UNLIKELY HEROES: The Extraordinary Story of the Britons Who Fought for Spain by RICHARD BAXELL

UNLIKELY HEROES: The Extraordinary Story of the Britons Who Fought for Spain
RICHARD BAXELL
Aurum Press, 2014,  531 pages, $24.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The defiant red and black flags, the proud trade union banners, the clenched fists, the full-throated slogans (No Pasaran! No Pasaran!), the spine-quivering singing of The Internationale – these drove the waves of emotion in Spain amongst the 2,500 British volunteers who came to the military defence of the Spanish Republic against General Franco’s fascists in the late 1930s, writes the London School of Economics’ Richard Baxell in Unlikely Warriors.  The Britons, although they and democratic Spain were to lose the Spanish Civil War, would never lose the memory of this electrifying solidarity.

The English-speaking volunteers from Britain, Ireland and Commonwealth countries (including over fifty from Australia) comprised the 15^th International Brigade from amongst the 35,000 overseas volunteers from 53 countries.

Most of the Britons were anti-fascists who had waged a “muscular response” to Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in England.  They would now do, in Spain, what their anti-communist governments, adopting the policy that the Spanish Republic was ‘better dead than red’, would not.

Unlike the early wave of literary intellectuals and other “radical romantics and middle class Marxists” in spontaneously-formed militias, the Brigaders were organised by the Communist International (the Moscow-led global network of national communist parties), around three-quarters being members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.  Most were working class men (and the occasional woman – the first British volunteer to be killed in battle was the sculptor, Felicia Browne).

The communist foundation of the International Brigades has allowed Cold War polemicists to argue that the Brigades were simply a political instrument for Stalin to pursue a satellite Spanish dictatorship behind an anti-fascist façade.

Whilst the Brigades’ political leadership certainly kept a watch on dissidents and rival leftist forces, the British Brigaders did not share in the responsibility for the Stalinist bastardry, so brutally illustrated in the suppression of the anarchists and the radical Partido de Unificacion Marxista (POUM) in the 1936 Catalan uprising.  There were no executions of Britons for political disobedience, a leniency extended to deserters whose harshest punishment was being sentenced to digging trenches or latrines, the comparatively mild disciplinary reactions of a “desperate army in a bitter struggle for its very survival”.  If the war was lost through military indiscipline, concludes Baxell,  then no revolution could be won.

The Stalinist “civil war within the Civil War” was tragically unhelpful at best, although Baxell notes that the Spanish Republic was to be defeated, not by Stalin’s terror, but by the “utterly farcical”  non-intervention agreement signed by 28 countries, including fascist Italy and Nazi Germany which blatantly supplied weapons and soldiers to their Francoist ally.  This one-sided pact left the Spanish Republic out-numbered, out-gunned and out-financed, doomed in the face of the ferociously effective, elite military forces of Franco’s Army of Africa from France’s Moroccan colony. 

Nevertheless, the political fervour and suicidal bravery of the Brigaders served to delay the end until they were withdrawn in 1938 by a besieged Spanish government in a vain attempt to mediate a peace with Franco through obtaining international assistance by expelling the illegal overseas fighters.  The International Brigades not only made a difference, they were different in that, as a British ambulance driver put it, ‘it was their war, they were fighting for their interests, unlike soldiers in large imperialist wars’.

As a work of academic scholarship, Unlikely Warriors is more than sound, and more than ethically decent in its not-uncritical empathy with the sometimes-shades-of-Stalinist-grey cause and personnel of thirties’ anti-fascism.

Baxell does not gloss over brute military reality (the wretchedness of life as a soldier) and he acknowledges that all was not battlefield heroism (incompetence and individual weakness fray the edges of the anti-fascist epic) or working class harmony (the Irish decamped en bloc from their ‘British’ comrades to the American battalion).  Baxell also examines the grudgingly-tolerated affront to the volunteers’ egalitarian political idealism offered by a traditional, non-democratic army (the Brigades were part of the Spanish Republican Army). 

