MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion veterans marching in the May Day parade in Vancouver, 1943.

By Sean Griffin

| n the last days of November,
1975, British Columbians were
witness to a strange spectacle. On
- orders from the protocol officer in
Victoria, the flags that fly over
public buildings and memorials
were flown at half mast. It was not
té honor the war dead for that
fitual had already been carried out
weeks earlier, on Armistice Day.
Nor was it to mark the death of

Some Canadian leader for none had

died.

The flags were lowered to mark
the death of — Francisco Franco.

At the end of that same year, a
veteran of the MacKenzie-
Papineau Battalion, Bob Turner,
also died. But his name meant little
to the protocol officer or, for that,
matter, the government; nothing
more, in fact, than a closed file in
the department of vital statistics.

“At the going down of the sun
and in the morning we will
remember them, except for those
times when we find it convenient to
forget,’ wrote the Fernie Free
Press in anger over the betrayal of
five International Brigade
veterans from Fernie.

But official circles in this
country have never remembered
the veterans of the MacKenzie-
Papineau Battalion. Nor have
other countries among. the
‘‘western democracies’’
remembered their International
Brigade veterans. The dark years
between 1936 and 1939, the years of

appeasement and betrayal, still
cast their shadow over the present.

It is now 40 years since Franco
launched his fascist rebellion from
Spanish Morocco; 40 years since
the International Brigades were
formed to defend the cause of the
Spanish Republic, a cause which
governments in Britain, France,
the United States, Canada and
elsewhere had chosen to ignore.
But in those 40 years, the shadow
has not passed; the voices that, in
1936 spoke so cynically of non-
interference in the internal affairs
of Spain while German and Italian
planes bombarded Spanish cities,
can still be heard in the capitals of
Europe and North America. The
fiction that the International
Brigades were made up of Quixotic
adventurers — some even suggest
mercenaries — still persists. And’

Spain still lies under the wip of

fascism.

: e

“JT wanted the right of any people
to elect their own government and
keep it in office. I went to Spain to
defend that right.”

Nels Madsen is 76 now and
nearly blind. But his perception of
the struggle in Spain, of what that
struggle meant, has never dim-
med. Like many others working
out of Gustafson’s Camp on Jervis
Inlet in 1936, he was anti-fascist.
Like the others, he volunteered to
fight fascism. _

To the Internationals —

If there are men with souls transcending borders, Sere
ae With the broad brows of universal brothers, — So ee
With visions of horizons, ships and. ‘mountains, ,
Of sand and snow, you are such men. oe
Your mative tewe cation yoriwatinz all ineietings;, 2
Your life’s breath will bless the earth with monuments.
eee Youcame to stop the blood thirst of the panthers — =
Full tilt you hurled yourself against their fangs.
With the ardor of all thesunsandalltheseas, =
Spain holds you close because you showed —
The tree-like ee continents.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—APRIL 30, 1976—Page 10

There were three from
Gustafson’s Camp who left for the
battlefields of Spain along with
Madsen. All of them — Ivor (Tiny)
Anderson, Pete Neilson, Isaac
Matson — were among the dead in
Spain but even in death they belie
yet another myth that has grown
up around the Canadian volun-

teers. The popular version has it.

that the men were rootless and
unemployed and gladly gave up the
empty existence in the relief
camps for the romanticism of the
Spanish war.

But these men, like the seamen
from the Great Lakes and the
miners from B.C. and Ontario, had
jobs. They had roots. In the
struggle being waged in Spain they
saw something of their struggle.
“Every night in the bunkhouse
there was a discussion about
Spain,’ Madsen recalls. “When

things were going badly in Spain, :

every man felt it.

‘‘We talked about the situation in
this country, about Spain and the
fight against fascism. And we
volunteered.”’

Even those from the relief camps
did not go to Spain out. of
rootléssness. ‘‘The way the
Mounties took after us in the
Regina riot — that was fascism, in
asense, tous,’’ says Jimmy Lucas.
With Red Walsh, Ron Liversedge
and scores of others, he crossed the
Pyrenees to Spain just as he had
crossed the Rockies on the Trek
two years earlier.

“Tt wasn’t any adventure. We
were anti-fascists. We saw fascism
coming to Canada and we went to
Spain to stop it.”

That they sought to stop fascism
on the Iberian Peninsula is to the

eternal honor of the Republican
Army and the International

Brigades. That they did not have

the weapons with which to do it is
to the eternal shame of govern-
ments in Europe and North
America which ‘hid their com-
plicity with fascism behind a mask
of neutrality.

These were the years of fascism
and the years of betrayal. They
were to find an echo in Munich and
the -cynical pronouncements of
“peace in our time.”’

In Britain, Oswald Mosley’ s
fascists marched provocatively in
the streets while police arrested

several of the many thousands of
workers and: students who had
turned out to oppose them. Not far
away, in the chambers of the
London Non-Intervention Com-
mittee, representatives of
European governments turned a
deaf ear as Alvarez del Vayo and
Soviet representative Ivan Maisky
showed proof to all the world that

NELS MADSEN

German and Italian troops and
materiel were going to Franco.
In Spain itself, at a time when the
cities in the north were under the
fire of a Fascist offensive, the
Anarchists of the FAI and the
Trotskyist POUM presented an
ultimatum to the president of
Catalonia, demanding control of all
the key ministries, Later Anarchist
historians would praise the action

as ‘“‘revolutionary,’’ but the facts :

record it as counter-revolutionary
treachery.

In this country, the local fascist
spokesman for the Canadian
Citizen’s League, the fascist poet,
Tom McInnes, shouted his
propaganda over the air waves
while Communist spokesmen,
seeking to break through the veil of
lies that surrounded Spain, were
often barred from the radio. In
Ottawa, the King government was
shaping its Foreign Enlistment
Act, making it illegal for
Canadians to volunteer for Spain.

“It was a war like no. other,
fought ata time like no other,’’ Len
Norris,
veterans of the MacKenzie-
Papineau Battalion veterans,
remembers. ‘“‘We had few proper

ne

now president of the’

weapons because of the betrayal of}
non-intervention. There was just 4h
hail of lead — above and on eithe! to,
side.”

Alone among nations that cam®}h
to the aid of the besieged Spanish |p,
Republic was the Soviet UnioMpf
whose ships brought arms an ’
food. But from among the people ‘

31 countries came the coin ae x
for the International Brigades-Br
From those at home caméle
thousands of dollars in aid, raise?Say
by scores of Spanish Aid Com Vo
mittees. Ber

“Men covered with burning§So,
gentleness and guns,’ Pabl0an,
Neruda would later call these me! Bo
of the International Brigades. Yel arg
in the face of non-intervention, #! »
the face of a never-ending rein
forcement of Franco’s forces bY Bh:
German and Italian regulars, evel Of
their generous heroism could n0'prj
turn the tide. In a last forlorn hop®ho
that the absence of the ID) ‘
ternational Brigades would forc®Pu
Britain and France to consider 4WWi
demand for the removal of Italia! Sp
and German troops, the
Republican government moved !} |
withdraw the Internationals. mut

It was something the volunteel® a

JOHN JOHNSON

had not considered. Certainly JoMSc
Johnson, pne of a few hundred ! jell)
among the decimated ranks of tht :
Mac-Paps, didn’t. ‘“‘Although the aie |
wererumors about the withdraw
of the Internationals, we thous!)
we would never leave Spain aliv@Mo
We were prepared to accept th@ 8h
“We thought we would battle a”
battle until we had done all