UNNECCESSARY WARS, Henry Reynolds

UNNECESSARY WARS

HENRY REYNOLDS

Newsouth, 2016, 266 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Australia’s first war (the Boer War in South Africa, 1899-1902), notes the historian, Henry Reynolds, in Unnecessary Wars, was intimately bound up with the uniting of the six Australian colonies into a single nation within the British empire.  This conjunction of militarism, nationalism and imperialism was ominous and Australia has never broken the habit of being at the military beck and call of its imperial managers.

 

War, says Reynolds, has become “the central and defining national experience” of Australian society.  For 58 of the last 76 years, Australia has been involved in war, whilst the national obsession with all things military, especially the endless, government-sponsored commemoration of past wars, “normalises war”, making it easier to get involved in every new one.

 

Australia’s pre-Boer-War military expeditions followed Britain into the Sudan and China but did not involve all six colonies and resulted in no real combat experience, and were thus found wanting as occasions for a national-military ‘coming-of-age’.  Both outings did, however, set a precedent of unquestioning Australian involvement in imperial wars.  The Boer War strengthened this tradition.

 

The war was Britain’s fight against two small Dutch republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) with the aim of annexing them (especially their gold mines) to the British empire.  It was “an imperial war of conquest” with all the brutal baggage which that concept entails.

 

Conveniently far away and vigorously censored, “the horrors of battle and the brutalisation of the Afrikaner civilian population” were hidden from Australians at home, as was the role of the Australian troops in Britain’s scorched earth war strategy.  Forty towns were razed and 30,000 farms destroyed, whilst Boer women, children and the elderly were detained in concentration camps – over-crowded and starved tent cities where 28,000 civilian Boers perished (22,000 of them children) along with 14,000 of their African servants and labourers.  One in five of the total Boer population was wiped out.  Australian soldiers took part in the general pillage and destruction, dragged the Boers onto wagon trains for transportation to the camps, and authored their own war crimes and atrocities.

 

Britain’s need to project military power meant that war was a constant companion to empire – “Britain was fighting somewhere in the world almost every year during the second half of the 19^th century”.  War would automatically involve its colonial assets as suppliers of soldiers to defend Britain’s global reach.  In turn, war would politically and culturally bind the dominions to empire in blood sacrifice.  The Boer War was Australia’s loyalist blood oath - Arthur Conan Doyle (the British Sherlock Holmes author) enthusiastically wrote that ‘on the plains of South Africa … the blood brotherhood of the Empire was sealed’.

 

The Boer War served as “martial grooming” of Britain’s colonies which was to fully mature a decade later in the human abattoir of 1914-18.  The murderous scale of the first World War relegated its South African predecessor (with its paltry ‘sacrifice’ of 600 Australian soldiers) to the shadows but the Boer War has recently been fully readmitted into the approved Australian militarist narrative.  Australia’s Boer War troops have been given the required propaganda treatment, morally cleansing their direct involvement in incarcerating and terrorising Boer civilians, and burning and looting their farms.  Australia’s Boer War soldiers have been officially elevated to the rank of ‘Fathers of the Anzacs’ and formally enrolled in the religiously venerated ‘cult of the digger’.

 

Subsequent Australian wars have been likewise sanitised and depoliticised.  Elite and popular attention is focused on how the Australian soldiers fight (heroically, yet compassionately, ‘punching above their weight’) and not why they fight (stealing land, markets and resources).  Not up for polite discussion is Australia’s auxiliary role in fighting the unnecessary wars of ‘our powerful friends’ against countries which pose no territorial threat to Australia against people we don’t know in places we can’t find on a map.  Australia’s fortunate continental remoteness and size have been recast as “liabilities not strategic advantages” and neutrality or ‘homeland defence’ have never been considered as official options to war.

 

War is seen as so “natural and inescapable” that contemporary Australian governments find it easy to go to war despite its costs, legality and morality.  There is, however, an honourable tradition of anti-militarist dissent that has accompanied every war, from the Boer War on.  Reynolds’ book is a worthy part of the resistance to the khaki tide.

