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The underhanded machinations of international diplomacy
The cenetista and faísta bureaucracy, in its clumsy and ridiculous attempt to justify its betrayals and its collaboration with the State, conceived the argument that it was necessary to support Companys in Catalonia and therefore to obey and uphold the power of the central government as well—whose President was Azaña—so that, on the surface, Spain would give the appearance to the diplomats of the democratic governments of a country ruled in accordance with the legal and political norms inherent to any well constituted State, so that these countries would make weapons, munitions and other urgently needed materiel available to the “anti-fascist” alliance.
It is not necessary to open the book that tells the story of the obscure diplomatic plots and machinations of the anti-fascist powers against republican Spain, which were so clearly revealed by the grave events that took place in those 30 months of fratricidal war, in order to affirm that the “transcendental” resolution of the CNT and the FAI to allow the whole dilapidated structure of the Spanish state to remain standing, in order to obtain moral support and arms from the “democracies”, was merely a crude pretext to conceal their absolute lack of anarchist convictions; their cowardice in the face of the shocking spectacle of the awakening of the Iberian proletarian multitudes; their well-dissimulated ambitious fantasies and their boundless authoritarian careerism. For it is not possible to suppose that during those moments they had forgotten the past of opprobrium and despotism that these nations had behind them, one that is identical with regard to violent methods and servile ends to the behavior currently manifested by the totalitarian states—as the prize of conquest—by imposing humiliation on the Czech, Ethiopian, Austrian, Albanian and other peoples.
France has used the guillotine on its rebels. It has enslaved the peoples of Africa, where it imposes, by force of arms, European “civilization”.
England has demonstrated its barbarous procedures of “adaptation” in the bloody war against the Boers, in Transvaal, and rules over India, Palestine, and other vast, and wealthy, regions.
The United States flaunts, in its long reactionary history, the red blemish of the Chicago Martyrs. It electrocuted Sacco and Vanzetti and it has imposed its military and economic dominance on various little republics in South America. Russia, which, by an irony of language, is denominated by its paid panegyrists as the “vanguard of democracy”, has a rigid and cruel dictatorship of the “proletariat”; there is no freedom of assembly or speech and the only press is the official state press.
However, even if we were to assume that their memories had proven to be unreliable, the suspicious events that were taking place—the refusal to deliver the train cars full of ammunition in Irún; the initiative of the leader of the French cabinet, the socialist Blum, to form the famous Non-Intervention Committee, which resulted in a tight blockade on the coasts of “loyalist” Spain; the fall of the cabinet presided over by Largo Caballero, ordered by Russia with the acquiescence of France and England; the surrender of Málaga, Bilbao, Santander, etc., without a fight, without destroying the machinery of the mines or the armaments factories; the presence in the port of Barcelona of English and French warships during the May Days of 1937, when the Marxists were murdering the anarchists in order to impose their complete domination over the “workers Republic”; the refusal to send arms to the Aragon front; the Bolshevization of the anti-fascist army, and its infiltration by large numbers of “technicians”, all communists; the control exercised by the communists over the frontier with France; the dissolution of the Defense Committee and the agrarian collectives of Aragon; the intervention of the army of Portugal—an ally of England—alongside Franco’s hordes; the transport, right under the noses of the English and the French, of thousands of “volunteers” sent by Mussolini and Hitler, without their “knowledge” and without them being detected; the bombing of Spanish cities and towns by German and Italian airplanes, fueled with Russian gasoline; and many other grave and symptomatic events—did it never occur to the brilliant minds of the men of responsibility of the CNT and the FAI to be concerned with investigating just where their “ingenuousness”, “good faith” and zeal to make alliances with the authoritarian politicians united in the anti-fascist bloc and with the democratic nations had led and was leading them?
The machinations and backdoor plots being hatched in the chancelleries of the “anti-fascist” countries were no mystery, maneuvers tending to eliminate the danger that was represented, for the governments and capitalists of the totalitarian nations as well as all the other ones, by the revolutionary wave spearheaded by the anarchists of the Iberian Peninsula. Tierra y Libertad, of Barcelona, in its issue of March 20, 1937, said:
“International capitalism has no wall that divides the fascist capitalists from the democratic capitalists, or the monarchists from the liberals, the rightists from the leftists. It has its great centers in London and in New York, in Berlin and in Paris, in Rome and in Buenos Aires, in Tokyo and in Geneva, in all the great capitals of the globe.”
Santillán claimed:
“So-called loyalist Spain collapsed as a result of our victory of July 19, under the influence of the imperialist constellation of the allegedly democratic powers. England and France, with the diplomatic alliance of Russia, were not very concerned, or not at all concerned, with the prospect of a fascist Spain; but they were very concerned about the possibility of a revolutionary Spain.”
Furthermore, the “pacifist” initiatives of the English politician Mr. Eden were very well known in Spain, initiatives which entailed the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The results of the grotesque Munich Conference were also known, where, with the mutual agreement of the four great powers, the disappearance of Czechoslovakia was decided. The efforts of the English prime minister on behalf of “pacification” were also well known, whom some humorists depicted with an open umbrella; and no one was unaware of the fact that English diplomacy—by dividing countries up or surrendering them—dominates the world; which helped transform Mussolini into a Napoleon; which preferred and helped bring about Franco’s victory; which received the protest of Portugal “against fascist interference” and … that is already enough. The democratic and totalitarian powers—seemingly at loggerheads—thus fulfilled their mission to “save humanity”, providing the means to make possible the stabbing in the back, the imprisonment and the shooting of the anarchists of Spain and today, they must be savoring, satisfied and in unison, the tragic task they accomplished in the Iberian regions, by means of the hosts of Franco.
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Now that the echo of the military bugles, the roar of the cannons, the staccato tapping of the machine guns, the buzz of the bombers, the heartrending cries of the wounded and the thump of human bodies hitting the Spanish soil, never to rise again, has just recently been silenced, once again the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are galloping over the fields of Europe. Attila returns in the form of Mars.
Once again, the brutal and destructive argument of combat weapons is employed: tanks, planes, gas, armor, flamethrowers and toxic liquids, etc., in order to determine the political and economic pecking order among the capitalist powers. It is thus that the madmen of absolutist sensualism, the unbalanced and dangerous agents of international diplomacy and the arms manufacturers have once again led the peoples of old Europe, after having intoxicated them with the opium of patriotism, to a hecatomb that is even greater than the one that started in 1914, which cost millions of lives and left in its wake millions of invalids, orphans and insane people. In all oral and written propaganda we note the fateful duo—Capital and the State—as the factors that are responsible for the painful and Dantesque spectacle that we behold as spectators from a distance, although the irrefutable arguments that we have always made to the workers in order to point with the finger of accusation at the causal factors of this collective crime and of our misfortunes, sacrifices and miseries, will not at the present time produce any greater reflective effect in the minds of the people, since the latter are dominated by war fever, which the bourgeois press injects into them on a daily basis. We must repeat, however, that those who today unleash the whirlwind of passions, of hatred and of limitless cruelty on the European peoples, are still hiding behind false appearances, seeking to appear as messengers of peace and saviors of humanity.
It is logical to state, then, that every person with an altruistic spirit and noble sentiments must feel despondent in the face of the impressive scene of cruelty, martyrdom and destruction that is currently taking shape in Europe, and must unite their reproach with our anathema against this crime against humanity signified by the war, joining the outcries of the mothers, sisters, children and elderly parents who will be the sacrificial victims of the current madness of war.
That, then, is the anathema we pronounce against all wars.
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