Unlikely Warriors is, however, primarily a work of oral history, and in this it excels by giving vivid, moving and honest voice to those who upended, and too often ended, their own lives in their attempt to save millions of others’ from fascism.

KLAUS FUCHS (Mike Rossiter) and KIM PHILBY (Ben Macintyre)

THE SPY WHO CHANGED THE WORLD: Klaus Fuchs and the Secrets of the Nuclear Bomb
MIKE ROSSITER
Headline, 2014, 344 pages, $xx.yy (pb)

A SPY AMONG FRIENDS: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

BEN MACINTYRE
Bloomsbury, 2014, 352 pages, $xx.yy (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Klaus Fuchs has had a very bad press because the refugee German physicist who was at the heart of the war-time British and American nuclear bomb projects also passed on all their secrets to Stalin’s Soviet Union.  There is, however, more to Fuchs than his depiction by conservative Cold Warriors as a reprehensible traitor, as can be gleaned from Mike Rossiter’s biography.

Fuchs came of political age during the rise of Nazism when he joined the German Communist Party (KPD) as the only effective resistance force to Hitler.  A fearless activist, Fuchs was once attacked by Hitler’s street thugs outside Keil University and thrown in a river, losing some teeth during the assault.

After Hitler’s power-grab, the KPD leadership sent their highly valuable young scientist to safety in Britain with a dual career as nuclear scientist and Soviet spy.  MI5, Britain’s domestic secret police, was unaware of Fuchs’ covert role and waved aside what they assessed as Fuchs’ ‘slight security risk’ for the sake of Britain’s greater nuclear good.   

A decrypted Soviet spy message, however, trained their gaze on Fuchs in 1949.  The evidence was scanty, vague and circumstantial, and, as MI5 would not want to reveal in court that it had cracked the Soviet’s secret espionage code, Fuchs would almost certainly have escaped prosecution.

Under gentlemanly interrogation by MI5, however, Fuchs volunteered a confession.  He may have developed doubts about the Soviet Union, and he was concerned about his colleagues, friends and family getting dangerously caught up in his MI5 investigation, but the inducement of immunity from prosecution, which was beyond MI5’s powers, in return for a confession was crucial.

Fuchs’ illegally obtained confession should have been ruled inadmissible as evidence in court but with Lord Chief Justice Goddard hearing the case, there was no way this rank conservative would obey legal niceties.  Nor was Goddard moved by the fact that Fuchs also effectively spied for Britain, his phenomenal memory transporting highly classified American nuclear weapons know-how, jealously-guarded from even US allies, back to Britain.

Washington, says Rossiter, knew that its nuclear weapons dominance “gave a significant advantage to the country that possessed it” in terms of geo-political power and it was not just the Soviet Union but also Britain which believed, as Labour’s Foreign Secretary put it, that ‘we could not afford to acquiesce in an American monopoly’ of the atomic bomb.

Tricked into a confession, Fuchs got fourteen years and served nine for good behaviour before returning to East Germany, becoming that neo-Stalinist state’s most senior nuclear physicist where he died in 1988, the year that also saw the death, in Moscow, of Kim Philby, another Soviet spy and as reflexively vilified, including by his latest biographer, Ben Macintyre. 

Like Fuchs, Philby moved from moderate laborist politics to communism in the 1930s after witnessing the brutality of fascism in Berlin.  An underground communist activist in quasi-fascist Austria, Philby returned to London and Cambridge University where his impeccable upper-crust family credentials made him a perfect choice for Soviet intelligence which was scouting for well-connected students at elite universities with good career prospects who could blend invisibly into the British establishment.

Reinvented under the guise of a keen young fascist and anti-communist, a role Philby found ‘deeply repulsive’ but compensated for by the romantic thrill of espionage, he joined MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, eventually rising to head up MI6’s anti-Soviet intelligence operations.

