Cover of first (and only) print edition (1972)

NOW AVAILABLE ON KINDLE* (.co.uk) and Kindle US (.com) Kindle Germany (.de) Kindle France (.fr) Kindle Spain (.es) Kindle Italy (.it)

Miguel García García was born in Barcelona in I908, the seventh of nine children. He became a newspaper-seller at the age of nine, and an apprentice printer at twelve; he was a lifelong member of the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist trade union in Spain.

Miguel García García fought for nearly forty years for the freedoms we take for granted. A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Miguel then put his experience as a printer to good use — forging documents and printing pamphlets for the Resistance.

On 21 October I949, he was arrested, tried and sentenced to death together with eight comrades. He spent thirty-eight days in the condemned cell until his sentence was commuted to thirty years’ imprisonment. Four of his comrades were executed.

Even in Franco’s jails, he never gave up the struggle — organising and taking part in numerous escape attempts, and always stubbornly refusing to compromise with the prison authorities.

Twenty years later he was released; a man old before his time, sick and without his family, but his spirit still unbroken. His memoir, FRANCO’S PRISONER reveals a side of Spain the tourists never saw, a Spain whose prisons were still crammed with political prisoners. This book is a blistering indictment of a police state; but it is also a great human story of integrity, courage and survival.

After his release from prison on 22 March 1969, García left Spain, and continued his campaign in Britain and elsewhere in Europe working with the International Anarchist Black Cross on behalf of Franco’s political prisoners and the anarchist idea, speaking at universities, town and village halls, trade union centres and working-men’s clubs.

(* A print edition will be available in 2013)

Sabaté by Flavio Costantini

Fundraiser fine art poster: Sabaté — Guerrilla Extraordinary by Flavio Costantini — £55.00; €68,00; US$90.00 (post free)

This premium A2 (420 x 594mm – 16.5 x 594 inches) giclée* print by Flavio Costantini is digitally printed on Epson Enhanced Matte Paper** (189gsm)*; it shares the same vivid colours, accuracy, and exceptional resolution that makes giclée prints the standard for museums and galleries around the world.

* The word “giclée” was created by Jack Duganne, a print maker working at Nash Editions. He wanted a name for the new type of prints they were producing on the IRIS printer, a large format high resolution industrial prepress proofing ink-jet printer they had adapted for fine art printing. He was specifically looking for a word that would not have the negative connotations of “ink-jet” or “computer generated”. To make the word descriptive of ink-jet technologies he based it on the French language word ”le gicleur” meaning “nozzle”, or more specifically “gicler” meaning “to squirt, spurt, or spray”. The Epson large format printer uses Ultrachrome inks which are fade free for over 100 years,

** Epson Enhanced Matte/Archival Matte – Epson Enhanced Matte – formerly named Archival Matte – is a single-sided paper with medium thickness and weight, and a smooth, soft white (slightly warm) surface. Print quality is excellent, with deep blacks, saturated colors and good shadow and highlight detail. Enhanced Matte is incredible value, offering outstanding print quality.

*** Giclée prints of selected Spanish Civil War/Revolution posters also available HERE

KINDLE edition available here (click on image)

This compelling and moving book, first published in Spanish in 1972 (and in English in 1974, and now republished for Kindle), examines the life of one of the best-known of all the Spanish resistance fighters — Francisco Sabaté Llopart, known as El Quico, General Franco’s ‘Public Enemy No. 1’. But it is more than this, for the author, Antonio Téllez, traces in detail what has been called ‘a little-known period of Spanish history’, the period that saw the development of the Anarchist resistance to the Fascist regime following the tragic end of the Spanish Civil War, a resistance that continues to this day (1974). It paints a striking picture not only of the development of resistance in Spain, but also of its too-long ignored influence on contemporary (1960s and 1970s) urban guerrilla movements in South America and in Europe.

It is a sad story: of a man who would not compromise his ideals nor treat with a system he found tyrannical and vile, a man who devoted his adult life to freeing the most openly oppressed people in Europe. But Sabaté ‘s story does not end in 1960, as did his life, in the dusty street in San Celoni surrounded by Militia and Guardia Civil and broken by their bullets. His struggle was taken up by men and women throughout Spain. As Téllez demonstrates, Sabaté proved by his selfless battle that the individual is never helpless; there is always a possibility of rebelling and defending an idea one considers just. Francisco Sabaté, unquenchably brave, undismayed by failure, unmarked by treachery, gave to his people and to the free world the knowledge of the rightness of his cause.

‘Soy El Quico!’ 1 — ‘Soy El Quico‘ – 2 — El Maquis a Catalunya

Antonio Téllez Solà (1921-2005), the Herodotus of the anti-Franco maquis by Stuart Christie

Antonio Tellez Sola (photo by Stuart Christie)

Antonio Téllez Solà, who has died at his home in Perpignan aged 84, was one of the last survivors of the anarchist resistance that fought to overthrow the Franco dictatorship. He was also one of the first historians of the post civil war urban and rural guerrilla resistance to the fascist regime. In his actions and his writings, Téllez personified refusal to surrender to tyranny.

The son of a railway worker, he was born in Tarragona and was radicalised by the October 1934 insurrection in Asturias, which failed when the unions outside the mining region failed to give their support. On 19 July 1936, when the workers, this time united, held at bay the rebellion of most of the Spanish officer class against the infant left-wing Republic, Téllez was in Lérida where he joined the anarchist youth organisation, the Juventudes Libertarias, immersing himself in the struggle to fight fascism and preserve the social revolution with which the union rank and file had answered the generals’ attempted coup.

Téllez joined the army aged 18, in the final stages of the Republic’s collapse, and saw action on various fronts until February 1939 when, with thousands of other anti-Francoist refugees, he was forced into exile in France. There he spent a year in the Septfonds concentration camp and then a further six months in the camp at Argeles sur Mer, two of many locations in which the French government interned the people who had held fascism at bay for almost three years. Escaping at the end of 1940, he joined a band of Spanish guerrillas operating in the Aveyron department, serving as part of the IX Brigade  (French Forces of the Interior), and resisting the occupation until Liberation in 1944.

In October 1944 Téllez took part in the ill-advised 10-day invasion of Francoist Spain by approximately 6,000 Spanish republican guerrillas of the CP-led Unión Nacional Española (UNE) via the Arán and Ronçal valleys in the Pyrenees, one of the first operations mounted by the maquis against the Franco regime. With the defeat of the UNE at the battle of Salardú, he moved to Toulouse where he set up clandestine arms dumps for the guerrilla campaign.

For two years Téllez served on the second peninsular committee of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL), carrying out clandestine liaison missions between the anarchist movement in France and Spain. Resigning from organisational activity in April 1946, he travelled undercover in Spain for three months establishing contacts with the guerrillas and what remained of the illegal anarchist movement. Téllez was unable to generate financial or organisational support for the Resistance due to the hostility of the Toulouse-based National Committee of the exiled anarcho-syndicalist union, the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) to armed struggle. Frustrated by oligarchic tensions and self-serving politicking, he moved to Paris where he worked as a reporter for Agence France Presse from 1960 until retirement in 1986, when he moved to Ceret in the Pyrenees and then to Perpignan.

In Paris Téllez continued to contribute to the anarchist press, but from 1954 onwards it was clear that his life’s work was to write the histories of the legendary names of the anarcho-syndicalist action groups: Francisco Sabaté Llopart, José Luis Facerias, Wenceslao Gimenez Orive, Francisco Denis, Raul Carballeira, Marcelino Massana Bancells — and many more, from the mountains and sierras of Catalonia, Aragón, Asturias and Galicia in the north to the Levante and Extremadura in the west and east, to Andalucia in the south.

