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And The Young Men Still Answered The Call…

More than 4,000 young British men went to fight in the Spanish civil war. They did it because they believed in something. How can we recapture that spirit today, asks Tony McNulty

By Tony McNulty

11 Jul 2011, 09:33

Let’s imagine a major Western European nation had democratically elected a government and then right-wing forces, together with some elements of the country’s military, decided that it was not a government that they could support. They decided to challenge the legitimately elected government by force of arms and pretty soon the whole country was involved in a vicious civil war.

This was essentially what happened to Spain in the 1930s, long before Chile in 1974, and by 1939 the rebel Fascists under Franco prevailed. Franco won largely because he had the support of his nationalist neighbour, Portugal as well as Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The great democracies of Europe at the time – France and the UK – prevaricated and watched democracy in Spain die .They did not support the democratically elected Republican Government of Spain – just as they stood idly by and watched the Nazis crush Austria and then Czechoslovakia – a “quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. Had they supported Spain, or Austria, or Czechoslovakia, there may have been profound ramifications for the start and subsequent course of the Second World War.

One of the most interesting aspects of this conflict was in the news again recently. MI5 has just released files on those who went to fight with the Republican Government against the Fascists. These files, released on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War, one of the darkest episodes in Europe’s recent history, show that around 4,000 British and Irish volunteers went to fight for the Republic. Until recently, historians thought the figure was closer to 2,500.

Of course MI5 had so much detail on those who were volunteering because they regarded them as subversives who were circumventing the Government’s policy of studied indifference to the overthrow of its democratically elected counterpart in Spain. MI5 and the police sought to prevent volunteers from going to fight with the republic. The UK, along with France, Italy and Germany, signed a non-intervention pact over Spain. All knew that Germany and Italy would ignore the pact and actively arm and support the Fascists, but France and the UK were happy to look the other way whilst democracy was strangled. We can only imagine the lessons Hitler learnt from such indifference – indifference even to the chilling terror of deliberately bombing civilian population, as was done at Guernica.

The fact that so many British and Irish young men and women were happy to volunteer to fight for democracy in a foreign land is fascinating, as is the news that the numbers were many more than historians had thought. There is no doubt that these young people were motivated by ideology – both the defence of democracy and a range of Leftist causes. There is no doubt that they went to defend the democratically elected government of the day. There is no doubt they were overwhelmingly well-intentioned, if naïve about the geo-politics playing out all around them.

There is no doubt that they put themselves in harm’s way and many died. At the time, it was clear that, for these young people at least, politics had become a matter of life or death – to be argued over passionately and, as democrats, defended to the death. Happily the guns are now silent in Western Europe, but how can we capture their passion for politics today?

* Franco's Friends: How British Intelligence Helped Bring Franco to Power in Spain  by Peter Day has just been published by Biteback. Details HERE.