Arts/Review

Mac-Paps recall the Spanish Civil War —

CANADIAN VOLUNTEERS: SPAIN
1936-1939. By William C. Beeching.
Published by Canadian Research Centre
University of Regina, 1989. $26.50. Avail-
able at People’s Co-op Bookstore.

Canadian Volunteers is the story of the
Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion — the “Mac
Paps” — the Canadian contingent of the
international volunteer brigades who fought
in Spain in the late Thirties on the side of the
Spanish people waging an anti-fascist war
to save their democratically elected popular
front government.

In July 1936, Gen. Francisco Franco
with a large part of his army, supported by
the Falange (fascists), the church, the big
landowners, and vast military assistance
from Hitler's Germany and Mussolini’s
Italy, revolted against this democratic
government.

This resulting Spanish Civil War consti-
tuted the first war against fascism, and it is
estimated that at least 35,000 men and
women from dozens of countries fought in
Spain for the Republican cause. When they
were defeated in 1939 some 57 per cent had
been either killed in action or murdered in
prisoner-of-war camps. Author William
Beeching claims that 1,448 Canadians are
known to have fought in Spain and 721
never returned home.

I have always felt that one of the most
dramatic and emotional events in modern
history was made by the international
volunteer brigades of ordinary people from
all over the world who virtually had to
sneak into Spain to fight alongside the
Spanish people and try to stem the tide of
rising fascism.

And yet, these brigades are not a part of
history in the Western world. School books
do not teach about them and universities
generally do not acknowledge their contri-
bution against fascist dictatorships —
although World War II, supposedly against
fascism, took place just eight months after
the defeat of Spain, and the veterans of that
war are eligible for pensions while the anti-
fascist volunteer brigade veterans are not.
Not in Canada anyway.

There have been other books on Cana-
da’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War,
including Victor Hoar’s noteworthy The
Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, Red Moon
Over Spain — concerning the Canadian
media’s treatment of the war — and The
Tall Soldier, by Manuel Alvarez, a personal
account. But this is the first book done by
the Mac-Paps themselves. Author Beech-
ing, a former editor of the Canadian Trib-
une and former leader of the Communist
Party in Saskatchewan, was a volunteer
now active in the Mac Paps organization.

Beeching writes that just after the out-
break of the war, Communist Party leaders
Tim Buck and A.A. McLeod returned to
Canada after meeting with the secretary of
the Spanish Communist Party. He quotes
Buck who recalled the first organizing meet-
ing to establish a Canadian contingent of
the International Brigades: “To our
amazement the arena was packed literally
to the roof tops and people were still out-
side.” It was at that meeting that the Cana-
dian campaign for volunteers for Spain was
launched.

This was in a period of tremendous reac-
tionary backlash in political Canada. In
Quebec Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale
government was openly hostile to Republi-
can Spain and enacted the Padlock Law,
which the author says “‘was, in the name of
suppressing communism, actually designed
to undermine trade unions, curtail freedom
of speech and discourage organized public
support for the Spanish Republican
government.”

A number of fascist oriented groups also
existed in Quebec, Ontario, and Winnipeg,
Man.

On July 31, 1937, the Canadian govern-
ment, under Prime Minister William Lyon

10 « Pacific Tribune, December 4, 1989

Canadian volunteers cross the Ebro River.

Mackenzie King, passed an_ order-in-
council making the Foreign Enlistment Act
applicable to the Spanish Civil war. Beech-
ing writes: “The volunteers had to leave
Canada clandestinely in order to escape the
surveillance of the RCMP and the provi-
sions of the Foreign Enlistment Act.”

To leave Canada required a passport co-
signed by some person in authority. That
old socialist CCFer, Dr. Lyle Telford, who
was later to become Vancouver’s mayor,
signed so many of them that he remarked:
“The passport department must be wonder-
ing at the sudden interest in the Paris Exhi-
bition on the part of all these single young
men in Vancouver.”

An interesting feature is the author’s use

of extensive quotes from the written and
oral record of the veterans. Through these
we learn of the harrowing ordeal from fol-
lowing a guide over the Pyrenees Moun-
tains in the dark. Since the volunteers had to
make Spain in one night, the journey
entailed scaling 24 metres of perpendicular
rock in an hour and a half, climbing the
peak and keeping off the skyline.

We hear Len Norris relate his experiences
of tending, single-handedly, the communi-
cations system under heavy bombardment.
Lionel Edwards, a captain, tells how he was

‘seriously wounded after crossing the Ebro

River, on the way to Asco. Meanwhile, Fred
Mattersdorfer, now of Burnaby, led a
charmed life. He always managed to have
just moved away when the bullet struck.

The Republican Army and the interna-
tional brigades were simply overwhelmed
by the massive military onslaught by wea-
pons and bomber planes supplied by Hitler
and Mussolini. The hundreds of commit-
tees formed to aid the Republicans were
unable to break the boycott and overcome
the non-intervention policies of the Western
powers.