I met Téllez for the first time in Paris in 1973. While I was on remand in Brixton prison he had sent me a copy of his newly published biography of Francisco Sabaté, which I translated from Spanish into English. After my acquittal I visited him to discuss the book, which he was constantly updating and revising, as he did with all his work. We became firm friends. His archives were enormous and his apartment overlooking the Pêre Lachaise cemetery was stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes of files, documents and photograph albums. His accomplishments in a particularly difficult area of study were quite remarkable given that his subject matter was clandestine groups and secretive and highly individualistic militants who were activists rather than theorists, many of whom were outcasts from their own organisations. I witnessed a good example of this in Paris, when I introduced Téllez to Octavio Alberola, the coordinator of Defensa Interior, the clandestine anarchist group responsible for organising assassination attempts on Franco between 1962 and 1966. The two men had never met and Alberola was taken aback when from on top of his wardrobe, Téllez produced the original plans for the proposed 1963 assassination attempt on Franco at the Puente de los Franceses near the Oriente Palace in Madrid. We never did discover where he acquired them.

Téllez’s published and unpublished output was phenomenal, covering the period from Franco’s victory on 1 April 1939 to his death on 20 November 1975, and beyond. He had two main objectives: to record the lives of selfless men who would not compromise their ideals nor treat with a system they found villainous and vile, men who devoted their adult lives to freeing Spain from the last of the Axis dictators. His work has been a major contribution to the movement for the recovery of historical memory, which is now playing such an important part in contemporary Spanish politics. Téllez’s other objective was to demonstrate that the individual is never helpless; there is always the possibility of rebelling and defending an idea one considers just, even in the most unfavourable and adverse conditions.

Antonio Téllez Solà, anarchist, guerrilla, historian, born January 18 1921; died March 27 2005. He is survived by his partner, Armonía, and two sons.

Published work:

1) Sabaté: the urban guerrilla in Spain (1945-1960.)

2) Facerías: urban guerrilla (1939-1957). The anti-Francoist struggle of the Spanish libertarian movement in Spain and exile.

3) The MIL and Puig Antich.

4) The Unsung Struggle — The Plot to Assassinate Franco from the Air — 1948.

5) The Anarchist Pimpernel — Francisco Ponzán Vidal (1936-1944). The anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the escape and evasion networks in World War II.

6) Apuntes sobre Antonio Garcia Lamolla y otras andares. Recuerdo (with José Peirats)

He was one of the founders of the publication Atalaya (1957-1958), and contributed regularly to Ruta, Solidaridad Obrera (Paris), CNT, Bicicleta, Cultura Libertaria, Polémica and Historia Libertaria, to which he brought fresh evidence on the little-known anarchist maquis in Asturias

Unpublished works include:

1) Guerrilla Warfare in Galicia — Mario Rodríguez Losada (O Pinche, O Langullo)

2) Atalaya.

3) Notas para una eventual ebozo biográfico de José García Tella

And many monographs on individuals, publications from 1944 to the Iberian Liberation Council, Defensa Interior, the First of May Group, the MIL, GARI and the collapse of the Suarez trial in Paris in 1979. When he died, he was working on a number of projects including a history of the FIJL from 1935, an incomplete manuscript on Action Direct, the French anarchist action group, another incomplete manuscript on his personal relationships with the guerrilla, and an index of the names and personal histories of the urban and rural guerrillas. Harmonia, his partner, has indicated these will probably be loaned to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam as part of a proposed Antonio Téllez Foundation.

Click to view illustrations

The Anarchist Pimpernel. Francisco Ponzán Vidal (1936 1944). The anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the Allied Escape Networks of WWII  by Antonio Téllez Solá (With the collaboration of Pilar Ponzán Vidal). Translated by Paul Sharkey. (Also available here from Amazon.com in the USA)

(Originally published in Spanish in 1996 as: ‘La Red de Evasion del Grupo Ponzán. Anarquistas en la guerra secreta contra el franquismo y el nazismo (1936-1944)’. This e-edition has been translated by Paul Sharkey from Tellez’s subsequently re-written and updated (1997) typescript, which incorporates the memoirs of Pilar Ponzán Vidal (Francisco’s sister) and Tellez’s hitherto unpublished work on Agustín Remiro ‘El Guerrillero Anarquista Agustín Remiro y el Batallón de Ametralladoras “C” (Batallón Remiro)’.

Founder and organiser of the escape and evasion lines used by the ‘Pat O’Leary’ and ‘Sabot’ networks, the French security services (Travaux Ruraux), and local French Resistance organisations, from 1940 to 1943, Francisco Ponzán Vidal’s group, consisting mainly of Spanish anarchist exiles, saved the lives of hundreds if not thousands of resistance fighters, evadees and escaped prisoners of war. Between January 1942 and April 1943 (when he was arrested by the Vichy milice), Ponzán’s records, consisting of two notebooks, list the names, dates and some photographs of 311 Allied evaders who successfully escaped to Spain and Gibraltar through his network. The names in the books include those of Lt. Airey Neave (the later MI9 officer and Thatcherite Tory MP), and RAF sergeant John Prendergast (later Sir John, colonial police chief — Kenya, Cyprus and Aden — and head of the Royal Hong Kong Police Special Branch). (Interestingly, one of those evaders who owed their life to anarchists was the ungrateful psycopath Harold ‘Tanky” Challenor, a Commando during the war, who later joined the Metropolitan Police (West End Central) and famously — and unsuccessfully— attempted to frame anarchist cartoonist Donald Rooum by claiming to have found a piece of brick — ‘an offensive weapon ‘ — in his pocket at a demonstration against the unpopular Greek king and queen during their visit to London in 1963).  Other successful — and appreciative — evaders Ponzán’s anarchist network helped to make it back to Britain included Bill Sparks (my wife’s cousin’s brother) and major ‘Blondie’ Hasler, the sole survivors of ‘Operation Frankton’, the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ Royal Marine commando raid on German ships in Bordeaux harbour.

The young (and myopic) Ponzán’s first run-in with the authorities occurred in the aftermath of the Jaca (Aragón) uprising of December 1930 when he was arrested and detained for a few days. In 1932 he was imprisoned again, this time for two months, during a general strike, and also in April, July and December 1933, following that month’s CNT-led insurrection.

The 1936 military-fascist uprising found him teaching in Huesca, and in October that year, at the height of the Spanish Revolution, he represented the Angües Regional Committee at the General Assembly of Trade Unions at Bujaraloz, which led to the formation of the Economic and Regional Defence Council of Aragón, probably the most genuinely libertarian administration of the Spanish Revolution. Ponzán served for 7 months as the Council of Aragon’s sub-secretary for Information and Propaganda, that is until the Council and its collectives were suppressed by General Enrique Lister’s 11^th Division (on the orders of republican Prime Minister Juan Negrín). Subsequently Ponzán enlisted in the ‘Rojinegra’ militia column led by his friend and comrade Maximo Franco, under whose aegis he organised and led a behind-the-lines intelligence/sabotage guerrilla unit known as ‘Los Libertadores’.

In the autumn of 1937 Ponzán was promoted to captain and co-opted into the SIEP (Servicio de Información Especial Periférica), the special services/military intelligence unit of the Xth Army Corps in the now fully militarised republican Army of the East, a post in which he remained until forced into exile at the end of the war.

With Franco’s victory imminent, Ponzán arrived in France, via Andorra, in February 1939, where he established a number of arms caches before being arrested and interned in the La Vernet concentration camp. Assigned to work for a local anti-fascist farmer by the name of M. Benazet, he immediately began building and consolidating an anarchist anti-Francoist resistance network throughout the Eastern Pyrenees. His reputation and standing among local anti-fascists soon brought him to the attention of the local British SIS (MI6) officer, ‘Major Marshall’, who, in November 1939, recruited Ponzán and his group to organise a ‘stay-behind’ operation in preparation for the expected arrival of the Wehrmacht. SIS operations in the Eastern Pyrenees at the time were based in the town of Foix, in the Ariège, and were coordinated by Major Marshall, Commander Hinman, and a Captain Philips. According to the French RG (Renseignements Généraux — security service) Ponzán’s group, all members of the CNT-FAI, included captains José Estevez Coll. Pedro Marcos Bilbao, a Spanish Merchant Marine officer, José Villa Briga Abizando, Antonio Castreo de la Torre, Onofre García Tirador, Juan Manuel (‘Juanel‘), Agustín Remiro, Saturnino Carod and Francisco Denís, ‘El Català’, Juan Zafón, Pascual and Eusebio López Lagarta, Vicente Moriones, Amádeo Casares, Rafael Melendo, Ricardo Rebola, Ginés Camarasa, Victorio Castán, Coteno, among others.