INK IN HER VEINS: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer by SYLVIA MARTIN

INK IN HER VEINS: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer

SYLVIA MARTIN

University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016, 328 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

In 1939, a young Australian woman grabbed the international headlines when she threw red paint from a thermos flask onto the doorsteps of 10 Downing Street, whilst distributing leaflets hidden in copies of the Ladies Home Journal, to protest the blood that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had on his hands for selling out Spain and Czechoslovakia to European fascism.

 

Aileen Palmer was fined five shillings for her dissent but worse was to come for her rebellious ways, as the University of Tasmania’s Sylvia Martin discusses in her biography of the anti-fascist, communist, poet and lesbian.

 

The daughter of the prominent, left-wing Australian literature figures, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Aileen joined the Communist Party of Australia in the early 1930s, spurred by Depression-era economic crisis, fascism and war.

 

Palmer was in Barcelona as a translator for the upcoming Olimpiada Popular (‘the People’s Olympics’), organised by Spain’s left-wing Popular Front government to counter the forthcoming Nazi Olympics in Berlin in 1936, when the fascists’ assault in Spain abruptly cancelled the proletarian games.  Joining the volunteer International Brigades as an interpreter for the British Medical Aid Unit, Palmer put her political convictions, linguistic skills (fluent Spanish, French, German) and youthful drive at the service of the Spanish Republic against the Franco/Hitler/Mussolini military attack.

 

The up-close pain and death that came to her with each lorry-load of bodies was a harsh initiation into adulthood for the teenage Palmer.  Between savage offensives, however, time dragged and tempers frayed in the personality-chafing, close proximity of her medical team.  Class tensions (working class ambulance mechanics versus Cambridge-trained doctors) and political tensions (Communist versus non-Communist volunteers) exacerbated the difficulties.  Yet Palmer always regarded Spain as the political highlight of her life.

 

Although her return to Australia after the second world war saw Palmer continue her political and literary activism (against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War), she was increasingly blighted by mental health problems.

 

Post-traumatic stress disorder from her war experience (‘the unbearable noise within’ her head, as a sympathetic sister poet put it) combined with bipolar disorder to create manic-depressive mood-swings and psychotic episodes.  This pot was kept brewing by the “tangled web of the Palmer family’s emotional dynamics” in which Palmer felt “submerged resentment” towards her parents, who under-valued their daughter’s chosen art form of the poem.

 

To further compound her psychological distress, Palmer’s lesbianism remained clandestine, deemed by contemporary social mores “to be sick or unnatural”, making her sexuality feel distasteful even to herself.  Palmer’s ‘shock treatments’ (including Electro-Convulsive Therapy) involved harrowing convulsions, coma and memory loss, and often made her mental state worse rather than better.

 

Palmer died in 1988 in a psychiatric nursing home, aged 73.  There were no obituaries, no tributes.  Sylvia Martin’s book (although overly-reliant on heavy chunks of Palmer’s diary) puts this to rights for Aileen Palmer, socialist and ‘poet of conscience’.

NAZIS IN OUR MIDST: German-Australians, Internment and the Second World War by DAVID HENDERSON

NAZIS IN OUR MIDST: German-Australians, Internment and the Second World War

DAVID HENDERSON

Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016, 197 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Australia’s then conservative Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, said that it would be “absurd to intern refugees and anti-fascists when they were on the Allies’ side” but, writes La Trobe University historian, David Henderson, in his case-study history, Nazis in our Midst, this is exactly what happened in Australia during World War 11 as German Jews and anti-Nazis were detained along with Nazis in Australia’s five internment camps.  Most of the 1,500 German-Australian internees were the innocent victims of racial prejudice or espionage hysteria simply because they were German.

