Often in the chronicles of human endeavor, what appears a great beginning, or at least a revival, in a political or ideological movement, in reality represents its final, decadent stage.  Some fireworks burn brightest as they die,  Thus it was that the flourishing anarchist movement during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, while viewed at the time as a powerful breakthrough for a phenomenon that defined itself in terms baffling to most today, as "libertarian communism," stood at the conclusion of radical labor's intervention in history. 

There are many more such examples, both in totalitarianism and in more benevolent chapters of the modern epic.  From the Parisian insurrection of 1968 to the riots in Athens today, the same judgment appears appropriate:  notwithstanding the frenetic acclamation of superficial commentators, these are better seen as concluding rather than inaugural moments.  In my view, the same could be said of the Islamofascist offensive embodied in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. I believe the horror of that day represented Saudi Wahhabism in extremis, rather than the commencement of a victorious worldwide jihad, just as Hitler's temporary victories in Europe in 1939-41 preceded the eventual collapse, rather than the triumph, of Nazi imperialism.

Of no 20^th century event does the coincidence of spectacle with decline seem more obvious, in retrospect, than the Cuban Revolution of 1959.   The pathetic story of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's fall from revolutionary hero in 1960 to scrounging vagabond liquidated in Bolivia in 1967 was, at the time, perceived by only a few observers in the international radical milieu as a sign that the wave of protest culminating in France six months afterward would close, rather than open, a cycle.

Guevara has returned to prominence as a symbol of the left, displayed on tee shirts and other ephemera, including a brand of cigarettes in Holland.  With that result, the appearance of Steven Soderbergh's bloated two-part film Che, totaling four hours of incident and detail incomprehensible to anybody who is not Cuban or a specialist in the annals of Castroism, comes as no surprise.  But as with the revolution itself, and the subsequent squalid defeat of Guevara's Bolivian campaign, what we see on the screen must stand as a stillborn exercise in nostalgia, rather than evidence of a Castroite resurrection.  

In addition, this cinematic monstrosity signifies the end of Soderbergh's credibility as a film director.   While the Georgia-born cinéaste has been hailed absurdly as a protean figure excelling in all aspects of movie-making, his career has slid since he displayed a clever perceptiveness about sexual deceit in sex, lies, and videotape (1989).  His Erin Brockovich and Traffic, released in 2000, were competent but effective more for their messages - the virtue of protest against corporate corruption in the first case, the power of corruption represented by the drug trade, in the second - than for their cinematic verve.  Traffic, for its part, was marred by unconvincing family entanglements attached to the character of a high government official, played by Michael Douglas.

Soderbergh's obsessions, focused on improbable narrative convolutions that hardly rise to the level of "plot twists," obscure gadgets, and shallow characterizations, have made his later pictures unattractive, when not incomprehensible, to critics and viewers alike.  With the Ocean's 11-12-13 franchise, his flaws were aggravated to a point where the last two films became caricatural.  The blank stupidity of employing the actress Julia Roberts to play a woman pretending to be the actress Julia Roberts, in Ocean's 12, was hard to exceed, although the same film was weighed down (physically no less than psychologically) by the enormously (in every sense) untalented Catherine Zeta-Jones, who had brought nothing but bulk to Traffic. 

In Ocean's 13, Soderbergh outdid his previous artistic failures by humiliating Al Pacino, making him a simulacrum of the suave outlaw roles in some of which he had excelled (see the Godfather trilogy and Carlito's Way, not the ludicrous Scarface).   Ocean's 13 similarly degraded Ellen Barkin, who once joined Pacino in lighting up the classic Sea of Love. And those were but two imbecilities in a movie filled with such tidbits.  Formerly, such film fumbles were usually blamed by the prevalence in Hollywood of a then-common variant of "p.c.": Peruvian cocaine.  In the case of Che, however, the drug at fault is obviously the more familiar political correctness.

Andy Garcia, an underrated and underutilized star who, with obvious justification, trudged through the Ocean's franchise as if his only concern might have been to collect his check, is a Cuban-American and pronounced anti-Castro patriot, so that his inveiglement into the Che disaster was doubtless impossible to imagine.  But a Cuban-born star with a thorough knowledge of the events in Cuba and Bolivia in the 1950s and 1960s could not have saved this latest debacle.  Not even Benicio del Toro, a good choice for a Guevara impersonation, could effect such a rescue.  

Soderbergh's Che appears more a pseudo-documentary than a dramatic film, an effect heightened by the film's dialogue being almost entirely in Spanish.  Yet it is a pseudo-doc with a considerable difference, in that notwithstanding its enervating length, Soderbergh's Che ignores, without exception, the entire backstory of the events it portrays.  The origin of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship is never explained; nor is the July 26, 1953 failed coup attempt by Castro, centered on an assault at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, for which the July 26 Movement (M-26-J) was named.  Among Cubans and foreign experts, the latter gap may be easily explained; how to account for the fact that Batista, universally portrayed by Castrophiles as a monster, was satisfied to see the defiant captive Castro sentenced to no more than 15 years in prison, of which he served only two before he was released in a Batista amnesty?  How, we may ask, does this compare with the dozens of executions carried out after Castro's takeover?  Similarly, the training of Guevara as a medical doctor is unaddressed, although it is doubtful that many spectators of this film will ask how a physician, who has taken the Hippocratic oath to preserve life, could have ordered so many of the mentioned shootings.