When the Germans finally invaded France in May 1940, ‘Major Marshall’, drawing on his CNT-FAI contacts cultivated over the years between the First World War and the Spanish Civil War, began liaising with Leonard Hamilton Stokes, the recently appointed SIS head of station in Madrid — and his deputy, Kenneth Benton — to fund communication lines and a resistance organisation (Ponzán’s) in anticipation of the expected German invasion of Spain and Portugal. Earlier that month Ponzán had been wounded during a raid into Spain to spring comrades, including Manuel Lozano Guillén (a commissar with the 127th Mixed Brigade of the 28th Division), from the Belver de Cinca concentration camp. Fortunately, his injuries were not serious and he was soon ready for action against the advancing German armies.

In April 1943 the Vichy milice arrested Ponzán for possessing false ID papers and sentenced him to 8 months imprisonment. His role in the resistance, however, was not widely known until June 1944 when, shortly before the due date for his release, he was betrayed.  The same morning the Allies began landing in Normandy the Gestapo moved him to the Saint-Michel maximum-security prison in Toulouse where he remained for three months, subject to who knows what tortures, until that fateful evening of 17 August — just two days before the Resistance liberated Toulouse — when he and around 50 other fellow Resistance fighters (the exact number is unknown) were taken by Wehrmacht troops to the forest of Buzet-sur-Tarn and murdered in cold blood, their bodies covered with petrol and incinerated.

PS: In 1940, shortly after the Nazi invasion of France, Francisco Ponzán, addressing a meeting in Toulouse of the  first resisters (including Dr Soula, the rector of Toulouse university and Dr Rene de Narcis, prefessor at the Catholic Institute and several eminent professors),  stated: “It is not the homeland of the French nor their freedom which is in jeopardy: the stakes are Freedom, Culture and World Peace”.

James Kelman — On Self-Determination

In an article for the US magazine NY Arts, Glaswegian writer James Kelman nails his colours to the mast with regard to the current debate on Scottish Independence:

‘In an American journal I read a prominent English writer was described as ‘very British’. What can it mean to be ‘very British’? Could I be described in this way? Can my work be described as ‘very British’? No, not by people in Britain, or by those with a thorough knowledge of the situation. The controlling interest in ‘Britishness’ is ‘Englishness’. This ‘Englishness’ is perceived as Anglo-Saxon. It is more clearly an assertion of the values of upper-class England, and their validity despite all and in defiance of all.

Power is a function of its privileged ruling elite. To be properly ‘British’ is to submit to English hierarchy and to recognise, affirm and assert the glory of its value system. This is achieved domestically on a daily basis within ‘British’ education and cultural institutions. Those who oppose this supremacist ideology are criticised for not being properly British, condemned as unpatriotic. Those Scottish, Welsh or Irish people who oppose this supremacist ideology are condemned as anti-English. The ‘British way’ is sold at home and abroad as a thing of beauty, a self-sufficient entity that comes complete with its own ethical system, sturdy and robust, guaranteed to outlast all others.

British people are led to believe that the Royal Family are admired, loved and glorified across the globe. Should another Solar System contain life upon any of its myriad planets its inhabitants will not only accede to the Christian church but acknowledge the Head of the English Royal Family as Defender of the Faith, in competition with the Pope, standing next in line to God.

Writers like myself are guilty of being ‘too Scottish’; our ‘Scottishness’ is as an attack on ‘Britishness’ and acts as a disqualification. It is assumed that Scottish experience is homogenous whereas English experience offers a wide-ranging and worldly heterogeneity. Our work is attacked in pseudo literary tones for its perceived insularity. This also happens within Scotland; anglocentric Scottish critics condemn Scottish writers for their ‘lack of diversity’.

Being ‘too indigenous’ is the same as being ‘too working class’ and, predictably, the closer we move to the realm of class the clearer we find concerns of race and ethnicity. No one remembers that ‘Briton’ has something to do with Celticness. Being ‘too Scottish’ is seen as an assertion of a Celtic rather than Anglo–Saxon heritage. The marketability of certain individuals derives from the arousal of this racial stereotype. The proof of the English footballer David Beckham’s marketability is in his Anglo-Saxon ‘provenance’.

A colonial or imperial context helps clarify the argument. The key is class. ‘Scottishness’ equates to class and class equals conflict. Even within Scotland we can be criticised for this. The work of writers deemed ‘too Scottish’ shares a class background. Occasionally we are condemned for confining our fiction to the world of the urban working class. This suggests that for working class people cultural boundaries are fixed in place. Their world is an entirety of experience, culturally as well as economic. None can step beyond the limits of that world. It is a world barren of the finer things in life which are not only material but spiritual. Working class people cannot engage with art and philosophy. In their world there is no art and philosophy.

This elitism is straightforward and at the heart of the hostility but, as with racism, is seldom remarked upon within the establishment and mainstrean media. It rarely occurs to critics that working class people might read ‘proper’ books or look at paintings as opposed to ‘pictures on the wall’. When it does occur to them it is treated as a phenomenon. They do not progress to the discovery that the life of one human being is as valid as another, that the life experience of one section of society is as diverse as another.

The bourgeoisie tend to go with the colonisers and the imperialists as a means of personal and group survival, and advancement. They quickly buy into the culture of the ruling elite. Indigenous languages and cultures are kept alive by those at the lower end of society. In India and much of Africa, as well as Australasia and North America, the voice of authority continues to be English. The lower order groups keep alive the local, the richness of the indigenous lanuages, the indigenous aethetic, the culture – as best they can, not necessarily by choice or intention. The proletariat and other lower order groups do not have much of a choice. Typically education is denied them, their languages and cultural markers are proscribed, regarded as weapons. To use these language or cultural markers is seen as cultural vandalism or acts of terrorism.

Since the 18th century the cultural and linguistic movement of the Scottish bourgeoisie and ruling elite is total assimiliation to Britishness where Englishness is the controlling interest. Scotland has its own languages too, and these are ‘living languages’, kept alive by people using them who, generally, are working class. Scottish literary artists have worked in these languages for centuries. Even where the writers are not themselves working class in origin the subject matter of the work is, as we see in some of the writings of Walter Scott or R.L. Stevenson.

Scotland also has its own philosophical, legal, religious, literary and educational traditions, and most of this too is marginalised. Scottish educators have to fight Scottish  institutions to find a place for Scottish philosophy, literature and education  itself. Many English people sympathise with the plight of Scottish culture; they see cultures and traditions marginalised everywhere, and recognise also the plight faced by people from Yorkshire, Cornwall,  Northumbria, Cumbria, Somerset, Lancashire and so on.

The difference is that Scotland is not an English county, it is a British country. It will continue to be a British country whether or not we are governed from London, England. This is because Great Britain is a geographical entity. It is a mistake to attribute particular sensibilities or character traits to the millions of people who live in its countries of Wales, England and Scotland. And then there is the north of Ireland.

People are right to treat nationalism with caution. None more than Scottish people who favour self determination. Any form of nationalism is dangerous, and should be treated with caution. I cannot accept nationalism and I am not a Scottish Nationalist. But once that is said, I favour a ‘yes or no’ decision on independence and I shall vote ‘yes’ to independence.

Countries should determine their own existence and Scotland is a country. The decision is not managerial. It belongs to the people of Scotland. We are the country. There are no countries on Mars. This is because there are no people on Mars. How we move ahead here in Scotland is a process that can happen only when the present chains are disassembled, and discarded, when the majority people seize the right, and burden, of self determination.

