Lincoln Brigade; roots of Vets For Peace [Jonn]

Someone emailed me a job offer from Veterans For Peace. In the listing, the group mentioned that “its membership comprises more than 7,000 members, including veterans from the Spanish Civil War to the Iraq War, who seek to raise public awareness of the true costs and consequences of militarism and war.”

Well, last year I’d read Hemmingway’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” about an American in the Spanish Republican Army fighting the facists in Spain and I remembered how I had to wade through the Stalinist propaganda in the story which was an excellent read otherwise.

So I started doing some research on the war and the relationship to the communists. It turns out that the major recruiting efforts for the columns of the Republicans’ foreign fighters was conducted under Stalin’s Communist International (Comintern) Bureau. Most of the funding for the Republicans came from Stalin. OK, well, for a staunch anti-fascist I guess that wouldn’t matter, as long as they had the opportunity to fight Franco who was funded by Hitler and Mussolini. And in 1936-1938 one side was as bad the other, I suppose, if you look at it from an American perspective in the context of it’s own time – not knowing that the Holocaust was coming, or that Katyn Forest massacre and the Great Purge was a few years away.

But to get back to the Vets For Peace, I found the members of the organization who had been Spanish Civil War veterans. In an article from Common Dreams, a bit is written about Clarence Kailin and Moe Fishman. I can’t find anything on Fishman being a member of the Lincoln Brigade, but the article was written nearly two years ago – he might be dead. But Clarence Kailin is immortalized in the Vets For Peace since their Madison, Wisconsin post bears his name (and he’s listed as one of the four surviving veterans at Wikipedia).

In the Common Dreams article Kailin and Fishman blamed the US inaction in relation to Spain for the misery of the following decade in Europe.

“It was fighting against Italian fascism and German Nazism. And we felt that if we lost the war, that World War II was pretty much inevitable, which is what happened. It happened because Britain and France and the United States refused to give us any help at all. And so, we fought barehanded at times.”

Moe Fishman, a spry 91-year-old Lincoln Brigade veteran, seconds Kailin’s point about the U.S.: “If they had turned to fighting fascism, Hitler would not have attempted a two-front war. There would not have been World War II, where fascism almost won, and 60 million dead, with destruction beyond compare. And, no, there would have been no Holocaust if Hitler had been stopped in Spain in 1936-39.”

Of course, that’s pure speculation. The US wasn’t prepared for war in 1936 – we didn’t have the manufacturing capacity or the sealift capability to fight in a war in Europe. And we still had a pretty bad taste in our mouths after the last European war not to mention the rescue of the Czech Legion.

But the two old warriors make the point that, having the hindsight to see that fascism was bad for the world, they were just fighting against fascism – admirable with the benefit of that hindsight I mentioned.

Most of the members of the Lincoln and Washington Battalions of the XV International Brigade were also members of the US Communist Party or the Industrial Workers of the World Party (Socialists). I suppose it wasn’t as big a deal then as it is now since it was before a lot of the drama we experienced during the Cold War.

Except for one little fact that historians friendly to the Civil War vets leave out of their accounts of the era. Many of the survivors joined the American Peace Mobilization (another communist front group funded by Comintern) when they returned to the US after the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed. Their focus immediately changed direction from anti-fascism to “peace” urging President Roosevelt to stop sending aid to France and England. Their 1000-hour non-stop demonstration in front of the White House ended the day before Operation Barbarosa began. The American Peace Mobilization changed it’s name to the American People’s Mobilization and pressed for US entry into the war. So their policies changed at the whim of Stalin’s Comintern.

And the latter day Veterans For Peace name one of their chapters after an unapologetic Stalinist who lobbied more often for the interests of Stalin than he did his own country. In an article in the leftist Capitol Times, Clarence Kailin is honored as a hero;

[H]e has campaigned tirelessly against the foreign policies of presidents who would make America an empire and an ally of the dark forces of military, political and economic fascism.

Too bad the Veterans For Peace couldn’t name their Madison post after an honorable American who campaigned tirelessly for policies that would strengthen this country and Americans instead.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Iraq Veterans Against the War