God help the anarchist movement that needs heroes!

bryan

Guest

Re: book reviews

« Reply #3 on Feb 20, 2005, 6:53pm »

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Book Review by Brian Bamford:

GOD HELP THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT

THAT NEEDS HEROES.

‘Granny made me an Anarchist: General Franco,

the Angry Brigade and me’ by Stuart Christie.

Published by Scribner price £10.99.

I ought to declare a special interest here in that I and my then wife, were involved with the same Spanish anarchist group as Mr Christie - the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (F.I.J.L) - between February 1963 and February 1967. Hitherto, I haven’t written about our experience of the Christie affair, except to criticise a few exaggerated claims by Mr Christie in his earlier autobiography ‘The Christie File’ (1980), during my report from Gibraltar on the SAS shootings there in 1988 of the IRA terrorists. Our job in Spain for the F.I.J.L. had nothing to do with arms or explosives, but was about gathering information and propaganda about Spanish society, reinforcing links with sympathetic contacts and reporting back to our F.I.J.L. contact—code name ‘Johnny’ (Salvador Gurucharri) in Paris.

Mr Christie, now 58, has already written three autobiographies. I have now read two of them, but not the very expensive 3-volume version. What would Mr Christie have to do to make his autobiography worth reading? Can an autobiography of this kind be justified? Some English northern anarchists like Derek Pattison have argued that ‘Stuart has been trading on this for the last 40 years’, but Carlos Beltran, a CGT anarcho-syndicalist in Madrid, told me Christie’s account may shed light on an interesting era in Spanish history: the 1960s.

To be any good Mr Christie’s account would have to describe his experiences clearly and honestly, he would need to give an idea of his motives and even reveal something disgraceful about himself. This last test is vitally important since, as Orwell wrote somewhere: ‘A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.’

Stuart’s account of prison life in both Spain, where he did over 3 years in Carabanchel and England where he was on remand for over a year in Brixton, matches my own experience in both cases. He writes of his experiences in Brixton saying his English friends thought ‘that the Spanish prisons would be much worse (than the English prisons), but it is a sad commentary on English liberalism that this just wasn’t true.’ Not only was the food worse in English gaols, but ‘Spanish jails in Franco’s time were run along on much more humane lines inasmuch as there was some degree of choice involved.’ In Spain, he writes: ‘You could work and earn more, or....not work and scrape by if you were prepared to do without things like f*gs and Serrano ham sandwiches.’ Thus, in Spain, ‘You could have money sent in...and spend it in...the prison restaurant...responsibility for the individual’s quality of life in prison became his own, that of his comrades or his family.’

Thus in Spanish gaols money could be sent in from outside and then spent by the prisoner in the prison canteen or other items. When, in the summer of 1963, I was detained in a dungeon in a village in the province of Segovia, the Guardia Civil offered to take me to the village bar to pay for my own meal. Of course, Stuart writes of this money in Spanish gaols that ‘its circulation in jail leads to corruption, but it is also the one thing that eases tyranny.’ He claims that: ‘Corruption exists in English jails - albeit fitfully’, but that: ‘In Spain it was built into the system.’ In fact, in English jails in the absence of money; f*gs became the currency of corruption and the tobacco barons ruled in Strangeways, Manchester even in the 1970s when I was in there.

BOYS' OWN ROMANTICISM.

As to his motives for going to Spain in the 1960s, I can see him grappling with the tedious constituency politics of the Labour League of Youth in Glasgow. He writes: ‘I technically became an anarchist one Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1963 outside Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, tearing up my Labour Party card after an exhilarating conversation with Bobby Lynn and Ronnie Alexander...secretary of the newly formed Glasgow Federation of Anarchists.’

He lost his job as an apprentice dental technician in 1963. As there had already been ‘in 1959 (actually May1960) a strike of Glasgow engineering apprentices’, Stuart claims: ‘...the employers were nervous of signs of activism’ - they didn’t want a repeat performance of the snowball strikes of the engineering apprentices which spread across the country. For another national strike of engineering apprentices we had to wait until November 1964. By that time, while we in the Manchester Apprentices’ Wages and Conditions Campaign on the picket line or selling our new libertarian apprentice paper Industrial Youth, Stuart Christie was in a Spanish gaol.

Stuart hadn’t much time or patience for the trade unions or Trade Council in Glasgow: he writes: ‘this was another political mirage: the shop steward worked with management in much the same way as the union leaders had been co-opted into the state.’ This is the view of an impetuous young man and one which in Stuarts’ case could only lead to catastrophe. It was not the view of one of his Spanish mentors - Salvador Gurucharri - who in February 1963 told me he thought the English anarchists should permeate the trade unions in much the same way as the Spanish anarchists had in Spain.

The aloofness of Stuart Christie seems to betray a certain distaste for the ordinary and everyday affairs of men and women, and suggest a love of the exotic and extraordinary - the peculiar and even the downright perverse. The arduous everyday affairs of the shop steward and trade union would be forever much too humdrum. Melodrama would be much more to Mr Christie’s taste.

