe Fishman, then secretary of the VALB organization. I asked them whether by any chance I could have just seen Harry Fisher among the vets. I remembered Harry’s picture on the back cover of this above-mentioned book and was not even sure whether the author would still be alive.
Moe answered, “Sure, he’s the fella’ over there wearing the red tie. Go ahead and tell him how much you liked his book. He may wanna hear that.” And that’s how we first met.
KB: It seems he lived a very difficult early life, growing up in an orphanage and then beginning work at a young age. Is there anything Harry shared with you about his time as a boy that sticks out in your mind?
UK: While traveling from one corner of Germany to the other, visiting thirteen cities on his 2001 reading tour, Harry told me quite a number of personal stories, some of which are in his second book Legacy, and some of which are not. The ones I remember most vividly were about his becoming a non-believer and actually interested in the ideas of socialism as a result of the beatings and his pedophile and sadistic supervisors at the orphanage. Contrary to many others, he did not grow to be bitter, disillusioned, or frustrated – not even after his subsequent experiences in Spain. His humanism was deeply rooted and came with a unique, good-natured humor.
Time and again he explained why after Spain he would never again say he was hungry or thirsty – for it was there that he had experienced these feelings for real.
KB: How did Harry first get into socialist politics, around what time was that and what organization did he join?
UK: Harry always stressed the fact that he had never read any books by Marx or Lenin before joining the YPSL. Still, he was made President of the SP’s Norman Thomas Club without knowing the first thing about socialism. He was looking for alternatives to the orphan-home-style or religion-based activities, and the Socialist Youth offered just that. It was probably more class instinct than class consciousness at that time. Soon, he came to the conclusion that the YPSLs were merely a debating club, and his witnessing a group of YCLers actively helping evicted families was probably one of the experiences that radicalized him.
KB: In his books, Spain obviously plays a central role in Harry's life. Having met or known of other veterans of the International Brigades in the GDR, what makes Harry stand out in your mind?
UK: When I first met Harry, I was amazed by his youthful, humorous, easy-going approach. This was not a man of 90 years; he was an activist young at heart and full of energy.
In the country where I grew up, schools, streets, barracks were named after German and International Brigadistas, and there was a lot of official honoring of them. We learned and sang their songs at school. Sadly, many of those brave Germans who survived not only the Spanish Civil War but also the fascist concentration camps afterwards were integrated into the Stalinist East German bureaucracy, some of them losing touch to the people and their ideals. Unfortunately, some – not all – German brigadistas became apparatchiks, making it harder for the younger generation to talk to them, actually meet them, identify with them.
In the U.S., the returning international volunteers had their passports taken away from them, were considered “premature antifascists” and not allowed in government jobs, were persecuted under McCarthy – yet apart from a handful who became “friendly witnesses” for McCarthy or published disgusting lies, most of them lived on true to their ideals even though they were never officially rewarded for their deeds and beliefs like in my country.
KB: I understand Harry also fought in the Second World War. A lot of those who were sent to Europe really believed that the US was waging war against fascism, especially those who were in the Communist Party and bought the Moscow Line. Was Harry one of those? Did he ever change his understanding of why the US was in the War?
UK: I think he was quite disillusioned in this from the onset. He knew that Roosevelt’s appeasement and non-intervention in Spain had enabled Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini to win. Had the U.S. seriously wanted to stop fascism, it could have and would have gotten involved earlier. Also, genuine U.S. antifascists had seen the rise of fascism in their own country, the rise of Father Coughlin’s hateful messages. While not a member of the CP, Harry did see fascism as a product of imperialism, and the U.S. was an imperialist country as well. While serving with the USAAF, he – like many others – fought to accomplish what in Spain had been denied to them as a result of the western “democracies” withholding support, to defeat fascism.
KB: When Harry came back from the War he worked for Tass, the Soviet news agency in New York. I understand he left the CP but never stopped calling himself a Communist. Can you touch on Harry's disillusionment with Stalinism?
UK: Well, he once told me – based on a statement of Pete Seeger, I believe – that he wanted to be referred to, if at all, as a communist with a lower-case “c”. He was neither a party member nor did he follow some party line as an apparatchik. Like many socialists and communists back then, he read the Daily Worker. Contrary to us in Eastern Europe, Khrushchev's speech at the XXII Party Congress must have had a devastating impact on progressives here. I would compare the effects of this to the results the per-war Hitler-Stalin Pact had had on many communists in Germany who were already forced into illegal activities. The Stalinist information policies – that we in the GDR experienced firsthand as well – must have played a key role for his disillusionment for sure. It started right after the war and culminated in the USSR’s basically refusing to report about the nuclear incident on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania – fearing it would trigger concerns among its people about the Soviet nuclear technology. Still, we must not forget that at this time the Soviet Union along with the other deformed workers states in Eastern Europe were considered by many the only allies for the labor movement in developed capitalist countries and for the national liberation movements in other parts of the world. I think this idea made it possible for many to excuse Stalinism for so long.
KB: I read that Harry was reluctant to meet you at first. Can you explain why and what changed?
UK: Yes, this is true. When I first approached him at the auditorium in NYC in April 2000 and introduced myself, he asked “Why are you in Germany?” And yes, he was not all that interested in reading my first letter.
I guess his wonderful family, his children as well as his grandchildren played an important role in adjusting his attitude toward Germany, as probably did his ability to communicate extraordinarily well with people in many different countries.
As he always explained it to me, it was one of the most wonderful and important lessons for him at that late a point in his life to realize that even we may fall for biases, and that we have to fight them and overcome them. He was forever thankful for having met a large number of what he called “good” Germans – people who attended his readings during his tour of Germany, and for having this wonderful experience at UZ-Pressefest, the biannual festival hosted by the (formerly West) German CP.
KB: What do you think are the most important lessons of your friend's life? How can we apply them today?
UK: I have good friends in Germany and other countries in Europe and Asia who consider themselves progressives, lefties, or even Marxists, yet still can’t help condemning entire countries for evil politics of some. Signs of lacking interest, nationalism, xenophobia or distrust, whatever we may call it.
We have to understand that a better world is possible, yes. And it means just that, the whole world. It is vitally important for people in Africa and Asia to know that they have friends and comrades in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Another lesson – don’t get discouraged, keep up the good fight. And you are never too young and never too old for that.
Solidarity, and our grand old slogan, Workers of all countries, unite.
Markin comment:
More often than not I disagree with the line of the IMT or its analysis(mainly I do not believe their political analysis leads to adequate programmatically-based conclusions, revolutionary conclusions in any case), nevertheless, they provide interesting material, especially from areas, “third world” areas, where it is hard to get any kind of information (for our purposes). Read the material from this site.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
***********
Remembering a Lincoln Veteran: on the Life of Harry Fisher – An Interview with Ulrich Kolbe
Written by Karl Belin Tuesday, 10 July 2012
The following interview with Ulrich Kolbe is centered on his friend and comrade, Harry Fisher. Ulrich played a major role in promoting Harry's story worldwide by translating his books Comrades – Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War and Legacy into German.
The Abraham Lincoln BrigadeHarry was a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, an all-volunteer force made up of more than 2,000 American workers and students who went to Spain during that country's Civil War, in order to fight fascism. The ALB was originally established by the Communist Party USA in their small office on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Although the party had already undergone the process of Stalinist degeneration, the workers who made up its ranks were convinced that they were fighting for socialism. Due to the authority of the Russian Revolution, many thousands had entered the Communist Party and Young Communist League on the basis of their loyalty to the original program of Lenin and the Revolution.
Harry FisherThe best of those members in the 1930's were to be found in the Spanish trenches. Since Stalin and his bureaucracy had zig-zagged from their earlier "Third Period" ultra-leftism to the so-called "Popular Front" alliances with the bourgeois radicals and republicans, the American fighters in Spain knew that the goal of the International Brigades was not to establish socialism in Spain, but to stop the march of fascism across Europe. Here, Ulrich recalls Harry, who died at the ripe old age of 92 in 2003, after participating in an anti-war demonstration in New York City.
KB: Tell us how you first heard of Harry and what prompted you to get in touch with him.
UK: Well, like many others, I had read his 1997 book Comrades – Tales of a Brigadiasta in the Spanish Civil War. Having always been interested in the International Brigades, I knew quite a few other books on that topic. Interestingly, Steve Nelson’s The Volunteers was published in my country, the GDR, in English and German, at about the same time he was being tried in Pennsylvania under the Sedition and Smith Acts.
Back in 2000, the annual Reunion of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade organization in New York City featured a program by Pete Seeger, his grandson Tao, and Arlo Guthrie. East German students had learned 'We Shall Overcome' and 'If I had A Hammer' in our English classes, so it was time for me to go there.
Eleven years after the defeat of the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe, we had to fly halfway across the world to hear, in what we had always considered the world’s center of imperialism – New York City, antifascist German labor songs and to witness an auditorium of seven hundred people standing up to sing the Internationale together. We met Milt Wolff, the last Commander of the Lincolns, and Moe Fishman, then secretary of the VALB organization. I asked them whether by any chance I could have just seen Harry Fisher among the vets. I remembered Harry’s picture on the back cover of this above-mentioned book and was not even sure whether the author would still be alive.
Moe answered, “Sure, he’s the fella’ over there wearing the red tie. Go ahead and tell him how much you liked his book. He may wanna hear that.” And that’s how we first met.
KB: It seems he lived a very difficult early life, growing up in an orphanage and then beginning work at a young age. Is there anything Harry shared with you about his time as a boy that sticks out in your mind?
UK: While traveling from one corner of Germany to the other, visiting thirteen cities on his 2001 reading tour, Harry told me quite a number of personal stories, some of which are in his second book Legacy, and some of which are not. The ones I remember most vividly were about his becoming a non-believer and actually interested in the ideas of socialism as a result of the beatings and his pedophile and sadistic supervisors at the orphanage. Contrary to many others, he did not grow to be bitter, disillusioned, or frustrated – not even after his subsequent experiences in Spain. His humanism was deeply rooted and came with a unique, good-natured humor.
Time and again he explained why after Spain he would never again say he was hungry or thirsty – for it was there that he had experienced these feelings for real.
KB: How did Harry first get into socialist politics, around what time was that and what organization did he join?
UK: Harry always stressed the fact that he had never read any books by Marx or Lenin before joining the YPSL. Still, he was made President of the SP’s Norman Thomas Club without knowing the first thing about socialism. He was looking for alternatives to the orphan-home-style or religion-based activities, and the Socialist Youth offered just that. It was probably more class instinct than class consciousness at that time. Soon, he came to the conclusion that the YPSLs were merely a debating club, and his witnessing a group of YCLers actively helping evicted families was probably one of the experiences that radicalized him.
KB: In his books, Spain obviously plays a central role in Harry's life. Having met or known of other veterans of the International Brigades in the GDR, what makes Harry stand out in your mind?
UK: When I first met Harry, I was amazed by his youthful, humorous, easy-going approach. This was not a man of 90 years; he was an activist young at heart and full of energy.
In the country where I grew up, schools, streets, barracks were named after German and International Brigadistas, and there was a lot of official honoring of them. We learned and sang their songs at school. Sadly, many of those brave Germans who survived not only the Spanish Civil War but also the fascist concentration camps afterwards were integrated into the Stalinist East German bureaucracy, some of them losing touch to the people and their ideals. Unfortunately, some – not all – German brigadistas became apparatchiks, making it harder for the younger generation to talk to them, actually meet them, identify with them.
In the U.S., the returning international volunteers had their passports taken away from them, were considered “premature antifascists” and not allowed in government jobs, were persecuted under McCarthy – yet apart from a handful who became “friendly witnesses” for McCarthy or published disgusting lies, most of them lived on true to their ideals even though they were never officially rewarded for their deeds and beliefs like in my country.
KB: I understand Harry also fought in the Second World War. A lot of those who were sent to Europe really believed that the US was waging war against fascism, especially those who were in the Communist Party and bought the Moscow Line. Was Harry one of those? Did he ever change his understanding of why the US was in the War?
UK: I think he was quite disillusioned in this from the onset. He knew that Roosevelt’s appeasement and non-intervention in Spain had enabled Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini to win. Had the U.S. seriously wanted to stop fascism, it could have and would have gotten involved earlier. Also, genuine U.S. antifascists had seen the rise of fascism in their own country, the rise of Father Coughlin’s hateful messages. While not a member of the CP, Harry did see fascism as a product of imperialism, and the U.S. was an imperialist country as well. While serving with the USAAF, he – like many others – fought to accomplish what in Spain had been denied to them as a result of the western “democracies” withholding support, to defeat fascism.
KB: When Harry came back from the War he worked for Tass, the Soviet news agency in New York. I understand he left the CP but never stopped calling himself a Communist. Can you touch on Harry's disillusionment with Stalinism?
UK: Well, he once told me – based on a statement of Pete Seeger, I believe – that he wanted to be referred to, if at all, as a communist with a lower-case “c”. He was neither a party member nor did he follow some party line as an apparatchik. Like many socialists and communists back then, he read the Daily Worker. Contrary to us in Eastern Europe, Khrushchev's speech at the XXII Party Congress must have had a devastating impact on progressives here. I would compare the effects of this to the results the per-war Hitler-Stalin Pact had had on many communists in Germany who were already forced into illegal activities. The Stalinist information policies – that we in the GDR experienced firsthand as well – must have played a key role for his disillusionment for sure. It started right after the war and culminated in the USSR’s basically refusing to report about the nuclear incident on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania – fearing it would trigger concerns among its people about the Soviet nuclear technology. Still, we must not forget that at this time the Soviet Union along with the other deformed workers states in Eastern Europe were considered by many the only allies for the labor movement in developed capitalist countries and for the national liberation movements in other parts of the world. I think this idea made it possible for many to excuse Stalinism for so long.
KB: I read that Harry was reluctant to meet you at first. Can you explain why and what changed?
UK: Yes, this is true. When I first approached him at the auditorium in NYC in April 2000 and introduced myself, he asked “Why are you in Germany?” And yes, he was not all that interested in reading my first letter.
I guess his wonderful family, his children as well as his grandchildren played an important role in adjusting his attitude toward Germany, as probably did his ability to communicate extraordinarily well with people in many different countries.
As he always explained it to me, it was one of the most wonderful and important lessons for him at that late a point in his life to realize that even we may fall for biases, and that we have to fight them and overcome them. He was forever thankful for having met a large number of what he called “good” Germans – people who attended his readings during his tour of Germany, and for having this wonderful experience at UZ-Pressefest, the biannual festival hosted by the (formerly West) German CP.
KB: What do you think are the most important lessons of your friend's life? How can we apply them today?
UK: I have good friends in Germany and other countries in Europe and Asia who consider themselves progressives, lefties, or even Marxists, yet still can’t help condemning entire countries for evil politics of some. Signs of lacking interest, nationalism, xenophobia or distrust, whatever we may call it.
We have to understand that a better world is possible, yes. And it means just that, the whole world. It is vitally important for people in Africa and Asia to know that they have friends and comrades in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Another lesson – don’t get discouraged, keep up the good fight. And you are never too young and never too old for that.
Solidarity, and our grand old slogan, Workers of all countries, unite.
The Latest From The “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox” Blog
Click on the headline to link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.
Markin comment:
I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize in 2003. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
Markin comment:
I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize in 2003. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog-The truth about Guernica: Picasso and the lying press
Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
*********
The truth about Guernica: Picasso and the lying press
March 9, 2012
By Martin Minchom-->
Picasso, Figure of a Woman Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, 19 January, 1937.
“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth” —Pablo Picasso
What inspired Picasso to paint his Guernica? It was not just the bombing of the Basque town on April 26, 1937. In fact, to properly understand the circumstances that gave rise to the creation of Picasso’s contribution to the 1937 World Fair, it is necessary to consider the full historical background, beginning with a series of events that influenced Picasso’s earliest artistic reactions to the Spanish Civil War in late 1936 and early 1937. (1) The great cultural tradition that links Picasso with artists like Goya has always been, and rightly so, the High Road towards the masterpiece. But, as we will see, exploring the Low Road of newspapers, pamphlets and street posters, government reports and conspiracy theories–teasing out information from exactly contemporaneous sources–can also provide surprisingly rich pickings. In what follows I will attempt to reconstruct a street view of Picasso the newspaper reader—the worried and indignant Spaniard in France—over an extended period between December 1936 and April 1937.
I will base my discussion on a close reading of French newspapers and weeklies, looking at the ways in which press influence can be traced in Picasso’s print Dream and Lie of Franco (an eighteen-scene narrative in etching and aquatint, sold as prints to raise funds for the Republic) and the Guernica itself. But let me begin with a strange drama, finely poised between tragedy and farce, that strongly affected French reactions to the Spanish Civil War. On December 8, 1936 the French embassy plane in Spain, a converted Potez 54 bomber plane, was intercepted and brought down by unknown attackers about 60 miles northeast of Madrid. Just one person died in that attack: the French journalist Louis Delaprée, who was returning to France to have it out with his newspaper editors, after they had censored and suppressed his reports denouncing the pro-Francoist aerial bombardments of Madrid. In previous pieces for the Volunteer (see here and here) I studied this case essentially from the left-wing perspective of Picasso’s circle of friends and the campaign spearheaded by the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité, arguing that this intriguing “Spanish” news of aerial bombardments, censorship and lies caught the attention of Pablo Picasso, who had not previously manifested any interest in the war as an artistic subject. (2)
But any confrontation has two sides. In this companion piece, I will retrace my steps through late 1936 and early 1937 to view the picture from a different angle, taking into account the conservative and right-wing reactions of those who were unsympathetic to the Spanish Republic. They were concerned with a quite different issue, namely the murky circumstances surrounding the downing of the embassy plane. There were persistent rumors that this was really a Soviet-style operation to cover up the previous month’s Republican killings near Madrid. (3) Despite the many uncertainties surrounding this case, there have been few “ifs” and “buts” in the literature on it, created mainly beyond the confines of historical scholarship. In cyberspace, in fact, the conjectures of the 1930s have by now hardened into dark certainties. If one looks up Paracuellos massacre (now the generic term for the Republican killings) in Wikipedia, for instance, an account of the attack on the embassy plane emerges as a key episode. Appearing under the heading “Henny’s attempted murder”, it is presented as though the whole affair were a closed case. (Dr. Henny was one of the plane’s passengers, as I discuss below.) (4) In this version of events, the clinching argument would be that the French government investigated the affair and blamed the Republicans, yet somehow failed to publish their findings. (5)
Le Charivari, 8-9 January 1937. (Martin Minchom)
As always, however, reality is more complicated. Last year, I located the official French files on this attack. Contrary to the more sinister hypotheses, these files had actually been sitting quietly undisturbed in the diplomatic archives in Nantes, simply waiting to be consulted. (6) To be sure, some of this material had initially been classified secret, exactly as we would expect; but after several decades it was declassified under equally standard procedures. In other words, there was no official French cover-up. What to the files show? While they suggest that French diplomacy harbored genuine suspicions about Republican involvement in the attack, they signally–and from the French point of view, frustratingly–failed to uncover much hard evidence. As a diplomatic incident, the case lays bare the fault lines in the fractious relationship between France and the Spanish Republic, while it is also instructive about internal tensions within France over the Spanish Civil War. French diplomacy and left-wing forces were uneasy bedfellows, although both were nominally loyal to the Popular Front-led government. Indeed, far from withholding papers to protect the Spanish government, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs may even have gone public to counteract French Communist agitation.