 

Military intelligence justified blanket internment because they saw refugees as ‘excellent cover for agents’ or as susceptible to blackmail by Hitler’s Nazi regime threatening their relatives in Germany.  The Australian press was vigorously pro-internment - ‘this is no time for squeamishness in dealing with foreigners in our midst’, honked the Hobart Mercury, for example.

 

Both the Menzies and Labor governments used broad internment powers to respond to a public sentiment that had reanimated latent World War 1 Germanophobia with paranoia about Nazi fifth columnists.  In this toxic atmosphere, the wildest denunciations about disloyalty were treated by the security agencies as good coin, including gossip, rumour, personal animosities, conflicts between neighbours, professional rivalries, even a fondness for German music composers.

 

Appeals tribunals offered scant scope for remedy.  These quasi-judicial bodies had a legal veneer but the hearings were held in secret, specific allegations by (mostly anonymous) informants were not disclosed and could therefore not be tested under the usual rules of evidence, a presumption of guilt applied to the internee, and judges could only make non-enforceable recommendations to the Attorney-General for an internee’s release.

 

The appeals process was “at best an unequal struggle, at worst a sham”, says Henderson, noting the discrepancy between a war ostensibly fought for liberty, democracy and the rule of law versus the legal-face-saving travesties of justice that accompanied internment.

 

The outcomes for those unjustly interned (years of monotony, morning roll calls, weather extremes, overcrowding, social stigma and long-term “damage, trauma and loss”) were vastly disproportionate to any actual domestic Nazi threat.  There were fewer than a couple of hundred full-blown German Nazis in Australia, whilst any nationalist hankering for Germany amongst Anglicised German immigrants was largely sentimental nostalgia.

 

No matter how diligently the Auslandsorganisation (the foreign arm of the German Nazi party) cultivated recruits from Germans living in Australia, their returns were meagre.  The Nazis’ takeover of Australia’s German Clubs (including celebrations of the Führer’s birthday and Hitler’s beer-hall putsch, swastika flag-flying and Nazi salutes) yielded few political gains amongst the Club membership, although the visible display of Nazi rituals and propaganda mistakenly fed suspicions amongst Australian authorities that German-Australian communities were “outposts of the Third Reich”.  They weren’t.  No German-Australian internee was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage, whilst only 77 internees were deported after the war.

 

Henderson generally strives for non-committal ‘balance’ in his treatment of internment but he does bloody his knuckles against historians who suggest that the Australian security agencies’ obsession with the Red Menace rather than fascism led to a rushed implementation of dragnet internment of Nazis which also netted the innocent.

 

Henderson’s message is clear - beware governments who grant themselves broad, sweeping powers and ask us to trust that they will not abuse them, he says.  The political temptation to be seen to be doing something muscular at the time of a ‘national security’ crisis will almost certainly result in harmful overreaction.

THE DIRTY GAME: Uncovering the Scandal at FIFA by ANDREW JENNINGS

THE DIRTY GAME: Uncovering the Scandal at FIFA

ANDREW JENNINGS

Arrow Books, 2016, 305 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

In 2014, the unravelling of the empire of Sepp Blatter, the multi-millionaire president of world football, began.  Blatter fretted as he presided over that year’s Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) Congress in Brazil as the corrupt, money-flushed bribe-takers and expense fraudsters from the world’s national and regional football associations, flanked by mounted police, fought their way through protesters who were angrily chanting ‘we want schools and hospitals FIFA-style’.  The next year, eight of Blatter’s thieving peers from the FIFA elite (its Executive Committee) were arrested by police, and Blatter, himself, was forced to announce his impending retirement.

 

How had it come to this?  In The Dirty Game, the British investigative reporter, Andrew Jennings, hangs out FIFA’s dirty laundry.  Jennings played a crucial role in the crumbling of FIFA’s criminal enterprise by providing confidential FIFA documents to the FBI identifying corrupt FIFA officials.

 

Jennings locates the rise of FIFA corruption to 1974, when the head of Brazilian football, João Havelange, the darling of South America’s many military dictators and a bit-player in Brazil’s organised crime network, was elected FIFA president, funding his vote-buying through pilfering $6 million from the Brazilian Federation for Sport which he headed and treated as his personal ATM.