The background of Guevara as an anti-American radical in the Guatemalan events of 1954 is also overlooked.  Add to this a silence about the history of the Directorio Revolucionario, the main alternative armed oppositional group to Castro's M-26-J.  Throughout the film, in addition to its near-exclusive Spanish dialogue, groups and names are mentioned without any effort to flesh them out.  A "Faustino" appears and denounces the PSP or Popular Socialist party, as the Cuban Communist party then styled itself, as Stalinists.  His full name, Faustino Pérez, is unmentioned, along with his cooptation into the Cuban Communist leadership.  Nor, of course, is the rich experience of the Cuban Stalinist apparatus as partners of Batista, whom they supported as the Nicaraguan Stalinists once backed Anastasio Somoza, discussed.   A "Rolando" is given orders, and is identified in the credits, printed in a separate pamphlet, as Rolando Cubela; Cubela's later turn against Castro, imprisonment in a plot to kill the dictator, and eventual exile, are deemed unworthy of mention. 

Similarly, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, a Spanish-born anti-Stalinist revolutionary who distinguished himself as a fighter in Cuba, is casually smeared, without further elucidation (Gutiérrez Menoyo also turned against Castro.)  As in the Ocean's franchise, Soderbergh remains fascinated with gimmicks rather than personalities.  He spends more time in the first half of the film recording the wrecking of apartment walls to gain a tactical position during the climactic battle of Santa Clara than with the crisis of the Batista regime caused by the same battle.       

In its second-half treatment of Guevara's Bolivian misadventure, context is even more important, and further absent.  Whatever one's view of the Bolivian Communist Party as a Soviet and Cuban tool, Guevara's delusions about life in the highland nation were absurd.  Bolivia's marginalized indigenous majority and history of Trotskyist trade-unionism, rather than pro-Soviet leftism or Castro-style socialist caudillismo, had nothing in common with the population in Cuba or its history.  Guevara emerged on the altiplano more as a subimperialist emissary of neighboring Argentina's Peronism than as an authentic social revolutionary, and left no visible influence in Bolivian political life.  Among the many phantom names that passes through this film like water in a sieve is that of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentine associate of Guevara who began his political career in a Peronist group with fascist tendencies.  This fact was revealed in a 1997 Guevara biography by Jon Lee Anderson, pretentiously credited as the film's Chief Consultant, but apparently ignored. 

Guevara was obviously a heedless risk-taker, as shown by the cigar- and pipe-smoking habits he maintained even though he was asthmatic.  Nobody has ever, it seems, asked what kind of person, especially one trained as a doctor, would so indulge himself. At the time of his death, few might have imagined the glamorous Guevara going to Bolivia to commit "revolutionary suicide" - a planetary equivalent of the "suicide by cop" in which insane individuals wave guns at the police.  But some in the Castroite milieu of the time, which existed in the U.S. no less than elsewhere, and of which I was then still a member, suspected that Guevara had become an uncomfortable presence for Castro.  

I remember vividly the rainy day in San Francisco, in October 1967, when the death of Guevara produced headlines in the local dailies.  We feared Guevara had been encouraged to leave Cuba and immolate himself in a faroff place, surrounded by people who did not understand or sympathize with him, with the complicity of Bolivian Stalinists.  In addition, much has been revealed since Guevara's death about Tamara Bunke, known as "Tania," the German-Argentine who accompanied him to Bolivia and was also killed there.  Bunke was a KGB/Stasi agent assigned to monitor Guevara's Bolivian operations.  All such perspective is missing from Soderbergh's film. 

The only thing more tedious about this film than its artistic and historic nullity was the juvenile reaction to it visible among the recusant leftists, many of them resembling escapees from an asylum, who crowded into its showing in Manhattan, giggling and cheering at predictable war scenes, like children at a Star Wars performance.  The film should be called Castro's 12, because like an Ocean's franchise product, it is all bogus aesthetics and no content - as well as in recollection of the 12 survivors, including Castro and Guevara, of the doomed Cuban revolutionary mission of 1956, in the yacht Granma.  These personages leap into the camera's eye and depart from it much as do the associates of George Clooney in the Ocean's series - but such may be the fate of any film roles created by Soderbergh.

In real history, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, notwithstanding their political faults, along with Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Ben Bella in North Africa, erupted into global attention as youthful idols.  The leadership of the leading nations then remained in the superannuated hands of men like Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan, DeGaulle, and Mao.  In this regard, the Cuban revolutionaries, in particular, and as I have written elsewhere, had more in common with Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley than with Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. 

But Guevara himself, as a doctor who embraced terrorism, may better be compared with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician who became second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, as well as the notorious Stalinist assassin and medical anthropologist, Mark Zborowski; Radovan Karadžić, the government psychiatrist who became infamous as a terror leader in the Balkan wars of the 1990s and now faces trial at The Hague, and even Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi death-camp doctor (see Scientific Training and Radical Islam, published by the Center for Islamic Pluralism).  This is the aspect of the Guevara legacy that most needs examination, and is most lacking from Soderbergh's overblown homage to a revolution that led to tragedy and disillusion, even before the Bolivian fiasco that ended Guevara's life.

