Author Archives: Advocate

Homage to Catalonia

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This is the third review about the Spanish Civil war. The first was written by an author sympathetic to the mostly Communist Republicans. The second was a book critical for how the Soviets used the conflict to rob the Spanish treasury while they spent as much time fighting allies as they did fighting Franco’s Fascists. This book was one of many written by Eric Arthur Blair under the name George Orwell, and I recommend it. Amazon has 123 reviews with an average rating of four and a half stars out of five. The book is based on Orwell’s personal experiences after he went to Spain as a journalist. He volunteered to join the Trotsky Communist army forces called the POUM as a foot soldier. The descriptions of his experiences paint indelible images of the harsh life of the soldiers. They maintained loyalty to one another while living in cold mud mixed with human waste in the trenches while dealing with continual infections of lice and shortages of food and fuel. Orwell’s battles ended after being shot through the neck by a sniper.

Orwell writes that the only real difference between the ragged, miserable men and boys in the trenches on the hills opposite his trench was the color of the flags and uniforms. The soldiers in both sets of trenches were there for no other purpose than to kill the people like themselves in the other trenches. People were enlisting their 15 year-old sons for the small enlistment payment and food they could return to their parents. Some were as young as eleven. Orwell says he was never certain he actually killed anyone. He describes how a “dot” that was a man’s (or boy’s) head above the lip of a distant trench disappeared after he fired a shot, and how he heard lengthy screaming after he tossed a hand grenade into a parapet. He observes he only wished to kill one Nationalist, because if every Republican killed one Nationalist, the war would be won. He maintained his loyalty to the Republicans despite admitting to atrocities being committed by them. He wrote “…the foreign anti-Fascist papers even descended to the pitiful lie of pretending that churches were only attacked when they were used as Fascist fortresses. Actually churches were pillaged everywhere….because….the Spanish Church was part of the capitalist racket.” 



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Buck as Slang for a Dollar

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There is speculation in straightdope.com that the word “buck” was used in poker games where a token was placed in front of the dealer, and the token was often a knife made of buck horn. It was said, perhaps tongue in cheek, that when it came time for the dealer to surrender the duty to the next player “the buck was passed.” It is plausible that the term was short for buckskin, which was a common medium of exchange. It was written in 1748 that a cask of whiskey was sold to Indians for 5 bucks. “The transition to dollars seems only natural.” The term “sawbuck” for the ten dollar bill has no relation. The old ten dollar bills were denominated with the Roman numeral Xs. “The Xs looked like the X-shaped arms of benches sawyers used to hold up logs for cutting.”

Spain Betrayed, The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War

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This is the second in a series of three reviews about the Spanish Civil War. The author of the first book sympathized with the Republican (mostly Communist) side that lost to Franco’s Nationalists. This book emphasizes the betrayals of the Republicans by the Soviet Union. The book was edited by Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov, and was “…prepared with the cooperation of the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) and the Russian Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.” There was significant research for the book, and translated Russian, French, and Italian documents are presented in full. The Abbreviations and Acronyms is an indication of the complexity of the political affiliations of the various parties involved in the war. There are a dozen listings for Anarchists, Communist, and Socialist organizations.

The Nationalists were initially led by generals Mola and Sanjurjo, but their failure to gain immediate success gave an opening to General Francisco Franco. He sent emissaries to Hitler and Mussolini to ask for help, the Republicans turned to Stalin, and the internationalization of the conflict assured that the war would be longer, more costly, and more brutal. President Franklin Roosevelt’s covert policy of providing military equipment to the Republicans in violation of the Neutrality Act and against the will of Congress allowed the Soviets to supply the Spanish Republican forces with American aircraft.

