King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has announced plans to organize an "interfaith conference" among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He invites "representatives of all the monotheistic religions to meet with their brothers in faith" in Saudi Arabia, in order to foster "respect among the religions."

King Abdullah's initiative is excellent and extremely positive. A conference of openKing Abdullah and sincere dialogue between representatives of the three Abrahamic traditions can only be a step forward. My only concern is that the diversity of Islamic opinion be fully represented, but indications from the Saudi kingdom are that King Abdullah recognizes the negative impact of Wahhabism, Deobandism, and other fundamentalist sects on the future of Islam. I hope that Jewish and Christian representatives will participate in such a conference with confidence in their own revelations, and will not give way to "politically correct" accommodations with Wahhabism.

Jewish and Christian representatives should understand that mainstream Islamic tradition respects the People of the Book and expects their teachers and other advocates to present their viewpoint in a learned and insightful manner, and not to engage in nonsensical rhetoric intended to improve relations with the Muslims by offering empty compliments. Jews and Christians who meet with and enter into dialogue with Muslims should do so from a position of self-respect, not of self-abasement. I hope and expect that Muslims at such an event will conduct themselves similarly.

[Editor's note: Earlier today, a mass anti-American and anti-Kosovar protest broke out in Belgrade. Protesters set fire to the US embassy.]

Now that Kosovo has declared independence and returned to the center of world news, it is instructive, if also astonishing, to see how the lies propagated by theUS embassy torched: Serbians protest Kosovo independence fascist Milosevic regime and its Serbian imperialist predecessors have been recycled and have even become widely accepted, anew, by global media. Serbs have yet again manifested their uncanny capacity to reinvent themselves as victims where they have acted as murderous criminals.

Let us examine the 10 most commonly-heard Serbian lies about Kosovo. The truth about each of these spurious claims can be easily confirmed.

1. Lie: “Kosovar Albanians are all Muslims.” Truth: Kosovar Albanians, like Albanians in general, include a significant Catholic community. There are Catholic churches in almost every major Kosovo town. Historically, Catholics were in the forefront of Albanian resistance to Serbian aggression. Catholics were therefore among the most significant victims of Serbian terrorism in 1998-99. The single worst Serbian atrocity against Kosovar Albanians mainly took the lives of Catholics: this was the massacre at Korenica on April 27, 1999, in which 377 people were killed, including infants.
2. Lie: “Kosovar Muslims are Islamists.” Truth: Kosovar Muslims despise radical Islam. Although Saudi Arabia maintains a relief office in Prishtina, and built a small number of mosques in Kosovo, their presence is resented. Kosovars disliked the Saudi Wahhabis, who defaced cemeteries on the argument that grave markers are idols, and who sought to replace historic Ottoman and modern Albanian mosques, which are also built in the Ottoman style, with new, Gulf-style mosques. More than a third of the mosques in the republic were completely destroyed by the Serbs.
3. Lie: “The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was aligned with Al-Qaida.” Truth: Unlike the army of the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina, the KLA did not permit foreign Muslims to join its ranks. The KLA was founded on a national struggle, rather than defense of a religious-based identity. The KLAScene from a Bosnian death camp included Catholic commanders and many Sufis (since, as Bernard Lewis has pointed out, Sufis are peaceful but not pacifist) as well as numerous non-religious people Also, radical Muslims outside the Albanian lands may have contributed money to the relief of Kosovo, but they played no role in the struggle of the KLA. This is one of the most bizarre Serb lies because no evidence of Arab or Islamist involvement with the KLA was sustained in mainstream media during the Kosovo intervention; the lie emerged, writ large, long after the war.
4. Lie: “Kosovar Muslims hate Orthodox Christians.” Truth: Albanians include some 20 percent believers in the Albanian Orthodox Church, which was founded as an autocephalous (religiously-autonomous) entity in the United States, against Greek Orthodox opposition. Its head was an outstanding Albanian patriot named Theofan Stilian Noli (1882-1965). Perhaps the greatest 20th century Albanian poet was Lasgush Poradeci (1899-1987), who came from an Orthodox family. Another renowned and popular poet was Millosh Gjergj Nikolla (Migjeni – 1872-1924), born of a Slav Orthodox family but author of verse in Albanian, and the first modernist writer in the language.
5. Lie: “Kosovo is the ‘Serb heartland.’ ” Truth: The Serb heartland in the Balkans was located in Raska, north of Kosovo. Serbia today speaks a variant of the South Slavic language originating in Vojvodina, which is relatively far to the north of Kosovo, and was part of Hungary until 1918.
6. Lie: “Serbs built the Orthodox monasteries in Kosovo.” Truth: The origin of most of the Orthodox monasteries remains unclear; they may have been established by Albanian, Byzantine, Romanian (Vlach), Macedonian, or Bulgarian Orthodox Christians. A wall fresco in the famous monastery at Peja in Kosovo portrays the Orthodox St. Sava in the company of Albanian believers, identifiable by their distinctive white felt hats, or plisat. The likeliest theory is that the monasteries were built by Bulgarians, who ruled Kosovo in the 9th and 10th centuries. The first council of Christian bishops from the west Balkan region of Dioclea, which was centered in today’s Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, met in 1199 in Antivari (Tivat), and was totally Albanian in composition, without Slav participation.
7. Lie: “Serbs fought the Ottoman Turks for centuries.” Truth: After the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, Turkish Sultan Bayazet I married a Serbian princess, Despina, and Serbia became a Turkish ally. Serbia did not rebel against the Ottomans until 1804.
8. Lie: “Serbs saved Jews in World War II.” Truth: Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, was officially designated “the first judenrein city in Europe” by the Serbian pro-Nazi regime of Gen. Milan Nedic. Statistics published by theUnmarked graves from the massacres in Kosovo Federation of Jewish Communities in then-Yugoslavia, in 1989, showed the highest rate of liquidation of Jews in Banat, ruled by Serb collaborationists (93 percent killed) and Serbia proper (88 percent killed). The lowest rate of genocide of Jews was in Albanian-ruled Kosovo (38 percent killed). Albania itself, which drew many Jewish refugees from Central Europe, did not turn a single Jew over to the Nazis; it was the only Axis-occupied nation to come out of the war with more Jews than lived on its soil before the conflict began. The role of Albanians as Righteous Gentiles was recently recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Heroes’ and Martyrs’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. Most of the Albanians who saved Jews were Muslim. The figure for Jewish deaths in Kosovo during the Holocaust has recently been challenged. The disclosure of the original German roster of individuals deported to death camps from Kosovo, as well as other documents, preserved by Sinan Shabani, former director of the Albanian National Archives, and distributed by Claire Lavoine, a disinterested Frenchwoman of high ethics, is of exceptional importance. These sources show that no more than 40 Jews or offspring of mixed marriages were deported by the Nazis from Kosovo. That figure would render a Jewish liquidation rate of only eight percent.
9. Lie: “Albanians became a majority by immigrating to Kosovo after World War II, and now seek a union with other Albanian-speaking territories in a Greater Albania.” Truth: The first Yugoslav census, taken in 1921, showed an overwhelming Albanian majority in Kosovo, even though they were systematically undercounted. Kosovo and Albania proper have much less in common than foreigners think. Kosovars speak the northern variant of Albanian, known as Gheg. Albanians in south and central Albania speak another variant, Tosk. Although Kosovo is still poor, thanks to the obstructionist policies of the United Nations on privatization and other issues, it has a higher standard of living than Albania. Kosovo has removed the remnants of Communism from its political life, while there has yet to be a reform of the judiciary and other institutions in Albania, aside from the holding of free elections and a proliferation of mediocre, politically-corrupt newspapers. No serious political leader in either country calls for a Greater Albania.
10. Lie: “Kosovo is a center of Albanian drug-smuggling.” Truth: Kosovo is the most heavily-policed region in Europe. Serbs and their supporters who make this charge cannot cite indictments, trials, or sentences, much less any other serious data about alleged drug-dealing in Kosovo, aside from an occasional petty seizure of marijuana. The republic’s foreign supervisors have no incentive to ignore such activities, if they existed.
    