Along with its Spanish background, the Delaprée case had other features to intrigue Picasso. Quite recently, I located a full-page cartoon about the attack that was used as the cover illustration for Le Charivari, an extreme right-wing satirical weekly, for its issue of January 8, 1937. (7) A few days later Picasso produced a painting, linked to his own Dream and Lie of Franco, that bears several unmistakable similarities to this particular right-wing caricature. Artistically, the Charivari sketch was no doubt crude and unworthy of Picasso’s attention–but it did represent the same forces with which the artist engaged so memorably in the Guernica.
A series of artistic reactions by Picasso show that he was repeatedly affected by aerial bombardments of civilian targets, and appalled at the silence of the mainly conservative French press on this issue. (8) Picasso was a regular reader of L’Humanité, which launched a vigorous campaign against “the lying press, the murderous press” in 1936 and 1937. (9) While L’Humanité certainly practised its own manipulations, I believe that this campaign shaped the context in which Picasso interpreted the distorted, incomplete and often distressing news from Spain. Picasso explicitly named the ‘lie’ in his title for Dream and Lie of Franco, and drew a clenched fist on a copy of Paris-Soir that ignored the bombing of Madrid. I will argue here that there are similar echoes in the Guernica itself.
One anecdote, possibly apocryphal, has it that when news of the bombing of Gernika reached Paris in April 1937 the subject was proposed to Picasso, who replied that he didn’t even know what a bombed town looked like. (10) If this response was true, it was certainly disingenuous. Nevertheless, Picasso does seem to have felt that an artist had the special power to counter deceit, by using the inversions and apparent deceptions of artistic creation to cut through all the lies propagated in the public sphere. In 1935, Picasso spoke of a dictatorship of painters, or of a painter, “to suppress all those who tricked us, to suppress the cheaters, to suppress the objects of trickery, to suppress customs, to suppress charms, to suppress history, to suppress a heap of still more things.” (11). Artistic truth, he seems to suggest, will be terrible rather than reassuring, opening our eyes but stripping away our illusions.
The wreckage of the French Embassy plane. (L. Delaprée, Morir en Madrid, 2009 / Lincoln-Delaprée collection.)
The Downing of the Potez 54 and its Strange Aftermath
I am especially interested in clarifying French reactions to the Potez 54 / Delaprée affair between 29 December 1936 and mid-January 1937, when Picasso was involved. But first I’ll look at the attack itself. Thirty years ago, the leading hispanist Ian Gibson suggested that if the official French files on this case were ever found, they might shed some interesting light. (12) Now that I have located them, however, I can only say that they raise as many questions as they answer.
During the Spanish Civil War, the French embassy in Madrid used a converted Potez 54 bomber plane to carry official correspondence, and sometimes passengers, between Spain and France. That plane was due to leave Barajas airport in Madrid on December 6, 1936. But it was delayed twice due to technical problems, and finally left for Toulouse, France, at 12.20 on December 8th. In addition to its captain and radio operator, it carried two French journalists, Louis Delaprée of the daily newspaper Paris-Soir and André Château of the Havas news agency. The French embassy gave three non-French passengers permission to travel, namely two Spanish girls and Dr. Henny, the Swiss envoy of the International Red Cross. The plane had not been in the air for long when, near Alcalá de Henares, it was approached by a monoplane. According to the captain of the embassy plane, Charles Boyer, the co-pilot had plenty of time to look it over. Some time later, when the Potez 54 had reached the Guadalajara region, it was attacked by a second aircraft, a biplane, at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. (13) Thanks to its pilot’s cool head it managed to make a bumpy crash landing in a field near the village of Pastrana. Dr. Henny was taken quickly to the Palace Hotel in Madrid, and after a delay, the other passengers were also taken to Madrid. One of them, the journalist Louis Delaprée died at 2:00 in the morning on December 11th.
Press reporting on the incident was initially confused. Contradictory information was spread, for example, with regard to the number of attacking planes. It was also often asserted incorrectly that an Air France plane had been brought down. Early on, it was generally assumed that pro-Francoist planes were responsible for the attack, and right-wing sources asked why the French embassy had been using a converted bomber plane that could so easily be confused with a military aircraft.
Louis Delaprée: the photo that was used on street posters on 31 December 1936. (Bibliothèque nationale de France.)
Suspicions quickly surfaced, however, that the attack had been specifically aimed at Dr. Henny because he had knowledge, and possibly documents, about the Paracuellos killings–the mass execution by Republicans of pro-Franco prisoners, which had taken place in November and early December–that he was taking to France and then on to Geneva. The arrival of this news in Geneva would have immediately preceded the Spanish State minister’s address to the League of Nations. (14) As early as December 9th, the day after the attack, Emmanuel Neuville, the French consul in Madrid, voiced his suspicions that the aim of the plane attack had been to stop Henny reporting the atrocities. (15) Dr. Henny reported back to the Red Cross in Geneva that he also thought he might have been the target. (16) An otherwise skeptical passenger, the injured journalist André Château, acknowledged that if the attack had been aimed at anyone, this would have been Henny. Neither Delaprée nor himself had any information that would have marked them out, he said, whereas Henny was potentially an “awkward witness”. (17)
All the same, Dr. Henny was not the only possible object of the attack, and Delaprée’s name also came up later, in other speculations, although less frequently. For example, it was claimed in 1938 that Louis Delaprée was carrying some information so vital that the “reds” wanted to intercept it at any cost. (18) Delaprée himself seems to have believed his life was threatened, and his papers may have been tampered with after the attack. (19)
There are many colorful details to this case, far more than I can do justice to here. At the height of the Cold War, in 1961 the Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer wrote a widely cited account, strewn with inaccuracies, that blamed Orlov’s Soviet agents. (20) In 1987, half a century after the event, a local resident Dr. Cortijo spoke of handing over two bags found near the wreckage to trustworthy French embassy officials. (21) In fact the diplomatic bag (which was indeed made up of two separate bags) does show up in the official inventory. (22) But according to legend, these bags were packed with compromising photos and documents on Paracuellos, while there is no such indication in the consular documentation. Finally, long after the event two Soviet pilots were described as have admitted to shooting down the aircraft, but without realizing that it was an embassy plane. (23)
Emmanuel Neuville, the French consul in Madrid, was in charge of investigations in situ and from the outset suspicions focused on a Frenchman, Robert Marcelin. Not much seems to have been known about Marcelin’s background, and he was not specifically identified as a Soviet agent, unless the description of him as a “member of the Cheka” was hinting at this. (The chekas were non-official people’s tribunals and make-shift prisons that administered very rough justice.) Marcelin certainly talked up his role because he was claimed to have boasted to foreign journalists that he was head of espionnage under the Madrid junta. (24) Marcelin’s connections make him a plausible suspect for the plane attack as the junta was set up after the Republican government had left Madrid for Valencia, and the Paracuellos killings were on its watch.
French diplomacy suspected Marcelin of practically every single unsolved crime involving foreigners in the Republican zone. However, by spreading the net so very wide, they also revealed how little hard evidence they really had. The French were particularly interested in tracking down one person at Barajas airport to whom Marcelin was alleged to have said, on the eve of the attack, that one of those leaving would never arrive. (25) This reported statement circulated widely, and was interpreted as a threat to attack the plane. But surely–if true–this was said earlier than reported, and meant that a passenger (Henny? Delaprée?) would meet a sticky end in a dark Madrid side-street. Marcelin was referring to one person, not seven; and how do you pick out a single victim at 10,000 feet?
The French embassy was given a report from the Madrid Junta on December 9, 1936 showing that Robert Marcelin and Florentino Ruiz had been the agents in charge of the initial investigation. (26) Embassy officials found this highly suspicious, and Marcelin’s name was underlined in red pencil on the document and highlighted by a red exclamation mark. Marcelin’s name subsequently disappeared from junta documentation, which only reinforced French suspicions.
Picasso's sketch of a hand holding a hammer/sickle, on a copy of Paris-Soir.
The Marcelin connection was the closest the French investigation ever got to a genuine lead, but plenty of details reveal an atmosphere of tension and distrust. On the day of the attack itself, Emmanuel Neuville’s suspicions were raised by the pilot’s reluctance to say over the phone who he thought was responsible. (27) On December 11, concern was expressed for the safety of the pilot and radio operator, who were discreetly taken out of Spain. (28) The French apparently even managed the logistical feat of having the plane itself moved to safe hiding. Otherwise, the French had little to go on, and their work focused almost entirely on the identification of the attacking planes. (29)
When the French government sent a letter of protest to the Republican government on December 28, it basically had to rely on this type of evidence. However, a photo of the wreckage of the plane (preserved by Mme. Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée) shows that the issue of identification was not clear-cut. The plane’s numbering F-A000 is clearly visible on the photo. However, the tail displays a single letter (F), which was characteristic of Malraux’s air squadron, and displays neither the tricolor nor the official letters RF. (30) As the embassy plane had previously been a military aircraft, in process of transformation for civilian use, the possibility of an erroneous identification was greater than usually imagined. The plane, in other words, looked like a Republican military aircraft. This reopens the possibility of an attack in error by pro-Francoist aviation.
The French went on investigating after they had sent their letter of protest on December 28, but if anything they found themselves going backwards. On January 5 1937, the injured journalist André Château was repatriated to France and hospitalized in Bordeaux, where his testimony failed to back up the Republican government’s conclusions. He had the “impression” that the Potez 54 has been attacked by a government plane, but he was not sure. He was not convinced about the identification because Franco’s planes had red and yellow markings, and the yellow was less visible. He did have doubts about whether Franco’s plane would have gone so near to Alcalá de Henares, where there was a military airport. He reckoned the attack might have been perpetrated by mistake by a government plane. The attacking plane did have time to look, but maybe the markings were not clear enough to allow for identification. (31) (The archives of the Havas news agency show that the unfortunate Château’s return to France was not to be a happy one, and he stoically had his right leg amputated in April 1937. (32))
By mid-January, the French consul Neuville reported that his investigation was stalling: he had not got new proofs which could be considered conclusive. “At best,” he said, he could point to the type and coloring of the wings of the attacking plane, as indicated by the pilot and radio operator. (33) However, he also expressed renewed suspicions of Marcelin. On January 29, 1937, a request was made for a bullet found after the attack to be examined more closely. On March 19, 1937, the consul in Madrid Emmanuel Neuville warned the consulate in Alicante that the Frenchman Robert Marcelin, described as the head of espionnage for the Madrid junta, was going there. (34) But basically, the official investigation was fizzling out.
And the mystery? My two cents goes on the mundane possibility that the embassy airplane was attacked in error, perhaps by pro-Francoist planes, perhaps by Republican planes. As for a planned Soviet attack, at this time Soviet foreign policy was still based on making a common front with France and Britain against Nazism; and Stalin would not have felt that shooting down French planes was the best way to go about it. Much the same argument would apply to the Republican government. But that does not rule out a more improvised local action. Local agents could–say–have messed up a dirty tricks operation in Madrid, and then panicked, providing (dis)information to pro-Republican aviation. But this conjecture is highly speculative. My guess is that only Soviet documentation, if it exists, could prove conclusively that there was a planned attack; and if Soviet agents had indeed done their worst, they might well not have written to Stalin to boast about it.
A sketch of 19 April 1937, showing the raised arm, clenched fist and hammer and sickle.
However, we can certainly dismiss the hypothesis of a French cover-up. The notion of official connivance between two brotherly Popular Front governments was never plausible given what we know about the troubled course of French-Spanish relations and the ambivalent attitude of the French State Office, the Quai d’Orsay. (35) In many ways, French diplomacy in Spain operated in a similar way to Britain’s. Both countries had absentee ambassadors on the frontier, who were bitterly hostile to the Republic, while their consular officials, like Emmanuel Neuville (and in the British case Ogilvie-Forbes), discharged their duties honorably in Madrid. (36) Embassy officials who were too sympathetic to the Republicans, like the French military attaché Henri Morel, found themselves in trouble. (37) On my reading, the French government had reasonable suspicions, but very little hard evidence, when it issued its findings attributing the attack to pro-Republication aviation.
The findings of the State Office were made public on December 31, 1936. At this point the two strands in the affair–the attack on the plane and the censorship of Louis Delaprée’s writings–converge. As a commentator observed at the time: “… the curiously ironical outcome of the incident [i.e. the attack on the plane, MM] was this: on the very day on which the walls of Paris were adorned with manifestos of protest by Left journalists, the Quai d’Orsay itself made an official statement to the effect that the ambassadorial plane had been shot down by the government forces. Apparently M. Blum’s liaison arrangements with the Left journalists were somewhat defective.” (38)
It must have been very soon after the attack that the Republicans and their supporters realized that Delaprée’s writing might have great propaganda value. While Delaprée was still being dismissed as a sensationalist jet-setter for the far-right press in a Spanish newspaper on December 9th, for example, a mere two days later the same newspaper suddenly started calling him a “genuine liberal”. (39) Something was clearly going on behind the scenes. In December, circles close to the Communist newspaper L’Humanité managed to get hold of the full copies of Louis Delaprée dispatches denouncing the pro-Francoist aerial bombardments of Madrid in November 1936. These had originally being filed with the Republican Censorship Office in Madrid, and were probably taken to Paris by L’Humanité’s correspondent, Georges Soria. Delaprée’s reports had mainly been rejected by his own newspaper, but soon they would be brought out in pamphlet form in no less than five languages, as part of a major propaganda initiative. (40)
The victims from a bombed church in Durango. (L’Humanité, 6 April 1937, and Durango, Ville Martyre, 30 April 1937.)
At the end of December, however, things were being warmed up with the launching of street posters (visible in a scene shown here in L’Humanité of 1 January 1937), in which Delaprée’s wan and melancholy face looks out at us alongside the words: “The voice of a dead man denounces the lies of the press.” Picasso’s biographer Sir John Richardson has drawn attention to the painter’s very first reference to the Spanish Civil War in Still Life with a Lamp on December 29, 1936, which included a severed arm (as in the Guernica), and a poster on the wall with the date. This was when the Delaprée poster was being printed, allowing us to infer that Picasso must have seen it before it came out. Perhaps the whole purpose of the campaign had been to get the world’s most famous artist to be more fully engaged with Republican Spain. If so, it was brilliantly successful.
In perfect synchronicity, the Right highlighted the attack on the plane at the same time as L’Humanité focused on Delaprée’s death and censored writings. L’Action Française of January 1, 1937 reported the French Government’s findings that Louis Delaprée had in fact been “murdered” by the Spanish Popular Front. There were also the first right-wing hints that the French writer André Malraux might somehow be mixed up in all this (which later turned into an aggressive, denunciatory campaign by the fascist writer Robert Brasillach (41)). L’Humanité did not buy into the idea that the timing of the announcement was a mere coincidence, alleging on January 2, 1937 that there was complicity between Paris-Soir and officials at the Quai D’Orsay. (42) On January 3, 1937 the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité made its own counter-accusation blaming Italian aviation.
The duelling resumed one week later, on Friday, January 8, 1937. That day, Louis Delaprée’s writings on the bombardments of Madrid were published as a pamphlet called The Martyrdom of Madrid. (On Saturday–see here–L’Humanité showcased it under the heading Shame on the Lying Press!) Friday was also the day of the week that many weeklies were brought out, albeit with Saturday’s dateline, so that they could reach people before the weekend. One right-wing weekly that came out that day was particularly significant because, as I will show in a moment, Picasso saw it and reacted to it.
It is worth noting the extraordinary violence of the language that marked this controversy. L’Humanité placed a caption beneath the photo of the street scene on January 1, 1937, making an allusion to the “press which kills and lies.” Strong stuff. These words were linked to L’Humanité’s ongoing campaign against the far Right press which it blamed, probably correctly, for having hounding a government minister called Roger Salengro to his suicide. On November 18, 1936, L’Humanité had brought out a special edition on Salengro’s death, specifically denouncing calumnies spread by the “murderous press.” As part of this campaign, L’Humanité’s director Paul Vaillant-Couturier wrote a pamphlet with a title that used similar language: “The lying press, the murderous press.” (43)
A 1930s press campaign was the very opposite of an ordered process of political debate; and in this one, both sides were accusing each other of nothing less than murder. But if we prioritize Picasso’s reactions, the idea of lying, also so decisive here, was not merely rhetorical–especially given the fact that insults to honor were a defining feature of Spanish culture.