“In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.”

Such is the famous opening of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, recognized in Catalonia itself, as in most of the rest of the world, as the indispensable account of disillusioned revolutionary hopes and Stalinist betrayal in the Spanish civil war of 1936-39.

I would, with proper humility, begin the following commentary with a paraphrase of Orwell: “In a newsstand at Barajas Airport in Madrid, the day before I headed back to Kosovo and its echoes of the Spanish civil war, I saw a title on a table of books.  It read Las víctimas de Negrín: Reinvindicación del POUM (The Victims of Negrín: Vindication of the POUM).  The author was Antonio Cruz González, a Spanish labor activist and historian.”

So the reader does not become lost,  deep in leftist sectariana, I will note that Juan Negrín was a minor politician from the Canary Islands who became the front-man for Soviet interference and repression of leftist dissidence late in the Spanish war.  He was infamous for his vanity and uncontrolled sexual and eating appetites, and the date of his birth is contested, but he died in his ‘60s in 1956.  His rehabilitation, as a member of the Spanish Socialist party who rose to a high level of power, has been pursued by a group of revisionist historians.  But he remains a figure of criticism and contempt among many Spanish Socialists who opposed totalitarianism, as well as anarchists and partisans of the anti-Stalinist Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista (POUM), the Workers Party for Marxist Unification, whose militia Orwell joined and described in his immortal volume.

Debate over the POUM and its fate, as well as that of the other Spanish anti-Stalinists, the Republic itself, and the Soviet agents, including, at least by implication, the American mercenaries for the Moscow secret police who called themselves “the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” has become a persistent theme in Catalan and general Spanish historiography in the 33 years since the death of dictator Francisco Franco.

With the post-1975 Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy, the national archives were opened, disclosing a considerable quantity of information about Soviet persecution under the Republic, including secret police notes on the pursuit of Orwell.  The Catalan Communists, for their part, sought to rid themselves of the taint of their involvement in Soviet liquidations of Spanish and foreign Trotskyists and others. The Barcelona Communist leaders, along with survivors of the POUM and the anarchist movement, and some distinguished historians, helped the main Catalan television channel produce a documentary, Operació Nikolai, describing the Russian kidnaping and assassination of POUM leader Andreu Nin (1892-1937).  The film was based on Nin’s official Soviet case file – the sole example of release by the Russians themselves of a dossier on a foreign liquidation – and shown on prime time in Catalonia in 1992.

The Catalan Socialist party, which had been joined by POUM remnants in the aftermath of the second world war, gained power and began a policy of renaming urban sites for anti-Stalinists, including Orwell (who has a small square in Barcelona), Nin, and other individuals.  Barcelona’s main railroad station, Estació Sants, now stands in a location celebrating Joan Peiró (1887-1942), a distinguished luminary of the anarchosyndicalist CNT union federation.  The region of Aragón where Orwell served as a militiaman currently advertises a tourist trail dedicated to him.  

The Soviet archives on the Spanish war were also partly and briefly opened, and in 2001 Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov published a selection of documents, Spain Betrayed, in the distinguished Yale University Press series of reference handbooks on Soviet history.  That book, which should have completely changed the historiography of the Spanish war, was translated and appeared in Spain itself in 2002.

More was to come.  In 2006, a Spanish historian, José María Zavala published En busca de Andreu Nin, on the murder of the POUM leader.  In 2007, I took to the webpages at Jewcy to challenge unapologetic Stalinist Eric Hobsbawm for his attack on the anarchists and POUM.

In recent times the broader issues of who did what to whom on all sides during the Spanish war has been resurrected, as if the reopening of past controversies and exhumation of the dead was necessary to heal a deep division in Spain’s past.  Most commentary on this topic has been directed against the Spanish right. The left has manipulated the case of the poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), who was executed by Francoist forces in circumstances that will probably never be fully elucidated, to demand public recognition of and, presumably, compensation for crimes committed by the counter-revolutionary side.  This month, Spanish magistrate and media freak Baltasar Garzón became an object of scorn even among those who sympathize with him when he learned he could not subject Franco and his close associates to a legal proceeding for their atrocities, given that the dictator has been dead for some decades.

During the 1970s, when revolutionary expectations were briefly rekindled in Spain, it was said that the civil war had ended as a struggle between the murderers of García Lorca and those of Nin.  This opinion echoed the argument of Nin’s co-founder in the POUM, Joaquím Maurín (1893-1973), who said the war was lost when it became a confrontation between Franco and Stalin instead of one between the indigenous right and left.  Another POUM intellectual, Julià Gòmez Gorkín (1901-87) theorized that in the Spanish Republic, Stalin had the first opportunity to test the political strategy of cooptation, repression, and manipulation that would produce the aberrant regimes seen in post-1945 Eastern Europe, and known as “people’s democracies.”  In this form of tyranny, the Russian secret police and the Communist parties controlled the system, but amelioratively-titled front parties gave the regime a public face of alleged pluralism.