Kosovar Albanians are not stupid or crazy. They owe their freedom to U.S.-led intervention and they will not forget it. They are entrepreneurial, moral, traditional people who are anxious to take their place as a responsible European nation. The U.S. has been correct in supporting the freedom of Kosovars, who will repay American help honorably and fully.

[Note: This post is Stephen Schwartz's take on an ongoing Jewcy debate between Jamie Kirchick and Ali Eteraz about the legitimacy of the term "Islamofascism." Read Kirchick's original post; Eteraz's reply to it; Kirchick's second post; Eteraz's reply to it.]

I claim to have originated the term “Islamofascist” as a description of present-day jihadists. “Islamofascism” was previously used, most notably, by the British scholar Malise Ruthven to denote Arab dictatorships, i.e. in a completely different context. Writing from Washington in The Spectator (London), a week after the atrocities of September 11, 2001, I intended to compare Al-Qaida with the threat of the Axis to the democracies during the 1930s, and the need to unite against the terrorists. I presumed that a common front would bring leftists and liberals together with conservatives, as it did in America in 1941, but leftists and liberals did not figure prominently in my thinking. The concept was not specifically aimed at leftists and liberals, and thus my own discourse about Islamofascism did not comprise an appeal to the left.

Rather, my formulation had emerged from my discussions with Muslims in America, in the Balkans, and by e-mail around the world, about Saudi-financed Wahhabism. These Muslims referred to the Wahhabis as “fascists in religious disguise.” Any consideration of leftists and liberals in discussing Wahhabis as Islamofascists was a secondary, if not a purely unconscious aspect of my thought process. The Muslims I then knew disliked leftist politics, and I was mainly concerned with Muslims.

In writing my book The Two Faces of Islam, however, I tried to develop the theory of Islamofascism in political and sociological terms. Last year, at TCSDaily.com, as reposted at the Weekly Standard website, I published a text titled “What is Islamofascism?” There I argued, “Political typologies should make distinctions, rather than confusing them, and Islamofascism is neither a loose nor an improvised concept. It should be employed sparingly and precisely. [Radical Islamist] movements should be treated as Islamofascist, first, because of their congruence with the defining characteristics of classic fascism, especially in its most historically-significant form – German National Socialism.”

Further on, I wrote, “Islamofascism [like Nazism] pursues its aims through the willful, arbitrary, and gratuitous disruption of global society, either by terrorist conspiracies or by violation of peace between states. Al-Qaida has recourse to the former weapon; Hezbollah, in assaulting northern Israel, used the latter. These are not acts of protest, but calculated strategies for political advantage through undiluted violence…

“Fascism rested, from the economic perspective, on resentful middle classes, frustrated in their aspirations and anxious about loss of their position. The Italian middle class was insecure in its social status; the German middle class was completely devastated by the defeat of the country in the First World War. Both became irrational with rage at their economic difficulties; this passionate and uncontrolled fury was channeled and exploited by the acolytes of Mussolini and Hitler. Al-Qaida is based in sections of the Saudi, Pakistani, and Egyptian middle classes fearful, in the Saudi case, of losing their unstable hold on prosperity – in Pakistan and Egypt, they are angry at the many obstacles, in state and society, to their ambitions. The constituency of Hezbollah is similar: the growing Lebanese Shia middle class, which believes itself to be the victim of discrimination.

“Fascism was imperialistic; it demanded expansion of the German and Italian spheres of influence. Islamofascism has similar ambitions; the Wahhabis and their Pakistani and Egyptian counterparts seek control over all Sunni Muslims in the world, while Hezbollah projects itself as an ally of Syria and Iran in establishing regional dominance.

“Fascism was totalitarian; i.e. it fostered a totalistic world view – a distinct social reality that separated its followers from normal society. Islamofascism parallels fascism by imposing a strict division between Muslims and alleged unbelievers. For Sunni radicals, the practice of takfir – declaring all Muslims who do not adhere to the doctrines of the Wahhabis, Pakistani Jama’atis, and the Muslim Brotherhood to be outside the Islamic global community or ummah – is one expression of Islamofascism. For Hezbollah, the posture of total rejectionism in Lebanese politics – opposing all politicians who might favor any political negotiation with Israel – serves the same purpose. Takfir, or ‘excommunication’ of ordinary Muslims, as well as Hezbollah’s Shia radicalism, are also important as indispensable, unifying psychological tools for the strengthening of such movements.

“Fascism was paramilitary; indeed, the Italian and German military elites were reluctant to accept the fascist parties’ ideological monopoly. Al-Qaida and Hezbollah are both paramilitary.

“I do not believe these characteristics are intrinsic to any element of the faith of Islam.”

I would add to this two supplemental notes. First, my method in analyzing Islamofascism was not original – it is derived from Trotsky’s writings on the menace of Nazism. But the influence of Trotsky as a historical and political thinker is not dependent on allegiance to socialism, much less Bolshevism.

Second, in response to a query from Christopher Hitchens, I would add that Wahhabism shares with German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese imperialism a theory of racial superiority – as every Muslim knows, Wahhabis believe that only Arabs are real Muslims, only Saudis are real Arabs, and only Najdis – from the desert region in which Wahhabism appeared – are real Saudis.

I emphasize that none of my commentary on this topic was or is directed to the left or aimed at influencing the left. The discussion of Islamofascism has, in effect, been hijacked by leftists, such that many who take up the matter now assume that given my Trotskyist background, and interest in Trotsky as a historical personality, the theory of Islamofascism was conceived as a political gambit to summon left-liberal support to the war on terror.