 

Blatter became understudy (FIFA General Secretary) to Havelange and, when he succeeded Havelange as president in 1998, he applied his master’s lessons, such as the power to sign, with no counter-signature, FIFA cheques to himself, to family, to friends and to those needing to be bribed.

 

As big corporate money moved in on global football and its centrepiece World Cup, the scope for major corruption expanded and opened up lush pastures for Blatter and his acolytes to graze on, including fraudulent travel and accommodation expenses, black market rackets with World Cup tickets, and a host of tasty perks and fringe benefits.

 

Their biggest revenue stream, however, was bribery - expensive gifts, suitcases of cash, brown bags stuffed with dollars, cheques made out ‘pay to bearer’ - for their votes on World Cup hosting, sponsorship and broadcasting rights.  All monies received were hidden in FIFA’s “opaque financial reports” and, of course, laundered through their off-shore, tax-haven accounts.

 

There are many corrupt fingers in the corporate-fattened FIFA financial pie but special mention must be made of two master FIFA crooks, Jack Warner and Chuck Blazer.

 

The World Cup self-enrichment of the Trinidadian, Warner (president of CONCACAF, the Central and North American regional football federation), was extensive, including his theft from Australian taxpayers for their 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids which was “in a class of its own”, says Jennings.  Warner wangled a cheque for $462,200 from Football Federation Australia for an ‘upgrade’ to his bogus ‘Centre of Excellence’, purportedly established for Caribbean soccer development but which was, in reality, an expensive leisure and entertainment complex, built and run by thieving $30 million from FIFA and CONCACAF.

 

Warner also took bribes from Blatter to fund his Caribbean business and political interests in return for the three dozen votes he controlled from the region’s micro-states shoring up Blatter’s re-election prospects.

 

The American, Chuck Blazer (CONCACAF’s General Secretary), trousered over $400 million of FIFA and CONCACAF money by automatically garnisheeing 10%  of all CONCACAF television and marketing revenues, supplemented through unspecified ‘commissions’ and ‘monthly fees’.  This financed every dollar of Blazer’s lavish living costs, including luxury apartment rent ($18,000 a month) in Trump Tower in New York.

 

It was Blazer who, when tumbled by the FBI, pulled the plug on FIFA.  A grotesque glutton, Blazer feared, more than anything else, a diet of jail food for the rest of his life, and he sang like Pavarotti, turning informer on dozens of his FIFA cronies.

 

Facing his own come-uppance is Blatter, whose secret salary, expenses and bonuses of around $4 million a year came courtesy of his vast powers of patronage, dispensed through multi-million dollar football ‘development grants’, World Cup ticket boondoggles and the provision of tasty freebies and generous bonuses to the global FIFA crime family to buy their loyalty.  The FIFA fish rots from the head.

 

Jennings’ book focuses on the detailed forensics of how a dogged journalist uncovered FIFA corruption rather than developing a broad analysis of the money culture of FIFA but Jennings deserves praise for his patient pursuit of the corporate exploiters and the financial bloodsuckers from the world’s soccer bureaucracies who engorge themselves off the people's game.

PARTY ANIMALS: My Family and Other Communists by DAVID AARONOVITCH

PARTY ANIMALS: My Family and Other Communists

DAVID AARONOVITCH,

Jonathan Cape, 2015, 309 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Party Animals, a memoir by David Aaronovitch, columnist with Britain’s establishment newspaper, The Times, seems, at first blush, to be a critical but sympathetic account of the lives of the socialists, including Aaronovitch and his parents, in the post-war Communist Party of Great Britain.  In Part Two of his book, however, Aaronovitch warms to the role of bitter ex-Communist and gives us the “real story” of what he sees as a monstrous, self-deluding ideology.