The question of whether Republican Spain was really the first example of a so-called “people’s democracy” is a complex one.  First, Stalin’s agents in Spain murdered and kidnapped dissidents (several of the latter were taken to Russia and disappeared, and, unlike Andreu Nin, Soviet documentation on their cases remains closed).   Moscow certainly betrayed the Republic, a development signaled by Soviet press compliments to the German Nazis in 1938.  At that time, the Communist International (Comintern) also shut down the Polish Communist party, since the latter, of all the Communists, would be least likely to accept the soon-to-come Stalin-Hitler pact.

Nevertheless, it is a major error to think that the Spanish Republic became a mere Soviet puppet at the end of the war.  Notwithstanding generations of overheated Trotskyist rhetoric, which has tried to portray the Spanish anarchists and POUM as helpless victims of wholesale slaughter because they would not heed the strategic advice of Trotsky, the anarchists were not killed en masse by the Stalinists, and managed to withdraw hundreds of thousands of their militia members into France at the end of the war.  Although a relatively small number of POUM militants were slain, the most notable being Nin, the POUM leadership was absolved at trial of a charge of acting on behalf of Franco.  The Spanish Republic’s bourgeois judiciary would not support a purge on the Moscow model, and most of the POUM leaders survived the war, as well as later imprisonment in French and German concentration camps.  Finally, the POUM and anarchists were far better than other anti-Stalinists at defending themselves, thanks to their deep roots among the Spanish populace.

In general, the anti-Stalinists have won the battle of historical memory in the Spanish left, not the mush-brained acolytes of Stalin, nor the later equivalents of the American sentimentalists who kept alive the myth of the so-called “Lincoln Brigade” (never larger than a battalion, never efficient in combat, never decisive in winning a battle, and finally consigned to police duties Spanish Republicans would not accept, like executing dissenting leftists).

This reality is demonstrated in many places in Spain.  Traveling from Barcelona to Madrid, on November 22, I read in  the dominant Spanish leftist daily El País about an art show at the Museo Nacional Centro Reina Sofía, dedicated to the German modernist Carl Einstein (1885-1940).  This Jewish exile fought alongside the Spanish anarchists in the civil war, rather like Orwell, but his work is now displayed thanks to the patronage of Spain’s reigning queen.  The same paper, the next day, included a long document titled “Stalin and Spain,” in which the historian Angel Viñas, one of the earliest to adopt this disgraceful path in the 1980s, attempted to close the debate over whether the Spanish Republic became the first “people’s democracy.”  Viñas used a report from the period by a Russian functionary, Sergey Marchenko, as evidence that the Russians pressured Negrin toward greater firmness, and that therefore the Spanish regime could be not considered under total Muscovite control.  This may indeed be true, but remains a detail: above all, Moscow undermined the Republic, attempted to bring it under its dominion, and unleashed a secret police hunt for non-conforming radicals.  These facts can no longer be denied.

All of which is mere background to the theme of my present commentary: the fate not of the POUM itself, but of the only volume dedicated to the POUM in English, written by the eminent Catalan historian Víctor Alba (born name Pere Pagès, 1916-2003) and translated, corrected, amplified, and otherwise edited by me.  The book is titled Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM, and was issued by an outfit called Transaction Publishers, located at Rutgers University, in 1988.  Alba recognized my contribution to the work by stipulating that I should be listed as co-author, rather than simply as translator, and assigning all royalties to me.

Twenty years of historical disclosures, debate, and reflection have passed since the issuance of the book I worked on, to my great pleasure and honor, with Alba.  It is cited and acknowledged in various works on the Spanish war, including the Radosh compendium, and resides in numerous libraries.  Some Spanish historians and recusant leftists have written polemics in reply to it.  One Spanish faker, who shall remain unnamed, managed to appropriate and claim as his own some of my research.  I would like to be able to revise the book to reflect the mass of revelations and discoveries since 1988.

It should seem that the updating of Spanish Marxism vs. Soviet Communism should be an easy task.  But the bizarre business enterprise called Transaction Books has made that impossible.  Transaction is headed by a second-rate associate of the New York intellectuals named Irving Louis Horowitz.  Horowitz once had a significant reputation as a historian of Communism in Cuba, but today he is mainly known to authors for the way he runs Transaction.  Claiming that his operation is the publisher of record in the social sciences, Horowitz solicits serious authors for works that have little hope of gaining trade publication.   In my case, he paid no advance, made no attempt to keep in touch with me about sales while I travelled around the world, insulted me (to my face) on various occasions, and now proposes to republish the book I completed with Alba, twenty years out of date, and with no changes to the text.

Why would a publisher conduct his affairs in such a manner?  Frankly, because Horowitz, in my opinion, has contempt for authors.  He knows he will never produce a successful trade book under his own name.  He knows he mainly publishes works that authors have little hope of  introducing to the trade.  He knows he is, finally, nobody, even though I once saw him preening at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where his list had almost no hope of gaining attention.  Did the state of New Jersey, which supports Rutgers, pay for that junket?  Horowitz has only one power and that is the power to say no.  In my case, even after I hired the most respected intellectual-property lawyer in Washington to try to pry the POUM book out of his claws, he put forward such arguments as the following: “Schwartz has nothing to complain about... we are protecting the rights of Víctor Alba [who, let us not forget, is now dead],” and 20 years of new historiography of the Spanish conflict provide no reason to revise such a book.