I was and remain indifferent to the views of leftists and liberals about Islamofascism because I have completely given up on the left and liberals in general as agents of positive change. I broke with the left openly in 1984 over Nicaragua, and their support for the Soviet-imperialist Sandinistas. Between then and now a series of other lessons in disaffection was reinforced for me by the American left. I was prominent in the Newspaper Guild, as I had previously been active in transportation unions, but watched as a labor organization dedicated to improved income, conditions, and job security was transformed into an ideological agency fixated on concentration of media ownership and other “progressive” issues. Politics has always been the death of effective trade-unionism, and there is no substantial labor movement in America today. In the absence of strong unions, there is no real left. Nor, of course, is there a basis for strong unions in the situation of industry, which has declined as an effect of the information revolution and rise of the world market. The unions have failed to grasp the challenge of organizing information workers or acting on a global level; rather, they have turned to the narcotic of protectionism. But none of these lacunae can be filled by the blandishments of leftist ideology, especially that sheltered in the Western academy.

My final loss of respect for the left and liberals came during the Yugoslav wars. I went to Bosnia-Hercegovina beginning in 1991, working (and living) there and in Kosovo during various periods from 1997 to 2001, and returning there repeatedly since 2003. I witnessed American and other foreign leftists siding with the Milosevic regime in its program of fascist aggression, and then observed the “politically-correct” policies imposed on the prostrated Balkan Muslim territories by the United Nations as well as representatives of the Clinton administration. UN and European Union administration, with American support, kept the murderous Serb terrorists in control of two-thirds of Bosnia and still deny independence to Kosovo, which is currently threatened by revived Serb violence. How can one consider “progressive” those who cannot tell the Bosnian and Albanian victims from the Serb aggressors? I also experienced the absurd process by which American liberals and social-democrats associated themselves with the bogus anti-Milosevic “revolution” in Serbia in 2000. I published a short meditation on that misadventure titled “Nausea,” but paraphrasing Camus rather than Sartre.

I could expatiate on this turn in modern political history, but that should wait for another time. I remain a defender of the oppressed, but I no longer believe at all in liberal clichés. The war in Iraq has reinforced my indifference to, and insistence on the irrelevance of, leftist and liberal rhetoric. As if these life-changing events were insufficient, I have lived to see a widespread propaganda emerge condemning democracy, in a vocabulary indistinguishable from that employed by the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s. Such nonsense has entered the American mainstream, along with unambiguous Jew-baiting directed against the neoconservatives, and both have been adopted with enthusiasm by the former left and liberals. Today’s true partisans of democracy are found more among the neoconservatives and traditional conservatives than among leftists and liberals.

It is therefore of little or no consequence to me whether leftists and liberals understand the threat of Islamofascism. More than ever, I am almost exclusively concerned with Muslim comprehension of the term, which has been badly misrepresented by Islamist demagogues.

Those who claim that “Islamofascism” is “offensive to Muslim Americans” are complicit in such deceptions. First, the category of “Muslim American” has been confected to transform a religious community, which should be referred to as “American Muslims,” comparable to “American Jews” or “American Christians,” into a presumptive ethnic community aggrieved about discrimination, like “African Americans.” (“Jewish Americans” is acceptable as a reference to those who define Jewishness ethnically, but American Muslims are not ethnically uniform, and nobody would refer to “Catholic-Americans” as if they were members a single culture. “Christian American,” in the past, was a euphemism employed by Jew-baiters and is a precedent Muslims should avoid.)

The only American Muslims offended by the term “Islamofascism” are those to whom it is best applied, i.e. the “Wahhabi lobby” centered on the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). On October 22, the first day of the Islamofascism Awareness Week organized by David Horowitz, 1,000 American Muslims assembled at the Saudi Embassy in Washington to protest “Wahhabi fascism.” They were obviously not offended by the identification of extremist Muslims as fascist. Nor, in the time immediately following 9/11, did one of America’s most strident and extreme Islamist preachers, Hamza Yusuf Hanson, anxious to reinvent himself as a moderate, refrain from telling the Guardian in London, “there are Muslim fascists.”

Perhaps predictably, I agree with Jamie Kirchick’s view that liberals and leftists are conditioned to denounce the term “Islamofascism,” rather than to analyze the Islamofascist phenomenon, out of a misplaced solidarity with Muslims. But I find Ali Eteraz’s response to Kirchick to be fantasy and nothing more. The claim that American academic institutions shelter those “leading the charge against theocracy, anti-semitism, fundamentalism, and disenfranchisement in the Muslim world” is exaggerated, to say the least. The few individuals he enumerates, laudable as they may be, are a tiny minority when compared with the army of apologists for radical Islam found in Middle East Studies departments on American campuses.
Further, I am not convinced that Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, Iranian dissidents Akbar Ganji and Haleh Esfandiari, Riffat Hassan, Amina Wadud (whose activities are ambiguous and distorted by Western media), Andullahi an-Naim, Rafia Zakaria, Laleh Bakhtiar, or Ziba Mir-Hosseini can all be accurately described as acolytes of the charlatan Edward Said. The diatribe titled Orientalism is not only incomprehensible but amazingly ignorant of Islam – Said even attacked Sufism. Frantz Fanon, whose work had nothing to do with Islam except that he was a guest of the Algerian revolutionaries, is forgotten. And what is the “post-colonial left” but another trivial invention of American academics? I have no reason to believe that any, much less all, of the mentioned figures reject the term “Islamofascism.”

But perhaps they do reject it. If so, so what? I and others, who in the anti-Wahhabi combat may be counted in the millions, do not reject it. Islamic pluralism means that we who love freedom may disagree with one another about theory, typology, and tactics, if we do not disagree in condemning the fascism represented by Saudi Wahhabism, Egyptian and Pakistani-Afghan radicalism, and the Iranian clique of Ahmedinejad. Although I have criticized some allies, and reserve the right to argue with others, we should not consider it more important to dispute with our associates in the battle against the extremists than to defeat the terrorists. But only a few leftists and liberals have so far proven their commitment to such a victory over Islamist violence.

Few hate Stalinism more than I, but I would never criticize Churchill and Roosevelt for their wartime alliance with the Muscovite monster. Various enemies of Islamofascism may anger us by their criticisms of what they perceive in Islam. But the Islamofascists want to kill us. While we keep our mouths wide open, yelling our disagreements with those also under terrorist attack, a sword is being sharpened for our necks. Let me add that one of the speakers at the aforementioned October 22 Muslim rally against Wahhabi fascism, the Saudi dissident Ali Al-Ahmed, lives in the U.S., but has been threatened with beheading on a Saudi website.

