truth and reconciliation?
Apr 18 2008 23:17
Do we need a truth and reconciliation committee for anarchism?
There has I think for a long time been rejection and repudiation of the old style 'propaganda of the deed' anarchist terrorism. I could suggest that it might need to be more explicitly extended to include attacks by popular anarchists, such as Alexander Berkam on Henry Clay Frick, and members of Buenaventura Durruti's group on Cardinal Soldevilla Romero. But at least it has I think now been rejected.
More substantial is Catalonia, where, during the period it was more or less exclusively under CNT-FAI control, there were many executions of civilians. 38,000 civilians executed in all Republican Spain is the minimum figure given by historians (the range of figures goes much higher), and the Anarchist share of that could easily be in the 10,000 range. Most all of those would have been entirely innocent victims - many were simple parish priests.
The impact of such killings on the wider population - oppositionists, dissidents, CNT-FAI rank and file, workers - must have been substantial. Inconsistent with the ideal of a free society.
I would suggest that it is hypocritical to criticize Lenin, and his followers, for their terrorism, while not similarly criticizing and disowning the terrorism of the Spanish Anarchists. And doing so unequivocally.
But maybe I'm out on a limb here? What do the rest of you think?
OK, the numbers might be small beer compared to Stalin and Mao. But that would miss the point, put us in the same league as Trotskyists (whose atrocity numbers are also small when compared to the real monsters).
Two from the historical record, as an example:
Arizona Daily Star, June 2007 wrote:
Two Carmelite priests who once worked in Tucson [Arizona] are among 498 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War who will be beatified in Rome this fall.Both Tristany and Farré returned to Spain [from Tuscon, Arizona] and died there in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War — an era punctuated by strong anticlerical sentiment.
According to research by the Rev. Jose Luis Ferroni, who is the associate pastor at Santa Cruz, Tristany was shot in the back outside the Carmelite monastery in downtown Barcelona. He was 64. A mural commemorating Tristany can still be seen inside the sacristy at the Barcelona monastery, Ferroni said.
Farré was preaching a novena to Carmelite nuns in Tiana [near Barcelona], Spain, in July 1936 when he received news of the war and urged the nuns to leave the cloister. Ferroni says Farré took refuge in a nearby home for several days until he was confronted by militia and told them he was a Carmelite friar. He was taken away in a large truck and was never seen again. He was 39.
Apr 19 2008 06:20
#2
i dont think you can take the guilt for something that happened in a war situation. there are always going to be atrocities when a war is raging.
Apr 19 2008 18:21
#3
While these killings were unnecessary, the Catholic church has yet to apologize to the working class for leaching off their back, or for its role in supporting the coup, or in defeat of the revolutionary movement and the massacres resulting from it.
Apr 19 2008 20:29
#4
Truth is fine, reconciliation with the Catholic church? Catch yersel' on mate.
Apr 20 2008 11:49
#5
Quote:
38,000 civilians executed in all Republican Spain is the minimum figure given by historians (the range of figures goes much higher), and the Anarchist share of that could easily be in the 10,000 range. Most all of those would have been entirely innocent victims - many were simple parish priests.
I'm sure we can find examples where people have been killed unjustly and I'd include some, but not all, priests in that. At a time of war and with popular revenge being unleashed however it's nowhere near as simple to pin blame or, in this case, to equate it to the centralised calculated mass killings that were seen on the other side. Who exactly should apologise, and to who? The people who were crushed by and lived under fascist rule to...the fascists? The Church? Weird.
Quote:
I would suggest that it is hypocritical to criticize Lenin, and his followers, for their terrorism, while not similarly criticizing and disowning the terrorism of the Spanish Anarchists. And doing so unequivocally.
The targets of anarchists, for example during the days of pistolerismo, were the oppressors of ordinary Spanish workers, not other ordinary Spanish workers. Taking the killing of capitalists, thugs, bishops et al. in the context of the time shows them to be quite the opposite to the sort of terrorism that the Cheka inflicted upon revolutionaries and the Russian proletariat. In all too many cases then, we have to defend these actions not lump them in with every other 'propaganda of the deed'.
'Truth and Reconciliation' that papers over class strife is reactionary balls. It's even more of a joke when mainstream Spanish society isn't prepared to talk about what happened, to exume mass graves or acknowledge the fact that in right-wing political parties you have people who came directly from the Francoist regime.
Apr 20 2008 15:31
#6
Apr 20 2008 15:35
#7
Bad things happen in war, and civil wars tend to be particularly viscious. Also how many of the so called innocent victims were fascist sympathisers or speculators? We'll never know...
Apr 20 2008 17:45
#8
What Volin said.
It is time to celebrate the 'terrorism' of the Spanish anarchists - especially in relation to the killing of "simple parish priests"!
Apr 20 2008 18:28
#9
All you can say against it is that, since they were constantly short of ammunition, it might have been a waste of bullets.
Apr 22 2008 02:35
#10
I'm not going to necessarily agree with some of those above that say "Shit happens", but I think its important to note the context and the situation that these things happened in. This was not an era of "Liberation Theology", it was an era of full-on support of Fascists by the Catholic hierarchy all the way down. I've never quite understood why religious figures whom provide shelter, financial support, and ideological leverage to mass-murders get off the hook because they wear robes and claim that they're "peaceful" (while their jack booted friends do the dirty work).