Horowitz’s attitude really comes down to him saying “this is my business, authors’ efforts become my property, not theirs, and I decide what happens once an author has the misfortune to hand me his or her work.”

What can I do in this situation?  The intellectual property attorney I hired told me that in the absence of a specific agreement providing for transfer of full authors’ rights to me after Alba’s death, I can do nothing. Yet the book in question is unquestionably a collaborative work, as Alba himself declared in the contract and Horowitz himself is compelled to admit.

These issues should have been cleared up by intellectual property law reforms in recent years.  Of course, there will always be vultures like Irving Louis Horowitz who believe that abusing the status of Rutgers to exploit and demean authors, is somehow an acceptable form of publishers’ conduct.

I will not give up.  I worked on the POUM book unpaid, and I do not seek profit from it, but I do want it brought up to date, considering that the changes in debate over the Spanish war, and, not least, over Orwell, have been as momentous in their way as those that transpired in ex-Soviet Russia itself.  Some old anarchist associates of mine have suggested that I simply edit the book and have it published outside the U.S., free of Horowitzian interference, since producing and distributing books is easier now than it was two decades past.  This could, presumably, be construed as piracy, and the irascible and selfish Horowitz might then have to pay lawyers much more money to pursue a case against me than he would have had to lay out for a simple revision of the book.  But why should an author be forced to “pirate” his own work, especially given that the specific volume in question will never turn a profit, and was created exclusively for the benefit of historical truth?

Greetings from Barcelona where there is now a Passeig Andreu Nin (Passeig being Catalan for Paseo).  It is quite an impressive item, especially since it is the location of what I believe to be the most overwhelming, overbearing, over-the-top shopping center in the history of commerce.  It is called Heron City for reasons I cannot fathom.  One could only believe in such a thing if one saw it for itself.  A bowling alley with an internet rank, at which I am now writing, is only one feature.  The rest is simply... staggeringly vulgar and crazy in the way only the Spanish can do such things.

One imagines Luis Buñuel creating such a monstrosity in a movie.  Andreu Nin, the ex-anarchist, martyr to Stalinism, Catalan literary critic, is now a beloved figure, his name decorating something that really looks like it was designed on LSD.

Of course the consolation is always that of normality.  Now that the anti-Stalinists have won the battle of historical memory in Spain it probably makes perfect sense to have a place like this on a street named for Nin.  It shows that Nin is simply part of the mental landscape of the Catalans, as he always was.  Of course there are still no streets in Barcelona named for Dolores Ibarruri, Milton Wolff, or the International Brigades.

It makes me think of a giant golf course in Beverly Hills on Leon Trotsky Boulevard.  One could even invent all sorts of extreme variations on the principle; a TV game show called NKVD For a Day in which down at the heels movie stars dress up as Yezhov... The Karl Marx lapdance bar... Lenin cough drops... Kropotkin cupcakes... Emma Goldman toothpaste...

Who knows what would have happened if the Via Laietana in Barcelona were to have kept its name as the Via Durruti?  There might now be the Via Durruti auto agency selling BMWs.

Of course there are other examples of how these things work.  In Uzbekistan they are so proud of the famous Islamic thinker Ibn Sino (known as Ibn Sina or Avicenna in the West) that one does see the Ibn Sino gas station, Ibn Sino t-shirt shop, etc.  And in Kazakhstan they have the Alfarabi meat market, etc.   Of course Western Europe is awash with images of the gentle physician and executioner Che Guevara, so that in Holland one can buy Che Guevara cigar cutters, ashtrays, t-shirts, backpacks, etc.   

I was in the North African section of Marseilles over the weekend and went into an Islamist bookshop.  Piles of books by Ibn Abd Al Wahhab alongside Che Guevara bookbags!

Barcelona has changed a lot and I must say, mainly not for the better.  Most of the old working class bars have disappeared.  Everything is designed for a Woody Allen film now.  The former Barri Xines or Barrio Chino (also known as El Raval), the shabby neighborhood on the lower side of the Rambles, was completely rehabilitated during the Olympics and is now squeaky clean, but has somewhat been consigned to the Muslim immigrants, including a lot of Pakistanis which is not surprising considering Pakistanis go where there is commerce, not hard labor, and in Catalunya hard labor would be done by Africans.  Very different from Marseille in that in the Raval immigrants and their businesses are present but there are apparently no Islamic bookshops -- maybe because there is so little radical literature in Spanish.

Some of the surviving nice snackbars do a kind of weird double business with their locals coming in and competing for space with tourists asking idiotic questions about tapas... I always tell them to try the blood sausage, which is really a sin, but I know it will make them suffer intestinally... which they deserve.