I believe Islamofascism will be defeated by Saudi Sufis, Shias and other non-Wahhabi Muslims, who are pressing King Abdullah to break the official links between the Wahhabi clerics and the monarchy; anti-Wahhabis in other Gulf states; Iranian reformist intellectuals and Sufis; Iraqi Shia opponents of the Khomeinist state system in Iran, and Iraqi Sunni enemies of Al-Qaida; Algerians and Egyptians who survived Islamist terror; Balkan Sufis and traditional Hanafi Muslims confronting Wahhabi infiltrators; Turkish Alevis opposed to the Sunnicentric AK party regime; Sufis and traditionalists in West Africa, Sudan, Kurdistan, Central Asia, and southeast Asia, and the brave opponents of Wahhabis, other takfiris, and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Western help is crucial in this war, as in earlier wars against tyranny.

But few of these Muslim heroes have heard, or care about, Edward Said or his peers. Few people in the West, including self-important Muslim bloggers, know or care about them. Many are ordinary peasants, village clerics, and local shaykhs. Some are Shias well-versed in Western as well as Islamic philosophy. But they know what Islamofascism is because they have faced it, and their opinion counts most. The left and liberals long ago ceased to advocate for such people, and instead placed all their confidence in the Western academic elite, i.e in themselves and those who aspire to become like them. Academic leftists, yearning for the ‘60s, are as repellent as old rock stars; they are to politics what Mick Jagger is to pop music – pathetically believing they are immortal. I am sorry, but I do not eat that bread.

(Welcome, Stumblers!)

The Kingdom, still playing in major movie houses, may be the most important recent contribution to the public discussion of U.S.-Saudi relations. Surprisingly and even hearteningly for those who follow developments in the desert monarchy, the film begins with the “W” word – Wahhabi – referring to the ultrafundamentalist Sunni Muslim sect that provides ideological support for the Riyadh regime.

American media, guided by academic Middle East Studies experts, have assiduously evaded discussion of Wahhabism, its murderous career over the past 250 years of Islamic history, and its complicity in incitement, recruitment, and financing of terrorism in Iraq today. Western journalists, academics, and politicians have even chimed in with Saudi claims that Wahhabism does not exist – only Islam, or “Salafism,” an abuse of the Islamic vocabulary. Wahhabis call themselves “Salafis” for the same reason Stalinists called themselves “progressives;” because when they are open about their affiliations and goals, they are repudiated.

The Kingdom is directed by Peter Berg, better known as an actor, with co-production by cinema genius Michael Mann (my favorite of Mann’s earlier films is the 1995 classic Heat, with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, followed by Collateral in 2004.) Jamie Foxx, who costarred in Collateral, is the lead in The Kingdom, as an FBI agent who, by means best described as “direct action,” takes over investigation of a terrorist bombing at a compound for Westerners on Saudi territory.

The picture has flaws – some of its Arabic translations are inaccurate. It is more than a bit difficult to imagine an American investigative team charging through Wahhabiland in such an energetic fashion. But The Kingdom has all the basic facts about the Saudi environment right, beginning with its references to Wahhabism. It correctly identifies the Saudi website alsaha.com as a major jihadist communications outlet that uses up-to-date technology to support the terrorist offensive. And most important, it includes an oleaginous American diplomat (Jeremy Piven) as reluctant to offend the Saudi authorities, and the armed bodies of men protecting the Saudi order as mainly ambivalent about extremism, when not sympathetic to it.

The Kingdom is a classic action epic, about which it is superfluous to analyze plot and characterization. Bombs blast away and guns go off, blood splashes in all directions, Foxx is tough and resourceful, a female FBI special agent played by Jennifer Garner is almost as tough, and an apparently Jewish special agent (Jason Bateman), is briefly kidnapped and threatened with beheading in front of a jihadist videocam.

But even with its improbabilities and other shortcomings, right now The Kingdom has almost the character of a documentary reportage rather than a dramatic film. Last week, a few days after seeing it, I attended a Capitol Hill press conference on the Saudi state held by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) – and had the sense I was walking into a scene left out of the movie.
On Monday, October 22, a new anti-Wahhabi coalition of American Muslims (www.al-baqee.org) will hold a demonstration at the Royal Saudi Embassy in Washington, protesting against Wahhabi terrorism in Iraq, and condemning the support for such atrocities originating south of the Iraqi-Saudi border. I am scheduled to speak at the rally, and plan to end my remarks by exhorting all present to see The Kingdom and urge others to do the same. Non-Muslims can hardly imagine the liberating effect of the seeing the truth about Wahhabism on the big screen.

I would close with my only caveat about the film: its ending proposes, Hollywood-style, moral equivalence between the combatants on both sides of the terror war. But no parallel, much less an attitude of neutrality in the conflict with the Wahhabis, is acceptable. America seeks to protect innocent people and has become a powerful ally of those who advocate pluralism in Islam; Wahhabis murder and lie without restraint. The main Wahhabi lie is the claim that Riyadh, the Wahhabi capital, and the rest of Saudi territory, aside from the Hejaz region of west Arabia including the cities of Mecca and Medina, are holy Islamic territory. Riyadh and the Wahhabi hinterland of Najd are not and never were sacred to Muslims; Najd was cursed by the Prophet Muhammad himself as a source of “earthquakes, conflicts, and the horns of Satan.”

For non-Muslims who will not easily contend with the learning curve required to understand the much-evoked “battle for the soul of Islam,” as well as for Muslims thirsty for truth about the crisis in the global umma, The Kingdom is a welcome relief from polite dissimulation about Saudi Arabia.

* * *

ALSO IN JEWCY

Ali Eteraz on Saudi Arabia:

• The Quran I Hate, and the One I Love
• The Threat That Is Iran

Other Shvitz bloggers on Saudi Arabia:

• Challenging the Religious Police
• Jihadi Jonestown
• Fun with Pig and Ape
• Abdallah Will Be Joining Us Shortly, As Soon As He's Done Executing His Prisoner.

Stephen Suleyman Schwartz has covered the Saudi peninsula before in "The Walter Duranty of Saudi Arabia."

I was interested to read Joey Kurtzman’s critique of Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League, and their position on the resolution of the Armenian question in Turkish history.

Before turning to the Armenian-Turkish controversy, let me say that I agree with Kurtzman that Foxman has focused unproductively on an alleged threat to American Jews from believing Christians. It is true that some Christian activists slip into the long-established and repellent tropes of historic Jew-baiting (I dislike the unscientific and anachronistic term “anti-Semitism”), especially when dealing with “the new world order.” But nobody serious can argue that American Christians have been swept by “conversion fever” toward Jews. I have much greater concerns about increased Jew-baiting in the guise of criticism of the neoconservatives, a matter Foxman and ADL have ignored.