The royal shivaree and Picasso’s Dream and Lie of Franco
As mentioned above, on Friday January 8, 1937, Picasso saw and reacted to a crude caricature on the cover of Le Charivari, a right-wing satirical weekly. Le Charivari was on the outer reaches of the French Right, at the point where it shaded into outright fascism. Previously, on 23 February 1935 Le Charivari’s cover had portrayed Léon Blum as a vulture. The caricaturist had curved Blum’s nose into the beak so beloved of anti-semitic caricaturists, showing him picking away at a Christ-like victim. Presumably, this was the fate in store for suffering taxpayers if the Popular Front ever came to power. (44) Ralph Soupault, the cartoonist who drew the cover which interests us, would subsequently make himself notorious in March 1937 for a violently anti-semitic depiction of Léon Blum. On that occasion, Soupault portrayed Blum, by then Prime Minister, as being covered in blood, saying: “Who said I had no French blood?” in reference to a violently suppressed demonstration. (45)
Picasso, Dream and Lie of Franco, Part I, 8 January 1937.
The cover for this particular issue of Le Charivari showed a vulture perched on the edge of a coffin. Although Saturday January 9 was its cover date, we can confirm that it came out a day earlier by consulting L’Action Française, which announced its appearance on January 8th. (See here, at the bottom.) Given the weekly’s previous and future record, the vulture on Le Charivari’s cover of January 8, 1937 must be a direct reference to the notion of the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, so beloved of the Nazi and Fascist right in the 1930s. The vulture has a red hammer and sickle on its chest, and two drops of blood are falling from its blood-covered beak. We know where the blood comes from because the open coffin on which it is perched carries a name: Louis Delaprée. (46)
The reason I am so sure that Pablo Picasso saw this caricature is that, a few days later, he replied to Le Charivari’s cover with a painting that is, detail by detail, its exact antithesis. On January 19, 1937, Picasso portrayed a woman-vulture from exactly the same angle, and with an identical slant of the neck, also looking sideways at us. In one claw, she grasps the Nationalist flag, red, yellow and red, except that against a yellow background we can only clearly make out the two little red stripes which match the vulture’s two drops of blood. Whereas the vulture’s body has the emblem of the hammer and sickle, hers is covered in crosses, their symbolic antithesis. She is standing on a raised balcony, which is of a funereal black but is covered by a white lapidary inscription: “Portrait of the Marchioness Of The Christian Ass, tossing a coin to the Moorish soldiers, defenders of the Virgin”. (47)
To Le Charivari’s dark evocation of Bolshevik machinations, Picasso is offering the riposte, much used on the Republican side, that the Nationalist generals have built their “Christian” crusade on the military might of the Moorish soldiers of the Army of Africa. Picasso adds a little touch of blasphematory burlesque by giving his woman-vulture the noble title of Marchioness Of The Christian Ass. In spirit, this painting has an obvious afinity with Dream and Lie of Franco. The text was unusually explicit by Picasso’s standards, although it had its own logic in this context.
The Charivari/Portrait of the Marchioness parallels prove that Picasso did indeed react to the Potez 54 / Delaprée affair. Picasso began his series of etchings Dream and Lie of Franco on January 8, 1937, on exactly the same day that the infinitely less gifted Ralph Soupault published his blood-spattered vulture; and Louis Delaprée’s writings on the bombing of Madrid also appeared that day. Picasso’s painting of a few days later not only shows that that Picasso reacted to that caricature, then, but also that something in it turned his stomach enough to make him want to “copy,” invert, and refute it. Dream and Lie, too, is a classic piece of inversion, beginning with its title, and I think I now have enough elements to study it more closely.
Dream and Lie of Franco is a two-part series of etchings, accompanied by a prose poem, that represents Franco as a grotesque king in a Spanish Golden Age setting. (48) In form, it is inspired by traditional narrative prints called aleluyas. (49) In successive scenes, Franco is shown riding a variety of steeds, walking a tightrope or chipping away at a classical statue. This monstrous polyp comes off much the worse in his jousting with a bull who radiates an incomparably greater power and dignity. There are four scenes, added later on, which are close to the Guernica; but a prostrate woman, also seemingly a war victim, belongs with the earliest etchings. The Franco figure is close to the burlesque scatological Ubu, a character created by the French author Alfred Jarry, while scholars have detected a number of quite specific references to the Spanish Civil War in this series, and especially to Madrid. (50)
The voice of a dead man accuses the lying press
As always, the spirit of Goya is omnipresent. Many people felt that Goya was somehow their contemporary in his portrayal of the horrors of war–”no better better reporter on the Spanish Civil War than Goya”, as the moderate weekly Marianne put it, juxtaposing Goya’s images with recent photos. (51) In this instance, an acknowledged influence is Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters, perhaps seen as a strange premonition of nocturnal aerial bombardments on the day that Delaprée’s reports on the bombing of Madrid were published.
Given that Picasso saw, and reacted to Le Charivari that day, I think we can ask whether the term ‘charivari’ (or ‘shivaree’ in the United States), had any significance for Dream and Lie. The shivaree was a a centuries-old custom with carnivalesque elements in which villagers made ‘rough music’, such as cacophonous noises with pots and kettles, beneath the windows of a newly married couple. The objects of this persecution were somehow considered to have transgressed habitual norms and expectations.
In European terms, the quintessential subject of a shivaree was talked about on the day that Picasso began Dream and Lie: the British monarch King Edward VIII and his lover Wally Simpson, a twice-divorced American woman, whose planned marriage had precipitated his abdication. The poster that L’Humanité had used to campaign against the ‘lying press’ at the end of December had reproduced Louis Delaprée’s acid comment: “The killing of a hundred Spanish kids is less interesting than a sigh from Mrs Simpson, the royal whore.” That message had also been reproduced in L’Humanité in an uncensored facsimile on December 31, 1936. When readers first saw Delaprée’s pamphlet on January 8, 1937, they will have noticed that the phrase ‘royal whore’ had gone, but of course they will have remembered it. Also on that day, L’Humanité contemptuously reported a complaint about some press reports on Mrs Simpson, managed to work Delaprée’s name into the discussion, and suggested that “Her Highnesses and Her Vile Lownesses should get their act together”. (52)
With regard to Delaprée’s most famous sentence–itself a kind of verbal shivaree–I believe that there is both a “royal whore” and a dethroned king in Dream and Lie. The joke is that Franco is both king and whore. In this carnival of reversals and inversions, Franco has a giant phallus in one scene, but is a female whore in another, swinging his/her hips suggestively, and carrying a fan bearing an emblem of the Virgin, for good measure. There is a destroyed town is in the background, so perhaps the dead kids are also present. In the following scene, the bull charges the monstruous king and he loses his crown. Dream and Lie has its own soundtrack in the form of a poem that is a cacophony of clanking sounds: “cries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of flowers cries of timbers and of stones cries of bricks cries of furniture of beds of chairs of curtains of pots of cats and of papers…” (53) I think that this part of the poem may have echoes of a shivaree, as well as the sounds of a bombed city.
I am not suggesting that Dream and Lie is literally a shivaree, but rather that this is one of a number of carnivalesque elements feeding into it. A peculiarity of Dream and Lie is that can be “read” both sequentially and at random. If we follow its apparent order, it works well as a kind of “story,” beginning one sunny day when the grotesque king sets off on his adventures. Yet the scenes are also independent, and at one point were going to be sold as postcards at the World’s Fair. If we make nine separate cards from the scenes in Part I, we can view them cinematographically in any order, and yet the effect is always the same. We cut continually from a procession to an event and then back again. In the procession sequences, Franco is always seen moving in the same direction against a low background. Our view is from one side, as when we watch a Spanish religious procession pass through a street. In fact, I think the monster is riding on a series of floats: an elongated horse (or perhaps the festive Catalan mulassa or mule); a wounded, winged pegasus; a tarasca (not simply a pig, I think–a tarasca was a dragon-like monster in the feast of Corpus Christi, with a curved back “like a giant armadillo” and a curled tail). (54) He may also be “riding” the giant phallus, in canivalesque register.
Dream and lie is, I believe, a perfect representation of the inversions of Spanish religious festivals, and by extension the broader world of carnivalesque popular culture. Later in 1937 Franco would order the abandonment of carnival precisely because, like Picasso, he saw this fierce explosion of popular energy as the antithesis, and at least potentially the enemy, of ordered, hierarchical Christian society. (55) Dream and lie is suffused with religious symbolism, such as the banners, or religious pendants, which can also be seen in Goya’s painting of the mock ceremony of the Burial of the Sardine at the end of Carnival. (56) But on my reading, this is not because the Church lent its support to Franco (or not mainly for that reason). (57) Rather, Picasso’s distancing in time and space made a religious framework so wholly appropriate: a Spanish religious festival drew on the energy of a whole people in its enactment of the triumph over evil, visualized as a grotesque hybrid monster. (58) In Dream and Lie that monster is Franco.
Picasso first reacted artistically to the Spanish Civil War in the period from 29 December 1936 to January 8-9, 1937. This time frame closely matches the chronology of the Embassy plane / Delaprée controversy. However, this was also a festive time of year. L’Humanité had launched its poster campaign on New Year’s Eve. More to the point, 28 December was the Spanish feast of the Holy Innocents, the equivalent of April Fools’ Day, while January 6th was the traditional Spanish Epiphany. The Holy Innocents commemorated the biblical Massacre of the Innocents, implicit in Delaprée’s phrase about Mrs. Simpson, and was specifically referred to in Delaprée’s Bombs Over Madrid: “Christ said: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’ I feel that after the slaughter of the innocents in Madrid, we should say: ‘Do not forgive them for they know right well what they are doing.’ “ (59) As for Epiphany, this celebrated the Three Kings, when the simplest and most universal inversion was the king’s cardboard crown that made its way into so many households. I can find no specific satirical intent in the photo that L’Humanité published on January 7th, which showed a chimpanzee wearing a cardboard crown and munching away at a slice of king cake; but it does remind us that this was a significant date, whether parodied or inverted.
Perhaps it was the strangeness of this controversy which drew Picasso towards it. (60) Although Picasso was clearly responding to the Spanish Civil War, this was not, in my view, politically commited art as it is usually understood. (61) These events also cohere if we strip them of their ideological trappings, and abstract them from time and place: The voice of a dead man denounces the lying press from beyond the grave; a king loses his crown on account of a whore; bombs are falling on my homeland; perhaps this is a dream, happening far away or long ago; but dreams (songes) are lies (mensonges)… (62) At this point, the drive in Picasso’s undoing of the monster Franco in Dream and Lie came from fierce, blasphematory mockery, and the tragic, universal vision was in the future.
The ruins of Gernika. (Le Petit Journal, 30 April 1937.)
“The lying press, the murderous press” in Picasso’s Guernica
On April 26, 1937, the planes of the German Condor Legion destroyed the Basque town of Gernika causing numerous civilian casualties in the attack that almost immediately preceded the creation of Picasso’s masterpiece. A new and unfamiliar name–Ce Soir initially called it Quirnica (63)–would enter the world’s consciousness. Five days later, Picasso finally moved beyond dilatory sketching for his commission for the Paris World’s Fair to throw all his extraordinary energy into the Guernica. Newspaper reporting played an acknowledged role in the genesis of that masterpiece, and indeed newsprint imagery has been detected within the painting itself. But I feel that there is much more to be said about it in the light of what we have seen of Picasso’s reactions over the previous months.
News of the attack on Gernika first reached Paris in the afternoon of April 27th, and on April 28th it was major headline news in L’Humanité and elsewhere. But it was not big news in all the French press, and in some French newspapers it was not even news at all. There is no doubt that the presence of foreign journalists in the Basque country, rapidly making their way to bombed Gernika, was decisive in bringing these events to the world’s attention. George Steer’s report had an especially notable impact because it was published in both the New York Times and London’s most influential newspaper, the Times. (In British establishment circles in the 1930s, only events mentioned in the Times were considered truly newsworthy.) (64) However, Herbert Southworth’s exhaustive work has shown that Gernika was primarily a media event in the English-speaking world, in contrast to what he calls a “wall of silence” in France. Southworth has also studied another twist, namely the story rapidly cooked up by Nationalist propagandists that the Basques had destroyed and burned the town themselves before retreating. (65)
Gernika/Guernica owes its symbolic primacy to Picasso’s masterpiece. Time and again we read that “nothing like this calculated and meticulously planned massacre… had occurred in modern times.” (66) But this is not true. Madrid remained a far more universal reference during the Spanish Civil War itself. (67) Prior to Gernika there had been – notably, but not exclusively – the day and night aerial bombardments of Madrid, the attacks on the Málaga-Almería road and the Basque town of Durango, and then the renewed artillery shelling of Madrid, each time with numerous casualties. (68) And before Picasso single-handedly refocused our vision, these attacks were threading together to form a single narrative. (69) When Delaprée’s accounts of the aerial bombardments of Madrid in November 1936 were published on January 8, 1937, this was under the title The Martyrdom of Madrid. But a French pamphlet on the aerial bombardments of Durango on March 31 and April 2, 1937 was given a near-identical title: Durango, Martyred Town. (70) I think Picasso’s painting draws directly on both these sources, as well as being an infinite enlargement of them, a kind of Martyrdom of Guernica.
A dead priest lies in the bombed church of Durango. (Durango, Ville Martyre, c 30 April 1937).
The religious connotations that suffuse the Guernica have been widely acknowledged, but to the best of my knowledge the pro-Francoist aerial bombardments of Durango have been wholly ignored as a possible source. Yet these dreadful massacres in the predominantly Catholic Basque country took the lives of priests and nuns, along with many others, and religious buildings were destroyed. No single event so perfectly undermined the case that Fascist and Nazi aviation somehow represented Christian values. The French pamphlet Durango, Martyred Town is likely to have been a far more important visual source for Picasso than the familiar newspaper photos of bombed Gernika. The pamphlet was profusely illustrated with terrible images but, more significantly, it was advertised for purchase in L’Humanité on Monday May 3, 1937. (71) That means that, like the other pamphlets and weeklies we have discussed, it will have been published on the previous Friday, i.e. April 30th, the day before Picasso began the Guernica. In an earlier piece I discussed how pamphlets like Delaprée’s Martyrdom were forwarded to international figures like Virginia Woolf, and this pamphlet will most certainly have reached Picasso. It was on much better quality paper than the daily newspapers, and the images were far sharper. This means that when Picasso was first hearing and reading about Gernika, he was really seeing Durango.
One image is especially strange. A dead priest lies shockingly inert, like a huge flattened puppet, in the foreground (p. 14). One of his arms stretches out horizontally in the posture of the Crucifixion, but the other arm seems to be completely missing. In the background we can make out images of the Mother and Child, while there is a vertical pulpit to the right. Three contemporary figures, Basque motorized policemen, stand incongruously in this mad, deformed Baroque scene. It is not for me to analyze Picasso’s imagery – and the cut arm appeared previously in Picasso’s painting of December 29, 1936 – but I do think this photo needs to be studied for possible links to the Guernica, and especially the image of the fallen warrior. (72) (I mention another photo of the victims in Durango below.)
The extent to which a particular bombardment became a full-scale media event depended, to put it crudely, on how much serviceable newspaper copy it generated and how quickly this reached the international press. Durango had been attacked on March 31 and April 2, 1937, but for all its passionate pro-Republican advocacy, L’Humanité was only able to publish this news prominently on its front page on April 6th. On the same day, the mass-circulation evening newspaper Paris-Soir also reported the dead and wounded in a church in Durango, while failing to make clear who was responsible. (73) On the other hand, the intensive shelling of Madrid in April 1937, a city which international figures as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a British Duchess, and Hollywood film star Errol Flynn all passed through, was always bound to make the headlines. (74) The result was that the shelling became a major Francoist propaganda setback, from which few obvious military advantages accrued.
We get a small reality check by looking at the French newspaper Le Matin for April 28, 1937, when the latest bombardment of Madrid was given a prominent place among the main headlines, while the news of Gernika was only secondary.
In a previous piece, I studied the raised arm holding a hammer and sickle that Picasso sketched on a copy of the mass circulation evening newspaper Paris-Soir on April 19, 1937. In impishly placing the hammer and sickle at the top of Paris-Soir’s name, Picasso was mimicking L’Humanité, where it formed part of the logo. That raised arm and clenched fist of defiance made their way directly into pre-Guernica sketches so we are talking about Picasso’s reactions on the eve of its creation. I believe that they reflected Picasso’s anger at what was missing from the front page of Paris-Soir that day, and had been discretely ‘hidden’ away on page 3, namely, the news of the bombardment of Madrid. The defaced front page had reported Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos’s bland wish to stay friends with all parties, i.e. including Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. So Picasso was also reproaching another type of deceit, the official Franco-British policy of Non-Intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The bombs falling in Spain gave the lie to Non-Intervention.
Given these precedents, I’d like to take a close look at the reactions of the Paris press, over the three days before Picasso started his painting. Many of the newspapers can now be consulted online, so the reader can follow the links provided at each date. (75) Of course Picasso will not have read all these newspapers, but I am convinced that they provide us with a good overall picture of the atmosphere in Paris – how the news story was panning out, what was being said and left unsaid. (76)
I’ll begin with two respected daily newspapers, the moderate Le Temps, and the more conservative Le Figaro. Neither newspaper had reports on Gernika on April 28–Le Temps had a general account of the Basque campaign that day–although the news had begun to reach Paris the evening before. In itself, there was nothing terribly sinister about this silence. In general, the more serious newspapers did not publish news items without copy from their own correspondents, or reports from agencies like Havas, neither of which they had received. And after all, Gernika was not Guernica yet. On April 29 and April 30 Le Temps attached comparable importance to the bombardment, the Nationalist denial and the reaction in London. On April 19 Le Figaro had coverage along similar lines, a ‘balanced’ three-way treatment, almost symmetrically divided into three parts: the Basque government’s accusations, the Nationalist counter-accusations and the émotion in London. On April 30 Le Figaro did include a photo of the ruins of Gernika, and specifically attributed the damage to an aerial bombardment.