From this position, all activities of MI6, and of the CIA courtesy of “long boozy lunches” with the CIA head in Washington, found their way to the Soviet Union which Philby never wavered from seeing as the embodiment of his left-wing political values, despite Stalin’s Show Trials and deadly purges, including the liquidation of Philby’s early, cultured and still idealistic Soviet ‘handlers’.

For Philby, his spying meant helping to foil the West’s Cold War ‘roll-back’ strategy which centred on MI6 and CIA operations to destabilise the strong national communist movements in France, Italy and Greece, to repress anti-imperialist liberation struggles in Latin and Central America, South America and Asia, and to foment insurrection behind the Iron Curtain.

When exposure loomed for Philby, he, too, like Fuchs, was offered immunity from prosecution in return for a confession but, unlike in Fuchs’ case, leading MI6 officers wanted to avoid what would have been a massive, and career-ruining, spy scandal and they did nothing to prevent his midnight flit to Moscow in 1963.

Philby’s services to Soviet intelligence had meant the deaths of those he fingered – the armed anti-communist insurgents in Georgia, Armenia, the Ukraine and other Soviet satellites; a would-be Soviet defector bearing the names of those spying for the Soviet Union in the West; and anti-Nazi but right-wing, anti-communist Catholic resistance activists in Hitler’s Germany.

Whilst Macintyre vents unalloyed disgust at Philby’s regret-free “killing for the communist cause”, he fails to summon such moral outrage for Britain’s war-time execution of Nazi spies (also a result of Philby’s ‘legitimate’ spy job), nor for the Western spy agencies’ vastly more numerous Cold War toll of peasants, workers, Catholic nuns and others in the developing world.  For Macintyre, some causes (such as “combating the communist menace”) apparently justify guilt-exempt, spy-induced murder.

Top-heavy on the what and how of spying (codewords, clandestine rendezvous, etc.) both books are underweight on the why (motives and principles) of Fuchs and Philby whose guilt is posed only at the level of breaching official secrets and treason laws.  True political guilt, however belongs to Stalin who was guilty of misleading the likes of Fuchs and Philby into a blind belief that Russia under the counter-revolutionary tyrant was socialist and therefore worth spying for.

In the spy’s micro-universe, Fuchs and Philby were isolated from public engagement as socialist activists working for a democratic, egalitarian and war-free world.  These were the revolutionary ideals that Fuchs and Philby started out with and for which, despite their misguided strategy, they remain guilty – and proudly so.

NO PLACE TO HIDE: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State
GLENN GREENWALD
Hamish Hamilton, 2014, 259 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide is not just a thrilling account of the journalist’s “cloak-and-dagger” encounter with National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, but a clinical and impassioned analysis of the danger posed by America’s vast surveillance state.

Greenwald, no tech-head, nearly blew his opportunity for the dramatic scoop because of his dilatoriness in installing a computer encryption program for communication with Snowden until guided mouse-click by mouse-click by the latter.  Only then, in 2013, was the six-decade history of near-invisibility of the NSA, the world’s largest intelligence agency, ready to be definitively breached.

A high-school dropout (intellectually unchallenged by the curriculum) and a US Army discard (ethically challenged by the invasion of Iraq), Snowden’s native computer intelligence saw him swiftly advance from CIA security guard to information technology specialist and then to high-level cyber-spy pulling in $200,000 a year in the NSA.

The faith of this spy-with-a-conscience that President Obama would honour his pledge to reform national security abuses and lead ‘the most transparent administration in history’ was extinguished, however, when Snowden found that the NSA’s powers were being expanded, its mission upgraded, as he told Greenwald, to build ‘a system whose goal was the elimination of all privacy, globally’.  If the President wouldn’t act, then, Snowden concluded, he himself would have to.