One poster, however, asserted that “Foxman has consistently ignored or worse, appeased actual, real and arguably much more dangerous examples of Muslim anti-Semitism here in the U.S.” As a moderate Muslim, I consider this statement partially incorrect. Abe Foxman cannot be accused of appeasing Muslim Jew-baiting. Indeed, I was alarmed not long ago when Foxman was alleged to have declared that ADL cannot undertake dialogue with moderate Muslims because there are no moderate Muslims.

Jew-baiting has long been a problem in the American Muslim community. It is time Muslims admitted the negative character of this phenomenon, mainly caused by the domination in American Islam of ethnic groups among which hatred of Jews has been cultivated by extremist ideologues. African-Americans, Arab-Americans, and Pakistani-Americans make up the overwhelming majority in American Islam. Many African-Americans bring hostility to Jews with them into Islam. Arabs have obviously been saturated with paranoia about Jews, and Pakistanis have come under the spell of Judeophobia thanks to the financial and other penetration of their native country, and its military and intelligence institutions, by Islamist radicals.

Nevertheless, there are more moderate Muslims willing to participate in serious dialogue with Jews and Israelis than is popularly believed. Another poster, replying to Kurtzman, defended Turkey as one of only three Muslim countries that maintain diplomatic relations with Israel – presumably referring to Jordan and Egypt as the other two. This is also inaccurate. Albania, Azerbaijan (a Shia Muslim country), Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzia, Mauritania, Senegal, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan all have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, and Qatar has never completely cut off its trade relations with Israel. Other Muslim countries, such as Morocco and Oman, have also maintained such back-channel links.

Some of these regimes, e.g. Uzbekistan, have bad human-rights records. But notwithstanding the unhelpful jibes of Sacha Baron Cohen, Kazakhstan, which has made measurable progress toward democratization, is also profoundly committed to Jewish-Muslim dialogue, and has hosted American Jewish religious and community leaders. Most important, Joey Kurtzman’s analysis of Foxman and ADL’s bad posture on Turkey and the Armenians is correct. The term “successful genocide” may be legitimately limited to the Jewish experience, since the Nazi liquidation of European Judaism was uniquely extensive. But it is clear that Turkey has failed to adequately account for its actions against the Armenians during the First World War. This is not a matter of an exclusively Armenian grievance.

Turkish secular Sunni Muslims, members of the Turkish and Kurdish Alevi Muslim minority (as many as 18 million people or 25 percent of the republic’s population, who hew to a fusion of Shia, Sufi, and pre-Islamic Turkish beliefs), other Orthodox Christians in Turkey, and the rest of the Kurds all have a stake in Turkish truth about the Armenians. That is because the Armenians stand for the fate of all religious and ethnic minorities that were submitted to compulsory Turkification by the republic’s government. Even the 500-year old Sephardic Jewish community was forced to adopt Turkish, rather than Judeo-Spanish, as its main medium of culture. The attempt to force all residents of the republic into a single Turkish identity has a complicated history. Suffice it to note here that while they have mainly been identified with Turkish secularism, the same chauvinist attitudes are supported by the Sunni-centric AKP party now in power in Ankara.

And that is the real problem. Turkey has used its relations with Israel and the situation of its Jewish community to blackmail American Jews into silence about the Armenians, to say nothing of the Alevis or Kurds. But Abdullah Gul, who had the arrogance to lobby American Jewish leaders to assist in continued suppression of the truth about the Armenian question, is an AKP Islamist whose party discriminates against all the aforementioned minorities. In addition, the AKP has allowed a dangerous anti-American rhetoric to grow in Turkey, complete with threats to invade Iraqi Kurdistan on the pretext of Kurdish nationalist radicalism. And if that were not enough, a Turkish popular literature proliferates, that is filled with anti-Jewish paranoia. Disreputable accusations had long been taught as history in Saudi Arabian schools: that the Turkish Sephardim, or descendants of those that became Muslim from among the followers of the false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, brought about the fall of the Ottoman caliphate. But such claims are now widely offered in Turkish bookshops.

It has often been said that the treatment of the Jews by a government is a standard by which to judge the civility, stability, and level of human dignity present in a country. By that gauge, Bosnia-Hercegovina is far ahead of some Christian as well as Muslim lands. But in Turkey, the Armenians play this role. The standing of the Armenian victims in Turkish history is the criterion for determining whether Turkey will become truly democratic as well as secular, will grant autonomy to its minorities, and will refrain from pursuing its Kurdophobic tendencies into a disastrous confrontation with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. American Jews cannot allow their international stature to be compromised by the demands of unreliable allies like Abdullah Gul and the AKP. That alone is an urgent reason to repudiate the unfortunate involvement of Foxman and ADL in Turkish-Armenian affairs.

I may be caricaturing myself by recommending a summer book that is a) hard to find, and b) obscure in subject matter.  Nevertheless: I recommend a search for a book called The Zohar in Muslim and Christian Spain, by Ariel Bension.   It can be encountered in the odd Judaica store or online at www.abebooks.com.  

This volume is unique: the only extended commentary by a 20th century Kabbalist on the relationship between Kabbalah and Sufism, i.e. Islamic spirituality, with especially interesting remarks on the greatest of all the Sufis, Muhyid’din Ibn ul-Arabi.   R. Bension goes further than either Gershom Scholem (who cited him), Moshe Idel, or any other modern Jewish scholar in this direction.   His book also illuminates the links between both Kabbalah and Sufism and Spanish Catholic mysticism.  The author was a Sephardi born in Jerusalem, and the first Sephardi from the Holy Land to study in modern European universities.  He was a rabbi in Manastir, one of the Sephardic and Sufi centers in the Balkans, where Jews frequented the Sufi assemblies of their Albanian and Turkish Muslim neighbors.  The book is extremely readable, and a good introduction to the Zohar.

In The Weekly Standard dated May 14, I published an article titled “The Balkan Front” in which I described my recent visit to Europe and discussions with Turkish, Kurdish, Albanian, and Bosnian Muslims about the resurgence of radical Islam in the eastern Mediterranean countries.

The story, its background, and its relevance became, in my view, imperative to Americans, with news of the arrest of six members of an alleged radical-Islamist conspiracy to attack U.S. service personnel at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The two ringleaders in the plot were Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, aged 22, from Jordan, and Serdar Tatar, 23, who was born in Turkey.

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Don't play it again, Eric: Hobsbawm masters the Stalinist conception of historyOrwell and the Spanish Civil War are all the rage again. Perhaps brought on by the fusion of fantasy and reality that was the international box office success Pan's Labyrinth, Western intellectuals have swooped down on the warmed-over carrion of Catalonia and waged the kind of factional combat over the historical truth and memory of that conflict that hasn't been seen since the Berlin Wall fell.