 

David’s father, Sam, a poor, atheist Jew, became a Communist in 1934 to combat poverty and fascism, and spent 25 years as a leading Party official.  Soap-box, loudhailer and self-education were his tools of choice, and, by all accounts, he was “charming, inspiring, a great teacher, a wonderful public speaker …”.  David’s mother, Lavender, from an upper class family, was likewise a tireless Party stalwart.  Whatever their illusions in the Soviet Union, Sam and Lavender were not ridgy-didge Stalinists – they were, rather, “people who cared about the downtrodden and the oppressed” and they devoted their lives to building a better world.

 

David Aaronovitch followed in his parents’ politically-outsized footsteps, as did many other baby-boomer ‘red diaper babies’ (in the fifties, “a third of the membership of the Party still had parents who were Communists”).  Despite regretting some “eccentricities” (no Beano comics because the publisher was non-union), Aaronovitch concludes that his Party upbringing was “not a poor heritage, but an oddly rich one”. 

 

Now, however, Aaronovitch is older and wiser and he unpicks the “comfortable assumptions” he held in his younger years about his parents and their politics.  Like a recovering alcoholic fervently severing all ties to the demon drink, Aaronovitch, the recovering Marxist, renounces his socialist addiction, discovering that strikes are awful, that his father led a campaign to censor lurid and violent US comics, that the Party harboured spies, and that it is a slippery slope between Stalin and a hypothetical British communist government which would eagerly “sentence dissidents to slave labour in the Welsh salt mines”.

 

Rather than openly tub-thump his neo-conservative/neo-liberal epiphany, however, Aaronovitch seeks to explain his political volte-face through the mysteries of “the psyche” as they played out in his family’s relationship pathologies and traumas.  Sam’s energetic adultery made his real family dysfunctional, says Aaronovitch, and it explains Sam and Lavender’s steadfast commitment to their substitute, idealised ‘family’, the Party, despite all its communist wickedness.

 

Aaronovitch’s rejection of his parents’ transgressions of infidelity and wilfully blind party loyalty accounts, he says, for his rightwards political trajectory.  Thus does Aaronovitch rationalise his anti-socialist spittle-flecked, ‘God-That-Failed’ anger as caused by psychology, not his political choice to go the full Thatcher.  In Party Animals, we get discount psychoanalysis not measured political analysis.

DARK MONEY: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right JANE MAYER

DARK MONEY: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

JANE MAYER

Doubleday, 2016, 449 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Like ‘dark matter’ (the vast amount of invisible mass which holds the cosmos together), “dark money” is the astronomical quantity of hidden corporate money which holds the conservative US political universe together.  This is the conclusion to be drawn from the meticulously documented book by Jane Mayer, investigative journalist at The New Yorker, on how America’s richest capitalists buy Republican Party politicians and shape their policies.

 

At the core of this corporate political power are two billionaire industrialist brothers, Charles and David Koch, whose combined personal fortune of around $90 billion is the largest on the planet.  The Kochs’ wealth exerts a strong gravitational force on some four hundred other ferociously-rich Americans, pooling their wealth in a Koch-run network that seeks to radically remake US politics in the cause of ultra-free-market extremism.

 

The Koch brothers’ wealth owed everything (namely, a $300 million inheritance each) to their father, Fred Koch, who made his fortune in the 1930s in the Soviet Union (powering Stalin’s brutal ‘rapid industrialisation’) and in Nazi Germany (fuelling Hitler’s war machine) with oil refineries that used his invention of an improved process for refining crude oil.

 

As his choice of international business clients would suggest, dictatorial control also defined Fred Koch’s domestic child-raising regime.  His sons claim that their authoritarian upbringing accounted for their embrace of the political philosophy of ‘libertarianism’, the absolutist rejection of state intervention, particularly taxation and government regulation, in private life.

 

That their libertarianism was merely an intellectual mask for corporate self-interest became obvious when David Koch, winning just 1% of the popular vote as the Libertarian Party’s Vice-Presidential candidate in 1980, and his elder brother decided that the 1% that really mattered politically was to be found elsewhere, amongst their capitalist peers.