The thousands of NSA documents Snowden leaked to Greenwald exposed lie after official lie.  NSA officials had repeatedly said they would not spy on innocent citizens but, with mathematical exactitude down to the last electronic tap of Internet servers, communications satellites, underwater fibre-optic cables, telephone systems and personal computers, the documents showed the NSA eavesdropping on billions of communications by millions of US and global citizens (97 billion emails and 124 billion phone calls globally in just the one month of May in 2013, for example).

This massive data trawl was enabled by the NSA’s corporate ‘partners’ (Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Gmail, Hotmail, Skype, YouTube), as the “richest and most powerful telecommunications providers in the country knowingly committed tens of millions of felonies” in providing the NSA with access to their users’ private data.  Those other theoretical devotees of individual freedom and liberty, the ‘democracies’ of America’s lapdog allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), were also eager collaborators with the NSA.

More hypocrisies were revealed by the leaked documents.  Washington, which had been furiously denouncing China for its penetration of the US telecommunications market with hardware allegedly implanted with surveillance devices, was itself using the NSA to intercept American Internet hardware being exported from the US and physically installing spyware – one NSA document crowed that this ‘signals intelligence tradecraft ... is very hands-on (literally!)’.

The documents also punctured the flimsy cover for the NSA’s mass surveillance – the “threat of terrorism”.  The most productive spying was actually global economic and diplomatic espionage on behalf of NSA ‘customers’ such as the US trade, agriculture, treasury, commerce and state departments.  Thwarting terror “is clearly a pretext”, says Greenwald, especially when official reviews have shown that conventional, and more democratically answerable, policing is much better at preventing terrorist incidents than the NSA which is yet to trouble the ‘War on Terror’ scorekeeper.

Even if the NSA were effective at its stated, anti-terrorist, job, there is less chance, notes Greenwald, of being killed in a terrorist attack than being struck by lightning, which makes the mass population surveillance and huge expense (domestic homeland security spending has increased by US$1 trillion since 9/11) a grossly irrational response to a terrorist possibility that has been exaggerated for interests that are political (watching dissidents, winding back civil liberties, diversion from domestic political unpopularity) and vested (commercial surveillance industries).

Essential to keeping the ‘national security’ panic inflated is the establishment media, says Greenwald, an unsparing critic of such media’s “excessive closeness to government, reverence for the institutions of the national security state, and routine exclusion of dissenting voices”.  Briefly dazzled by the glittering new story revealed by the NSA leaks, many journalists turned a long-forgotten sceptical eye on the NSA but quickly reminded themselves of where their political values and corporate paychecks lay and reverted to form as “loyal servants to the government” whilst predictably rounding on the whistle-blower and his conduit.

The tame media downplayed the substantive issues of NSA spying in favour of personalising the story and psychologising political dissent.  Snowden was portrayed as a strange coot, Greenwald discredited as an obsessive with a damning past including the heinous crime of having a dog over the weight limit allowed in his condominium apartment.  Media stars joined right-wing politicians in calling for the criminal indictment of both men as traitors. 

Greenwald’s journalist credentials were denied, his media peers labelling him a mere blogger, a reprehensible ‘activist’.  The inflammatory stoking of terrorist dread, and the concomitant cheerleading for a strong government not too prissy about democratic niceties, by the tabloid ink-slingers is, in their universe, not activism of course whilst the national security reporting of the more ‘professional’, ‘objective’ reporters, the “the opinion-less, colour-less, soul-less” journalists as Greenwald calls them, neuters the impact of critical stories with a ‘balance’ that treats the official government voice with uncritical deference.  Both species of journalist are “a threat to nobody powerful” which ensures their access to, and membership of, the political elite.

By depicting Snowden and Greenwald as weird deviants, the establishment media reinforce the message that “obedience to authority is implicitly deemed the natural state” whilst those who radically, and actively, depart from the political norm are unnatural.  Remain boring and you will be safe, runs the political sedative - only bad people with something to hide should fear NSA surveillance.  Limitless spying, however, is certain to be abused, says Greenwald, with the historical surveillance record crammed with targets overwhelmingly drawn from left and progressive dissidents, and from whatever marginalised population subgroup is ripe for vilification.

