History to the Defeated

Jewcy contributor Stephen Schwartz has written a must-read essay in this week's Weekly Standard on the comparisons between the current "civil wars" in Iraq and Lebanon and the one in Spain. Both regions were riven by similar factionalisms, and exploited as proxies by greater totalitarian powers (and no, the U.S. isn't one of them.) Both regions can also be seen as microcosmic preludes to impending global disasters: in Spain's case, World War II; in Iraq and Lebanon's, who knows?

W.H. Auden was the Homer of that low, dishonest decade, which saw Hitler shadow-box with Stalin before their fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace in '39. One of his best, though seldom remembered, poems is a long eulogy on the Spanish Civil War, a stanza of which runs as follows:

'What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will. I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic Death? Very well, I accept, for I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.'

The apostrophe here belongs to what Auden called "the life," which, if it "answers at all" cops out of any pat little determinism of ideology and lets the playing out of events fall upon human actors. (Remember that the next time isolationists dismiss Ahmadinejad or Nasrallah as ignorable entities in some far-off place.) Anyway, the suicide pact — if not quite the romantic death — is upon us again…

Conveniently, Stephen happens to be an expert on the history of the Republican struggle against Francosim as well as on history and theology of Islam. He's got a personal investment in both: he used to be a Trotskyist and is now a Sufi neoconservative. (This has my award for most interesting self reinvention.) Here's his thesis:

Spanish entrepreneurship and economic development were most advanced in the Basque and Catalan regions, whose cultural affiliations with the Madrid monarchy were weakened. In corresponding fashion, the Iraqi Kurds have leaped far ahead in modernization, yet like the Basques and Catalans, they are culturally and linguistically distinct from, and resentful of, the Iraqi Arabs.

Spain in 1936 included a vast and turbulent mass of radical industrial workers and farm laborers whose political culture was mainly anarchist, and whose aspirations were barely perceived, much less understood, in the outside world. Iraq's Shia majority resembles the Spanish anarchists–there are many of them, they are militant, and they often seem to have no friends. So the Iraqi Shias, like the Spanish left, are enticed into a dangerous courtship with a totalitarian suitor: Iran plays the role in Basra that Russian Stalinism had in Barcelona.

Spain at war, like Iraq, became an arena for massacres and militias, hostage-taking and disappearances, assassinations and reprisals. The Franco forces murdered the poet Federico Garcia Lorca; Soviet agents who infiltrated the Republican police killed a dissident Catalan Marxist author, Andreu Nin. The competing ideologies in Spain also included Carlism, an extreme form of monarchism, as well as anarchism, no less volatile than the cruel doctrines of Wahhabism, the inspirer of the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and the Shia extremism of Moktada al-Sadr. And as Germany and Italy helped Franco, so elements in Saudi Arabia finance and recruit Sunni terrorists to kill in Iraq, while Iran supports Iraqi Shia paramilitary expansion.