Ideationally Puzzling

Flag of the Lincoln Battalion

I had a chance last week to watch Ken Loach's 1995 film Land and Freedom. My review of the film is forthcoming, but I went back to read what Stanley Kauffmann thought of the film. Writing in his column at The New Republic on April 1, 1996, Kauffmann wrote favorably of Land and Freedom, but with curious reservations. He was moved by its portrayal of a crucial moment in history that was overshadowed by the greater catastrophe of World War Two, the Spanish Civil War, to make a confession that is significant:

In Jim Allen's screenplay, Dave's granddaughter goes through his letters and clippings and photos, and the film flashes back to his experiences in Spain: his combat life, his encounters with the communist factionalism that accompanies the fight against fascism, his involvement in the ponderous discussion groups, his love affair with a young woman in the ranks alongside him and the dreadful inevitable results of the war - inevitable not only because Italy and Germany were supporting Franco, not only because the democracies were reluctant to support communists, but because of the strife among anti-Franco forces and the subversions of Stalin.

For those of us who lived through those days, Loach recreates engulfingly the atmosphere in which we lived and feared. Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 had been naked brutality. Still, it seemed somewhat distant. Franco's rebellion in Spain seemed to presage the tidal roll of fascism toward us. Loach made me remember nightmares (and my two heroic days when I got an application form for the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and studied it, then never filled it out).

World War II and subsequent events erased that simplicity but apparently not for Loach. As Dave Hart's body is lowered into his Liverpool grave, his relatives and friends, young and old, raise their fists in the communist salute. It's not kneejerk anticommunism, I think, to wonder after that salute about the purpose of the film. Is Loach sympathizing or satirizing? Is he telling us that Dave and perhaps he himself learned nothing from the slitherings of communist policy in the Spanish Civil War, let alone the cascade of subsequent history? In recent years, even deeply held radical beliefs have come in for darker tempering; we get no sense of that from Loach's excellently made but ideationally puzzling film.

What's puzzling for me about Kauffmann's last remark is that it wasn't just Dave who came away from his participation in a moment of history, a participation joined by the likes of George Orwell, feeling vindicated, but Stanley who decided against participating, who ultimately failed to see the point of participating. 

With allowances made for the lapse of sixty years, Kauffmann didn't seem to know what the Spanish Civil War was really about. Quite simply, it was the overwhelming defeat of a people's choice of how they wanted to be governed by the forces of fascism, that the Western powers - the democracies - had an opportunity to stop, which may have sent a message to Hitler and Mussolini that we considered democracy worth fighting for and fascism worth resisting. But we failed, like Kauffmann, to fill out the application form and stayed home to watch fascism win, only to find ourselves fighting it anyway across Europe and the Pacific a few years later.

Dave dies of old age in Liverpool and his granddaughter discovers a small suitcase filled with his mementos, his souvenirs of an adventure he never told her about. And of those mementos Ken Loach gives us his "excellently made" film, ending with a group of Dave's fellow Socialists (Kauffmann continually calls them Communists) giving him the raised fist salute, which was the anti-fascist salute in Spain, made by communists, socialists, and anarchists. I found the moment to be neither naïve nor ironic, but beautiful.

In December 1936, when George Orwell arrived in Barcelona, the de facto capital of the Spanish Republic, he was a journalist sent to find out what was really going on - since the British press had been reporting quite conflicting accounts. He was so overwhelmed by what he saw, with the working class, as he put it, "in the driver seat," that he joined a militia that was unaffiliated with the hardline communist forces called Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista, or POUM - which is incidentally the very same militia that Dave joins in Land and Freedom. He saw action on the Aragon front until he was wounded in the throat by a falangist sniper and invalided out of Spain. He wrote the book Homage to Catalonia to try and set the historical record of the war straight. In 1943 he published an essay called "Looking Back on the Spanish War" in which he wrote:

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.

The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan't they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later — some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.

So Stanley Kauffmann, who was otherwise a heroic figure among American film critics, was right to refrain from filling out the form and joining the Lincoln Battalion. The cause was lost, and Kauffmann had reason to think he did right. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference (just 2,500 Americans served in the Battalion), but perhaps the cause wouldn't have been such a lost one if he - and numerous other liberals like him - had filled it out and girded his loins in defense of democracy.