First, Anthony Daniels penned a notorious essay in the February issue of The New Criterion which claimed that in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell proved himself to be a totalitarian-minded socialist who -- and I'm not making this up -- made Joseph Stalin look like a "freedom-fighter."

March brought with it Auden's centennial, and the inevitable re-evaluation of the more contentious verses of this one-time Communist poet, especially the couplet from his gorgeous mosaic of word-pictures, "Spain," which runs: "To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder." Critics including Orwell have read these lines as a sinister endorsement of  killing when performed in the quest for social democracy -- even if it was suborned and then betrayed by the Comintern.

Lastly, the "Red don" of Cambridge, Eric Hobsbawm, recently offered to the Guardian this pathetic tribute to the conventional wisdom of 1936 about the fight against Iberian fascism.

Knowing that Jewcy contributor Stephen Schwartz is a leading expert on the Spanish Civil War, fluent in the Catalan tongue and culture, and that his scholarship has helped turn post-Soviet revisionism into the accepted narrative of how Catalonia was lost, I've asked him to submit a rebuttal to the Hobsbawm piece. Here it is.

--Michael Weiss

Dedicated to Jerry Mintz, friend, mentor, and historian of Hasidism and Anarchism (1930-1997)

The Anglo-German “historian” Eric Hobsbawm, an unrepentant defender of the political and pseudo-intellectual legacy of Stalinism, committed to print, in The Guardian of February 17, a banal but repellent rehash of long-discredited clichés about the Spanish civil war of 1936-39. The chief intent of this arrant falsification was to undermine the reputation of George Orwell and his classic Homage to Catalonia, and thus to rehabilitate the Soviet purge machine that contributed so dreadfully to the defeat of the embattled Spanish Republic.

Hobsbawm represents, at once, a reprehensible genre of poseurs on Spain and, in his inimitable fashion, a special case. In the first instance, Hobsbawm is but one among a vast assortment of commentators on the Spanish war who know little of the Spanish language, much less Catalan, which is the language of some of the most important historical documentation on the conflict. Their works are typically founded on secondary sources in English. This variety of fakers also reveals little comprehension or even superficial acquaintance with the basic historical issues leading to the war or the ideological foundations of the differing factions in the war. Worst of all, the Hobsbawm school on Spain demonstrates an uninterested arrogance with regard to the collective memory of the Spanish people in general, and the Catalan nation in particular, about the war.

Hobsbawm embodies a principle on which I and others have long written: the distinction that must be made between the war of 1936-39 as experienced by the Spanish people, and the parallel conflict fantasized by intellectuals of a leftist persuasion mainly (and now retrospectively) situated, to paraphrase Trotsky, in the Bronx of the Young Communist League. The two had and have nothing in common.

Anglo-American and Anglo-German authors scribble obsessively about the so-called International Brigades, regarding which they foster despicable lies; about the “heroic” role of the Spanish Communist Party, which before the war and after the restoration of democracy following Franco’s death was and remains repudiated by the majority of the Spanish left; and about various brands of second-hand gossip and what today would be called “sound-bite” pseudo-expertise.

This band of memory-murderers have never come to grips with the fundamental lie of Stalinist propaganda, which holds that the Republicans would have won the war if they had submitted to dictation from Moscow – a claim every educated Spanish individual knows to be absurd. The Hobsbawm con therefore works only outside Spain and among a handful of Spanish academics anxious to parade their knock-off versions of Anglo-American campus fashions.

POUM Man: George Orwell served with the anarchosyndicalist/Trotskyist militia in CataloniaThe Spanish people, fortunately, have memories resistant to fraud, and the majority of them long ago came to agree with the anti-Stalinist intellectual Joaquim Maurín, who argued that the Spanish war was lost precisely because it was perceived, toward its end, as a confrontation between Franco and Stalin rather than between Franco and the Spanish left. The Spanish would fight for their radical demands, articulated in the specific idiom of their traditions; they would not fight for Stalin. Tragically, they were forced into a situation in which they were neither right nor wrong, but were robbed of the power to make their own decisions.

Thus the Hobsbawmistas cannot grasp that the battle of historical memory was won long ago in Spain, by neither the Francoists nor the Stalinists, but by the indigenous revolutionary forces. These included the Catalan Republican Left party (Esquerra); the Spanish anarchosyndicalist unions (CNT), the largest and most militant radical labor movement in the world during the 1930s; the militant wing of the Spanish socialist party (PSOE); and the Catalanist anti-Stalinists of the Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista, or POUM, in the militia of which George Orwell served.

Hobsbawm first became prominent in the field of Spanish war studies with a contemptible exercise in pseudo-history included in a volume with the revealing title Primitive Rebels, issued in 1959. The text in question purported to examine the outlook of CNT militants in the uprising at Casas Viejas, a rural hamlet in Andalusia, in 1933.

Hobsbawm claimed to have perceived in the horrific Casas Viejas events – in which numbers of poor land workers and their relatives were shot down and burned alive by the “progressive” Republican state police known as Storm Troops (Guardia del Asalto) assisted by a handful of the detested Guardia Civil – a manifestation of “archaic,” millenarian, incoherent, pseudo-religious, and other ambiguous forms of social discontent. He based this “analysis” on a brief foray into field work during the Franco regime, 23 years after Casas Viejas occurred, The aim of the Stalinist luminary was obvious: to prove that the CNT, which was one of the most cultivated and articulate intellectual phenomena in global left-wing history, was a grab-bag of hallucinated cranks and deluded visionaries, inferior to the mighty Communist police network to which Hobsbawm remains sentimentally loyal.

The deceit employed by Hobsbawm in his discussion of Casas Viejas was so extensive and outrageous it would take a whole book to adequately expose it – and that task was, in fact, successfully undertaken by the late Jerome Mintz, an American ethnologist, in his most excellent 1982 volume The Anarchists of Casas Viejas. Mintz, with devastating accuracy, exposed Hobsbawm as a mendacious tourist in Spanish war topics, noting that notwithstanding the latter’s claim to have gone to the scene and interviewed local people, “his account is based primarily on a preconceived evolutionary model of political development rather than on data gathered in field research.” Mintz correctly states, “The model scales labor movements in accord with their progress toward mass parties and central authority… [Hobsbawm] explains how anarchosyndicalists were presumed to act rather than what actually took place… his evolutionary model misled him on virtually every point.”

Of course the Stalinist Hobsbawm despised the anarchosyndicalists; of course he did not comprehend that Casas Viejas was a moment in Spain’s march toward civil war comparable in notoriety to the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, and that he therefore trod on risky ground in improvising a version of it for consumption by gullible English-speakers. In Spain today Mintz’s work, based on extensive and serious research and interviews, enjoys high esteem, and in the international ethnological profession it has legitimately become a classic. (Full disclosure: my review of Mintz’s book was one of my first publications in Spanish, and appeared in the historic and admirable anarchist journal Orto, formerly known as Ideas, and forever associated with the anti-Stalinist tradition in Spanish historiography.)