How would the likes of Picasso have reacted to this seemingly anodyne type of coverage? Rather than its lack of depth (not in itself so unusual), I think two other aspects were outrageous. Firstly, thanks to the Times’ decisive impact, the reaction in Britain had become the story. On 29-30 April the French press, across the political spectrum, focused on the turmoil in Britain. Potentially at stake, of course, was the joint policy of Non-Intervention, the rock on which French-British cooperation was built. The bombs falling on the Basque country were somehow minor collateral damage in a bigger game. But we can be absolutely sure that Picasso did not see things in these terms. If the big news in the mainstream French press was that the British were getting worked up, then surely this represented a huge challenge for a Spanish artist living on French soil. If the artist had the power to cut through all the falsehoods and make us look straight at the world, what better opportunity would he get?
Secondly, news which for once was based on an irreproachable source like the Times was being placed on exactly the same footing as the Nationalist counter-accusations. Nearly all historians have stressed how heavy-handed and counterproductive these Nationalist claims were, and over time this was no doubt true. The Nationalist propagandists were to prove remarkably unwilling to let things go, and their claims had a sinuous and persistent after-life. (77) Nevertheless, for a very short time they did muddy the waters. For example, on 29 April the Catholic newspaper La Croix called the bombing ‘frightful and useless’, but on 30 April it practically retracted: “Who is responsible for the bombing of Guernica?” (78) The point about this backtracking is that it took place just before Picasso launched himself into the Guernica. At this point the lie seemed to be gaining ground.
While there was a conservative bias in the French press, mass circulation newspapers never liked to miss out on big news stories, and mainly thanks to the Times this had certainly become one. Le Petit Parisien made it a huge front page story on 28 April, presumably in its later editions as it used material from that day’s Times. On 29 April it covered the debate on Gernika in the British Parliament. On 30 April a girl’s eyewitness account made the front page. It was also important news in Le Petit Journal on 28 April, as well as on the 29 April (see also here); but once again with a considerable emphasis on the indignation in London. The photo that Le Petit Journal published on its front page on 30 April has an interesting spatial disposition. As in the Guernica, the sky is seen through a window on the top right, there is intense light in the center of the photo, while the buildings on the left are receding. (There were more images of desolation on page 3.) Paris-Soir benefited from its agreement with the Daily Express to republish Noel Monks’ eyewitness report. Typically, Paris-Soir tried to have it both ways, with a main headline saying that Gernika had been destroyed by planes, and a secondary one reporting the Nationalist allegations. (79)
Among reactionary newspapers, L’Écho de Paris retracted a detail in its previous day’s report and blamed the Basques for the destruction on 29 April. It provided the full Nationalist version on 30 April, complete with a photo of the damage caused by the ‘red militia’. On the far right, L’Action Française didn’t bother to cover the attack at all. It included a small announcement on 30 April that Gernika had been taken.
L’Humanité, Picasso’s regular newspaper, attached great importance to the bombing from 28 April onwards. Its assertion that this was “the most horrible bombardment” since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War was typical of its combative style. That day L’Humanité also printed a photo to accompany its first report of the news from Gernika. This photo could not possibly have reached the newspaper so quickly from Gernika. Indeed L’Humanité specifically acknowledged this fact in its caption, which referred to “some women – no doubt mothers – killed during a bombardment”. In other words, its point was a universal one: fascism kills.
This photo is no minor detail in our narrative of the Guernica because it has been argued that this photo of the dead woman facing upwards was ‘the decisive shock’ for Picasso, and that she was the model for a prostrate woman in an early version of the Guernica. (80) Similar photos had been published periodically since the bombardments of Madrid in November 1936, but not even L’Humanité served them up on a daily or weekly basis. On 10 February 1937, L’Humanité published an image of bomb victims, who had been escaping from Málaga, Picasso’s birthplace. On 30 April 1937 the pamphlet Durango, Ville Martyre published a photo of the dead victims of the bombing of a church in the Basque town of Durango (p.18), which had previously been published in L’Humanité on 6 April. If we compare that image with the one that the same newspaper reproduced on 28 April, we can see that the woman in the foreground is not only very similar, but is shown in the same posture, and from an identical angle. The woman in the earlier photo looks younger, but then so does the woman in Picasso’s preliminary sketch.
The prostrate woman in Picasso’s sketch may have been one or the other of these victims, or perhaps both. I don’t think it matters that neither actually came from Gernika itself because we are still talking about the maelstrom of emotion in the wake of its destruction. There is a cumulative effect in this recurring pattern of aerial bombardments: ever more dead, ever more lies. Anger and mockery had previously surfaced in Picasso’s work, but nothing compared to the Guernica’s extraordinary release of energy, in which so many disparate elements were fused together. Surely, now, the future bombardment of Barcelona, where Picasso’s mother and sister lived, was also in the air. (It was to happen in March 1938.)
The widespread assumption that George Steer’s report, which was republished in L’Humanité on 29 April, had a decisive impact on Picasso is altogether plausible. (81) Apart from Steer and Delaprée, few other ‘bourgeois’ journalists can have had their reports published in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité at this period. Both journalists described the effects of the aerial bombardments of civilians, albeit in contrasting styles as Steer was more measured and less emotional than Delaprée. I think their writings had such an impact precisely because of their provenance. L’Humanité’s combative and iconoclastic style may have been good fun for readers like Picasso, but the critical writing of independent journalists from newspapers like the Times or Paris-Soir must have carried more authority.
I believe the spirit of Picasso’s masterpiece is close to Louis Delaprée’s descriptions of the nightmarish nocturnal bombardments of Madrid in November 1936. The theme of the Mother and Child Pietà is so universal that it would be reckless to ascribe it to a single influence. Nevertheless, I do think Picasso scholars should study the passage in Louis Delaprée’s night scene in Bombs Over Madrid where a flashlight illuminates a dead child in the arms of an injured woman who has had her breast gashed. (That last detail is also present in Guernica-related sketches.) The text of Bombs Over Madrid was published in The Martyrdom of Madrid on 8 January, the same day that Picasso began Dream and Lie, and it was also republished in L’Humanité on the following day. Its religious/blasphematory conclusion (also very much in the spirit of the Guernica) was placed at the top left of the page as an epigraph: “Christ said: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do’. I feel that after the slaughter of the innocents in Madrid, we should say: ‘Do not forgive them for they know right well what they are doing.’”
The aerial bombardments of Madrid, Durango and Gernika had all been enveloped in lies and silences. But the most brazen and insistent deception was the Nationalist claim from late April 1937 onwards that the Basques had destroyed Gernika themselves. That lie was beginning to gain in force precisely when Picasso began the Guernica and, according to at least one interpretation, provided its central focus. Thus, the head in the window has been interpreted as an allegory of truth, in accordance with a Bronzino painting from which the accompanying arm holding a light was also taken. The counter-argument runs that if Truth were the subject, following the Bronzino allegory, then surely Calumny and Deceit should also be present. (82) But perhaps they are: the lamp held by the arm is shining onto scratchy newsprint. And if truth is represented by a classical image, the newsprint it shines onto is strictly contemporary. There is a similar opposition in Dream and Lie of Franco, when the revolting little monster Franco chips away at a majestic, noble, classical bust. The French title Songe et Mensonge de Franco also reflects this contrast. Songe was the classical word (in everyday useage ‘dream’ would be rêve), while mensonge was the altogether contemporary word that Picasso read on a daily basis in L’Humanité’s ongoing campaign against the “lying press”.
My work has been based on the premise – scarcely sacrilegious – that the Guernica was an artifact of its times, rooted in the social history of the 1930s. Picasso’s art “created reality on its own terms”(83): instead of representing one event literally, the Guernica plays on the nightmare of recurring aerial bombardments, in which Gernika is the culmination of a process that has already affected Madrid and Durango. When Picasso created both Dream and Lie of Franco and the Guernica, it was each time slightly after the event, and each time in a context in which the main story was being obscured or overwhelmed by deception. On 8 January 1937, Picasso responded to the bombardments of Madrid, but only on the delayed publication of Delaprée’s writing, and amidst press controversy. Picasso began his Guernica on 1 May, fairly soon after the destruction of Gernika, but when Nationalist claims were gaining ground. Picasso had an astonishing artistic armory to combat lies and distortions. It was on this slippery terrain that he ridiculed the monster Franco in January 1937; while in the Guernica he shone a fierce light onto the tattered newsprint of the “lying press, the murderous press”.
Martin Minchom’s publications include Spanish editions of Geoffrey Cox, La defensa de Madrid (2005), and Louis Delaprée, Morir en Madrid (2009).
1 I am especially grateful to Mme Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée for all her help, and I would also like to thank Prof. Sebastiaan Faber. Part of this material was presented at the “Jornadas sobre las Brigadas Internacionales: de lo local a lo global”, International Institute, Madrid, 20-21 October 2011 (with thanks to Justin Byrne and Seve Montero).
2 Prior to my Volunteer pieces (see here and here), I suggested a link between Picasso and Delaprée in my edition of Louis Delaprée, Morir en Madrid, Madrid, Editorial Raíces, 2009, pp. 88-96. John Richardson, “How Political was Picasso?“, New York Review of Books, 25 November 2010, pp. 27-30, uncovered a painting of 29 December 1936 that relates to the Delaprée affair. The art historian Gijs van Hensbergen, Sir John Richardson’s collaborator, kindly sent me a pre-publication copy of this painting.
3 For these killings see Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, W.W. Norton, 2012, read by me in the Spanish edition (2011).
4 Paracuellos massacre“, Wikipedia[last accessed 15 Feb. 2012].
5 César Vidal, Paracuellos-Katyn: un ensayo sobre el genocidio de la izquierda, Barcelona, Planeta, 2007, pp. 207-213. It’s depressing that Vidal can be so categorical (p. 213) about documentation that he has neither seen nor apparently attempted to locate.
6 I looked in the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères et Européennes, Paris (MAEE/P), before finding the key file in the Archives diplomatiques de Nantes: Madrid – Ambassade – Guerre Civile (AD/N – MAGC) 570.
7 Le Charivari was dated 9 January 1937, but like most weeklies it came out a day earlier.
8 The classic account is Herbert R. Southworth, La destruction de Guernica: Journalisme, diplomatie, propagande et histoire, Paris, Ruedo Ibérico, 1975. See David Wingeate Pike, France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain, Eastbourne, Sussex Academic Press, 2011, pp. 280-305, for a useful summary of the French press and its political sympathies.
9 Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Presse qui ment, presse qui tue!… Paris, Éd populaire de propagande, n.d. (1936).
10 Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon, London, Bloomsbury, 2004 (2005 edn.), p. 33.
11 Eric Michaud, “Matisse and Picasso: The Redemption and The Fall”, nonsite.org, January 25, 2011 [last accessed 15 February, 2012]. See here here for the epigraph at the head of this piece: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
12 Ian Gibson, Paracuellos: cómo fue [1983], Madrid, Temas de hoy, 2005, p. 150-151. (These files were only declassified well after Gibson had published his book.)
13 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 278, 11 December 1936: testimony of Charles Boyer.
14 Ian Gibson, op. cit., p. 150.
15 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 271, 9 December 1936.
16 Pierre Marqués, La Croix-Rouge pendant la Guerre d’Espagne, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2000, p. 119, Henny, Report to the Red Cross, Geneva, 2 January 1937.
17 AD/N – MAGC, 570, nº 25, 10 January 1937, Déclarations de M. Château: “Henny passait sans doute pour être un témoin gênant.”
18 Miguel Pérez Ferrero, Drapeau de France: La vie des refugiés dans les legations de Madrid, Paris, Sorlot, 1938, pp. 93-94.
19 Mme Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée is the author of a very lively and readable reconstruction of her late father’s final days (forthcoming). Despite Château’s comments, Delaprée does seem to have felt himself threatened.
20 Sefton Delmer, Trail Sinister, Londres, Secker & Warburg, 1961, pp. 322-326.
21 Felipe Ezquerro Ezquerro, “El derribo del Potez de la Embajada Francesa sobre Pastrana. ¿Error o intención?”, Revista Española de Historia Militar, nº 9, marzo 2001, pp. 120-121.
22 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 269-272, 9 December 1936.
23 Andrés García Lacalle, Mitos y verdades: la aviación de caza en la Guerra Española, Mexico, Oasis, 1973, pp. 218-220.
24 This point emerges in the AD/N documentation, while c.f. the generally unreliable Keith Scott Watson, Single to Spain, London, Arthur Barker, 1937, p. 234.
25 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 290-291, 12 December 1936: “Il y aura tout au moins un de ceux qui partent qui n’arrivera pas.”
26 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Folder 19 January 1937.
27 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 265, 8 December 1936, time: 21.00.
28 AD/N – MAGC, 570, 283, 11 December 1936; and 308, 16 December 1936.
29 AD/N – MAGC, 570, 19 January 1937: Telegram on identifying planes. According to nº 291, 13 December 1936, the pilot and radio operator saw similar planes on the ground near Guadalajara.
30 Juan Manuel Riesgo had not seen my 2010 Alba piece (at note 13), when he confirmed this point in a talk in Madrid in early 2011.
31 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 25, 10 January 1937: Déclarations de M. Château.
32 Archives nationales, Paris 5AR, 271: Madrid – Havas – Guerre Civile. Dossiers de Reporters. Mr Château. Letter from Château to Havas, 18 April 1937. Telegram, Bordeaux, Havas, 19 avril 1937.
33 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Diplomatie 50-51, 16 January 1937: he found no new “argument péremptoire contre les Autorités gouvernementales. / Tout au plus pourrait-on insister sur le fait (signalé par mon télégramme nº 290-291) que d’après le pilote Boyer et le radiotélégraphiste, le type et les bandes rouges de l’appareil agresseur étaient semblables à ceux des avions gouvernementaux”.
34 AD/N – MAGC, 570, 19 March 1937.
35 See for example, the article of Ricardo Miralles in Ángel Viñas (dir.), Al Servicio de la República, Diplomáticos y guerra civil, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2010, at pp. 130-133.
36 For similar contrasts in British diplomacy, Ángel Viñas, La conspiración del general Franco, Barcelona, Crítica, 2011, pp. 129-246. There are many examples of an anti-Republican bias: AD/N – MAGC, 570, 1232, 14 December 1936, for reflections on the need to rethink the whole perspective on Republican Spain in the light of this case. Telegram of 15 December 1936 sent by a general in Valladolid to the consul in San Sebastián saying “The person you’re looking for is called Red”, (“Autor que le interesa se llama Rojo”), and taken completely seriously despite its Francoist provenance.
37 Anne-Aurore Inquimbert, Un officier français dans la guerre d’Espagne. Carrière et écrits d’Henri Morel (1919-1944), Presses Universitaires de Rennes / Service Historique de la Défense, Rennes, 2009, for example, pp. 162, 175.
38 A. R. Chisholm, “Europe and Ourselves—And a Saxophone”, The Australian Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (June 1937), p. 70.
39 For this contrast, “Metralla en las alas de Francia, La Voz, 9 December 1936 compared to “Ha muerto Louis Delaprée”, La Voz, 11 December 1936.
40 Carlos Serrano, L’enjeu espagnol: PCF et guerre d’Espagne, París, Messidor / Éditions sociales, 1987, pp. 91-92 for an undefined propaganda initiative. I have consulted the corresponding papers in the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Fondo Araquistáin, Leg 23 A 108, but they provide few details. This was a time of intense propaganda activity, c.f. MAEE/P, Direction des Affaires Politiques et commerciales, Espagne 142 (p. 200), Direction Génerale de la Sûreté Nationale to MAE, Paris, 9 January 1937, mentioning the imminent publication of L’Espagne Libre, a weekly published by the Generalitat’s press office in Paris, and with some Komintern money from Willi Münzenberg. For the activites of Agence Espagne, see Hugo García, Mentiras necesarias, La batalla por la opinión británica durante la Guerra Civil, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2008, pp. 89-92.
41 Robert Brasillach, “Allo Malraux”, Je suis partout, 2 January 1937; and then much more explicitly, “Quand demandera-t-on l’extradition d’André Malraux?”, Je suis partout, 16 January 1937 (now online: here). For Brasillach, Niall Binns, La Llamada de España: Escritores Extranjeros en la Guerra Civil, Madrid, Montesinos, 2004, pp. 145-148, and Martin Hurcombe, France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War next Door, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 81-109.
42 Arturo Barea, La forja de un rebelde, Barcelona, Debate, 2003 edn., p. 735, claimed that Delaprée was going to have it out with the people at the Quai d’Orsay when he returned to France; but I think he was misremembering this posthumous controversy. On the evidence of the files, Delaprée had no problems with the diplomatic service.
43 Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Presse qui ment, presse qui tue!… op. cit.
44 Online here (halfway down the page).
45 Eugen Weber, L’Action Française, Stanford University Press, 1962, p. 391. See here for another anti-semitic caricature of Blum. (When accessed on 20 February 2012, this website gave inflated circulation figures for the right-wing press.)
46 Le Charivari, 8-9 January 1937: my own copy.
47 Figure of a Woman Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Paris, 19 January, 1937.
48 From Picasso’s notes it appears that the title Songe et Mensonge de Franco was not meant to be Sueño y Mentira de Franco in Spanish. At one point, he jotted down wordplay, once again contrasting opposites: ‘dicha desdicha/de Franco’ (well-being and misfortune): Vinyetes al front, Barcelona, Museu Picasso, 2011, p. 161 (pp. 157-166, online here). According to Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 17-18, 20-21, a drawing of 9 January 1937, “Bather under a black sun” was also linked to Spain. The common thread may be Gérard de Nerval’s poem El Desdichado (“The Ill-starred One”), which referred to “the black sun of melancholy”. In Dream and Lie, the bright sun darkens.
49 See the essays and illustrations in Vinyetes, op cit.
50 For scene by scene references, Patricia Failing, “Picasso’s ‘Cries of Children…Cries of Stones.’” Art News 126, 7 (Sept 1977): 55-64; and Vinyetes, pp. 167-177 (text in English).