The Barcelona bookstores have taken a dive in quality.  The old days when they were filled with fabulous academic works on Judaism and Islam have ended.  It´s all bestsellers now -- except that the Catalans remain obsessed with their history before and during the civil war and there are a lot of extremely interesting new books on aspects of the 1930s that never saw light of day in the past.  I suspect this is part of the rather suspect revival of recriminations over the civil war by the Zapatero crowd.  Since Zapatero wants to dig up all the dead from the civil war the Catalans are going to lead the pack by getting a lot of new stuff in print, which in principle is fine. I bought enough books that I have to send them to DC by UPS tomorrow, but they are mostly about Catalan history, not about Islam or Judaism which is what I really wanted.   Maybe the Madrid bookstores will be better -- I´ll go there Wednesday, but I am not optimistic.  A lot of books I used to see all over the place are now probably only available from second hand dealers.   Since I personally donated 100+ Spanish academic books on Sephardic subjects to the University of Sarajevo I might now have to go back and ask them to let me copy some of them.

Looking back on this era of history, the gravest threat of the hour will probably not be understood to be Islamic extremism or Western neoliberalism, or whatever one's preferred party-fashionable bogeyman might be. It will likely be certain strains of Western philosophy.

Ian Buruma and Paul Berman have been among the most prominent figures who have tried to show the connection between Islamic radicalism and it's having absorbed ideas from European thinkers, although Stephen Schwartz has out-muscled both of them in his explication of the historical and ideological debt that modern Islamic radicalism owes to that infamous people of the Najd. Islamism doesn't stand a chance in the long run because depraved nihilistic movements always burn themselves out. The question is only how much ground they'll gain and how much damage they'll do before then (no small matter in view of the power of 21st century weapons technology). The ears their claims fall upon and the responses of the societies they attack and wish to destroy play a large part in determining the course of events. As one can quickly gather from reading Anja Havedal's review of Afghan Women by Elaheh Rostami-Povey in this month's issue of Democratiya, the particular Western incarnations of philosophy that inform certain current understandings of multiculturalism are poisoning "Western" minds just as much as the screeds of kaffir beheaders are infecting the minds of Muslims.

According to Havedal, Rostami-Povey thinks that just about every effort to help women in Afghanistan is a failure and/or a ploy disguising colonialist arrogance and avarice in the cloak of rights and freedom. But what's nonsense in all the talk about us and them, Western and non, is that while Elaheh Rostami-Povey claims that "an alien imperialist culture and prefabricated identity wrapped in the rhetoric of 'security, development, women's liberation and democracy' has [sic] been imposed on Afghan women and men alike" she herself speaks as one educated in the halls of British academe. Her CV is impressive: a BSc in Applied Economics (University of East London), an MA in Agrarian Studies (University of Sussex), and a PhD from the Open University. According to Rostami-Povey's view of things, she is herself imposing the philosophical insights of Western thinkers on Afghan women.

Culture is a notion that only has meaning through alienation or distance from one's way of life--the kind of alienation experienced in modern multicultural societies. Much widespread understanding of the moral evils of imperialism derive from the European-American experience of having been imperialists. The critique of imperialism most preferred by academics to this day was hatched by a German Jew steeped in the work of the monumental German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. So when Rostami-Povey mounts her high horse of anti-imperialism and cultural preservation, shall we accuse her of making Afghan women Hegelians or Marxians? Individualistic self-determination, one could argue, is decidedly a product of European political philosophy, and the modern understanding of authenticity from Trilling to Taylor is American and Canadian, respectively. Isn't Rostami-Povey's argument just an imposition of a tapestry of "Western" ideas?

One doubts that she would welcome this critique. Certainly Rostami-Povey believes that Afghan women deserve a certain quality of life that is universally appreciated by our species. Freedom from war, loss, starvation, coercion, and suffering. This was precisely the political project from Hobbes onward, to see that humans improve their lot beyond the short, brutish one it has potential to be. But was Hobbes unique? Muhammad was himself a sort of political philosopher and conflict resolver proposing a way of organizing life both personal and political so that suffering might be decreased and goodwill promoted. More likely, these figures spoke in different places to the same need.

But Afghanistan is one of the most recently converted majority Muslim countries in what can only rightly be described as an Islamic empire. Prior to the arrival of Islam, and in many ways even after, Afghans adhered to centuries-old patriarchal tribal traditions. So when Rostami-Povey insists that Afghan women should be allowed to " struggle against local male domination in their own way and according to their culture," to which 'culture' can she possibly be referring if she hopes to maintain an ethic of anti-imperialism and women's rights?

People like Rostami-Povey must decide whether they believe it is a universal good that women be free and persons have a right to self-determination. If she does, then she must also accept that Western philosophers' ideas were not ethnically bounded, but considerations of human beings attempting to create what used top be called in less relativistic times "the good life." Those ideas are no more culturally specific than is the basic need to live free of the horror that Afghan women have been experiencing for centuries under male, Soviet or Islamist domination. Instead, she suffers from the cancer in Western philosophy--the popularization of two absurd notions in particular. One, that the preservation of culture is an end in itself, even if that culture espouses ideas that are inimical to the good life; and two, that quest for the good life is a conceit to be replaced by instating the regime relative values. That regime is, by Rostami-Povey's standards, a German (read: Nietzschian) one. I prefer to say it's just a bad idea.