 

As the fossil-fuel-based Koch Industries grew to what is now the second largest (and biggest polluting) private, family-owned company in the US, the Kochs waged war against ‘big government’ through slashing corporate taxes, extinguishing environmental protections and tearing up the welfare safety net.

 

Their particular innovation was to maximise the political purchasing power of their fellow billionaires, who gather at the Kochs’ six-monthly, invitation-only ‘donor summits’ held under intense secrecy and tight security.  These are the “invisible rich”, says Mayer, subject to miniscule public disclosure obligations, whose much-prized anonymity allows them to launder their political bribes through the Koch organisation which exerts an “outsize influence over American politics”.

 

Their combined financial clout is dedicated to pushing American conservative political culture, and its centrist neighbour, ever more rightwards, through donations to (overwhelmingly Republican) politicians, the hiring of lobbyists, and the ‘philanthropic’ funding of ostensibly independent but tightly-controlled ‘educational’ foundations, think-tanks and university institutes. 

 

The Koch-driven expansion and masking of dark money has been aided by Koch-initiated court cases in 2010 which abolished all caps on political funding and restricted public accountability.  The American political system is more than ever “awash in unlimited, untraceable cash”, says Mayer.  The Koch political funding model is the cash-stuffed ‘brown envelope’ on steroids.

 

The Koch network’s national political apparatus is as big as the Republican Party’s, and its aggregated $889 million pledged for the 2016 election cycle rivals the $1 billion election budget of both the Republicans and Democrats.  The tentacles of the ‘Kochtopus’ reach far and deep, ensnaring Republican politicians at Presidential, Senate, House and state levels.

 

Donald Trump, the billionaire 2016 Republican presidential nominee, appears, however, to have eluded the Koch grasp.  Mayer notes that Trump’s wealth means he “can afford to ignore the Koch billions”.  Mayer, however, does not further explore the Trump-Koch relationship and what it tells us about the disconnect between the Republican Party’s Koch-aligned elite and its rank-and-file (and their populist mascot, Trump), a deepening political rift between the rich and the rest that also plays out in the Democratic Party and in wider society.

 

Trump was the only Republican Presidential hopeful the Kochs did not invite to their summit auditions because he is too moderate for the Kochs’ liking, especially on taxation, free trade agreements, cheap immigrant and overseas labour, government welfare for the needy, and foreign policy.  Trump appeals to blue-collar workers whose jobs are threatened by the neo-liberal, globalisation agenda that the Kochs promote.  Part of Trump’s success with his white working class supporters is due to the perception that he is not in the pocket of what he calls the ‘donor class’ - Trump had dismissed his Republican nominee-contenders as Koch ‘puppets’.

 

Has Trump trumped the Kochs?  Not quite.  Some of Trump’s senior campaign personnel are veterans of the Koch machine, and, whilst Trump may have been able to largely finance his own donor-free race in the primaries, a Trump-led Republican Party will covet the resources of the Koch network for the much more expensive and sophisticated full election.  There are also significant policy overlaps between Trump and the Kochs, including global warming denialism and opposition to raising the minimum wage, where Trump does not need to be bribed.

 

Conventional politicians in bourgeois parliamentary democracies are in hock to their moneyed  masters.  Corporate wealth - whether Trump’s self-financed billions, or Hillary Clinton’s $275,000 Wall Street speeches, or routine corporate political donations, or the Kochs’ subterranean ‘dark money’ - corrupts democracy by buying political influence and control on behalf of the super-rich few.

SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS: Americans in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

ADAM HOCHSCHILD

Macmillan, 2016, 438 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

The Spanish people were too darn democratic for their own good in 1936.  For not only did they elect a centrist-leftwing national government, they also experimented with revolutionary democracy, taking control of farms, factories and offices as well.

 

General, Francisco Franco, who launched a military counter-revolution, was not the only one to spot the danger of the daring Spanish flirtation with socialism.  Franco’s backers, Mussolini and Hitler, were also alert, the fascists providing weapons, submarines, planes, pilots.