Anti-Stalinist Anarchist: Francisco Sabate LlopartHobsbawm’s meretricious methodology on Spanish matters was not limited to his examination of the martyred poor of Casas Viejas. He went on to produce a despicable jumble regarding the Catalan anarchist Francisco Sabate Llopart (1915-60), a veteran anti-Stalinist who carried on an active armed struggle against the Franco regime until his murder, again by the hated Civil Guard along with members of the Catalan rural parapolice body, the Sometent. Hobsbawm’s assault on Sabate was published in another book with a revealing title, Bandits (1969). Of that effusion I will say little more than that the surviving comrades of Sabate were once my comrades; and on reading Hobsbawm’s stupidities on Sabate I was moved to hurl the book into a river, an act I do not regret.

It was therefore entirely predictable that Hobsbawm would take to the pages of the Guardian in 2007 to attack Orwell, the POUM, and the general legacy of the Spanish revolution. I will take his contemptible impostures point by point:

Hobsbawm begins by quoting two non-Spanish sources on the war: the French historian François Furet and the British filmmaker Ken Loach. He states “It was not, as the neoliberal François Furet argued it should have been, a war against both the ultra-right and the Comintern – a view shared, from a Trotskyist sectarian angle, by Ken Loach’s powerful film Land and Freedom (1995).” But the Spanish, I am glad to say, know better than Hobsbawm what happened; they understand that the war involved five main forces. On the right, the counter-revolutionary military and, outside the Basque country, traditionalist Catholics, were supported by a tiny fascist movement.

By contrast, three distinct trends appeared on the Republican side:

a) the Catalan Left, Basque nationalists, and other liberal bourgeois trends who wanted to carry out a Jacobin-style modernization;

b) the proletarian upsurge of the CNT, Socialists, and POUM;

c) the Stalinist conspiracy to create a one-party dictatorship.

Moscow tried to unite a) with c) to overcome b), but a) and b) had more in common with each other, and the attempt failed. Stalin, however, succeeded in effectively sabotaging the Republican defense; his discreet 1938 message to Hitler indicating Soviet willingness to withdraw support for the Republic was a crucial step.

Hobsbawm continues, with extraordinary condescension, “87 per cent of Americans favored the Republic… unlike in the second world war, the wrong side won. But it is largely due to the intellectuals, the artists and writers who mobilised so overwhelmingly in favour of the Republic, that in this instance history has not been written by the victors.” For the learned Anglo-German, the opinion of the ordinary Spanish people is nonexistent and irrelevant.

When Spanish voices are finally cited in Hobsbawm’s text, they are limited to the stock Anglo-American curriculum in Castilian poetry: “no doubt where the poets of the Spanish language - those who are now remembered - stood: García Lorca, the brothers Machado, Alberti, Miguel Hernández, Neruda, Vallejo, Guillén.”

La guerra es infierno: Picasso's GuernicaIn reality, Garcia Lorca was politically ambivalent, and although he was probably murdered for having written a poem titled “Ballad of the Civil Guard,” his death occurred very early in the war, and it is not impossible he would have sided with Franco’s Nationalists. Rafael Alberti, who was once a talented poet but sold himself to the Stalinists, is largely unread in Spanish today.

Neruda was a Stalinist agent and is highly overrated as a poet, mainly the object of devotion by teenagers in the Hispanic world and illiterates elsewhere. About “Guillén” one must indicate another Hobsbawmista gaffe: does he refer to the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén (1893-1984), who sided with the Republic but who was also a Catholic mystic, disliked the Communists intensely, and republished his work in Franco’s Spain, although he was in exile? Or, more likely, does he invoke the Castroite poetaster Nicolás Guillén (1902-89), who first became known by writing a poem to Stalin, then won a Stalin Prize in 1953, the year of the dictator’s demise, and is today unread except by gullible Anglophones?

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, as well as Georges Bernanos (1888-1948). With his talent for Stalinist elision, Hobsbawm neglects to mention that Bernanos was a man of the right who originally supported Franco but criticized the atrocities of the Nationalist forces. Hobsbawm was never much for nuance; I doubt he ever read a word of Bernanos. He also seems unaware that a fairly significant number of talented Spanish writers sided with Franco or were otherwise “fascist,” including Camilo José Cela (1916-2002), the 1989 Nobel laureate in literature, who was anything but conformist in his work or his demeanor.

It would be of little use to further cite most of them because to the foreign audience they would be mere ciphers. The Galician regionalist author Álvaro Cunqueiro (1911-81), another dissenter under Franco, and the Catalanist-fascist Josep Vicenç Foix (1894-1987), who discovered the art of Miró, Dalì, and Tàpies, and supported the Republic notwithstanding his ultrarightist views, come to mind. (I once read a truly idiotic academic work by an American professor who assumed that Foix’s poems, which made him a Catalan cultural hero of outstanding importance, were leftist when they were actually Catholic and counter-revolutionary. Dalì, of course, sided with Franco, and given that, as everyone in Spain today admits, he was one of the most devoted homosexual lovers of García Lorca, it is not impossible that his influence would have drawn the latter in the same direction.)

History to the Defeated: Orwell called Auden's "Spain" one of the "only decent things written about the Spanish war."Hobsbawm continues his memorial for revolutionary tourism in Spain by citing Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice, and the unfortunate John Cornford (1915-36). Hobsbawmista amnesia is again applied in the Cornford matter; Cornford served in a unit of the POUM, wrote eloquently in support of that party, and might well have been liquidated by the Communists had they gotten the chance.

Hobsbawm recalls, “Anyone entering the rooms of Cambridge socialist and communist students in those days was almost certain to find in them the photograph of John Cornford, intellectual, poet and leader of the student Communist Party, who had fallen in battle in Spain on his 21st birthday, in December 1936. Like the familiar photo of Che Guevara, it was a powerful, iconic image - but it was closer to us, and, standing on our mantelpieces, it was a daily reminder of what we were fighting for.” Yet again, the real Spain is distant, for the “iconic image” of John Cornford is largely unknown to those whose predecessors and surviving relatives, in their millions, underwent the horrors of the Spanish war.

And thus we arrive at the main point: Hobsbawm on Orwell and the POUM. 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.” By those standards, what are we to make of, say, Moby-Dick, which failed to sell out its first printing? Or Homer, who was really awkward, being blind? Or Fernando Pessoa, who some, myself included, consider among the greatest writers of the 20th century – but who also evinced qualities that would have made him unacceptable to Hobsbawm? Pessoa had almost no literary success during his lifetime and was a rightist in politics, but since Pessoa wrote in Portuguese, there is no reason Hobsbawm should take notice of him.