Her system of designations is undesirable. That regime is, according to the standards of anyone interested in bettering of the lives of others, at best a hindrance and at worst a recipe for the kind of liberal nihilism, despair and self-hatred that will say when thousands of its countrymen die at the hands of illiberal murderers, 'We deserve it.' But in Afghanistan, it makes the best the enemy of the good, positing failure due to the 'self interest' part of enlightened self interest. It declares the messy business of aid a fiasco where there are instead some lives improving, even if not all at the rate and to the degree that Rostami-Povey--and any decent person, I might add--would like to see.

[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.

Last seen preciously explaining why "[t]he discussion of [Che] Guevara is still divisive and complicated, years after his death, and it should be," the good folks over at Campus Progress have launched a jihad on use of the word "Islamofascism." They've been prompted to do so by David Horowitz's "Islamofascism Awareness Week," a right-wing roadshow that the former left-wing radical is taking to college campuses across the country. Anyways, it would be nice if liberals expressed as much outrage over actual Islamic Fascism as they have at David Horowitz's supposed exploitation of it for his own, nefarious political purposes.

The first (of many) errors in the piece is its authors' (Annika Carlson and Sarah Dreier) attempt to label the use of "Islamofascism" a "conservative smear tactic." It's true that many of those who use the word are "conservatives," but it was neither originated by conservatives nor is there anything inherently "conservative" about it's use." Christopher Hitchens, no conservative he, wrote about "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the September, 11th terrorist attacks. Paul Berman is also a popularizer of the term. The authors attack Stephen Schwartz (a Jewcy contributor) without bothering to mention that the man is himself a Muslim and a scholar of Islam. But, alas, he is brushed off as a writer for the Weekly Standard, and thus his thoughts can be discarded.

Carlson and Dreier also take issue with the fact that "the term Islamofascism is offensive to Muslim Americans." Boo-hoo. There's nothing remotely offensive in the use of this phrase unless one is an intended target of its wrath, in which case, you're already offended by America's lascivious culture. Simply put, Muslims who are not themselves fascists -- who do not believe in the imposition of Sharia law, the stoning of women, the beheading of gays, the abolition of secularism -- have a duty to distinguish their peaceful Islam with that of the type that's trying to destroy Iraq and acquire nuclear weapons.

There's a lot of this walk-softly, lets-hold-hands type of stuff in the essay, and the best case for the continued use of the "Islamofascist" descriptor comes, unsurprisingly, from Christopher Hitchens. He was not responding to the Campus Progress piece in particular, but likely anticipated the liberal reaction that would likely follow from Horowitz's deliberately provocative campus outreach project. Hitch first points out that the Left has never had a problem using the word fascist to describe its political enemies (and I'll add that "fascist" flows from liberal lips today like shit from a goose when describing the Bush administration), particularly when referring to the ties between the Catholic Church and right-wing, authoritarian governments in Latin America, Spain and the Balkans. It appears then, that the Left's aversion to use of "Islamofascism" has much to do with the simple fact that Islam is a non-Western religion, supposedly comprised of the wretched of the earth, and thus, a different standard must apply to its most fanatical adherents, whose real motivation must, at "root" be a legitimate anti-imperialist impulse (for the most sinister and perverse form of this sort of thinking, see my essay on Columbia University professor Joseph Massad's rationalization of Muslim state homophobia as just that).

Read Ali Eteraz's Reply to this post, and Jamie Kirchick's Counter-Reply. 

(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."

Our Sufi neocon baba gives a potted history of the land in which Orwell served as a colonial civil servant and concludes that Chinese intervention isn't the answer:

Some Western pundits have argued that a China now oriented toward capitalist growth has an incentive to dissuade the Burmese army from administering a bloodbath. Such optimism about Beijing, however, is vain.The only hope for the rescue of the tormented peoples of Burma resides in the solidarity expressed by President George W. Bush at the U.N. General Assembly when he said, "Americans are outraged by the situation in Burma. The ruling junta remains unyielding, yet the people's desire for freedom is unmistakable."
 
Cynics may decry the president's stand as a mere effort to renew the vision of democratization that accompanied U.S. intervention in Iraq. But Burma--like Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzia before it--shows that the weak links in the global chain of tyranny are breaking, one by one, and that the worldwide movement for entrepreneurship, accountability, and popular sovereignty can assert itself, with or without the help of outsiders. For Americans and all haters of oppression, the message is clear: The United States should show effective support for the aspirations of Burma's diverse citizens; tougher sanctions against the regime are only the beginning.  

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.

"Plan Z" sounds like something out of an Ed Wood movie, and is just as enticing, argues Jewcy contributor Stephen Schwartz:

Etzioni has suggested that in Iraq the U.S. should "separate both warring parties without 'tilting' towards one or the other." This merely recapitulates the false policy of moral equivalence pursued by Europe in reaction to the Yugoslav wars, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Failure to recognize responsibility for aggression and terrorism rewards aggression and terrorism. Serbs attacked Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnians did not attack Serbia. Sunni terrorism is the main problem in Iraq now, and is supported by Wahhabi extremists in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. When Sunni terrorists die in Iraq, their pictures and biographies appear in Saudi media. Notwithstanding Iranian assistance to and incitement of the Shia militias, to suggest moral equivalency between the Sunni terrorists and the Shia majority is to send the wrong message to the mainly-Shia Iraqi government and people: that the United States is prepared to abandon them. It is also the wrong message to send to Sunni radicals: that the U.S. is ready to placate them.