51 “Pas de meilleur reporter sur la guerre civile en Espagne que Francesco (sic) Goya”, Marianne, 19 august 1936.
52 “Aux trusts de presse en attendant mieux”, L’Humanité, 8 January 1937, discussing Mrs Simpson’s complaints about some press reports: “Que ces Altesses et ces Bassesses se débrouillent entre elles!”
53 Translation from Vinyetes, op. cit., p. 166.
54 David D. Gilmore, “Tarasca: Ritual Monster of Spain“, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 152 (3), September 2008, p. 367. For images from an earlier period, Javier Portús Pérez, La Antigua Procesión de Corpus Christi en Madrid, Madrid, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 1993. The pig was not a common animal in Picasso’s bestiary, and this hybrid could have been both pig and tarasca.
55 David D. Gilmore, Carnival and Culture, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998, p. 12.
56 Picasso studied at the San Fernando academy in Madrid, which owned this painting, and knew the area because he had attended the verbena at San Antonio de la Florida in 1898: John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906, London, Pimilico, [1991], 209, p. 97. As well as its pendant, the sinister, smiling Sun is similar to the – Falangist? – one which shines at Franco in the opening scene of Dream and Lie.
57 The source for Franco walking the tightrope is Goya’s May the Rope break, which is remarkable for its portrayal of the latent power of the watching crowd.
58 The bull has been associated with the Spanish people in Dream and Lie, and it is shown twice, gaining in vitality after it has defeated the monster. In the second depiction, the bull is a noble animal radiating power. c.f. David D. Gilmore, “Tarasca“ op. cit. p. 366, for “rituals in which people are attacked by an external force representing evil, usually embodied in the form of a menacing animal or a monster. The people then defeat the monster through common action, killing the beast and returning to normalcy, not in the same form as before, but with a renewed “vitality” that they derive from appropriating and “consuming” the power of the thing they have killed.” Festive rivalry was the ultimate expression of group honor: Timothy J. Mitchell, Violence and Piety in Spanish Folklore, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, pp. 38-56.
59 L’Humanité used it as an epigraph at the top of the page on 9 January 1937.
60 For Picasso’s politics, John Richardson, “How political” op. cit. An example of Picasso’s hitherto apolitical character was the way, 30 years earlier, he sat out Catalonia’s agitated Tragic Week, John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume II, 1907-1917, London, Pimilico, [1996], 2009, p. 136.
61 The commission for the World’s Fair is not proof that Picasso wanted to do something ‘political’, given how dilatory he was prior to the Guernica. The political references in Failing, op. cit. 55-64, and Vinyetes, pp. 167-177 are unmistakeable and extremely well documented (and, interestingly, many of them refer to Madrid). But I feel that Picasso’s fiercely ironic and transforming mockery belongs to a very different tradition from most ‘political’ art.
62 The Golden Age dramatist Calderón de la Barca’s Life’s a Dream has been considered a possible influence. The advert for Dream and Lie included a fascinating quotation from Francisco de Quevedo, which is a strange reminder of how the “voice of a dead man” was made to speak in L’Humanité’s press campaign: “I govern men going rotten, neither living nor dead, who bring a finely adorned ghost..” (“Yo administro unos hombres a medio podrir, entre vivos y muertos, que traen bien aliñada fantasma…”, Vinyetes, p. 161.
63 “800 victimes a Quirnica, Ancienne capitale basque”, Ce Soir, 28 de abril 1937.
64 In 1936, the dying King George V was injected with morphine so that the news would be announced in the Times and not in the “less appropriate” evening newspapers.
65 Herbert R. Southworth, op. cit., studies how the French Havas agency failed to supply good copy rapidly, despite having a reporter in the Basque country. His book is dedicated, in part, to those who broke this “wall of silence”.
66 Russell Martin, Picasso’s War, Dutton, 2002, p. 51.
67 Simone Téry recalled the “famous” bombings of Madrid when she was looking for a point of reference for bombardments of Barcelona by Italian aviation in March 1938. Simone Téry, Front de la liberté: Espagne 1937-1938, Paris, Éditions sociales internationales, 1938, p. 315.
68 For figures, Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and Joan Villarroya, España en llamas, La guerra civil desde el aire, Madrid, Temas de Hoy, 2003. Compare: Robert Stradling, Your Children will be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2008.
69 A pamphlet was published, or at least edited, just two days after the bombing of Gernika: Pierre Gérôme, La Presse et Franco, Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes, Paris, 28 avril, 1937. As Gernika was such recent news, it is interesting that they managed to work in a footnote at all (at p. 34n). The main narrative of ‘events’ consisted of sections on Badajoz, Madrid, Málaga and Durango (pp. 28-34), and only the first of these had no place in the emerging series of aerial bombardments. L’Humanité connected Gernika and Durango on innumerable occasions: for example, 7, 9, 10, 15 and 31 May and 11 June 1937. Paradoxically, it was Picasso’s masterpiece, drawing on both, that eventually broke this link.
70 Durango, Ville Martyre: Ce que furent les bombardements de la ville de Durango par les avions allemands, Comité Franco-Espagnol, Paris, n.d. (before 3 May 1937). Despite its title, Italian aviation was involved. ‘Le Martyre de Guernica’ was subsequently evoked, c.f. Southworth, op. cit. pp 21, 40.
71 Durango only made page 1 of L’Humanité on 6 April 1937 so preparation certainly began later than that. It needed some time to be written and printed (although this was usually done quickly), which takes us into late April. The advertisement in L’Humanité on 3 May gives us a likely cut-off date of 30 April 1937. (1 May was a celebration and 2 May was a Sunday.)
72 This strange and disturbing image was also later reproduced in G.L. Steer, The Tree of Gernika: A Field Study of Modern War, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1938, pp. 96-97.
73 “Des bombes d’avion tombent sur l’église de Durango (Biscaye)”, Paris-Soir, 7 April 1937 (a day earlier).
74 “Madrid’s 18 Days Under Shell Fire / Still a Million People in the Capital / Senseless Bombardment of Frequented Streets”, The Manchester Guardian, 30 April 1937; “Comment j’ai failli être tué dans Madrid bombardée”, par le célèbre acteur de cinema Erroll Flynn”, Paris-Soir, 8 April 1937.
75 Non-digitized newspapers (as of 15 February 2012) include Paris-Soir and Ce soir, consulted on microfilm at the National Library in Paris.
76 Picasso read several newspapers at this period, c.f. Patricia Failing, op. cit. pp.55-64.
77 This point is developed in great depth in Southworth, op. cit.
78 In this case, La Croix reported the surreal accusation that red planes might be attacking their own town.
79 “La ville sainte des basques: Guernica détruite de fond en comble par les avions.” Lesser heading: “Cependant les nationalists affirment que la ville a été incendiée par les Basques avant d’être evacuée”, Paris-Soir, 29 April 1937 (in fact a day earlier).
80 Herschel B. Chipp, El Guernica de Picasso, Historia, transformaciones, significado, Barcelona, Polígrafa, 1991, p. 83, for both photo and image; Rachel Wischnitzer, “Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. A Matter of Metaphor”, Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 6 (12) 1985, p. 165.
81 Carlos García Santa Cecilia, ed., Corresponsales en la Guerra de España, Madrid, Instituto Cervantes / Fundación Pablo Iglesias, 2006, facsimile online here, at pp. 127-128; Paul Preston, We Saw Spain Die, London, Constable, 2008, pp. 263-290.
82 Rachel Wischnitzer, op. cit., pp. 163-165, citing R. Hohl, Die Wahrheit über Guernica, Pantheon, 36 (January 1978), pp. 41-58.
83 Gertje R. Utley, op. cit., p. 172.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
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The truth about Guernica: Picasso and the lying press
March 9, 2012
By Martin Minchom-->
Picasso, Figure of a Woman Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, 19 January, 1937.
“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth” —Pablo Picasso
What inspired Picasso to paint his Guernica? It was not just the bombing of the Basque town on April 26, 1937. In fact, to properly understand the circumstances that gave rise to the creation of Picasso’s contribution to the 1937 World Fair, it is necessary to consider the full historical background, beginning with a series of events that influenced Picasso’s earliest artistic reactions to the Spanish Civil War in late 1936 and early 1937. (1) The great cultural tradition that links Picasso with artists like Goya has always been, and rightly so, the High Road towards the masterpiece. But, as we will see, exploring the Low Road of newspapers, pamphlets and street posters, government reports and conspiracy theories–teasing out information from exactly contemporaneous sources–can also provide surprisingly rich pickings. In what follows I will attempt to reconstruct a street view of Picasso the newspaper reader—the worried and indignant Spaniard in France—over an extended period between December 1936 and April 1937.
I will base my discussion on a close reading of French newspapers and weeklies, looking at the ways in which press influence can be traced in Picasso’s print Dream and Lie of Franco (an eighteen-scene narrative in etching and aquatint, sold as prints to raise funds for the Republic) and the Guernica itself. But let me begin with a strange drama, finely poised between tragedy and farce, that strongly affected French reactions to the Spanish Civil War. On December 8, 1936 the French embassy plane in Spain, a converted Potez 54 bomber plane, was intercepted and brought down by unknown attackers about 60 miles northeast of Madrid. Just one person died in that attack: the French journalist Louis Delaprée, who was returning to France to have it out with his newspaper editors, after they had censored and suppressed his reports denouncing the pro-Francoist aerial bombardments of Madrid. In previous pieces for the Volunteer (see here and here) I studied this case essentially from the left-wing perspective of Picasso’s circle of friends and the campaign spearheaded by the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité, arguing that this intriguing “Spanish” news of aerial bombardments, censorship and lies caught the attention of Pablo Picasso, who had not previously manifested any interest in the war as an artistic subject. (2)
But any confrontation has two sides. In this companion piece, I will retrace my steps through late 1936 and early 1937 to view the picture from a different angle, taking into account the conservative and right-wing reactions of those who were unsympathetic to the Spanish Republic. They were concerned with a quite different issue, namely the murky circumstances surrounding the downing of the embassy plane. There were persistent rumors that this was really a Soviet-style operation to cover up the previous month’s Republican killings near Madrid. (3) Despite the many uncertainties surrounding this case, there have been few “ifs” and “buts” in the literature on it, created mainly beyond the confines of historical scholarship. In cyberspace, in fact, the conjectures of the 1930s have by now hardened into dark certainties. If one looks up Paracuellos massacre (now the generic term for the Republican killings) in Wikipedia, for instance, an account of the attack on the embassy plane emerges as a key episode. Appearing under the heading “Henny’s attempted murder”, it is presented as though the whole affair were a closed case. (Dr. Henny was one of the plane’s passengers, as I discuss below.) (4) In this version of events, the clinching argument would be that the French government investigated the affair and blamed the Republicans, yet somehow failed to publish their findings. (5)
Le Charivari, 8-9 January 1937. (Martin Minchom)
As always, however, reality is more complicated. Last year, I located the official French files on this attack. Contrary to the more sinister hypotheses, these files had actually been sitting quietly undisturbed in the diplomatic archives in Nantes, simply waiting to be consulted. (6) To be sure, some of this material had initially been classified secret, exactly as we would expect; but after several decades it was declassified under equally standard procedures. In other words, there was no official French cover-up. What to the files show? While they suggest that French diplomacy harbored genuine suspicions about Republican involvement in the attack, they signally–and from the French point of view, frustratingly–failed to uncover much hard evidence. As a diplomatic incident, the case lays bare the fault lines in the fractious relationship between France and the Spanish Republic, while it is also instructive about internal tensions within France over the Spanish Civil War. French diplomacy and left-wing forces were uneasy bedfellows, although both were nominally loyal to the Popular Front-led government. Indeed, far from withholding papers to protect the Spanish government, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs may even have gone public to counteract French Communist agitation.
Along with its Spanish background, the Delaprée case had other features to intrigue Picasso. Quite recently, I located a full-page cartoon about the attack that was used as the cover illustration for Le Charivari, an extreme right-wing satirical weekly, for its issue of January 8, 1937. (7) A few days later Picasso produced a painting, linked to his own Dream and Lie of Franco, that bears several unmistakable similarities to this particular right-wing caricature. Artistically, the Charivari sketch was no doubt crude and unworthy of Picasso’s attention–but it did represent the same forces with which the artist engaged so memorably in the Guernica.
A series of artistic reactions by Picasso show that he was repeatedly affected by aerial bombardments of civilian targets, and appalled at the silence of the mainly conservative French press on this issue. (8) Picasso was a regular reader of L’Humanité, which launched a vigorous campaign against “the lying press, the murderous press” in 1936 and 1937. (9) While L’Humanité certainly practised its own manipulations, I believe that this campaign shaped the context in which Picasso interpreted the distorted, incomplete and often distressing news from Spain. Picasso explicitly named the ‘lie’ in his title for Dream and Lie of Franco, and drew a clenched fist on a copy of Paris-Soir that ignored the bombing of Madrid. I will argue here that there are similar echoes in the Guernica itself.
One anecdote, possibly apocryphal, has it that when news of the bombing of Gernika reached Paris in April 1937 the subject was proposed to Picasso, who replied that he didn’t even know what a bombed town looked like. (10) If this response was true, it was certainly disingenuous. Nevertheless, Picasso does seem to have felt that an artist had the special power to counter deceit, by using the inversions and apparent deceptions of artistic creation to cut through all the lies propagated in the public sphere. In 1935, Picasso spoke of a dictatorship of painters, or of a painter, “to suppress all those who tricked us, to suppress the cheaters, to suppress the objects of trickery, to suppress customs, to suppress charms, to suppress history, to suppress a heap of still more things.” (11). Artistic truth, he seems to suggest, will be terrible rather than reassuring, opening our eyes but stripping away our illusions.
The wreckage of the French Embassy plane. (L. Delaprée, Morir en Madrid, 2009 / Lincoln-Delaprée collection.)
The Downing of the Potez 54 and its Strange Aftermath
I am especially interested in clarifying French reactions to the Potez 54 / Delaprée affair between 29 December 1936 and mid-January 1937, when Picasso was involved. But first I’ll look at the attack itself. Thirty years ago, the leading hispanist Ian Gibson suggested that if the official French files on this case were ever found, they might shed some interesting light. (12) Now that I have located them, however, I can only say that they raise as many questions as they answer.
During the Spanish Civil War, the French embassy in Madrid used a converted Potez 54 bomber plane to carry official correspondence, and sometimes passengers, between Spain and France. That plane was due to leave Barajas airport in Madrid on December 6, 1936. But it was delayed twice due to technical problems, and finally left for Toulouse, France, at 12.20 on December 8th. In addition to its captain and radio operator, it carried two French journalists, Louis Delaprée of the daily newspaper Paris-Soir and André Château of the Havas news agency. The French embassy gave three non-French passengers permission to travel, namely two Spanish girls and Dr. Henny, the Swiss envoy of the International Red Cross. The plane had not been in the air for long when, near Alcalá de Henares, it was approached by a monoplane. According to the captain of the embassy plane, Charles Boyer, the co-pilot had plenty of time to look it over. Some time later, when the Potez 54 had reached the Guadalajara region, it was attacked by a second aircraft, a biplane, at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. (13) Thanks to its pilot’s cool head it managed to make a bumpy crash landing in a field near the village of Pastrana. Dr. Henny was taken quickly to the Palace Hotel in Madrid, and after a delay, the other passengers were also taken to Madrid. One of them, the journalist Louis Delaprée died at 2:00 in the morning on December 11th.
Press reporting on the incident was initially confused. Contradictory information was spread, for example, with regard to the number of attacking planes. It was also often asserted incorrectly that an Air France plane had been brought down. Early on, it was generally assumed that pro-Francoist planes were responsible for the attack, and right-wing sources asked why the French embassy had been using a converted bomber plane that could so easily be confused with a military aircraft.
Louis Delaprée: the photo that was used on street posters on 31 December 1936. (Bibliothèque nationale de France.)
Suspicions quickly surfaced, however, that the attack had been specifically aimed at Dr. Henny because he had knowledge, and possibly documents, about the Paracuellos killings–the mass execution by Republicans of pro-Franco prisoners, which had taken place in November and early December–that he was taking to France and then on to Geneva. The arrival of this news in Geneva would have immediately preceded the Spanish State minister’s address to the League of Nations. (14) As early as December 9th, the day after the attack, Emmanuel Neuville, the French consul in Madrid, voiced his suspicions that the aim of the plane attack had been to stop Henny reporting the atrocities. (15) Dr. Henny reported back to the Red Cross in Geneva that he also thought he might have been the target. (16) An otherwise skeptical passenger, the injured journalist André Château, acknowledged that if the attack had been aimed at anyone, this would have been Henny. Neither Delaprée nor himself had any information that would have marked them out, he said, whereas Henny was potentially an “awkward witness”. (17)
All the same, Dr. Henny was not the only possible object of the attack, and Delaprée’s name also came up later, in other speculations, although less frequently. For example, it was claimed in 1938 that Louis Delaprée was carrying some information so vital that the “reds” wanted to intercept it at any cost. (18) Delaprée himself seems to have believed his life was threatened, and his papers may have been tampered with after the attack. (19)
There are many colorful details to this case, far more than I can do justice to here. At the height of the Cold War, in 1961 the Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer wrote a widely cited account, strewn with inaccuracies, that blamed Orlov’s Soviet agents. (20) In 1987, half a century after the event, a local resident Dr. Cortijo spoke of handing over two bags found near the wreckage to trustworthy French embassy officials. (21) In fact the diplomatic bag (which was indeed made up of two separate bags) does show up in the official inventory. (22) But according to legend, these bags were packed with compromising photos and documents on Paracuellos, while there is no such indication in the consular documentation. Finally, long after the event two Soviet pilots were described as have admitted to shooting down the aircraft, but without realizing that it was an embassy plane. (23)
Emmanuel Neuville, the French consul in Madrid, was in charge of investigations in situ and from the outset suspicions focused on a Frenchman, Robert Marcelin. Not much seems to have been known about Marcelin’s background, and he was not specifically identified as a Soviet agent, unless the description of him as a “member of the Cheka” was hinting at this. (The chekas were non-official people’s tribunals and make-shift prisons that administered very rough justice.) Marcelin certainly talked up his role because he was claimed to have boasted to foreign journalists that he was head of espionnage under the Madrid junta. (24) Marcelin’s connections make him a plausible suspect for the plane attack as the junta was set up after the Republican government had left Madrid for Valencia, and the Paracuellos killings were on its watch.