I have chosen to pass over Hobsbawm’s imbecilic comments on Italian literature (which boasted more than one talented and distinguished fascist), and to mention Borges in this context is mere provocation. As we all know, fascist views are unforgivable in writers, but Stalinism remains, to many politically-correct intellectuals, a badge of honor.

As to the POUM, it is in discussing this phenomenon that Hobsbawm reveals the extent of his obliviousness about the Spanish civil war. He refers with something approaching disdain to “the murder of its leader Andrés Nin [having] caused some international protest.” In reality, as is well-known in Spain today, protests over the brutal murder of Andreu Nin were commoner in Catalonia than outside Spain, and the Catalan Stalinists never overcame the ignominy the crime brought down upon them.

The POUM becomes the pretext for a summum of Hobsbawmian ignorance. He writes, “Polemics about the dissident Marxist Poum are irrelevant here and, given that party’s small size and marginal role in the civil war, barely significant. They belong to the history of ideological struggles within the international communist movement.” This last note is especially grating; having attempted to destroy the POUM’s reputation, Hobsbawm nonetheless want s to make a claim on it.

Martyr of the Noble Left: Andreu Nin, leader of the POUMAndreu Nin (1892-1937) was not simply a Catalan-born ex-Soviet official and leader of an anti-Stalinist party. He was also a respected Catalan-language journalist and the translator into Catalan of several major Russian works, including Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina. His versions of these classics are still widely known in Catalonia, and it is mainly because of them that his murder by the Stalinists has never been forgotten. Memorials to him have been placed in Barcelona and in his birthplace, El Vendrell.

Nin's assassination was the subject of a prime-time documentary, Operació Nikolai, shown on the Catalan channel TV3 in 1992 and now available in DVD. He was a lover of Mercè Rodoreda (1908-83), one of the most famous Catalan writers of the 20th century. In a dreadful example of what today would be called “collateral damage,” the outstanding Russian novelist Boris Pilnyak (1894-1938) was liquidated by Stalin’s police only because one of his lesser works, the 1930 novel The Volga Flows Into the Caspian, was translated into Catalan by the “Trotskyite” Nin, and Pilnyak had made the enormous mistake of keeping the letters Nin had sent him from Barcelona. To kill Nin was not the same as it would have been to murder, say, the American Trotskyist Max Shachtman, but would have been more like liquidating John Dos Passos – something the Stalinists in Spain would have been pleased to do.

The role of the POUM in Catalan history was never marginal, for several important reasons: it filled the Marxist political space in the region’s labor movement left open by the overwhelming domination of the CNT; its members included most of the original founders of the Spanish Communist party, and it embraced “minority” nationalism, i.e. Catalanism, at a time when such a position was novel in Spain and, with regard to other “stateless languages,” almost unknown elsewhere in the Western European left. Nin was the only theoretician of European movements for national emancipation prominent in the Communist milieu of the 1930s. After the civil war, while the Spanish Stalinists were so discredited they could not maintain an underground network in Barcelona, the CNT and POUM were able to continue resistance (Sabate being but one example) and, following the second world war, even led mass strikes.

In 1945, a faction of the POUM formed the Moviment Socialista de Catalunya, which helped organize a Stalinist-free Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) that was joined by other prominent POUM members in 1976. The PSC happens to govern Catalonia today. The outstanding historical figure of the post-Franco Catalan Socialists, Pasqual Maragall, served as an extremely popular mayor of Barcelona and president of the Catalan regional Generalitat, and has written and spoken vividly about the relevance of the POUM for modern Catalan politics. In 1998, Maragall presided over the naming of a small square for Orwell in Barcelona’s old town. Nothing could better symbolize the victory of the anti-Stalinists in the battle of historical memory in Spain.

Fascism Is Back: Sergei Lopez is as the blood-boltered Francoist in Pan's LabyrinthIn the cultural field, one cannot fail to mention the impact in Spain of the first major novel to address the horrific aftermath of the civil war – a period recently re-examined in the Oscar-winning film El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth). The work that inaugurated a debate on this topic in Spain was Si te dicen que caí (The Fallen), by the Catalan writer Juan Marsé, published in 1973 in Mexico, while Francoist censorship was still in effect. Si te dicen que caí was made into a motion picture by the leading director Vicente Aranda in 1989.

Its plot focuses on the fate of a young girl related to Andreu Nin, Aurora Nin, who had been active as a teenager in the ranks of the left during the war but was degraded beyond measure after the defeat of Republic. The book, considered a contemporary classic, deliberately incorporates echoes of Homage to Catalonia. In the movie, Aurora Nin was played by the popular actress Victoria Abril; the cast also included Antonio Banderas. The film is deeply upsetting, but ends on a note of resistance. It includes a references to the “chinos” or “Chinese” who killed Andreu Nin – “the Chinese” was the nickname the Barcelona proletarians gave their Soviet benefactors.

In addition, the Catalan Communist author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939-2003) produced a sympathetic novel, The Pianist (1985) about a POUM supporter – as an expression of his guilt over his party’s campaign of lies and terror against the anti-Stalinists. But of course a Catalan writer would suffer a crisis of conscience about these matters, which leave Hobsbawm untouched.

Unfortunately, however, 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.

The Spanish people fought for three years, in a libertarian fashion – not limited to the CNT and POUM militias, but also in the militia formations of the Esquerra, the PSOE, and the Basque Nationalists, alongside the “traditional” Republican military units to which the Stalinists were so attached. As the Spanish today know very well, the militia units generally fought better than the militarized units. In particular, the Stalinist-controlled International Brigades and the militarized Republican soldiery with whom they were coordinated were known for incompetence in battle, desertion, and, in the case of many of the foreigners, their reassignment to special groups ordered by the Russians to kill leftist dissidents, since the Spanish would not carry out such duties. Furthermore, the acolytes of Spanish Stalinism ignore that the CNT and POUM never attempted to transform the militarized units into militias; they simply wanted to maintain their own autonomy.

More important, perhaps, is the fact, imperceptible to Hobsbawm and others like him, that the Spanish people, in 1936-39, bore profound knowledge of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain of 1808-14, in which the modern, highly-disciplined, and ideological armies of Bonaparte were largely defeated by Spanish guerrilla forces. It was, indeed, in that war that the term “guerrilla” was invented, and from that tragic and epic struggle that some of the most famous works of Goya, as well as Spanish songs later appropriated and corrupted by the Stalinists, to be sung in the Bronx to the sound of Pete Seeger’s banjo, emerged. The Spanish knew so many things that Hobsbawm will never know – and above all, they know that while Orwell’s methods might not have guaranteed the victory of the Spanish Republic, those of Stalin and his admirers assured its defeat.