Dr. Norman Bethune, who operated the
first mobile blood transfusion unit ever used
in warfare, made a special trip back to Can-
ada to try and arouse more support for the
Republican cause.

In the spring of 1938, Franco launched a
tremendous military barrage across the
entire front line, and according to the

author, he used a modern motorized force ~

of more than 150,000 men with 30 anti-tank
companies and 25 German fighter-bomber
squadrons. The Republican Army num-
bered 35,000 men_and possessed at best 60
planes and 60 tanks.

Thus began the period known as the
Retreats. “A retreat is the most difficult
experience which an army can face,”’ Beech-
ing writes, ‘‘for it is punishing, demoralizing
and unrelenting. Those who survived the

Retreat of the Republican forces from

March to April 1938, emphasize the dis-
order, the terror, of being captured by the
Moors or the fanatical Requets, and also the
agony of not knowing what became of
friends and comrades.”

It was in the late fall of 1938 that Prime
Minister Juan Negrin reluctantly agreed to
unilaterally withdraw the International Bri-
gades, “in the vain hope of ending all for-
eign intervention in the civil war,” Beeching
writes.

On Oct. 29, the volunteers from all the
brigades marched for the last time down the
main boulevards of Barcelona raising

clenched fists, singing “the International” in
many languages and openly weeping —

because they were forced to leave the Span-
ish people to the butchers. .

There were addressed by Dolores Ibar-
ruri, the famous Communist known as La
Pasionaria: “You are history. You are
legend. You are the heroic example of
democracy’s solidarity and universality.”

— Jonnie Rankin

Spike Lee double-bill plays

DO THE RIGHT THING. Written and
directed by Spike Lee. At the Vancouver
East Cinema, Dec. 15-17, 9:15 p.m. Also
onis Lee’s first film, SHE’‘S GOTTA HAVE
IT, Dec. 15-17, 7:30 p.m. Admission cov-
ers both films.

Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing is a
most interesting essay on contemporary
black culture in a Brooklyn neighbour-
hood.

The movie’s main character, Mookie
(Spike Lee), is a young black man who
tries to make a living by way of delivering
pizzas for a local, white-owned pizzeria.

The film’s other main character, a
young Afro-American known as Buggin’
Out, is a sort of freelance community
organizer who works to raise the con-
sciousness of his peers.

Buggin’ Out’s consciousness-raising
collides with the racist attitudes of Moo-
kie’s employers, and the result is a brawl in
the restaurant, with black youths battling
the racist whites who own the pizzeria. A
white policeman, summoned to the scene,
murders a black youth. The police then
make off with the dead youth in one vehi-
‘cle and Buggin’ Out in another police car.

Mookie, exhibiting a marvelous solidar-
ity with his community, then throws a

garbage can through the pizzeria’s large
front window. At this point, members of
the community proceed to demolish the
place.

Immediately before the film ends with a
portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Malcolm X, quotes attributed to each of
those martyred black leaders appear on
the screen. King states that violence is both
impractical and immoral, while Malcolm
X advises that to act violently in self-
defence constitutes an intelligent decision.

One’s immediate perception is that the
film’s basic political statement is an affir-
mation of Malcolm’s self-defence posi-
tion. Lee, however, stated in an interview
in the People’s Daily World that “both
views can be incorporated into one’s phi-
losophy. It doesn’t have to be one or the
other.”

Whatever the case, this film is well
worth seeing.
; — Sam Snobelen

* * *

Writer-director Spike Lee’s first effort
was the sometimes whimsical, sometimes
heavy and often funny She’s Gotta Have
It. The title accurately reflects what you
assume this film is about, but this is no
entry for the X-rated cinema. It has a
lyrical quality and a warmth that draws

you to its central character.

Nola Darling has a strong sexual appe-
tite, and an equally strong sense of her
own independence. A guileless person
who seems unaffected by the shame that
binds most of us, Nola’s constant dilemma
is how to maintain relationships with her
three current lovers while resisting their
respective entreaties for exclusive monog-
amy. She’s Gotta Have It is no feminist
tract, but Lee’s perceptive foray into black
American society examines with humour
and the satirist’s razor the pretensions of
male machismo.

The strength of this film is that non-
black viewers need not feel excluded; the
all-black cast dishes out a plateload of
universal themes. A modern dance per-
formed in an outdoor park — a touch-
ingly original birthday present for Nola
— and Spike Lee’s own character, who
chatters on like a stuck record and bears a
crewcut in the shape of an arrow pointing
straight ahead, are worth the price of
admission.

The problems are occasionally ama-
teurish acting and a scene of sexual brutal-
ity that reinforces the disturbing ambiguity
of this film: is independence the right of all
women, or only something sought by
those who’ve “gotta have it?”

— Dan Keeton