The Nationalist Party has exposed its weakness in this area. Under their leadership ‘independence’ may be distinguished from ‘self determination’. In his speech of 25.1.2012 Alex Salmond declared: “With independence we will have a new social union with the other nations of these islands and will continue to share Her Majesty the Queen as Head of State.” This returns us to the 17th Century when the ruling elite in Scotland retained their own Parliament but shared kingship with England and Wales. During this period all major policy matters concerning army and international affairs were settled not by the so-called ‘Scottish Parliament’ but in the Palace of Westminster. That so-called ‘Scottish Parliament’ belonged to such a tiny group of aristocrats, landowners and corrupt placemen that there is little point discussing it when we refer to the issue of self determination. The majority Scottish people have never experienced self determination at any time in history.

I am not a patriot. A ‘patriot’ is one who accepts national identity as grounds for a primary solidarity. It is patently absurd that the majority people should expect solidarity from the ruling elite and upper classes. In Scotland there is no justification for such a hope let alone expectation.

The British establishment left, right and centre are as one in their opposition to Scottish self determination. This appolies to the many Scottish politicians of the Tory Party, the Labour Party and the Liberal-Democrat Party who ‘cross the political divide’ to stand together in defence of the Union. It is useful to see this priority expressed so clearly. This type of united front is common in situations of war..

For many people, not only career politicians, a benign paternalism is preferable to independence. A similar choice is faced by adolescents. Should we leave home and live as self determining adults or stay home and enjoy the comforts provided by mum and dad?

The Scottish Nationalists’ push to subject the majority people to a Royal Family pays homage to another tradition associated with ‘Scottish identity’: submission and servitude to the ruling elite. Manna for Empire builders and Colonialists. Dependency is at the root of this aspect of ‘Scottish identity’. There may be a ‘right’ of self determination; on the other hand there may not. Even if there is such a right it need not be exercised. Siding with the imperialist is a better option: dogs brought to heel can be robbed of their bones.

Scottish people are encouraged by the establishment to take pride in their service to the Monarch, the Royal Family and all of its subjects. Scottish children are taught to glorify submission and servitude, embodied in the myth of “the Scottish soldier who wandered faraway and soldiered faraway” in the retention of British authority and the denial to the majority people both foreign and domestic, of the right of self determination.

There are centuries of imperialist myth-making, misinformation and propaganda to disentangle. Clan allegiance has been strong in the highlands and islands of Scotland, as has religious difference throughout the country. This continued throughout the 17th and on through the 18th century until the Battle of Culloden in 1746 when the clan system and Jacobitism was effectively destroyed.

The British State has sought to deny the right to self determination consistently over the past few hundred years in Africa, the Americas, Ireland, the Indian Sub-continent, South East Asia or Australiasia. The State has used every argument it can to cling onto power and when necessary applied the requisite dirty tricks, and finally moved in the army to achieve their objective, at whatever cost, including the slaughter of innocents.

Unfortunately religious difference remains significant into the 21st Century. The Scottish Nationalists support for such an intrinsically British institution will appears as a sop not only to Unionist sympathisers but to ‘the Protestant vote’. This opens a nasty sore on the Scottish political and cultural scene. Traditionally, Protestants are anti-Republican Unionists who regard the King or Queen of England as Defender of the Faith. Roman Catholics are believed to favour Republicanism. In Scotland many people confuse ‘Republicanism’ ‘Roman Catholicism’ and ‘Irishness’. Some believe them to be one and the same thing. The subtext to their ‘pro-Unionist, anti-Republican stance is sectarian racism: anti-Catholic anti-Irish. Others in Scotland will view the Nationalist retention of the British Monarchy in these terms.

To what extent religious sectarianism will play a part in the move towards independence is unknown but few politicians will want to become embroiled in this. The Nationalists have stated elsewhere that they are in favour of lifting the ban on Roman Catholics holding the Monarchy. This may set the minds of some to rest.

The continuing debate in Britain is led by the establishment and mainstream media and focuses on whether or not independence is ‘good for Scotland’. This is a red herring. It is an argument from self interest and therefore secondary. The economic consequences of self determination are important but is not and cannot be the central issue. Experts and specialists debate on the deployment of capital resources; defence and foreign policy, business & industry; health and welfare issues, religions and secularism. Shall Scotland seek to enter NATO, the UN, the British Commonwealth, the European Union? What will happen to ‘our’ soldiers and ‘our’ army-towns, ‘our’ battleships, warplanes, tanks and submarines. What effects will independence have upon our relationships with the USA, with England, Wales and Ireland, not to mention Spain, Italy, Israel, Turkey and all those other countries keeping the lid on their own governance issues.

How we progress as a people will depend on how we contend with those and other matters. A people cannot be asked to settle in advance of independence how they shall act in hypothetical situations. We are being asked to provide a priori evidence of our fitness to determine our own existence before the freedom to do so is allowed.

Imperialists and colonisers lay down the judgment that there is no ‘right’ of self determination. But that judgment has no place in the 21st Century. The right to self determination inheres in every adult human being and distinguishes us from animals, mammals, birds, fowls or fish. No one grants us this right. It is not allowed to us by a benign authority. People exercise the right. It can only be denied to us, as it is denied to the vast majority of the world’s population.

Ultimately there is only one issue: the right to self determination. Underlying the ‘good for Scotland’ debate is the denial of that right.

People can be subjected to hideous forms of torture and mutiliation, and for some it ends in death. This may be rationalised by the perpetrators who deny their victims humanity. Their death carries less value than if the victims were ‘100 percent’ human. Neo-fascism is illustrated where the burden of proof is placed upon human beings to provide evidence of their humanity. Some fall into the trap of accepting the burden of proof. They seek to provide evidence to establish their own humanity. They can only fail. Humanity cannot be ‘granted’ or ‘allowed’ them. They already are human. Their humanity is being denied.

We are talking about freedom. We exercise freedom. If freedom be denied us we seize it as our right. No one gives us our freedom. We take it. If it is denied us we continue to take it. We have no choice. If it is taken from us and we allow it to be taken from us then we are colluding in our own subjection.

The Scottish Nationalists pay allegiance to the concept of ‘hereditary subjection’ (and spiritual degradation), as embodied in the Queen of the British Kingdoms and I find this repugnant. The question is of historical as well as contemporary relevance. People have fought and died for a political freedom inclusive of Republicanism. They would turn in their grave: such as Thomas Muir, John Baird, James Wilson, Andrew Hardie, James Connolly, Arthur McManus, John Maclean.  No one has the right to represent the voice of the Scottish people in a matter of such gravity. It is a massive set-back but not insurmountable. It is my belief that the Nationalists’ brand of independence should still be grasped. We can learn from the past. Sooner or later the right to self determination will be exercised by the majority people in my country. When I vote ‘yes’ to independence I shall be voting towards that end.’

John Brailey, anarcho-syndicalist (1934-2012)

John Brailey, SOGAT rank-and-file militant (with fellow anarchist Albert Meltzer) and anti-war activist, worked for many years as a printer in Fleet Street until the mid-1980s when the newspaper print industry moved to Wapping, after which he became involved in bookselling.

A founder member of the Committee of 100, John was closely associated with the ‘Spies for Peace’ group in 1963 and was one of those who demonstrated against the Greek royal family during their visit to London in the summer of 1963, the first time the Queen of England had been booed on the streets of London. He  also among those who occupied the Greek Embassy in London in April 1967.