French diplomacy suspected Marcelin of practically every single unsolved crime involving foreigners in the Republican zone. However, by spreading the net so very wide, they also revealed how little hard evidence they really had. The French were particularly interested in tracking down one person at Barajas airport to whom Marcelin was alleged to have said, on the eve of the attack, that one of those leaving would never arrive. (25) This reported statement circulated widely, and was interpreted as a threat to attack the plane. But surely–if true–this was said earlier than reported, and meant that a passenger (Henny? Delaprée?) would meet a sticky end in a dark Madrid side-street. Marcelin was referring to one person, not seven; and how do you pick out a single victim at 10,000 feet?
The French embassy was given a report from the Madrid Junta on December 9, 1936 showing that Robert Marcelin and Florentino Ruiz had been the agents in charge of the initial investigation. (26) Embassy officials found this highly suspicious, and Marcelin’s name was underlined in red pencil on the document and highlighted by a red exclamation mark. Marcelin’s name subsequently disappeared from junta documentation, which only reinforced French suspicions.
Picasso's sketch of a hand holding a hammer/sickle, on a copy of Paris-Soir.
The Marcelin connection was the closest the French investigation ever got to a genuine lead, but plenty of details reveal an atmosphere of tension and distrust. On the day of the attack itself, Emmanuel Neuville’s suspicions were raised by the pilot’s reluctance to say over the phone who he thought was responsible. (27) On December 11, concern was expressed for the safety of the pilot and radio operator, who were discreetly taken out of Spain. (28) The French apparently even managed the logistical feat of having the plane itself moved to safe hiding. Otherwise, the French had little to go on, and their work focused almost entirely on the identification of the attacking planes. (29)
When the French government sent a letter of protest to the Republican government on December 28, it basically had to rely on this type of evidence. However, a photo of the wreckage of the plane (preserved by Mme. Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée) shows that the issue of identification was not clear-cut. The plane’s numbering F-A000 is clearly visible on the photo. However, the tail displays a single letter (F), which was characteristic of Malraux’s air squadron, and displays neither the tricolor nor the official letters RF. (30) As the embassy plane had previously been a military aircraft, in process of transformation for civilian use, the possibility of an erroneous identification was greater than usually imagined. The plane, in other words, looked like a Republican military aircraft. This reopens the possibility of an attack in error by pro-Francoist aviation.
The French went on investigating after they had sent their letter of protest on December 28, but if anything they found themselves going backwards. On January 5 1937, the injured journalist André Château was repatriated to France and hospitalized in Bordeaux, where his testimony failed to back up the Republican government’s conclusions. He had the “impression” that the Potez 54 has been attacked by a government plane, but he was not sure. He was not convinced about the identification because Franco’s planes had red and yellow markings, and the yellow was less visible. He did have doubts about whether Franco’s plane would have gone so near to Alcalá de Henares, where there was a military airport. He reckoned the attack might have been perpetrated by mistake by a government plane. The attacking plane did have time to look, but maybe the markings were not clear enough to allow for identification. (31) (The archives of the Havas news agency show that the unfortunate Château’s return to France was not to be a happy one, and he stoically had his right leg amputated in April 1937. (32))
By mid-January, the French consul Neuville reported that his investigation was stalling: he had not got new proofs which could be considered conclusive. “At best,” he said, he could point to the type and coloring of the wings of the attacking plane, as indicated by the pilot and radio operator. (33) However, he also expressed renewed suspicions of Marcelin. On January 29, 1937, a request was made for a bullet found after the attack to be examined more closely. On March 19, 1937, the consul in Madrid Emmanuel Neuville warned the consulate in Alicante that the Frenchman Robert Marcelin, described as the head of espionnage for the Madrid junta, was going there. (34) But basically, the official investigation was fizzling out.
And the mystery? My two cents goes on the mundane possibility that the embassy airplane was attacked in error, perhaps by pro-Francoist planes, perhaps by Republican planes. As for a planned Soviet attack, at this time Soviet foreign policy was still based on making a common front with France and Britain against Nazism; and Stalin would not have felt that shooting down French planes was the best way to go about it. Much the same argument would apply to the Republican government. But that does not rule out a more improvised local action. Local agents could–say–have messed up a dirty tricks operation in Madrid, and then panicked, providing (dis)information to pro-Republican aviation. But this conjecture is highly speculative. My guess is that only Soviet documentation, if it exists, could prove conclusively that there was a planned attack; and if Soviet agents had indeed done their worst, they might well not have written to Stalin to boast about it.
A sketch of 19 April 1937, showing the raised arm, clenched fist and hammer and sickle.
However, we can certainly dismiss the hypothesis of a French cover-up. The notion of official connivance between two brotherly Popular Front governments was never plausible given what we know about the troubled course of French-Spanish relations and the ambivalent attitude of the French State Office, the Quai d’Orsay. (35) In many ways, French diplomacy in Spain operated in a similar way to Britain’s. Both countries had absentee ambassadors on the frontier, who were bitterly hostile to the Republic, while their consular officials, like Emmanuel Neuville (and in the British case Ogilvie-Forbes), discharged their duties honorably in Madrid. (36) Embassy officials who were too sympathetic to the Republicans, like the French military attaché Henri Morel, found themselves in trouble. (37) On my reading, the French government had reasonable suspicions, but very little hard evidence, when it issued its findings attributing the attack to pro-Republication aviation.
The findings of the State Office were made public on December 31, 1936. At this point the two strands in the affair–the attack on the plane and the censorship of Louis Delaprée’s writings–converge. As a commentator observed at the time: “… the curiously ironical outcome of the incident [i.e. the attack on the plane, MM] was this: on the very day on which the walls of Paris were adorned with manifestos of protest by Left journalists, the Quai d’Orsay itself made an official statement to the effect that the ambassadorial plane had been shot down by the government forces. Apparently M. Blum’s liaison arrangements with the Left journalists were somewhat defective.” (38)
It must have been very soon after the attack that the Republicans and their supporters realized that Delaprée’s writing might have great propaganda value. While Delaprée was still being dismissed as a sensationalist jet-setter for the far-right press in a Spanish newspaper on December 9th, for example, a mere two days later the same newspaper suddenly started calling him a “genuine liberal”. (39) Something was clearly going on behind the scenes. In December, circles close to the Communist newspaper L’Humanité managed to get hold of the full copies of Louis Delaprée dispatches denouncing the pro-Francoist aerial bombardments of Madrid in November 1936. These had originally being filed with the Republican Censorship Office in Madrid, and were probably taken to Paris by L’Humanité’s correspondent, Georges Soria. Delaprée’s reports had mainly been rejected by his own newspaper, but soon they would be brought out in pamphlet form in no less than five languages, as part of a major propaganda initiative. (40)
The victims from a bombed church in Durango. (L’Humanité, 6 April 1937, and Durango, Ville Martyre, 30 April 1937.)
At the end of December, however, things were being warmed up with the launching of street posters (visible in a scene shown here in L’Humanité of 1 January 1937), in which Delaprée’s wan and melancholy face looks out at us alongside the words: “The voice of a dead man denounces the lies of the press.” Picasso’s biographer Sir John Richardson has drawn attention to the painter’s very first reference to the Spanish Civil War in Still Life with a Lamp on December 29, 1936, which included a severed arm (as in the Guernica), and a poster on the wall with the date. This was when the Delaprée poster was being printed, allowing us to infer that Picasso must have seen it before it came out. Perhaps the whole purpose of the campaign had been to get the world’s most famous artist to be more fully engaged with Republican Spain. If so, it was brilliantly successful.
In perfect synchronicity, the Right highlighted the attack on the plane at the same time as L’Humanité focused on Delaprée’s death and censored writings. L’Action Française of January 1, 1937 reported the French Government’s findings that Louis Delaprée had in fact been “murdered” by the Spanish Popular Front. There were also the first right-wing hints that the French writer André Malraux might somehow be mixed up in all this (which later turned into an aggressive, denunciatory campaign by the fascist writer Robert Brasillach (41)). L’Humanité did not buy into the idea that the timing of the announcement was a mere coincidence, alleging on January 2, 1937 that there was complicity between Paris-Soir and officials at the Quai D’Orsay. (42) On January 3, 1937 the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité made its own counter-accusation blaming Italian aviation.
The duelling resumed one week later, on Friday, January 8, 1937. That day, Louis Delaprée’s writings on the bombardments of Madrid were published as a pamphlet called The Martyrdom of Madrid. (On Saturday–see here–L’Humanité showcased it under the heading Shame on the Lying Press!) Friday was also the day of the week that many weeklies were brought out, albeit with Saturday’s dateline, so that they could reach people before the weekend. One right-wing weekly that came out that day was particularly significant because, as I will show in a moment, Picasso saw it and reacted to it.
It is worth noting the extraordinary violence of the language that marked this controversy. L’Humanité placed a caption beneath the photo of the street scene on January 1, 1937, making an allusion to the “press which kills and lies.” Strong stuff. These words were linked to L’Humanité’s ongoing campaign against the far Right press which it blamed, probably correctly, for having hounding a government minister called Roger Salengro to his suicide. On November 18, 1936, L’Humanité had brought out a special edition on Salengro’s death, specifically denouncing calumnies spread by the “murderous press.” As part of this campaign, L’Humanité’s director Paul Vaillant-Couturier wrote a pamphlet with a title that used similar language: “The lying press, the murderous press.” (43)
A 1930s press campaign was the very opposite of an ordered process of political debate; and in this one, both sides were accusing each other of nothing less than murder. But if we prioritize Picasso’s reactions, the idea of lying, also so decisive here, was not merely rhetorical–especially given the fact that insults to honor were a defining feature of Spanish culture.
The royal shivaree and Picasso’s Dream and Lie of Franco
As mentioned above, on Friday January 8, 1937, Picasso saw and reacted to a crude caricature on the cover of Le Charivari, a right-wing satirical weekly. Le Charivari was on the outer reaches of the French Right, at the point where it shaded into outright fascism. Previously, on 23 February 1935 Le Charivari’s cover had portrayed Léon Blum as a vulture. The caricaturist had curved Blum’s nose into the beak so beloved of anti-semitic caricaturists, showing him picking away at a Christ-like victim. Presumably, this was the fate in store for suffering taxpayers if the Popular Front ever came to power. (44) Ralph Soupault, the cartoonist who drew the cover which interests us, would subsequently make himself notorious in March 1937 for a violently anti-semitic depiction of Léon Blum. On that occasion, Soupault portrayed Blum, by then Prime Minister, as being covered in blood, saying: “Who said I had no French blood?” in reference to a violently suppressed demonstration. (45)
Picasso, Dream and Lie of Franco, Part I, 8 January 1937.
The cover for this particular issue of Le Charivari showed a vulture perched on the edge of a coffin. Although Saturday January 9 was its cover date, we can confirm that it came out a day earlier by consulting L’Action Française, which announced its appearance on January 8th. (See here, at the bottom.) Given the weekly’s previous and future record, the vulture on Le Charivari’s cover of January 8, 1937 must be a direct reference to the notion of the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, so beloved of the Nazi and Fascist right in the 1930s. The vulture has a red hammer and sickle on its chest, and two drops of blood are falling from its blood-covered beak. We know where the blood comes from because the open coffin on which it is perched carries a name: Louis Delaprée. (46)
The reason I am so sure that Pablo Picasso saw this caricature is that, a few days later, he replied to Le Charivari’s cover with a painting that is, detail by detail, its exact antithesis. On January 19, 1937, Picasso portrayed a woman-vulture from exactly the same angle, and with an identical slant of the neck, also looking sideways at us. In one claw, she grasps the Nationalist flag, red, yellow and red, except that against a yellow background we can only clearly make out the two little red stripes which match the vulture’s two drops of blood. Whereas the vulture’s body has the emblem of the hammer and sickle, hers is covered in crosses, their symbolic antithesis. She is standing on a raised balcony, which is of a funereal black but is covered by a white lapidary inscription: “Portrait of the Marchioness Of The Christian Ass, tossing a coin to the Moorish soldiers, defenders of the Virgin”. (47)
To Le Charivari’s dark evocation of Bolshevik machinations, Picasso is offering the riposte, much used on the Republican side, that the Nationalist generals have built their “Christian” crusade on the military might of the Moorish soldiers of the Army of Africa. Picasso adds a little touch of blasphematory burlesque by giving his woman-vulture the noble title of Marchioness Of The Christian Ass. In spirit, this painting has an obvious afinity with Dream and Lie of Franco. The text was unusually explicit by Picasso’s standards, although it had its own logic in this context.
The Charivari/Portrait of the Marchioness parallels prove that Picasso did indeed react to the Potez 54 / Delaprée affair. Picasso began his series of etchings Dream and Lie of Franco on January 8, 1937, on exactly the same day that the infinitely less gifted Ralph Soupault published his blood-spattered vulture; and Louis Delaprée’s writings on the bombing of Madrid also appeared that day. Picasso’s painting of a few days later not only shows that that Picasso reacted to that caricature, then, but also that something in it turned his stomach enough to make him want to “copy,” invert, and refute it. Dream and Lie, too, is a classic piece of inversion, beginning with its title, and I think I now have enough elements to study it more closely.
Dream and Lie of Franco is a two-part series of etchings, accompanied by a prose poem, that represents Franco as a grotesque king in a Spanish Golden Age setting. (48) In form, it is inspired by traditional narrative prints called aleluyas. (49) In successive scenes, Franco is shown riding a variety of steeds, walking a tightrope or chipping away at a classical statue. This monstrous polyp comes off much the worse in his jousting with a bull who radiates an incomparably greater power and dignity. There are four scenes, added later on, which are close to the Guernica; but a prostrate woman, also seemingly a war victim, belongs with the earliest etchings. The Franco figure is close to the burlesque scatological Ubu, a character created by the French author Alfred Jarry, while scholars have detected a number of quite specific references to the Spanish Civil War in this series, and especially to Madrid. (50)
The voice of a dead man accuses the lying press
As always, the spirit of Goya is omnipresent. Many people felt that Goya was somehow their contemporary in his portrayal of the horrors of war–”no better better reporter on the Spanish Civil War than Goya”, as the moderate weekly Marianne put it, juxtaposing Goya’s images with recent photos. (51) In this instance, an acknowledged influence is Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters, perhaps seen as a strange premonition of nocturnal aerial bombardments on the day that Delaprée’s reports on the bombing of Madrid were published.
Given that Picasso saw, and reacted to Le Charivari that day, I think we can ask whether the term ‘charivari’ (or ‘shivaree’ in the United States), had any significance for Dream and Lie. The shivaree was a a centuries-old custom with carnivalesque elements in which villagers made ‘rough music’, such as cacophonous noises with pots and kettles, beneath the windows of a newly married couple. The objects of this persecution were somehow considered to have transgressed habitual norms and expectations.
In European terms, the quintessential subject of a shivaree was talked about on the day that Picasso began Dream and Lie: the British monarch King Edward VIII and his lover Wally Simpson, a twice-divorced American woman, whose planned marriage had precipitated his abdication. The poster that L’Humanité had used to campaign against the ‘lying press’ at the end of December had reproduced Louis Delaprée’s acid comment: “The killing of a hundred Spanish kids is less interesting than a sigh from Mrs Simpson, the royal whore.” That message had also been reproduced in L’Humanité in an uncensored facsimile on December 31, 1936. When readers first saw Delaprée’s pamphlet on January 8, 1937, they will have noticed that the phrase ‘royal whore’ had gone, but of course they will have remembered it. Also on that day, L’Humanité contemptuously reported a complaint about some press reports on Mrs Simpson, managed to work Delaprée’s name into the discussion, and suggested that “Her Highnesses and Her Vile Lownesses should get their act together”. (52)
With regard to Delaprée’s most famous sentence–itself a kind of verbal shivaree–I believe that there is both a “royal whore” and a dethroned king in Dream and Lie. The joke is that Franco is both king and whore. In this carnival of reversals and inversions, Franco has a giant phallus in one scene, but is a female whore in another, swinging his/her hips suggestively, and carrying a fan bearing an emblem of the Virgin, for good measure. There is a destroyed town is in the background, so perhaps the dead kids are also present. In the following scene, the bull charges the monstruous king and he loses his crown. Dream and Lie has its own soundtrack in the form of a poem that is a cacophony of clanking sounds: “cries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of flowers cries of timbers and of stones cries of bricks cries of furniture of beds of chairs of curtains of pots of cats and of papers…” (53) I think that this part of the poem may have echoes of a shivaree, as well as the sounds of a bombed city.
I am not suggesting that Dream and Lie is literally a shivaree, but rather that this is one of a number of carnivalesque elements feeding into it. A peculiarity of Dream and Lie is that can be “read” both sequentially and at random. If we follow its apparent order, it works well as a kind of “story,” beginning one sunny day when the grotesque king sets off on his adventures. Yet the scenes are also independent, and at one point were going to be sold as postcards at the World’s Fair. If we make nine separate cards from the scenes in Part I, we can view them cinematographically in any order, and yet the effect is always the same. We cut continually from a procession to an event and then back again. In the procession sequences, Franco is always seen moving in the same direction against a low background. Our view is from one side, as when we watch a Spanish religious procession pass through a street. In fact, I think the monster is riding on a series of floats: an elongated horse (or perhaps the festive Catalan mulassa or mule); a wounded, winged pegasus; a tarasca (not simply a pig, I think–a tarasca was a dragon-like monster in the feast of Corpus Christi, with a curved back “like a giant armadillo” and a curled tail). (54) He may also be “riding” the giant phallus, in canivalesque register.
