Hobsbawmistas and Spain

An Anglo-German historian is taken to task for his Stalinist leanings (via Arts & Letters Daily):

Hobsbawm cites Hemingway and Malraux – a “macho” admirer of Stalin and a compulsive liar – who wrote two of the worst books imaginable on the Spanish war...

...The Stalinist view of Orwell put forward by the noted academic is almost too dense and transparent to merit comment: he dismisses Homage to Catalonia because it was turned down by a Soviet-lining publisher and sold few copies in its first printing. Hobsbawm offers an allegedly self-incriminating quote from an Orwell letter: “Orwell himself recognised in a letter to a friendly reviewer, ‘what you say about not letting the fascists in owing to dissensions between ourselves is very true.’” But a commonsense, as opposed to a deceptive reading of this remark would indicate that Orwell had the Stalinists in mind when he referred to the sowing of dissensions that permitted a Franco victory.

For Hobsbawm, Orwell is not only illegitimate because his book did not sell well, but because he was “an awkward, marginal figure.” ..

I must conclude by briefly addressing Hobsbawm’s libels against the Spanish revolutionary militias, with which he closes his polemic. Hobsbawm informs us “Wars, however flexible the chains of command, cannot be fought, or war economies run, in a libertarian fashion. The Spanish civil war could not have been waged, let alone won, along Orwellian lines.” Once again, the Stalin-nostalgia betrays his ignorance of Spanish reality...

Now that's a polemicist in action. Much more in the full piece.

For a balanced military history of the war, see this. An anarcho-syndicalist approach to conducting the war was a guarantee of defeat; the Soviet support just made the war longer and bloodier--including internally on the Republican side--without a serious commitment actually to winning. Very nasty stuff.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at March 7, 2007 08:19 PM