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.

Continue reading...

Why are Bosnian Muslims wary of Israel?  Hint: It has nothing to do with Zionism or the Jews. Jewcy contributor Stephen Schwartz reports:

Perhaps the most surprising message brought by the delegation from the Al Qasemi Academy in Baqa al Garbya, Israel, was their description of the sharia courts maintained by the state of Israel for resolution of disputes among Muslims. Sharia courts are scarce in the Balkans, and the explanation that Israel recognizes religious courts for Jews and Muslims (and, if they desire them, Christians) alongside the civil judicial apparatus, with the right of anybody to opt in or out of the alternative systems, was provocative for Bosnian Muslims.

Provocative indeed when they hear that it was cabalistic American intellectuals said to have a secret loyalty to the Jewish state who encouraged and facilitated the belated bail-out of Bosniaks during Milosevic's genocidal nightmare.

The crux of Stephen's piece is about the incipient Wahhabism now trying to choke the vibrant and cosmopolitan tradition of Islam in the Balkans:

In the clash between Wahhabism and moderate Islam in the Balkans, the most prominent battleground at present is the poor but bustling city of Tetovo, in western Macedonia. Many local people are followers of the Bektashi Sufis, a gnostic order named for Hajji Bektash Veli (1209-1271), a Turkish-language poet and friend--some say rival--of Rumi. The Bektashis, like the Shias and the Turkish and Kurdish Alevis, revere Imam Ali. They are without doubt the most active and influential Sufi movement in the Balkans, but they are despised by Wahhabis, for several reasons.

First, they represent a liberal trend among the Shias, and Wahhabis loathe Shias even more than they hate Jews and Christians. Second, the Bektashis consume alcohol. And third, men and women are equals in Bektashi rituals. Several Bektashi babas, as their teachers are known, have insisted to me that they are the "most progressive" element in global Islam, and they back that statement up with a long, proven, and fervent commitment to secular governance and popular education.

Last we heard from Stephen, he was delivering a speech in Macedonia that began: "Greetings to the Kryegjysh of the World Bektashi Community, Baba Reshat Bardhi, and to the assembled babas and believers."

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 21^st 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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

Auden was briefly an ambulance driver during the SCWJewcy contributor Stephen Schwartz has written a must-read essay in this week's Weekly Standard on the comparisons between the current "civil wars" in Iraq and Lebanon and the one in Spain. Both regions were riven by similar factionalisms, and exploited as proxies by greater totalitarian powers (and no, the U.S. isn't one of them.) Both regions can also be seen as microcosmic preludes to impending global disasters: in Spain's case, World War II; in Iraq and Lebanon's, who knows?

W.H. Auden was the Homer of that low, dishonest decade, which saw Hitler shadow-box with Stalin before their fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace in '39. One of his best, though seldom remembered, poems is a long eulogy on the Spanish Civil War, a stanza of which runs as follows:

'What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.'

The apostrophe here belongs to what Auden called "the life," which, if it "answers at all" cops out of any pat little determinism of ideology and lets the playing out of events fall upon human actors. (Remember that the next time isolationists dismiss Ahmadinejad or Nasrallah as ignorable entities in some far-off place.) Anyway, the suicide pact -- if not quite the romantic death -- is upon us again...

Conveniently, Stephen happens to be an expert on the history of the Republican struggle against Francosim as well as on history and theology of Islam. He's got a personal investment in both: he used to be a Trotskyist and is now a Sufi neoconservative. (This has my award for most interesting self reinvention.) Here's his thesis:

Spanish entrepreneurship and economic development were most advanced in the Basque and Catalan regions, whose cultural affiliations with the Madrid monarchy were weakened. In corresponding fashion, the Iraqi Kurds have leaped far ahead in modernization, yet like the Basques and Catalans, they are culturally and linguistically distinct from, and resentful of, the Iraqi Arabs.

Spain in 1936 included a vast and turbulent mass of radical industrial workers and farm laborers whose political culture was mainly anarchist, and whose aspirations were barely perceived, much less understood, in the outside world. Iraq's Shia majority resembles the Spanish anarchists--there are many of them, they are militant, and they often seem to have no friends. So the Iraqi Shias, like the Spanish left, are enticed into a dangerous courtship with a totalitarian suitor: Iran plays the role in Basra that Russian Stalinism had in Barcelona.

Spain at war, like Iraq, became an arena for massacres and militias, hostage-taking and disappearances, assassinations and reprisals. The Franco forces murdered the poet Federico Garcia Lorca; Soviet agents who infiltrated the Republican police killed a dissident Catalan Marxist author, Andreu Nin. The competing ideologies in Spain also included Carlism, an extreme form of monarchism, as well as anarchism, no less volatile than the cruel doctrines of Wahhabism, the inspirer of the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and the Shia extremism of Moktada al-Sadr. And as Germany and Italy helped Franco, so elements in Saudi Arabia finance and recruit Sunni terrorists to kill in Iraq, while Iran supports Iraqi Shia paramilitary expansion.