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Pick Your Preferred Communists

Do my eyes deceive me, or does Stephen “Politics of the Future” Schwartz actually have the chutzpah to attack someone else’s views of the Spanish Civil War as unduly rose-coloured and propagandistic?  What did Schwartz miya have to say about the war a few months ago?  He wrote: Spain represented a confrontation between the politics of the […]

Do my eyes deceive me, or does Stephen “Politics of the Future” Schwartz actually have the chutzpah to attack someone else’s views of the Spanish Civil War as unduly rose-coloured and propagandistic?  What did Schwartz miya have to say about the war a few months ago?  He wrote:

Spain represented a confrontation between the politics of the past, represented by Franco, and the politics of the future, embodied in a confused but nonetheless genuine Republic. 

That this person was at the same time gamely trying to downplay the civil war in Iraq by making pathetic comparisons with the Spanish conflict only made this obnoxious view that much worse.

Stephen Schwartz's picture

Victory For POUM, Insh’allah

Can Schwartz miya really be so cheeky as to refer to someone else as a poseur?  But of course he can!  Look on in wonder as the old commie and neocon fellow traveler re-fights old fights over that old worry, “Who lost Spain to fascism?”  All of this might be interesting except for the problem that the Republicans weren’t fighting fascism and the Second Republic was a good example of how democracy can empower the fanatics who lead it to destruction.  Like another old commie, Ronald Radosh, who edited Spain Betrayed in the tradition of the anti-Stalinist radicals of the Republican cause, Schwartz miya is still mired in disputing over whether the Republic’s domination by the Soviets or its lack of domination and direction by them was its undoing.  It is the Soviets’ responsibility in undermining the Republican cause that so energises Schwartz miya, rather than the horrors inflicted by the Republicans in a war precipitated by their radicalism.  It would never cross the mind of this old lefty-turned-Muslim that the Republican side was itself in the wrong and deserved to lose if moral desert has anything to do with military outcomes (it doesn’t).  How neoconservatives can continue to consort with people like this and somehow pretend that they are not still at some level rehashing their old sectarian fights on the left, I do not pretend to know.

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