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Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War - #smrgSAHAF
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For years I have searched for a history like this of the Spanish Civil War. For anarchists, this is one of the most important moments of history to understand, as it was the only occurance of a mass, anarchist-led social revolution. Considering the overwhelming quantity of books and film documentaries on WWII, and the fact that Franco's military coup in Spain in 1936 and the world's response to it set the stage for the world war, the paucity of scholarly and popular works on the Spanish Civil War should be startling... if it wasn't so typical of the biases of American media and scholarship. The neglect of the Spanish Civil War, and, moreover, the Spanish Revolution that this war precipitated, is all the more tragic in light of the absolute repression of its memory in Spain during the Franco years. A contemporary anarchist from Spain told me that almost everything he learned about the revolution came from foreign sources. He was hardly aware that there had even been a revolution until he saw Ken Lasche's film "Land and Freedom"--an excellent British drama produced in the early 1990s. And this is someone who grew up AFTER Franco... and in Barcelona!--the city at the center of the revolution, a city which in anarchist mythology looms like Jerusalem to Jews and Christians. It is in light of this egregious deficit that one fully appreciates "Blood of Spain", Ronald Frazer's outstanding collection of oral histories that has preserved the dying memories of this fascinating period. Frazer presents opinions and accounts of events from every side of the conflict. Frazer attempts to be unbiased in his presentation of the views of fascists side-by-side those of ultra-leftists--a helpful contrast to the histories written by anarchists, which are about the only accounts I have found of the collectives of Catalonia and Aragon. I imagine that most who have read this book were sympathizers of the revolutionaries and were, like I, eager to hear what life was like in revoltutionary Spain. I can't imagine this book disappointed them. The accounts of the rural collectives and of the collectization of industry in Barcelona and other cities are amoung the most vivid and moving that I have read. No one interested in this time and place--and I wish more people were!--should pass up this book. By the way, there is a fanastic documentary called "The Spanish Civil War" that is very hard to come by, but which would be an excellent companion to this book. Although I have not confirmed it, the person who loaned me "Blood of Spain" (which I am happily buying at the time of writing this review) thought that Ronald Frazer produced the documentary as well. This would not surprise me, because, like the book, it is filled with interviews of participants, and it was produced around the same time the book was written... both done just in time: many of the interviewed probably died soon-after, and very few are still alive to be interviewed again. How much irredeemably poorer our collective memory would be without Frazer's preservation.
For years I have searched for a history like this of the Spanish Civil War. For anarchists, this is one of the most important moments of history to understand, as it was the only occurance of a mass, anarchist-led social revolution. Considering the overwhelming quantity of books and film documentaries on WWII, and the fact that Franco's military coup in Spain in 1936 and the world's response to it set the stage for the world war, the paucity of scholarly and popular works on the Spanish Civil War should be startling... if it wasn't so typical of the biases of American media and scholarship. The neglect of the Spanish Civil War, and, moreover, the Spanish Revolution that this war precipitated, is all the more tragic in light of the absolute repression of its memory in Spain during the Franco years. A contemporary anarchist from Spain told me that almost everything he learned about the revolution came from foreign sources. He was hardly aware that there had even been a revolution until he saw Ken Lasche's film "Land and Freedom"--an excellent British drama produced in the early 1990s. And this is someone who grew up AFTER Franco... and in Barcelona!--the city at the center of the revolution, a city which in anarchist mythology looms like Jerusalem to Jews and Christians. It is in light of this egregious deficit that one fully appreciates "Blood of Spain", Ronald Frazer's outstanding collection of oral histories that has preserved the dying memories of this fascinating period. Frazer presents opinions and accounts of events from every side of the conflict. Frazer attempts to be unbiased in his presentation of the views of fascists side-by-side those of ultra-leftists--a helpful contrast to the histories written by anarchists, which are about the only accounts I have found of the collectives of Catalonia and Aragon. I imagine that most who have read this book were sympathizers of the revolutionaries and were, like I, eager to hear what life was like in revoltutionary Spain. I can't imagine this book disappointed them. The accounts of the rural collectives and of the collectization of industry in Barcelona and other cities are amoung the most vivid and moving that I have read. No one interested in this time and place--and I wish more people were!--should pass up this book. By the way, there is a fanastic documentary called "The Spanish Civil War" that is very hard to come by, but which would be an excellent companion to this book. Although I have not confirmed it, the person who loaned me "Blood of Spain" (which I am happily buying at the time of writing this review) thought that Ronald Frazer produced the documentary as well. This would not surprise me, because, like the book, it is filled with interviews of participants, and it was produced around the same time the book was written... both done just in time: many of the interviewed probably died soon-after, and very few are still alive to be interviewed again. How much irredeemably poorer our collective memory would be without Frazer's preservation.
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