Dream and lie is, I believe, a perfect representation of the inversions of Spanish religious festivals, and by extension the broader world of carnivalesque popular culture. Later in 1937 Franco would order the abandonment of carnival precisely because, like Picasso, he saw this fierce explosion of popular energy as the antithesis, and at least potentially the enemy, of ordered, hierarchical Christian society. (55) Dream and lie is suffused with religious symbolism, such as the banners, or religious pendants, which can also be seen in Goya’s painting of the mock ceremony of the Burial of the Sardine at the end of Carnival. (56) But on my reading, this is not because the Church lent its support to Franco (or not mainly for that reason). (57) Rather, Picasso’s distancing in time and space made a religious framework so wholly appropriate: a Spanish religious festival drew on the energy of a whole people in its enactment of the triumph over evil, visualized as a grotesque hybrid monster. (58) In Dream and Lie that monster is Franco.
Picasso first reacted artistically to the Spanish Civil War in the period from 29 December 1936 to January 8-9, 1937. This time frame closely matches the chronology of the Embassy plane / Delaprée controversy. However, this was also a festive time of year. L’Humanité had launched its poster campaign on New Year’s Eve. More to the point, 28 December was the Spanish feast of the Holy Innocents, the equivalent of April Fools’ Day, while January 6th was the traditional Spanish Epiphany. The Holy Innocents commemorated the biblical Massacre of the Innocents, implicit in Delaprée’s phrase about Mrs. Simpson, and was specifically referred to in Delaprée’s Bombs Over Madrid: “Christ said: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’ I feel that after the slaughter of the innocents in Madrid, we should say: ‘Do not forgive them for they know right well what they are doing.’ “ (59) As for Epiphany, this celebrated the Three Kings, when the simplest and most universal inversion was the king’s cardboard crown that made its way into so many households. I can find no specific satirical intent in the photo that L’Humanité published on January 7th, which showed a chimpanzee wearing a cardboard crown and munching away at a slice of king cake; but it does remind us that this was a significant date, whether parodied or inverted.
Perhaps it was the strangeness of this controversy which drew Picasso towards it. (60) Although Picasso was clearly responding to the Spanish Civil War, this was not, in my view, politically commited art as it is usually understood. (61) These events also cohere if we strip them of their ideological trappings, and abstract them from time and place: The voice of a dead man denounces the lying press from beyond the grave; a king loses his crown on account of a whore; bombs are falling on my homeland; perhaps this is a dream, happening far away or long ago; but dreams (songes) are lies (mensonges)… (62) At this point, the drive in Picasso’s undoing of the monster Franco in Dream and Lie came from fierce, blasphematory mockery, and the tragic, universal vision was in the future.
The ruins of Gernika. (Le Petit Journal, 30 April 1937.)
“The lying press, the murderous press” in Picasso’s Guernica
On April 26, 1937, the planes of the German Condor Legion destroyed the Basque town of Gernika causing numerous civilian casualties in the attack that almost immediately preceded the creation of Picasso’s masterpiece. A new and unfamiliar name–Ce Soir initially called it Quirnica (63)–would enter the world’s consciousness. Five days later, Picasso finally moved beyond dilatory sketching for his commission for the Paris World’s Fair to throw all his extraordinary energy into the Guernica. Newspaper reporting played an acknowledged role in the genesis of that masterpiece, and indeed newsprint imagery has been detected within the painting itself. But I feel that there is much more to be said about it in the light of what we have seen of Picasso’s reactions over the previous months.
News of the attack on Gernika first reached Paris in the afternoon of April 27th, and on April 28th it was major headline news in L’Humanité and elsewhere. But it was not big news in all the French press, and in some French newspapers it was not even news at all. There is no doubt that the presence of foreign journalists in the Basque country, rapidly making their way to bombed Gernika, was decisive in bringing these events to the world’s attention. George Steer’s report had an especially notable impact because it was published in both the New York Times and London’s most influential newspaper, the Times. (In British establishment circles in the 1930s, only events mentioned in the Times were considered truly newsworthy.) (64) However, Herbert Southworth’s exhaustive work has shown that Gernika was primarily a media event in the English-speaking world, in contrast to what he calls a “wall of silence” in France. Southworth has also studied another twist, namely the story rapidly cooked up by Nationalist propagandists that the Basques had destroyed and burned the town themselves before retreating. (65)
Gernika/Guernica owes its symbolic primacy to Picasso’s masterpiece. Time and again we read that “nothing like this calculated and meticulously planned massacre… had occurred in modern times.” (66) But this is not true. Madrid remained a far more universal reference during the Spanish Civil War itself. (67) Prior to Gernika there had been – notably, but not exclusively – the day and night aerial bombardments of Madrid, the attacks on the Málaga-Almería road and the Basque town of Durango, and then the renewed artillery shelling of Madrid, each time with numerous casualties. (68) And before Picasso single-handedly refocused our vision, these attacks were threading together to form a single narrative. (69) When Delaprée’s accounts of the aerial bombardments of Madrid in November 1936 were published on January 8, 1937, this was under the title The Martyrdom of Madrid. But a French pamphlet on the aerial bombardments of Durango on March 31 and April 2, 1937 was given a near-identical title: Durango, Martyred Town. (70) I think Picasso’s painting draws directly on both these sources, as well as being an infinite enlargement of them, a kind of Martyrdom of Guernica.
A dead priest lies in the bombed church of Durango. (Durango, Ville Martyre, c 30 April 1937).
The religious connotations that suffuse the Guernica have been widely acknowledged, but to the best of my knowledge the pro-Francoist aerial bombardments of Durango have been wholly ignored as a possible source. Yet these dreadful massacres in the predominantly Catholic Basque country took the lives of priests and nuns, along with many others, and religious buildings were destroyed. No single event so perfectly undermined the case that Fascist and Nazi aviation somehow represented Christian values. The French pamphlet Durango, Martyred Town is likely to have been a far more important visual source for Picasso than the familiar newspaper photos of bombed Gernika. The pamphlet was profusely illustrated with terrible images but, more significantly, it was advertised for purchase in L’Humanité on Monday May 3, 1937. (71) That means that, like the other pamphlets and weeklies we have discussed, it will have been published on the previous Friday, i.e. April 30th, the day before Picasso began the Guernica. In an earlier piece I discussed how pamphlets like Delaprée’s Martyrdom were forwarded to international figures like Virginia Woolf, and this pamphlet will most certainly have reached Picasso. It was on much better quality paper than the daily newspapers, and the images were far sharper. This means that when Picasso was first hearing and reading about Gernika, he was really seeing Durango.
One image is especially strange. A dead priest lies shockingly inert, like a huge flattened puppet, in the foreground (p. 14). One of his arms stretches out horizontally in the posture of the Crucifixion, but the other arm seems to be completely missing. In the background we can make out images of the Mother and Child, while there is a vertical pulpit to the right. Three contemporary figures, Basque motorized policemen, stand incongruously in this mad, deformed Baroque scene. It is not for me to analyze Picasso’s imagery – and the cut arm appeared previously in Picasso’s painting of December 29, 1936 – but I do think this photo needs to be studied for possible links to the Guernica, and especially the image of the fallen warrior. (72) (I mention another photo of the victims in Durango below.)
The extent to which a particular bombardment became a full-scale media event depended, to put it crudely, on how much serviceable newspaper copy it generated and how quickly this reached the international press. Durango had been attacked on March 31 and April 2, 1937, but for all its passionate pro-Republican advocacy, L’Humanité was only able to publish this news prominently on its front page on April 6th. On the same day, the mass-circulation evening newspaper Paris-Soir also reported the dead and wounded in a church in Durango, while failing to make clear who was responsible. (73) On the other hand, the intensive shelling of Madrid in April 1937, a city which international figures as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a British Duchess, and Hollywood film star Errol Flynn all passed through, was always bound to make the headlines. (74) The result was that the shelling became a major Francoist propaganda setback, from which few obvious military advantages accrued.
We get a small reality check by looking at the French newspaper Le Matin for April 28, 1937, when the latest bombardment of Madrid was given a prominent place among the main headlines, while the news of Gernika was only secondary.
In a previous piece, I studied the raised arm holding a hammer and sickle that Picasso sketched on a copy of the mass circulation evening newspaper Paris-Soir on April 19, 1937. In impishly placing the hammer and sickle at the top of Paris-Soir’s name, Picasso was mimicking L’Humanité, where it formed part of the logo. That raised arm and clenched fist of defiance made their way directly into pre-Guernica sketches so we are talking about Picasso’s reactions on the eve of its creation. I believe that they reflected Picasso’s anger at what was missing from the front page of Paris-Soir that day, and had been discretely ‘hidden’ away on page 3, namely, the news of the bombardment of Madrid. The defaced front page had reported Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos’s bland wish to stay friends with all parties, i.e. including Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. So Picasso was also reproaching another type of deceit, the official Franco-British policy of Non-Intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The bombs falling in Spain gave the lie to Non-Intervention.
Given these precedents, I’d like to take a close look at the reactions of the Paris press, over the three days before Picasso started his painting. Many of the newspapers can now be consulted online, so the reader can follow the links provided at each date. (75) Of course Picasso will not have read all these newspapers, but I am convinced that they provide us with a good overall picture of the atmosphere in Paris – how the news story was panning out, what was being said and left unsaid. (76)
I’ll begin with two respected daily newspapers, the moderate Le Temps, and the more conservative Le Figaro. Neither newspaper had reports on Gernika on April 28–Le Temps had a general account of the Basque campaign that day–although the news had begun to reach Paris the evening before. In itself, there was nothing terribly sinister about this silence. In general, the more serious newspapers did not publish news items without copy from their own correspondents, or reports from agencies like Havas, neither of which they had received. And after all, Gernika was not Guernica yet. On April 29 and April 30 Le Temps attached comparable importance to the bombardment, the Nationalist denial and the reaction in London. On April 19 Le Figaro had coverage along similar lines, a ‘balanced’ three-way treatment, almost symmetrically divided into three parts: the Basque government’s accusations, the Nationalist counter-accusations and the émotion in London. On April 30 Le Figaro did include a photo of the ruins of Gernika, and specifically attributed the damage to an aerial bombardment.
How would the likes of Picasso have reacted to this seemingly anodyne type of coverage? Rather than its lack of depth (not in itself so unusual), I think two other aspects were outrageous. Firstly, thanks to the Times’ decisive impact, the reaction in Britain had become the story. On 29-30 April the French press, across the political spectrum, focused on the turmoil in Britain. Potentially at stake, of course, was the joint policy of Non-Intervention, the rock on which French-British cooperation was built. The bombs falling on the Basque country were somehow minor collateral damage in a bigger game. But we can be absolutely sure that Picasso did not see things in these terms. If the big news in the mainstream French press was that the British were getting worked up, then surely this represented a huge challenge for a Spanish artist living on French soil. If the artist had the power to cut through all the falsehoods and make us look straight at the world, what better opportunity would he get?
Secondly, news which for once was based on an irreproachable source like the Times was being placed on exactly the same footing as the Nationalist counter-accusations. Nearly all historians have stressed how heavy-handed and counterproductive these Nationalist claims were, and over time this was no doubt true. The Nationalist propagandists were to prove remarkably unwilling to let things go, and their claims had a sinuous and persistent after-life. (77) Nevertheless, for a very short time they did muddy the waters. For example, on 29 April the Catholic newspaper La Croix called the bombing ‘frightful and useless’, but on 30 April it practically retracted: “Who is responsible for the bombing of Guernica?” (78) The point about this backtracking is that it took place just before Picasso launched himself into the Guernica. At this point the lie seemed to be gaining ground.
While there was a conservative bias in the French press, mass circulation newspapers never liked to miss out on big news stories, and mainly thanks to the Times this had certainly become one. Le Petit Parisien made it a huge front page story on 28 April, presumably in its later editions as it used material from that day’s Times. On 29 April it covered the debate on Gernika in the British Parliament. On 30 April a girl’s eyewitness account made the front page. It was also important news in Le Petit Journal on 28 April, as well as on the 29 April (see also here); but once again with a considerable emphasis on the indignation in London. The photo that Le Petit Journal published on its front page on 30 April has an interesting spatial disposition. As in the Guernica, the sky is seen through a window on the top right, there is intense light in the center of the photo, while the buildings on the left are receding. (There were more images of desolation on page 3.) Paris-Soir benefited from its agreement with the Daily Express to republish Noel Monks’ eyewitness report. Typically, Paris-Soir tried to have it both ways, with a main headline saying that Gernika had been destroyed by planes, and a secondary one reporting the Nationalist allegations. (79)
Among reactionary newspapers, L’Écho de Paris retracted a detail in its previous day’s report and blamed the Basques for the destruction on 29 April. It provided the full Nationalist version on 30 April, complete with a photo of the damage caused by the ‘red militia’. On the far right, L’Action Française didn’t bother to cover the attack at all. It included a small announcement on 30 April that Gernika had been taken.
L’Humanité, Picasso’s regular newspaper, attached great importance to the bombing from 28 April onwards. Its assertion that this was “the most horrible bombardment” since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War was typical of its combative style. That day L’Humanité also printed a photo to accompany its first report of the news from Gernika. This photo could not possibly have reached the newspaper so quickly from Gernika. Indeed L’Humanité specifically acknowledged this fact in its caption, which referred to “some women – no doubt mothers – killed during a bombardment”. In other words, its point was a universal one: fascism kills.
This photo is no minor detail in our narrative of the Guernica because it has been argued that this photo of the dead woman facing upwards was ‘the decisive shock’ for Picasso, and that she was the model for a prostrate woman in an early version of the Guernica. (80) Similar photos had been published periodically since the bombardments of Madrid in November 1936, but not even L’Humanité served them up on a daily or weekly basis. On 10 February 1937, L’Humanité published an image of bomb victims, who had been escaping from Málaga, Picasso’s birthplace. On 30 April 1937 the pamphlet Durango, Ville Martyre published a photo of the dead victims of the bombing of a church in the Basque town of Durango (p.18), which had previously been published in L’Humanité on 6 April. If we compare that image with the one that the same newspaper reproduced on 28 April, we can see that the woman in the foreground is not only very similar, but is shown in the same posture, and from an identical angle. The woman in the earlier photo looks younger, but then so does the woman in Picasso’s preliminary sketch.
The prostrate woman in Picasso’s sketch may have been one or the other of these victims, or perhaps both. I don’t think it matters that neither actually came from Gernika itself because we are still talking about the maelstrom of emotion in the wake of its destruction. There is a cumulative effect in this recurring pattern of aerial bombardments: ever more dead, ever more lies. Anger and mockery had previously surfaced in Picasso’s work, but nothing compared to the Guernica’s extraordinary release of energy, in which so many disparate elements were fused together. Surely, now, the future bombardment of Barcelona, where Picasso’s mother and sister lived, was also in the air. (It was to happen in March 1938.)
The widespread assumption that George Steer’s report, which was republished in L’Humanité on 29 April, had a decisive impact on Picasso is altogether plausible. (81) Apart from Steer and Delaprée, few other ‘bourgeois’ journalists can have had their reports published in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité at this period. Both journalists described the effects of the aerial bombardments of civilians, albeit in contrasting styles as Steer was more measured and less emotional than Delaprée. I think their writings had such an impact precisely because of their provenance. L’Humanité’s combative and iconoclastic style may have been good fun for readers like Picasso, but the critical writing of independent journalists from newspapers like the Times or Paris-Soir must have carried more authority.
I believe the spirit of Picasso’s masterpiece is close to Louis Delaprée’s descriptions of the nightmarish nocturnal bombardments of Madrid in November 1936. The theme of the Mother and Child Pietà is so universal that it would be reckless to ascribe it to a single influence. Nevertheless, I do think Picasso scholars should study the passage in Louis Delaprée’s night scene in Bombs Over Madrid where a flashlight illuminates a dead child in the arms of an injured woman who has had her breast gashed. (That last detail is also present in Guernica-related sketches.) The text of Bombs Over Madrid was published in The Martyrdom of Madrid on 8 January, the same day that Picasso began Dream and Lie, and it was also republished in L’Humanité on the following day. Its religious/blasphematory conclusion (also very much in the spirit of the Guernica) was placed at the top left of the page as an epigraph: “Christ said: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do’. I feel that after the slaughter of the innocents in Madrid, we should say: ‘Do not forgive them for they know right well what they are doing.’”
The aerial bombardments of Madrid, Durango and Gernika had all been enveloped in lies and silences. But the most brazen and insistent deception was the Nationalist claim from late April 1937 onwards that the Basques had destroyed Gernika themselves. That lie was beginning to gain in force precisely when Picasso began the Guernica and, according to at least one interpretation, provided its central focus. Thus, the head in the window has been interpreted as an allegory of truth, in accordance with a Bronzino painting from which the accompanying arm holding a light was also taken. The counter-argument runs that if Truth were the subject, following the Bronzino allegory, then surely Calumny and Deceit should also be present. (82) But perhaps they are: the lamp held by the arm is shining onto scratchy newsprint. And if truth is represented by a classical image, the newsprint it shines onto is strictly contemporary. There is a similar opposition in Dream and Lie of Franco, when the revolting little monster Franco chips away at a majestic, noble, classical bust. The French title Songe et Mensonge de Franco also reflects this contrast. Songe was the classical word (in everyday useage ‘dream’ would be rêve), while mensonge was the altogether contemporary word that Picasso read on a daily basis in L’Humanité’s ongoing campaign against the “lying press”.