My first contact with the Brailey family was when John’s partner, Laura, visited Brian and Margaret Hart at their flat at 57 Ladbroke Road in Notting Hill (where I was living at the time). Brian and Margaret hosted the monthly Notting Hill anarchist meetings (from which sprang, eventually, the Notting Hill Anarchist Group). She’d brought her three children along, and telling me about it later Brian told me the little boy was ralking excitedly about the moon. All the kids were well behaved, but lively and natural. They had all just moved into Peter Lumsden’s large and rambling apartment in Colville Houses further down Notting Hill. Peter, a truly saintly person, was a great admirer of the US Catholic Anarchist movement round Dorothy Day (Catholic Worker Movement), and had visited their centre for ‘down and outs’ (‘the Joe Hill House of Hospitality’) run by Ammon Hennacy, the Irish American Christian anarchist and pacifist in Salt Lake City. Anyway, Peter wanted to run something similar in the UK, but was unable turn anyone away and his place soon filled up with less unfortunate leftists, mostly under forty and unmarried, with housing problems. Many of these were members of — or associated with — the London Committee of 100 (as opposed to the more holier-than-thou Committee of 100 people around Bertrand Russell). These included some of the original ‘Eskimos’ — Terry Chandler and Mike Nolan — who attempted to board the Polaris submarine Patrick Henry on the Clyde from their kayaks in 1961. It was also home to the late Doug Brewood Jr, the only (as far as I know) identified member of the ‘Spies for Peace’ group. In fact Colville Houses was such a hotbed of radical activism that the security service had at least one agent planted there as a tenant. The one I am aware of, a guy called Darren, was exposed when someone asked him for change and, pulling a handful of coins from his pocket, a brass button inscribed ‘RAF Police’ fell to the floor.

I went to Spain soon after and didn’t re-establish contact with John until 4 or 5 years later when I was working closely with Albert Meltzer, who by that time was employed as a copytaker on the Daily Sketch and, later, on the Daily Telegraph, and quite often would run into John in ‘The Albion’ bar, with Albert, after SOGAT meetings, or on demonstrations. In later years, after Wapping, John took up second-hand bookselling, and he would be my first port of call if I was looking for a particular title or the back issue of some magazine or other. He’ll be sadly missed! May the earth lie lightly on you, John.

Stuart Christie

Danger! Official Secret: the Spies for Peace: Discretion and Disclosure in the Committee of 100 by Sam Carroll

The 'odd couple': the perfidious Germinal Esgleas i Jaume and partner Federica Montseny i Mañé (see Pistoleros! Vol 3)

An interesting ‘Top Secret’ report on the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE) in exile in France by the Vichy police Special Branch (Police Judiciare General Inspectorate) dated 20 January 1942*. (Côte document – Archives du Gard 1W170). The ‘Germinal’ mentioned in the report is Germinal Esgleas i Jaume, partner of Federica Montseny, whose (joint) perfidious villainy is one of the key themes explored in Pistoleros! (Volume 3).

 Vichy, 20 January 1942. TOP SECRET

Re: The Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE) in France.

Some months ago, the police in Casablanca stumbled upon an anarchist propaganda centre in the Spanish refugee community in Morocco. The instructions for said foreign propaganda emanated from France where the movement appeared to be under the direction of persons called “Germinal” and “Marin”. Enquiries carried out by Superintendent Taupin of the Police Judiciare General Inspectorate resulted in the identification of the promoters of this Libertarian Movement who had set themselves up as a National Committee.

Origin: For the origin of the Libertarian Movement we must look to Spain where it was born and where, for a little less than a century past, it grew in Spanish labour circles, under the influence of the First International’s theorists, finding a favourable welcome since individuals there by their very nature carry a germ of anarchism within them. The Libertarian Movement moved into the realm of politics with the foundation of the Iberian Anarchist Federation( FAI) and into the trade union realm with the founding of the National Confederation of Labour. It should not be forgotten that the FAI remained clandestine at all times, so it was in need of an official agency through which to bring its influence to bear on the public authorities. That agency is the CNT, the leaders of which are, broadly speaking, affiliated to the FAI or, at the very least, in sympathy with libertarian ideas and it is through them that this influence is brought to bear. The participation in the Largo Caballero government of four CNT representatives enjoying ministerial status is a very telling example, for Federica Montseny, Juan Garcia Oliver, Juan Peiró and Juan López are, above all else, representatives of the FAI. The libertarian family comprises of the CNT, the FAI and the Libertarian Youth.

 The Libertarian Movement in France: The defeat inflicted upon the Spanish republican army forced the leaders and members of the CNT and FAI to seek refuge in France. The Spanish Refugee Aid Agency (SERE) and the Spanish Republican Aid Council (JARE), bodies set up in Paris to handle emigration and accommodation matters for republican refugees, enabled the Libertarian Movement’s leaders to make a tentative effort to rally their members, but that attempt was short-lived, because the SERE and the JARE were disbanded and their leaders brought before the courts in the Seine [department] for breaching the orders of 12 August and 26 September 1939. Despite these steps, the emigration and accommodation issue as it affects Spaniards remains a very pressing one in Spanish quarters and the former partners of the SERE and JARE continued their activities in concert with the legation from Mexico which, under the French-Mexican accords of 22 August 1941, took responsibility for the problem of Spanish refugees in France, effectively supplanting the two agencies that had been set up in Paris and which had, as we have stated, been disbanded. Under cover of correspondence and circulars on the subject of emigration issues, they were peddling libertarian propaganda inspired by some “national Committee” the secretary of which was none other than Montseny’s husband, Jaime José [Germinal} Esgleas, b. in Malgrat on 5 October 1903, a deportee in Salon (Dordogne), an individual named in the Police Nationale’s list of suspects since 15 June 1938 as an anarchist propagandist. The other members of the “National Committee” were: Federica Montseny Mañé, Esgleas’s wife, b. Madrid on 12 February, a deportee in Salon (Dordogne) and erstwhile Health and Social Assistance minister in the Largo Caballero government, a renowned propagandist named in Police Nationale records as an anarchist: Germinal de Souza, b. in Porto (Portugal) on 22 May 1906, a Spanish national, secretary of the FAI and member of the CNT, who appeared in List No 2 of persons suspected of terrorist threats as published by the Police Nationale with this comment “expelled from France as a dangerous anarchist”: Francisco Isgleas Piernau, b. 16 February 1916 in San Feliu de Guixols, one-time political commissar with the [{popular] Army, Counsellor for Defence in the Generalitat government, member of the CNT Policy Commission, FAI member, listed as a terrorist in the suspects’ list NO 1 compiled by the Police Nationale back in April 1939.{ Valerio Mas Casas b. 24 May 1894 in Barcelona, Counsellor for Economy, Public Services and Social Assistance with the Generalitat of Catalonia and a CNT member; Pedro Herrera Camarero, b. 18 January 1909 in Valladolid, chair of the Foreign Trade Board of Catalonia, minister of Social Assistance and Health in the government of Catalonia, secretary of the CNT’s Catalonian union, member of the FAI Peninsular committee and delegate on the General Council of the SIA (International Antifascist Solidarity). It should be pointed out that some Libertarian Movement members – including those that under the chairmanship of General Miaja, had formed the Madrid Defence Junta, the last nucleus defending the Republic and who had fled to London in 1939 – refused to acknowledge the authority of Esgleas or this National Committee. That tendency, known as the “London friends” are represented by Manuel Salago [Salgado PS] and José González Pradas who got together in London with: Manuel González Marín aka “Manuel Marín”, b. in Archena on 4 July 1898, a deportee in Albefeuille-Lagarde (Tarn-et-Garonne department), a member of the National Council of the Madrid Defence Junta, named in the archives of the Prefecturate of Police as an active CNT and FAI member and anarchist posing a grave danger to public order: Eduardo del Val Bescós aka “Val”, b. in Jaca on 13 October 1908, a deportee in Toulouse at No 20, rue Beausejour, government delegate in the organising of the militias in Madrid and member of the Madrid Defence Junta: Francisco Ponzán Vidal, b. 30 March 1912 in Oviedo, a deportee in the home of Madame Viñuales at 41 rue Limarec in Toulouse.