"Reconciliation" is too often a buzzword for giving right-wing reactionaries absolution in some sort of "All things equal" bargain. But this is bullshit. You can't compare the actions of the oppressed in defense of their lives against the systemic and brutal annihilation of a whole class of people. This was the fundamental split between Camus and Sartre; is the retaliatory violence of the Algerians on the same footings as the systemic and conscious violence of the French state? And my answer, as was Sartre's was, is no. You can't compare the two straight out.
This doesn't mean the bombing of schools should be viewed as some sort of revolutionary model (it isn't), but it does mean that there is no "Reconciliation" with right-wing, reactionary forces. There should be transparency, and honesty in regards to things gone fucking wrong, but thats a far cry from kissing Falangists on the lips.
Apr 22 2008 02:41
#11
I mean once you exclude the priests who weren't fascists, fascist sympathisers and other types of counter revolutionaries there's a very good chance that the other ones shot were nonces.
Apr 22 2008 02:45
#12
Quote:
This was the fundamental split between Camus and Sartre; is the retaliatory violence of the Algerians on the same footings as the systemic and conscious violence of the French state? And my answer, as was Sartre's was, is no. You can't compare the two straight out.
Nah I'm with Camus on this one, Sartre was just being a middle class cunt who could well afford to talk about the violence in such a detached manner, saying as he was never likely to bare the brunt of fuck all in his Parisian apartment.
If you can explain to me how the no warning bombing of cafe's and disco's in Algiers had anything to do with defending the lives of anyone I'll be amazed.
Apr 22 2008 02:59
#13
I wonder what those poor misguided Catholic Workers would say? They got all excited when Oscar Romero was shot. Actually, does anyone know what Dorothy Day thought about the executions of priests in Spain, not that I care about her opinion, just curious.
Apr 22 2008 03:41
#14
Quote:
Nah I'm with Camus on this one, Sartre was just being a middle class cunt who could well afford to talk about the violence in such a detached manner, saying as he was never likely to bare the brunt of fuck all in his Parisian apartment.
I've heard this argument before, and it doesn't wash, mostly because Sartre picked up most of his ideas from Frantz Fanon, whom no one can accuse of being a "middle class cunt" (which Sartre butchered most of his positions, but generally got the gist right). And appealing to someones economic background is the worst kind of logical fallacy thats get thrown around in radical circles; its essentially a modified version of an appeal to authority, albeit an appeal to proletarian.
I'm not arguing that bombing discotheques is "defending the lives of anyone"; its pure visceral hatred compounded by years of discrimination and oppression. The fact that its understandable does not make it in and of itself a good idea or a moral one.
Apr 22 2008 03:49
#15
Sartre was always a fucking poseur compared to Camus and Franz Fanon overcompensated for his relative privilege by spouting a lot of absolute bollocks in an attempt to justify the injustifiable.
There is of course the actual brutal violence carried out didn't represent a transition to anything more progressive than the colonial regime, and it had fuck all to do with white masks but rather was part of a struggle for power by a new ruling strata with the same disregard for ordinary people, something common to all national liberation struggles.
Algeria has been fucking awesome since ole whitey got fucked out, no brutal civil wars or nothing, the beautifully homogenous 'oppressed' would never prove themselves to be as every bit as brutal as their old 'oppressors'.
Apr 22 2008 04:07
#16
the more I think about Sartre on a personal level the more he fucking reminds me of all those middle class wee cunts in the likes of the SWP or mental Maoist organisations who defend all sorts of brutality and barbarism when it's far away and being carried out by some romanticised 'oppressed' people. Well saying the soft middle class cunts never actually have to see the reality of it.
Swotty middle class cunt.
Cool mutha fucka.
Apr 22 2008 06:34
#17
Well clearly, I have been seduced by the unending wit of it all. You fail to mention of course that Camus was FOR a French Algeria (not against nationalism..simply against a separatist one), so using him in a harangue against nationalism is absurd.
Conflating bourgeoisie nationalism, and its attendant failures, to the fucking never-ending bloodshed that is the African continent, ignores for the moment the continued presence of colonial powers, old and new, all over the fucking place. From the Cold-War positioning of the Soviet Union (alongside Cuba) and the US, to the continued meddling from France and others, simply saying "Whitey" is out ignores the reality.
At the same time, the fundamental bankruptcy of the state as we know it is made even more apparent all over Africa. From the arbitrarily drawn lines, to the farce of elections (often times more a reflection of tribal demographics than political ideology), nationalism is a bankrupt myth that hoary old dingbats like Mandela and Mugabe cling to in order to keep their parties relevant.
Apr 22 2008 12:52
#18
Well blow me down! I agree with revol about Sartre, the man was a cunt.
Apr 22 2008 18:43
#19
Didn't Camus eventually say some well reactionary and almost racist shit about the Algerian uprising though?
And Sartre's a good fuckin writer when he sticks to fiction.
Apr 22 2008 19:07
#20
Nah he's a cunt.
Also the OP is ridiculous, to just guess that anarchists killed 10,000 without any sort of evidence, just pulling a number out of the air.
Like considering that the anarchists didn't have any centralized political police, and all the executions were done by mobs basically, I think I'll trust the workers who've lived in a parish all their life to know what the local priest was up to.
Plus convents weren't anything cute, they were basically prisons at the time and priests who had anything to do with them shoulda been shot on that basis alone.
Apr 22 2008 19:12
#21
Any truth and reconciliation committee would have to start with a full investigation into this act of insurrectionist propaganda by the deed terrorism:
What? You think that all anarchists who somehow share some sort of mystical collective guilt for some bizarre reason should have a truth and reconciliation session with the catholic church or maybe with modern day falangists? Fucking hell thats mental.