He talks freely of the ‘class struggle’ and claims that when in 1972, he appeared before an English jury at the Old Bailey in the Angry Brigade trial, the jury ‘had seen (in Christie) an average working-class guy, who worked long hours with very ordinary working-class mates...’ There is no denying Mr Christie has charm, indeed he recently appeared on the Ned Sherrin chat show ‘Loose Ends’ on Radio 4 promoting his book and one can well imagine enjoying a drop of Glenmorangie with him. But his book betrays on almost every page his love of the glamorous and the exotic. Just as in Paris in August 1964, he told us of his passion for Robbie Burns and the Bonnett Gang (French bank robbers), so in later life it became ‘Sabate: Guerrilla Extraordinary’.

STUART'S GRANNY HAS A LOT TO ANSWER FOR!

So it was in August1964, at the tender age of 18, he came to conclude: ‘The (Spanish) civil war was still going on...’ and ‘we needed new volunteers to...hopefully, change the world. That was my mission. Something had to be done and no one else was doing it so it was down to me. As my Granny used to say: “If you want something doing, do it yourself”.’

In his chapter ‘A Rebel with a Cause’, Mr Christie writes: ‘I was no Hamlet.’ He stoutly declares: ‘My authority was my conscience and the ghosts of countless victims of Francoism since 1936.’ Concluding that ‘Wrongdoers had to be held to account....’ and saying ‘I had an obligation to intervene...It was a just war...against a clearly defined enemy - the last of the Axis regimes.’

In the end it became not like Hamlet, but more like Shakespeare’s ‘The Comedy of Errors’:

‘Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak;

Lay open my earthly great conceit,

Smother’d in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,

The folded meaning of your worlds’ deceit.’

For evidence of Mr Christie’s ‘earthly great conceit’ we need only refer to his own earlier account ‘The Christie File’ (1980), in it Stuart writes: ‘I was inveigled into appearing on what later turned out to be a disastrous chat show, show—Let Me Speak, chaired by Malcolm Muggeridge...’ Naturally, Muggeridge being a brilliant interviewer, asked Stuart, billed as a revolutionary anarchist’, the obvious question: ‘Would (he), for instance, assassinate Franco if (he) had the chance?’ To which Stuart writes: ‘What could I say but yes?’

Talk about ‘Three sheets to the wind’! What kind of a gormless morning would put himself in that position? A revolutionary, one would have thought, should keep his head down and his trap shut, not go on TV before going on a mission. But Mr Christie tells us ‘my veins were pumping pure adrenaline’ as he watched the white cliffs of Dover disappear in the distance on boat to France, and the first step to his ultimate destination of General Franco’s Carabanchel gaol in Madrid.

(If you think I’m being harsh here, consider Dear Anarchist what we are being asked to believe. We are being asked to believe that a man, or rather a boy, who flunked a gentle question about his intentions from the sympathetic Englishman Malcolm Muggeridge in July 1964, would in August 1964 withstand all the days of interrogation that Comisario, Don Saturnino Yague and the Brigada Politico Social team threw at him in the Seguridad office of the Spanish Interior Ministry in Madrid. We laugh when the Marxists and others believe in Fairy Tales, but when it suits us some anarchists seem willing to swallow them too.) NORTHERN VOICES

Logged

Northern Voices

Guest

Re: book reviews

« Reply #4 on Feb 20, 2005, 7:44pm »

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The review above 'God Help the Anarchist Movement that needs Heroes' is a shorterned version of a much more extensive booklet published this month by the journal 'NORTHERN VOICES'. It was published for the highly successful Newcastle Projectile Anarchist Festival 11-13 February 2005 and is priced at 1.40 (post free) from 63a, Armdale Road, Dukinfield, Cheshire

SK16 5AG - cheques payable to 'Northern Voices'.

The original review: 'My meditations on Mr Christie, his Granny and our Spanish adventures by Brian Bamford (anti-Franco activist: 1963 to 1967)' is 16 pages long. 'Northern Voices' has published this account in response to Mr Christie because we believe it is vital that the people in this country gain a complete view of the anglo-spanish historical events that occurred in Spain in the 1960s.

At the time Brian Bamford's account was published just over a week ago, Mr Christie and Mr Bamford discussed the incidents that both of them took part in at an open Forum at The Side Cinema in Newcastle on Friday 11th, February. Since then Mr Christie has claimed that many of the criticisms made by Bamford have been tackled in Mr Christie's own limited edition 3-volume autobiography priced just over £100. Mr Christie also says he had little or no control over either the English or Spanish commercial versions.

Unfortunately, it is likely that it will be the cheaper commercial versions of the autobiographies in both languages that are going to be the most influential. In this respect 'Northern Voices' feels justified in raising the issues we have, because in this way we hope the there will be a wider public understanding both in this country and Spain of what went on during the Franco era in the 1960s.