My work has been based on the premise – scarcely sacrilegious – that the Guernica was an artifact of its times, rooted in the social history of the 1930s. Picasso’s art “created reality on its own terms”(83): instead of representing one event literally, the Guernica plays on the nightmare of recurring aerial bombardments, in which Gernika is the culmination of a process that has already affected Madrid and Durango. When Picasso created both Dream and Lie of Franco and the Guernica, it was each time slightly after the event, and each time in a context in which the main story was being obscured or overwhelmed by deception. On 8 January 1937, Picasso responded to the bombardments of Madrid, but only on the delayed publication of Delaprée’s writing, and amidst press controversy. Picasso began his Guernica on 1 May, fairly soon after the destruction of Gernika, but when Nationalist claims were gaining ground. Picasso had an astonishing artistic armory to combat lies and distortions. It was on this slippery terrain that he ridiculed the monster Franco in January 1937; while in the Guernica he shone a fierce light onto the tattered newsprint of the “lying press, the murderous press”.
Martin Minchom’s publications include Spanish editions of Geoffrey Cox, La defensa de Madrid (2005), and Louis Delaprée, Morir en Madrid (2009).
1 I am especially grateful to Mme Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée for all her help, and I would also like to thank Prof. Sebastiaan Faber. Part of this material was presented at the “Jornadas sobre las Brigadas Internacionales: de lo local a lo global”, International Institute, Madrid, 20-21 October 2011 (with thanks to Justin Byrne and Seve Montero).
2 Prior to my Volunteer pieces (see here and here), I suggested a link between Picasso and Delaprée in my edition of Louis Delaprée, Morir en Madrid, Madrid, Editorial Raíces, 2009, pp. 88-96. John Richardson, “How Political was Picasso?“, New York Review of Books, 25 November 2010, pp. 27-30, uncovered a painting of 29 December 1936 that relates to the Delaprée affair. The art historian Gijs van Hensbergen, Sir John Richardson’s collaborator, kindly sent me a pre-publication copy of this painting.
3 For these killings see Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, W.W. Norton, 2012, read by me in the Spanish edition (2011).
4 Paracuellos massacre“, Wikipedia[last accessed 15 Feb. 2012].
5 César Vidal, Paracuellos-Katyn: un ensayo sobre el genocidio de la izquierda, Barcelona, Planeta, 2007, pp. 207-213. It’s depressing that Vidal can be so categorical (p. 213) about documentation that he has neither seen nor apparently attempted to locate.
6 I looked in the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères et Européennes, Paris (MAEE/P), before finding the key file in the Archives diplomatiques de Nantes: Madrid – Ambassade – Guerre Civile (AD/N – MAGC) 570.
7 Le Charivari was dated 9 January 1937, but like most weeklies it came out a day earlier.
8 The classic account is Herbert R. Southworth, La destruction de Guernica: Journalisme, diplomatie, propagande et histoire, Paris, Ruedo Ibérico, 1975. See David Wingeate Pike, France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain, Eastbourne, Sussex Academic Press, 2011, pp. 280-305, for a useful summary of the French press and its political sympathies.
9 Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Presse qui ment, presse qui tue!… Paris, Éd populaire de propagande, n.d. (1936).
10 Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon, London, Bloomsbury, 2004 (2005 edn.), p. 33.
11 Eric Michaud, “Matisse and Picasso: The Redemption and The Fall”, nonsite.org, January 25, 2011 [last accessed 15 February, 2012]. See here here for the epigraph at the head of this piece: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
12 Ian Gibson, Paracuellos: cómo fue [1983], Madrid, Temas de hoy, 2005, p. 150-151. (These files were only declassified well after Gibson had published his book.)
13 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 278, 11 December 1936: testimony of Charles Boyer.
14 Ian Gibson, op. cit., p. 150.
15 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 271, 9 December 1936.
16 Pierre Marqués, La Croix-Rouge pendant la Guerre d’Espagne, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2000, p. 119, Henny, Report to the Red Cross, Geneva, 2 January 1937.
17 AD/N – MAGC, 570, nº 25, 10 January 1937, Déclarations de M. Château: “Henny passait sans doute pour être un témoin gênant.”
18 Miguel Pérez Ferrero, Drapeau de France: La vie des refugiés dans les legations de Madrid, Paris, Sorlot, 1938, pp. 93-94.
19 Mme Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée is the author of a very lively and readable reconstruction of her late father’s final days (forthcoming). Despite Château’s comments, Delaprée does seem to have felt himself threatened.
20 Sefton Delmer, Trail Sinister, Londres, Secker & Warburg, 1961, pp. 322-326.
21 Felipe Ezquerro Ezquerro, “El derribo del Potez de la Embajada Francesa sobre Pastrana. ¿Error o intención?”, Revista Española de Historia Militar, nº 9, marzo 2001, pp. 120-121.
22 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 269-272, 9 December 1936.
23 Andrés García Lacalle, Mitos y verdades: la aviación de caza en la Guerra Española, Mexico, Oasis, 1973, pp. 218-220.
24 This point emerges in the AD/N documentation, while c.f. the generally unreliable Keith Scott Watson, Single to Spain, London, Arthur Barker, 1937, p. 234.
25 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 290-291, 12 December 1936: “Il y aura tout au moins un de ceux qui partent qui n’arrivera pas.”
26 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Folder 19 January 1937.
27 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 265, 8 December 1936, time: 21.00.
28 AD/N – MAGC, 570, 283, 11 December 1936; and 308, 16 December 1936.
29 AD/N – MAGC, 570, 19 January 1937: Telegram on identifying planes. According to nº 291, 13 December 1936, the pilot and radio operator saw similar planes on the ground near Guadalajara.
30 Juan Manuel Riesgo had not seen my 2010 Alba piece (at note 13), when he confirmed this point in a talk in Madrid in early 2011.
31 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 25, 10 January 1937: Déclarations de M. Château.
32 Archives nationales, Paris 5AR, 271: Madrid – Havas – Guerre Civile. Dossiers de Reporters. Mr Château. Letter from Château to Havas, 18 April 1937. Telegram, Bordeaux, Havas, 19 avril 1937.
33 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Diplomatie 50-51, 16 January 1937: he found no new “argument péremptoire contre les Autorités gouvernementales. / Tout au plus pourrait-on insister sur le fait (signalé par mon télégramme nº 290-291) que d’après le pilote Boyer et le radiotélégraphiste, le type et les bandes rouges de l’appareil agresseur étaient semblables à ceux des avions gouvernementaux”.
34 AD/N – MAGC, 570, 19 March 1937.
35 See for example, the article of Ricardo Miralles in Ángel Viñas (dir.), Al Servicio de la República, Diplomáticos y guerra civil, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2010, at pp. 130-133.
36 For similar contrasts in British diplomacy, Ángel Viñas, La conspiración del general Franco, Barcelona, Crítica, 2011, pp. 129-246. There are many examples of an anti-Republican bias: AD/N – MAGC, 570, 1232, 14 December 1936, for reflections on the need to rethink the whole perspective on Republican Spain in the light of this case. Telegram of 15 December 1936 sent by a general in Valladolid to the consul in San Sebastián saying “The person you’re looking for is called Red”, (“Autor que le interesa se llama Rojo”), and taken completely seriously despite its Francoist provenance.
37 Anne-Aurore Inquimbert, Un officier français dans la guerre d’Espagne. Carrière et écrits d’Henri Morel (1919-1944), Presses Universitaires de Rennes / Service Historique de la Défense, Rennes, 2009, for example, pp. 162, 175.
38 A. R. Chisholm, “Europe and Ourselves—And a Saxophone”, The Australian Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (June 1937), p. 70.
39 For this contrast, “Metralla en las alas de Francia, La Voz, 9 December 1936 compared to “Ha muerto Louis Delaprée”, La Voz, 11 December 1936.
40 Carlos Serrano, L’enjeu espagnol: PCF et guerre d’Espagne, París, Messidor / Éditions sociales, 1987, pp. 91-92 for an undefined propaganda initiative. I have consulted the corresponding papers in the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Fondo Araquistáin, Leg 23 A 108, but they provide few details. This was a time of intense propaganda activity, c.f. MAEE/P, Direction des Affaires Politiques et commerciales, Espagne 142 (p. 200), Direction Génerale de la Sûreté Nationale to MAE, Paris, 9 January 1937, mentioning the imminent publication of L’Espagne Libre, a weekly published by the Generalitat’s press office in Paris, and with some Komintern money from Willi Münzenberg. For the activites of Agence Espagne, see Hugo García, Mentiras necesarias, La batalla por la opinión británica durante la Guerra Civil, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2008, pp. 89-92.
41 Robert Brasillach, “Allo Malraux”, Je suis partout, 2 January 1937; and then much more explicitly, “Quand demandera-t-on l’extradition d’André Malraux?”, Je suis partout, 16 January 1937 (now online: here). For Brasillach, Niall Binns, La Llamada de España: Escritores Extranjeros en la Guerra Civil, Madrid, Montesinos, 2004, pp. 145-148, and Martin Hurcombe, France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War next Door, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 81-109.
42 Arturo Barea, La forja de un rebelde, Barcelona, Debate, 2003 edn., p. 735, claimed that Delaprée was going to have it out with the people at the Quai d’Orsay when he returned to France; but I think he was misremembering this posthumous controversy. On the evidence of the files, Delaprée had no problems with the diplomatic service.
43 Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Presse qui ment, presse qui tue!… op. cit.
44 Online here (halfway down the page).
45 Eugen Weber, L’Action Française, Stanford University Press, 1962, p. 391. See here for another anti-semitic caricature of Blum. (When accessed on 20 February 2012, this website gave inflated circulation figures for the right-wing press.)
46 Le Charivari, 8-9 January 1937: my own copy.
47 Figure of a Woman Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Paris, 19 January, 1937.
48 From Picasso’s notes it appears that the title Songe et Mensonge de Franco was not meant to be Sueño y Mentira de Franco in Spanish. At one point, he jotted down wordplay, once again contrasting opposites: ‘dicha desdicha/de Franco’ (well-being and misfortune): Vinyetes al front, Barcelona, Museu Picasso, 2011, p. 161 (pp. 157-166, online here). According to Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 17-18, 20-21, a drawing of 9 January 1937, “Bather under a black sun” was also linked to Spain. The common thread may be Gérard de Nerval’s poem El Desdichado (“The Ill-starred One”), which referred to “the black sun of melancholy”. In Dream and Lie, the bright sun darkens.
49 See the essays and illustrations in Vinyetes, op cit.
50 For scene by scene references, Patricia Failing, “Picasso’s ‘Cries of Children…Cries of Stones.’” Art News 126, 7 (Sept 1977): 55-64; and Vinyetes, pp. 167-177 (text in English).
51 “Pas de meilleur reporter sur la guerre civile en Espagne que Francesco (sic) Goya”, Marianne, 19 august 1936.
52 “Aux trusts de presse en attendant mieux”, L’Humanité, 8 January 1937, discussing Mrs Simpson’s complaints about some press reports: “Que ces Altesses et ces Bassesses se débrouillent entre elles!”
53 Translation from Vinyetes, op. cit., p. 166.
54 David D. Gilmore, “Tarasca: Ritual Monster of Spain“, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 152 (3), September 2008, p. 367. For images from an earlier period, Javier Portús Pérez, La Antigua Procesión de Corpus Christi en Madrid, Madrid, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 1993. The pig was not a common animal in Picasso’s bestiary, and this hybrid could have been both pig and tarasca.
55 David D. Gilmore, Carnival and Culture, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998, p. 12.
56 Picasso studied at the San Fernando academy in Madrid, which owned this painting, and knew the area because he had attended the verbena at San Antonio de la Florida in 1898: John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906, London, Pimilico, [1991], 209, p. 97. As well as its pendant, the sinister, smiling Sun is similar to the – Falangist? – one which shines at Franco in the opening scene of Dream and Lie.
57 The source for Franco walking the tightrope is Goya’s May the Rope break, which is remarkable for its portrayal of the latent power of the watching crowd.
58 The bull has been associated with the Spanish people in Dream and Lie, and it is shown twice, gaining in vitality after it has defeated the monster. In the second depiction, the bull is a noble animal radiating power. c.f. David D. Gilmore, “Tarasca“ op. cit. p. 366, for “rituals in which people are attacked by an external force representing evil, usually embodied in the form of a menacing animal or a monster. The people then defeat the monster through common action, killing the beast and returning to normalcy, not in the same form as before, but with a renewed “vitality” that they derive from appropriating and “consuming” the power of the thing they have killed.” Festive rivalry was the ultimate expression of group honor: Timothy J. Mitchell, Violence and Piety in Spanish Folklore, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, pp. 38-56.
59 L’Humanité used it as an epigraph at the top of the page on 9 January 1937.
60 For Picasso’s politics, John Richardson, “How political” op. cit. An example of Picasso’s hitherto apolitical character was the way, 30 years earlier, he sat out Catalonia’s agitated Tragic Week, John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume II, 1907-1917, London, Pimilico, [1996], 2009, p. 136.
61 The commission for the World’s Fair is not proof that Picasso wanted to do something ‘political’, given how dilatory he was prior to the Guernica. The political references in Failing, op. cit. 55-64, and Vinyetes, pp. 167-177 are unmistakeable and extremely well documented (and, interestingly, many of them refer to Madrid). But I feel that Picasso’s fiercely ironic and transforming mockery belongs to a very different tradition from most ‘political’ art.
62 The Golden Age dramatist Calderón de la Barca’s Life’s a Dream has been considered a possible influence. The advert for Dream and Lie included a fascinating quotation from Francisco de Quevedo, which is a strange reminder of how the “voice of a dead man” was made to speak in L’Humanité’s press campaign: “I govern men going rotten, neither living nor dead, who bring a finely adorned ghost..” (“Yo administro unos hombres a medio podrir, entre vivos y muertos, que traen bien aliñada fantasma…”, Vinyetes, p. 161.
63 “800 victimes a Quirnica, Ancienne capitale basque”, Ce Soir, 28 de abril 1937.
64 In 1936, the dying King George V was injected with morphine so that the news would be announced in the Times and not in the “less appropriate” evening newspapers.
65 Herbert R. Southworth, op. cit., studies how the French Havas agency failed to supply good copy rapidly, despite having a reporter in the Basque country. His book is dedicated, in part, to those who broke this “wall of silence”.
66 Russell Martin, Picasso’s War, Dutton, 2002, p. 51.
67 Simone Téry recalled the “famous” bombings of Madrid when she was looking for a point of reference for bombardments of Barcelona by Italian aviation in March 1938. Simone Téry, Front de la liberté: Espagne 1937-1938, Paris, Éditions sociales internationales, 1938, p. 315.
68 For figures, Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and Joan Villarroya, España en llamas, La guerra civil desde el aire, Madrid, Temas de Hoy, 2003. Compare: Robert Stradling, Your Children will be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2008.
69 A pamphlet was published, or at least edited, just two days after the bombing of Gernika: Pierre Gérôme, La Presse et Franco, Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes, Paris, 28 avril, 1937. As Gernika was such recent news, it is interesting that they managed to work in a footnote at all (at p. 34n). The main narrative of ‘events’ consisted of sections on Badajoz, Madrid, Málaga and Durango (pp. 28-34), and only the first of these had no place in the emerging series of aerial bombardments. L’Humanité connected Gernika and Durango on innumerable occasions: for example, 7, 9, 10, 15 and 31 May and 11 June 1937. Paradoxically, it was Picasso’s masterpiece, drawing on both, that eventually broke this link.
70 Durango, Ville Martyre: Ce que furent les bombardements de la ville de Durango par les avions allemands, Comité Franco-Espagnol, Paris, n.d. (before 3 May 1937). Despite its title, Italian aviation was involved. ‘Le Martyre de Guernica’ was subsequently evoked, c.f. Southworth, op. cit. pp 21, 40.
71 Durango only made page 1 of L’Humanité on 6 April 1937 so preparation certainly began later than that. It needed some time to be written and printed (although this was usually done quickly), which takes us into late April. The advertisement in L’Humanité on 3 May gives us a likely cut-off date of 30 April 1937. (1 May was a celebration and 2 May was a Sunday.)
72 This strange and disturbing image was also later reproduced in G.L. Steer, The Tree of Gernika: A Field Study of Modern War, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1938, pp. 96-97.
73 “Des bombes d’avion tombent sur l’église de Durango (Biscaye)”, Paris-Soir, 7 April 1937 (a day earlier).
74 “Madrid’s 18 Days Under Shell Fire / Still a Million People in the Capital / Senseless Bombardment of Frequented Streets”, The Manchester Guardian, 30 April 1937; “Comment j’ai failli être tué dans Madrid bombardée”, par le célèbre acteur de cinema Erroll Flynn”, Paris-Soir, 8 April 1937.
75 Non-digitized newspapers (as of 15 February 2012) include Paris-Soir and Ce soir, consulted on microfilm at the National Library in Paris.
76 Picasso read several newspapers at this period, c.f. Patricia Failing, op. cit. pp.55-64.
77 This point is developed in great depth in Southworth, op. cit.
78 In this case, La Croix reported the surreal accusation that red planes might be attacking their own town.
79 “La ville sainte des basques: Guernica détruite de fond en comble par les avions.” Lesser heading: “Cependant les nationalists affirment que la ville a été incendiée par les Basques avant d’être evacuée”, Paris-Soir, 29 April 1937 (in fact a day earlier).
80 Herschel B. Chipp, El Guernica de Picasso, Historia, transformaciones, significado, Barcelona, Polígrafa, 1991, p. 83, for both photo and image; Rachel Wischnitzer, “Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. A Matter of Metaphor”, Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 6 (12) 1985, p. 165.
81 Carlos García Santa Cecilia, ed., Corresponsales en la Guerra de España, Madrid, Instituto Cervantes / Fundación Pablo Iglesias, 2006, facsimile online here, at pp. 127-128; Paul Preston, We Saw Spain Die, London, Constable, 2008, pp. 263-290.
82 Rachel Wischnitzer, op. cit., pp. 163-165, citing R. Hohl, Die Wahrheit über Guernica, Pantheon, 36 (January 1978), pp. 41-58.
83 Gertje R. Utley, op. cit., p. 172.
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