With an unaccountable NSA, Washington set up a “one-way mirror” in which “the US government sees what everyone else in the world does … while no one sees its own actions”.  It takes the life-altering courage of rebels like Snowden, and committed journalists like Greenwald, to shatter this mirror - ‘I have’, said Snowden, ‘been to the darkest corners of government and what they fear is light’.

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COLD WAR, DADDY? Curthoys & Damousi

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COLD WAR, DADDY? Personal Stories From a Troubled Time
ANN CURTHOYS & JOY DAMOUSI (eds)
NewSouth, 2014, 297 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The Cold War (1946 - 1991) affected everything, so how did the conflict between the capitalist West and the Soviet East play out at the personal level, ask Ann Curthoys and Joy Damousi (History professors at Sydney and Melbourne universities) in What Did You Do In The Cold War, Daddy?  The book’s contributors try to recreate how their families experienced the Cold War in Australia.

Patrick Stalin Brislan (fortunately, this classical musician’s middle initial now stands for Sean) was the wartime son of a father who was, not surprisingly, a Communist Party of Australia (CPA) organiser, and he recalls the trouble his middle name threatened on top of the “personal physical violence” he already received from his school peers.

George Zangalis, of Greek anti-fascist familial origins, found support as a migrant worker in the CPA  as he encountered double Cold War jeopardy, being told by a police officer when arrested as a CPA election candidate in Victoria in 1973 that ‘What’s worse than a commo bastard is a dago commo bastard’.

John Docker (culture academic) remembers the struggle between doctrinal purity and friendship as political rifts split the Old Left, including his own arguments over the New Left with his father, Ted, a founding member of the CPA.

Children of both the expelled and the expellers sense an emotionally fraught atmosphere in a party which was often enough the author of its own misfortunes because of its slavish adherence to a Moscow-imposed party line.

The temperature was cooler over at the Australian Labor Party (ALP).  Rodney Cavalier (party ‘machine operative’) was the son of an ‘unthinking Liberal’ and was unmoved by the sixties in university until, in 1968, he joined the ALP, not the  students who were ripping up Parisian cobblestones and capitalist verities.  ‘Never attracted to Marxism’, he found the serenity of often inquorate but career-smoothing ALP branch meetings more comforting.

For the ALP more broadly, the Cold War meant the wary and stumbling choreography between its Right and ‘Left’ factions, and the CPA, for union influence in the face of ‘The Movement’, B. A. Santamaria’s visceral anti-communist, anti-Labor, Catholic organisation.  The political manifestation of ‘The Movement’ was the Democratic Labor Party which housed Peter Manning (ABC and commercial journalist), from a conservative Catholic family, during his time at Sydney University, and it took many years for him to see that, at least on the Vietnam War, it might be better to be red than dead.

With Professor Martin Krygier, the historically sloppy and politically lazy equating of the left (all shades) with Stalinist authoritarianism is on display as he inherited the stale anti-communist formula which justified the switch of his father, Richard, from Polish socialist to leading Australian anti-communist and founder of the CIA-funded magazine, Quadrant.

For conservatives like the Krygiers, the Cold War was always about the class war, no matter how they dressed it up as a fight between tyranny and ‘liberal democracy’.   Stalin’s gulags and ‘the God that failed’ were only ever excuses for the reactionary social policies, intellectual conformity and ‘free enterprise’ economy that were their true religion.

Few contributors, alas, meet the, admittedly difficult, brief of the book’s editors.  As young children, informed political awareness of the Cold War was not possible so their contributions rarely bring off a successful merger of history with memoir, anecdote with analysis.

Nevertheless, their chapters can be productively compared to show that, for all its self-inflicted faults, the historical communist left in Australia, and not the Cold War Right, were on the truly right side, the side of the exploited and oppressed many, not the powerful and wealthy few.  The Cold War may be over but the class war goes on.