Propaganda:  The propaganda activity takes the shape of the issuance of circulars and the exchange of letters that deal broadly with emigration matters or other matters having a bearing on the problems of Spanish refugees in France, but which are used as opportunities to expound philosophical notions of an anarchist bent. The object being to regroup the CNT membership, renewing and bolstering past ties of solidarity between them and maintaining contacts with an eye to possible return to Spain. At present a return to their land of birth appears impossible and likewise passage to the Americas. The upshot of all of this is that we are left with a mass of individuals who showed what they were made of during the Spanish civil war and who stand ready to cross the frontier in the event of the collapse of the Franco regime, representing a standing threat to public order in this country. It from among such Spanish libertarian circles that agents tasked with carrying out acts of sabotage or outrages on our soil may be recruited by the [French] Communist Party or the intelligence services of foreign powers. The circulation of such circulars and propaganda by means of correspondence are at the root of unrest in Spanish refugee circles in France.  In some cities, the Movement’s representatives have set up committees, out-and-out anarchist cells, the function of which is to monitor the membership in their region, circulate circulars and indeed, as in Morocco, facilitate the escape of those interned in concentration camps under guard or drafted into foreign labour companies, in which the Movement has its representatives too.  The national Committee of the Libertarian Movement in France also liaises with those members who have remained behind in Spain and with those who have fled to the Americas or to England. Such liaison is the responsibility of its agents.  As for those members residing in France, North Africa or Morocco, correspondence is routed through the following intermediaries: Mateo Baruta Vila, poste restante, Marseilles; Francisco Sánchez at the Mexican consulate in Marseilles or Félix Rambaud at PO Box 31, Marseilles. The latter collect letters addressed to Germinal [Esgleas] and forward them to one André Germain, PO Box 49 in Périgueux who passes them to the Libertarian Movement’s General Secretary. As for Manuel González Marín, his correspondence is addressed in the name of Cayetana Alcaine at 5 rue Bombet in Montauban. It should be pointed out that Libertarian Movement members are encouraged to use everyday language in their correspondence. The aforementioned Germinal de Souza, Francisco Isgleas Piernau, Valerio Mas Casas and Pedro Herrera Camarero are currently held of the Le Vernet camp (Ariege). José Jaime aka ‘Ger’ aka ‘Germi’ aka ‘Germinal’; Manuel González Marín, Eduardo de Val Bescós, Mateo Baruta Vila b. 18 July 1901 in Molins de Llobregat [Molins del Rey}, a deportee living at the Hotel Sainte Claire at 12 rue Sainte Claire in Mareilles and Francisco Sánchez Martinez, b. 29 April 1909 in Villamayor de Santiago, a deportee at 11 Rue du Coq in Marseilles have been arrested and are subject to the authority of the 17^th Military Division’s Standing Court Martial based in Toulouse, on charges of threatening anarchist activities posing a threat to the external security of the state, an offence set out in Article 80 of the Penal Code. Francisco Ponzán Vidal has been released on licence and Julio Sanjurjo López, deportee of 13 rue de la Redoune in Estaque Plage (Bouches-du-Rhone department), in contact with the membership in Morocco, has gone on the run. In the course of enquiries many addresses were uncovered, the most noteworthy being included in this present list.

Translated by Paul Sharkey

* The Nazis occupied Vichy France on 11 November 1942

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn

In December, 2011 a tiny but wondrous Chicago program of the Illinois Humanities Council (IHC) launched an on-line auction to raise needed cash for its public programming. The Public Square was celebrating its Tenth Anniversary, and Bernardine and I had been on its Advisory Board from the start. We kicked in what money we could, and we donated two items to the auction: choice seats at a Cubs game and an afternoon at beautiful Wrigley Field with Bernardine—an ardent and unruly fan—and dinner for six, cooked by team Ayers/Dohrn. We’ve done the dinner thing two dozen times over the years— for a local baseball camp, a law students’ public interest group, alternative spring break, immigrant rights organizing, and a lot of other worthy work—and we’ve typically raised a few hundred dollars. There were many more attractive items on that year’s list: Alex Kotlowitz was available to edit twenty pages of a non-fiction manuscript, Gordon Quinn to discuss documentary film projects over dinner, and Kevin Coval to write and spit an original poem for the highest bidder.

We paid little attention as the online auction launched and then inched onward—a hundred dollars, two hundred, and then three—even when a right-wing blogger picked it up and began flogging the Illinois Humanities Council for “supporting terrorism” by giving tax-payer money to us. He was a little off on the concept, because we were actually donating money and services to them, not the other way around, but this was a rather typical turn for the fact-free, faith-based blogosphere, so onward and upward, no worries.

There was a little button on our dinner item that someone could select and “Buy Instantly” for $2500.00, which seemed absurdly high. But in early December the TV celebrity and self-described conservative bad boy, Tucker Carlson, hit the button, and we were his.

I loved it immediately. Surely he had some frat boy prank up his sleeve—his signature gesture a kind of smug and superior practical joke or an ad homonym put down —but so what? We’d just raised more for the Public Square in one bid than anyone thought would be raised from the entire auction. We won!

Well, not so fast—this did mean we had to prepare dinner for Tucker plus five, and that could become messy. But, maybe not, and anyway, we argued, it’s just a couple of distasteful hours at most, and, bingo! Cash the check!

Right wing blogs lit up, some writers tickled with Tucker’s entertaining sense of humor, others earnestly saluting his willingness to enter the den of dodgy enemies of the state and sit in close quarters, an unmistakable act of courage and daring in the service of “the cause.” But some took a grimmer view: Don’t do it Tucker, they pled, this will legitimize and humanize “two of America’s greatest traitors.”

Tucker Carlson got a letter from the IHC: “Congratulations,” it began. “You are the winning bidder for The Public Square’s 10th anniversary auction item: Dinner for six with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Thank you very much for your payment of $2500 for this item.”

The letter went on to offer ten potential dates for the dinner, and to note that “all auction items were donated to the IHC [which] makes no warranties or representations with respect to any item or service sold…” and that “views and opinions expressed by individuals attending the dinner do not reflect those of the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the Illinois General Assembly.” I imagined the exhausted scrivener bent at his table copying out that carefully crafted, litigation-proof language—does it go far enough? How about the governor or the Joint Chiefs of Staff? But then I’m no lawyer.

Tucker chose February 5, Super Bowl Sunday as it happens.

We were besieged by friends clamoring to come to dinner—“I’ll serve drinks,” wrote one prominent Chicago lawyer, “Or, if you like, I’ll wear a little tuxedo and park the cars. Please let me come!”

Everyone saw it as theater, but not everyone was delighted with the impending show. A few friends called Carlson and company “vipers” and argued that we should never talk to people like them, ever. We disagreed; talk can be good. Others began distancing themselves from us, wringing their hands the moment they saw themselves mentioned on the right-wing blogs, and instantly, almost instinctively, assuming a defensive crouch.

Things quickly got weirder: two board members resigned from the IHC, complaining that the organization was now affiliated with people who “advocate violence,” presumably Bernardine and me, not Tucker Carlson or his friends, not the Mayor, the Governor, the State Legislature, the Cabinet, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The paid stenographers at the Chicago Tribune duly reported the two resignations, quoting the outraged quitters, and leaving it at that.

(Parenthesis here on the art and science of fact-checking: Had the Tribune in fact checked the facts, the fact-checker would have checked the fact that the quitters used the term “advocates violence.” Check. Had he or she dug a little deeper, the fact-checker might have discovered that, yes, we’d been described that way before, even in the pages of the Tribune.  Check. And so it goes in the hermetically-sealed, narcissistic echo chamber—a characterization becomes a fact with enough repetition, check, the fact-checker simply reviews the work of previous fact-checkers with no felt-need to analyze primary sources or inquire up-close or in-person. Check. Presumably another fact-checker did that already, and if not, so what? Oh, and for the record, we don’t advocate violence—we’re not with NATO or G8. Check. End parenthesis)

Some winced and stooped a little deeper; no one was apparently moved to speak up publically to defend the idea of dialogue, controversy and conversation as essential to the culture of democracy and to the vitality of the humanities, and no one condemned the most knee-jerk instance of demonization and far-fetched guilt-by-association.

Dinner with Tucker seemed cheery and worthwhile compared to counseling a bunch of cringing liberals. Where is the back-bone or the principle? No wonder the tiny group of right-wing flame-throwers with a couple of email accounts feels so disproportionately powerful—liberals seem forever willing to police themselves to the point of forming an orderly line right into the slaughterhouse.