 

As Adam Hochschild recounts in his history of American involvement in the Spanish Civil War, the outcome, and the innumerable horrors of the world war that were to follow, could all have been so different, if more leaders of the bourgeois democracies had shown the same spirit of the 2,800 Americans who volunteered to cross an ocean and fight for the Spanish Republic.

 

Like the forty thousand other volunteers from fifty countries who comprised the International Brigades, the Americans in the ‘Abraham Lincoln battalion’ were under-armed, under-resourced, under-trained and under-fed.  They were over-exposed as shock troops of the resistance, suffering an exceptionally high mortality rate of one in four.  Two hundred died just getting to Spain from France, crossing the frigid Pyrenees at night.

 

The prototypical American volunteer was a New Yorker, worker, trade unionist, and communist.  The Communist Party link brought the benefits of discipline, coordination and centralisation to disjointed militias.  The communist brigaders put winning the war ahead of making revolution – even the leftwing but anti-communist British writer and volunteer, George Orwell, who initially believed that to counterpose war and revolution was a false choice, was later critical of the ‘revolutionary purism’ of some militias when ‘the one thing that mattered was to win the war’ in a backs-to-the-wall struggle for survival of the Republic.

 

The communist dimension, however, came at a cost.  In return for military aid from the Soviet Union, Stalin’s agents, paranoid about Trotskyists and other anti-Stalinist leftists, took control of the Spanish government’s internal security apparatus.  Socialist dissenters were killed by Stalinist heresy-hunters in street fighting and in prisons.  Hochschild concludes, however, that although the Stalinist-instigated civil war within the Civil War was humanly wasteful, politically damaging and militarily unhelpful, it was not the fatal factor in the defeat of the Republic.

 

This was provided by the politicians and corporate executives in Washington.  Because Franco couldn’t pay up-front cash for the oil necessary to wage his fascist-backed war (Spain’s gold reserves were held by the Republican government), and because Germany and Italy had to import most of their oil, the fuel for the fascist armed forces came courtesy of Texas, sold to Franco on credit, by American corporate oil giants, including Texaco, Shell and Standard Oil.  Also joining in the profitable overseas business opportunity were General Motors, Studebaker and Ford (trucks), and Firestone (tyres), which they sold to Berlin and Rome. 

 

Texaco’s global network of ports also supplied maritime intelligence services to Franco.  The information they provided on oil shipments to Republican Spain allowed the identification of potential naval targets for fascist pilots and submarine captains (29 oil tankers bound for Republican Spain were sunk).

 

Roosevelt’s Democratic federal government in the US facilitated the Francoist-fascist war against Republican Spain by letting this corporate aid proceed unhindered, whilst both the Democrat and Republican  parties, fearful about Spain’s socialist revolution becoming contagious, supported a crippling ‘non-intervention’ policy – a 1937 resolution in both houses of parliament prohibiting military assistance to Spain steamed through by 491 votes to 1, dooming the Republic.

 

Hochschild is quietly outraged by Spain’s bourgeois deserters and capitalist aides in America, and is highly sympathetic to the Republic’s international volunteers.  He is, however, sceptical of their socialist ambitions.  Albeit courageous and idealistic, the communist volunteers’ political aims were “illusory”, he says.  The socialist flowering of cooperatives, land worked in common and worker-controlled factories was always an “impractical and romantic dream”, even in peacetime, he adds.

 

Hochschild’s specialty is not socialist advocacy but narrative historical journalism, focusing on stories of the personal (romance amongst the bullets) and the military (heroic stands, chaotic retreats, the everyday drudgeries of soldiering).  Within these limits, his book excels in providing a vivid account of the lived experience of the Spanish Civil War.

 

The last surviving American volunteer, Delmer Berg, died in February, 2016, aged one hundred.  Before signing up, he was a dishwasher.  What the world still needs is more dishwashers and fewer oil executives.