Stalin’s paranoia about Trotsky influenced the outcome of the war. Stalin believed anyone accepting Trotsky’s beliefs was an enemy, and a large number of the Communists fighting with the Republicans belonged to Trotsky’s “Worker’s Party of Marxist Unity” (POUM in Spanish initials). The fact that Trotsky eventually repudiated his support for the POUM didn’t stop the Stalinist Communists from imprisoning or executing members of that group. The Spanish Communist Party (PCE) devoted at least as much energy to murdering people they decided were POUM members as they did to fighting the Nationalists. The Anarchists also fell out of favor, and thousands of them were killed. The impact of Stalin’s paranoia didn’t end with the POUM and the Anarchists. Early in the war he had sent 700 military advisors to serve the dual role of taking over command of the Republican army and providing intelligence to the Soviets while being paid by Spain. Few of those advisors had survived Stalin’s purges by the end of the war in 1939. The only consolation for Soviet military personnel sent to Spain might have been that it wouldn’t have been safe for them in Russia either. The Soviet high command lost 90 percent of its leaders and 70 percent of the total officer corps to Stalin’s purges. There was a quote in Pravda that “…cleaning up Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist elements (in Spain) will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR.” Continue reading →

On Your High Horse

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Charles Earle Funk’s book, “A Hog on Ice & Other Curious Expressions,” attributes the expression to royalty or other dignitaries being mounted on the heavy charger horses used in battle or tournaments. The term was first recorded in the fourteenth century, and referred to a person selecting a large horse for a pageant as evidence of their high rank. The expression remains, and means someone is pretentiously and arrogantly demonstrating superiority.

The Spanish Civil War, An Illustrated Chronicle, 1936-39

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I intend to do reviews of three books (of the estimated 15,000) on this subject, and this book by Paul Preston leans heavily to Republican (mostly Communist) side and against the Franco Nationalists (Fascists). (Note that I did not find the book on Amazon, but there it is available at Abe Books.) The author writes, “…there is little sympathy here for the Spanish right, but I hope there is some understanding.” The book is liberally sprinkled with words such as “bourgeoisie,” the French word defined by Marxists as the social class which exploits workers and “proletariat,” the workers. The second review will be about the Soviet manipulation of those opposing Franco that, in my opinion, resulted in emptying the Spanish treasury and victory by Franco’s forces. The final review will be about George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia.” Orwell fought as a soldier in the trenches of the Trotsky Communist army, and the book gives an excellent insight into the miserable life of the soldiers and the complicated agglomeration of factions involved in the war.

One common thread in the books and articles I’ve read, regardless of point of view, is that Spain was used as a training ground for World War II. The armies of Germany and Italy on the Nationalist side and the Soviets on the Republican side used the conflict to test their equipment and train their military people under conditions of war. The German Condor Legion firebombed the almost completely military-free Basque town of Guernica to test their planes and train their pilots in dive-bombing during the 3-4 hour bombardment that destroyed the town. Ironically, the allies later used the same firebombing techniques to destroy the German city of Dresden, which also was a not a military center.

There were several years of political strife that led to the war. The book has a couple of chapters about the unrest in the country. The economy had decayed into a desperate depression, and the workers and peasants had little to lose. A strike by miners brought action by the military, and the conflict spread quickly. The allegiances within the two sides were complex. Simplistically, the Republican side consisted of several Communist, Socialist, and Anarchist organizations. The Nationalist side controlled most of the Spanish military and represented the Falangists (fascists), middle class, landowners, and Catholic Church. It was a brutal war, and thousands of people were tortured and executed by both sides. The Nationalists killed people suspected of supporting the Republicans. The Republicans destroyed Catholic Churches and executed priests, factory owners, landlords, and public officials. Continue reading →

Bootleg

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Urbandictionary.com defines the term to mean alcohol illegally made, sold, or transported. Several sources describe that the term originated with cowboys concealing a bottle of liquor in their tall boots. There was a show titled “Whiskey” on the History channel that had an example of a different method of “bootlegging” alcohol in the Prohibition era. Bottles were made with a rounded back, which allowed then to be strapped onto women’s legs and concealed under their long and billowing dresses.