So on January 12, 2012, I wrote Tucker a quick letter:

We’re looking forward to seeing you all for dinner in Chicago on February 5, 2012, and what we assume will be a spirited and enlightening conversation. We salute you for making such a generous contribution to the Public Square, a tiny program that works mightily to promote public dialogue in unlikely places, and bases its efforts on a core belief that in our wildly diverse democracy, talking to strangers is an essential way forward. Our dinner surely fits that bill.

We’ve received lots of messages from friends who can’t quite believe this is happening, and find it surreal at best. Some want to serve drinks or wait tables, but others insist it’s all a silly publicity stunt. We disagree, and point to both the importance of conversation across a variety of orientations, as well as your good comment to the Tribune: “I bought the auction dinner because I support the important work of the Illinois Humanities Council.”

It appears that you’re taking some heat yourself from far-right pundits and bloggers for agreeing to sit down with us at all, and that some of your political allies argue that you are undermining “the until-now-airtight argument that Obama was wrong” to have any associations with people like us who hold quite different political beliefs, or who likely won’t agree on a wide range of issues. We’re glad to see that you disagree with these folks, and that you believe, as we do, that we can all share a dinner, have a lively conversation about the spirit and direction of our country and the world, perhaps learn something from one another, and still maintain the integrity and independence of our own views.

We heard that you were kidding around about the dinner with Dennis Miller on his radio show, and said with a laugh, ”When I hear the word ‘humanities’ I draw my gun.” It was a joke, of course, but please leave your guns at home!

So, this is a note of welcome. Come and dine, enjoy the food, the company, and the exchange, and travel safely with hope in your heart and a good appetite.

Tucker responded:

Thanks a lot for this. I’m looking forward to Sunday. Just bought plane tickets and reserved a hotel for myself and one of our reporters, Jamie Weinstein. I haven’t finished the rest of the guest list—I’ve been on the road for these primaries nonstop—but I’ll send you the names as soon as I have them. Where’s dinner? I want to make sure we’re not staying too far away.

We’ll meet up and you’ll be dining be in the proverbial Undisclosed Location—ten minutes by cab from any down town hotel. It’s a lovely home with a perfect kitchen for me to prepare something sensational. Keep me updated on the guests and on any dietary issues. You know, of course, that the Super Bowl begins at 5:20 Chicago time.
On another note: poor you, slogging through those particularly unattractive primaries. I’m eager to hear true stories from the front, Hunter Thompson style if possible!

Undisclosed location? Holy smokes. Are you guys in hiding again?
Nope! We’re open and easily accessible. But if we did meet in the proverbial undisclosed location I like to think we would engage the ghost of Christmas past.
I’ve got a really nice dinner planned, so bring an appetite as well as people who enjoy good food.

That’s a riot. And have no fear: I have an appetite like a golden retriever. 

Raw meat?  Gosh, I was going a cut above Alpo, but maybe I should scale back.

You could probably serve kibble. I’m not very discerning about dinner. 

If I’d been feeling mean-spirited I might have responded that he’s not very discerning about a lot more than dinner, but what the heck?

A few days later Tucker sent us the guest list: Jamie Weinstein, Andrew Breitbart, Matt Labash, Audrey Lowe, and Buckley Carlson. “Entertaining, civil people all of them, guaranteed,” he concluded.

I figured Jamie and Matt were his young associates at the Daily Caller, Buckley his brother, and Audrey his random reader who had won the privilege in some kind of contest Tucker held on-line. Andrew Breitbart, self-described “media mogul,” entertaining perhaps, but not civil, I thought, performed the role of grinning and menacing bomb-thrower of the radical right—Breitbart’s record included active assistance in the demise of ACORN, efforts to damage Planned Parenthood, and the deeply dishonest discrediting of Shirley Sherrod at the Agriculture Department which led to her being fired (followed by an apology).

Entertaining and civil! Guaranteed!

A couple of nights before the dinner I was hosting a meet-and-greet coffee at home for a young friend and former student running for the Illinois Senate (True! He told me he too had aspirations to be president someday—the first Mexican-American in the White House—and a coffee at our house seemed like the perfect launching pad!). Bernardine was away for work, so I was on my own. As the event wound down and people began to drift away, an old friend took me aside and told me it was foolish of me to have offered the dinner to the Public Square in the first place—an act of “left adventurism” she called it—and going through with it now would be provocative and stupid. What? I said, my voice rising and cracking; we’ve done this dozens of times, so how is this particular dinner/donation adventurism? “Oh, please,” she said, annoyed. And we’ve been on their board for a decade, I continued, and they asked us to do it, so how is that provocative?

“But not in this context,” she explained. “And this is a publically-funded group. They’re vulnerable, and this is not good for them.” I was stunned.

I’m innocent and I didn’t do anything wrong, I said, but that sounded whiny and ridiculous the moment it left my mouth—I’m not “innocent” in the least, and I do wrong things all the time. Still this dinner just didn’t seem like one of my many terrible or even tiny transgressions. I felt rattled and alone.

But this all had a clarifying effect as well. Friends came into sharper focus, well-defined and evident, and those who understood the importance of standing on principle—friends or not—on issues like resisting the grotesque demonization of individuals and whole social groups, or fighting the toxic use of guilt-by-association in political discourse, also became dazzlingly obvious. Those who were confused or confounded, duped or bamboozled faded toward the background. It occurred to me once more that the good liberals I know would surely do the right thing if zealots began burning young girls as witches in Massachusetts, for example, or if the government said, in a time of fear and threat, “We are rounding up all Japanese-Americans, and placing them in prison camps.” I’m sure they all cheered watching the movie “Spartacus” as every slave who’d been lined up on the field stepped forward in solidarity and said, “I am Spartacus,” and in “Point of Order” when the courageous Joe Walsh stood up to the bullying Joe McCarthy, and in a voice breaking with emotion uttered the famous line, “Have you no shame, Senator? At long last, have you no shame?” If only we’d lived in that more perfect time.

It’s pretty easy to be a hero generations gone by—we’re all Abolitionists and Freedom Fighters now, we’re all heroes in retrospect—but that settles nothing for today: several state legislature want teachers right here, right now to compile lists of students with questionable immigration status; several people right here, right now are being interrogated, persecuted, and jailed for giving money or medical supplies to charities disapproved of by the state department; citizens are legally barred by the US government right here, right now from free travel to a single country in the world, that terrifying island ninety miles from Miami. Where is the outrage, right here and right now? Oh, but these things are quite complicated and so very controversial that it’s hard to know what to do now—it was all so obvious and a little too easy back then. I mean McCarthy’s name itself was a dead giveaway: McCarthy/McCarthyism…who couldn’t see that shit coming a mile away?

I shopped; I cooked; I set up for dinner. But it felt mostly like a heavy slog through thick mud. I was cold; I was lonely; I was tired. Not at all the mood or the tone I’d wanted.

Things got better inside my head when Bernardine returned to Chicago. She went right to work making the carrot-ginger soup, chilling me out, and when a wondrous collection of our closest folks assembled at a friend’s beautiful home to help out and serve, mostly to be present at the dinner party, I felt fine. There was lots of wine and beer, and we set an elegant table with a placecard depicting six different “great Americans”—Rosa Parks, for example, and Gertrude Stein, as well as Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin—at each place-setting, along with a menu printed on card stock they could each keep as a souvenir:  Hoisin Ribs and Cucumbers, Carrot Ginger Soup, White Fish with Black and Red Quinoa, Midwest Farmhouse Cheeses, Apple Pie and Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream Ice Cream. At the bottom of the menu I’d included two quotations about the humanities: “I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.”—David McCullough (Awarded the Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush); and, “When I hear the word humanities, I draw my gun.” —Tucker Carlson. It was, of course, a joke.

I meditated on Rilke:

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.

And then they arrived: Let the rumpus begin!

Spirited greetings and introductions all around, laughter at the improbability of the whole thing, a flurry of separate conversations as wine was poured and glasses lifted. I proposed a toast to Tucker thanking him for his generous gift of $2500 to the Public Square, and I reminded everyone that this was a dinner party, not an interview or a performance (of course, dinner is always a performance, and this one more than most), and they were at the table, first course served.

Friends had warned us that they would try to create a gotcha moment, but not much happened. We ferried food in and out, pulled up chairs periodically to chat while they ate. Tucker Carlson and Bernardine gazed out the windows for a time at the Chicago skyline, and discovered a shared Swedish background (Christmas cookies!). Jamie Weinstein acted the intrepid cub-reporter, note-book in hand, scribbled the titles of books from the book shelves, questions flying in a steady stream, but perhaps his manic, in-your-face manner was the result of jet-lag (“I’m just off the plane from Israel,” he said half a dozen times.”My third trip!”). Carlson and Breitbart had been on the road covering the primaries, and each expressed deep disdain for the Republican candidates seeking the presidency; when Jamie complained that none was a bona fide conservative, I asked him to define “conservative” for me. “Small government,” he said. That’s it? I asked. “Yes.” It certainly makes thinking easier, if not completely beside the point. I pointed out that Somalia, to take an example, was a small government paradise.

Tucker told me at one point that his kids went to the same boarding school that he’d attended, and asserted that the only difference between his kids’ school and a failing school in Chicago was that at the prep school they could fire the bad teachers. I laughed out loud, and he smiled weakly.

Meanwhile at the other end of the table, Bernardine was saying that the US should close all foreign military bases immediately, begin to dismantle the Pentagon, and save a trillion dollars a year—a small government proposal if ever there was one. The boys weren’t buying it at all, clamoring for violence here, violence there, violence (normalized, routine, and taken-for-granted) practically everywhere. Andrew Breitbart, humid and heating up, argued noisily for US military interventions in Iran and Syria, and then, egging himself on, North Korea and China (!)—on humanitarian grounds, of course—while Bernardine, that notorious poster child for violence, steadfastly urged disarmament, peace on earth, good will toward all. It was utterly surreal.

We gave each guest a SWAG bag with candy kisses and one of my books, autographed. Tucker took my comic book about teaching, and I signed it “To my new best friend!” I had bought his book Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites, with an epigram (returned to again and again in the text) from Larry King: “The trick is to care, but not too much. Give a shit—but not really.” I asked him to please autograph it for me and he wrote: “Thanks for the fantastic ribs! Please read every word of this—the truth lies herein.” Perhaps he was being ironic as well.

As they were leaving Breitbart told Bernardine that he was thrilled to know her, and he noted that we had at least one thing in common: we were all convenient caricatures in the “lame-stream” media.

It was all over in an hour and a half. Andrew Breitbart tweeted from the taxi ferrying them back to their hotel: Shorthand: Ayers, a gourmand, charmer. Dohrn, hot at 70, best behavior. Potemkin dinner. Pampered by their coterie. Kicked out by half-time.

ISBN:978-84-9942-001-1/522 pages

Paul Sharkey has brought another important recent book on Spain to my attention. This one focuses on the blood price of the much-lauded and so-called ‘peaceful’ 8-year transition from Francoism to a ‘well-tied-up’ and Franco-endorsed monarchic democracy, a period in which upwards of 600 people were murdered for ‘reasons of state’. ‘La transición sangrienta’ (‘Bloody Transition. A violent history of the democratic process in Spain 1975-1983’) — by 58-year old journalist and lecturer Mariano Sánchez Soler —  exposes the vicious policies implemented by the unchanging repressive organs of the rump of the Francoist state, desperate to avoid justice and to retain its power and privileges. The author traces the links between the Establishment’s ‘dirty war’ against ETA, GRAPO and other anti-State groups during the eight-year period that saw the regime revert to state-sponsored covert terrorism (GAL — Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación — Anti-terrorist Liberation Groups) backed up by special criminal legislation, and a systematic policy of brutal repression bearing the hallmarks of the immediate post-civil war period —  all deployed to control the streets and political opposition to the disgraceful ‘Pact of Silence’ that gave immunity to some of the bloodiest criminals in European history since 1945. The victims of Francoist violence have suffered a double-death; they have been murdered, and their murders — and murderers — ignored!

 Interview with Mariano Sánchez Soler

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Sunday Telegraph, 26 February 2012 (click to read)

What on earth are the criteria used by the Sunday Telegraph books editor to dredge up its reviewers? In a review of Paul Preston‘s ‘The Spanish Holocaust,’ Sunday’s (26/2/12) ’s ST magazine carried what is probably the most outrageously offensive and mealy-mouthed defence of Franco’s heritors since Brian Crozier’s 1967  hagiography ‘Franco’  (in which he defended the view that Guernica was destroyed not by the Germans but by the Basques themselves!). The reviewer is one Jeremy Treglown, Professor of English at Warwick University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a man whose work has hitherto focused on the lives of Roald Dahl, Henry Green Faber and the letters of John Wilmott, Earl of Rochester.

Basically, the thrust of his self-serving argument is that Francoist atrocities should not be investigated because it undermines political stability — a defence of impunity that was never raised at Nuremberg, Tokyo — or through to the more recent Baathist trials in Baghdad.

Words (almost) fail me. This guy’s got the gall to state: ‘Without the co-operation of former Francoists at all levels, the new system couldn’t have worked…’ Has it not occurred to this ivory-towered chancer that if they hadn’t cooperated they’d be either swinging from lampposts across Spain or seeking asylum in the Argentine of the Junta, Pinochet’s Chile, Stroessner’s Paraguay, Hugo Banzer’s Bolivia, or Geisel’s Brazil. The only places that would have them!

Treglown continues: ” . . . the new democracy distinguished itself . . . [by not being vindictive]. An obvious example is the fact that most of Franco’s descendants still live in Spain.’ Of course they still live in Spain – they still own the effen place, AND they control the legislature, the judiciary and most of the press!

Another weasely criticism Treglown makes of Paul Preston’s riveting new book is his use of the word ‘Holocaust’ in the title, which he appears to imply is sensationalist, exploitative and should be used exclusively in reference to the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, ignoring all the other victims of the Nazi killing machine: socialists of every kind, gays, gypsies, liberals, anti-fascists . . . One salient point EVERYONE should remember is that Franco killed more Spaniards than Hitler ever killed German Jews.

The academic from Warwick ends with another particularly cretinous comment: ‘In more immediate terms, a problem with the Spanish left’s current obsession, endorsed by this book, with the sins of the grandfathers is that in being used for party-political ends it also acts as a substitute for anything more constructive.’

Listen, Jeremy Treglown! the left’s so-called ‘obsession’ with the ‘sins of the grandfathers’ has bugger all to do with ‘party-political ends’. The movement for the recovery of historical memory is most definitely ANTI party-political; it has been precisely the party politicians of all hues — but particularly the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) — who, since Franco’s death and throughout the so-called ‘transition’ to the present day, have consistently deferred to the Church, the army, the press and the Francoist lobby, and have successfully sabotaged all attempts to rehabilitate the victims of Franco’s dictatorship. In my mind at least there is no doubt that the PSOE’s failure to win at the last elections wasn’t just down to the anti-social policies it was responsible for during the last parliament, but also its craven refusal to get on with the ‘complete rehabilitation of the victims of the Francoist dictatorship’, to quote the promise made by PSOE leader Rubalcaba in 2004 when he announced the setting-up of the Inter-Ministerial Commission for that very purpose.

As for Treglown’s jaw-droppingly elitist parthian shot, ‘It may be time for the left to forget about remembering’ — a sentiment whole-heartedly endorsed by Judge Baltasar Garzón’s right-wing political and judicial enemies who have succeeded in having him barred from the bench for 11 years. I can’t believe anyone with pretensions to integrity, scholarly objectivity or academic rigour, especially someone who presumes to review such an important historical study as Paul Preston’s ‘The Spanish Holocaust’, could have written that …

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!