John Cornford And The Fight For The Spanish Republ

[RedJacobin]

“The most glorious page in the history of the British left”

John Cornford and the Fight for the Spanish Republic
By GEORGE GALLOWAY

No men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain
-- Ernest Hemingway, 1939

But for a bullet in the brain on the Ebro, Rupert John Cornford might have loomed as large as George Orwell in the British left-wing lexicon. Orwell would probably have informed on him to his bosses in British Intelligence. For Cornford was a Communist. Not just a Communist, but a potential leading figure of the party, then rising towards the zenith of its power as the potential nemesis of Fascism, as well as a war poet as brilliant as he is now obscure. Not bad for a man who was killed doing his internationalist duty on his 21st birthday.

John Cornford was the grandson of Charles Darwin, son of the Victorian poet Frances Cornford, and part of the golden generation of the British left who went to fight fascism in Spain. That their memory has been sullied by Orwell's slanders, unfortunately reinforced by Ken Loach's film Land and Freedom, and now lies largely forgotten on the Iberian peninsula by the progressives of the 21st century is the main reason why I am working on an historical novel, Heart of the heartless World at the centre of which is the tall handsome figure of John Cornford.

Recruited, as one of the brightest and the best, at Cambridge University by the same party talent spotters who sent his classmates Philby, Burgess and MacLean underground in the service of the USSR. Cornford was just too good to be used as a mere mole. Athletic, an orator, an organizer, poet and propagandist, the best student of his generation, a heart-throb to boot -- Cornford was a socialist-realist poster-boy.

Yet he was sacrificed for the cause on the scorched earth of the Spanish Civil War in the International Brigade, in which the C.P was the driving force and which wrote the most glorious page in the history of the British left -- a left which thanks to Orwell and the passage of time has either forgotten, never known or now misunderstands its importance.

Full: http://www.counterpunch.org/Galloway07212006.html

[Cheung Mo]

Now if only he felt the same way about Islamists as he feels about fascists....He might actually be a decent guy...

[JKP]

Is Galloway actually denying the Leninist betrayal of the Spanish revolution? Obviously there were people in the Leninist parties who meant well, but the role that such parties played as an organiztion in preventing a true communist society is undeniable.

[Intelligitimate]

Bullshit. The anarchist/Trot narrative of Spain is the biggest load of bullshit ever. That worthless anarchist traitor Orwell ratted out his fellow travelers to the IRD, and the POUM were in collaboration with the Nazis during the Barcelona uprising. I can't disclose the evidence of POUM-Nazi collaboration at the moment, because the person who found it is still waiting for it to get published.

[Marion]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27 2006, 02:08 AM
Bullshit. The anarchist/Trot narrative of Spain is the biggest load of bullshit ever. That worthless anarchist traitor Orwell ratted out his fellow travelers to the IRD, and the POUM were in collaboration with the Nazis during the Barcelona uprising. I can't disclose the evidence of POUM-Nazi collaboration at the moment, because the person who found it is still waiting for it to get published.
Even if your categorisation of the POUM is correct (and we can't judge it based on the lack of evidence at present), what is your argument against the anarchists in Spain? As far as I can see it was that one person, who didn't fight with the anarchists and didn't call himself an anarchist (at best he was slightly sympathetic at the time) decided, many years later when he was most definitely not an anarchist, to pass on peoples names to the secret service.

Hardly proves the anarchist narrative of what happened in Spain in bullshit. The anarchist role in Spain can definitely be criticised, but your argument doesn't prove anything about the value of their role or their narrative about it...

[rebelworker]

Stalinist gasping at straws, such a sad sight.

I never heard of this Orwell acusation before (and for the record Orwell was never an anarchist, he was just so impressed apon seeing anarchism in practice that he wrote favorable about it).

Not that it matter to me that much, Orwell was just a writer(a damn good one), hardly an important political figure, but Id like to hear what this eeling people out buisness is all about.

[RedJacobin]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27 2006, 02:20 PM
I never heard of this Orwell acusation before (and for the record Orwell was never an anarchist, he was just so impressed apon seeing anarchism in practice that he wrote favorable about it).

Not that it matter to me that much, Orwell was just a writer(a damn good one), hardly an important political figure, but Id like to hear what this eeling people out buisness is all about.
It's true. Orwell was a snitch (and a racist too). He shouldn't be viewed favorably by any section of the Left, regardless of their views on Stalin. He should be exposed as a reactionary and a pig.

Even his "anti-colonial" writings like Shooting an Elephant have more to do with poor Orwell and poor Britain being morally tarnished in India. He doesn't express any kind of solidarity with the colonized, who he depicts as savages with "sneering yellow faces."

Here's an article from The Nation by Alexander Cockburn. It's not online, so I'm posting the whole thing.


The Nation, Dec 7, 1998
Alexander Cockburn, "Beat the Devil"
St. George's List

In our last installment we left the two most notable anti-Communist
literary figures in postwar England about to enjoy a country weekend
together, with George Orwell visiting Arthur Koestler's cottage in
Wales. This was Christmas 1946. Also present were Koestler's second
wife, Mamaine, and her twin sister, Celia Kirwan. Orwell took a shine to
Celia and indeed proposed to her soon after they were back in London.
She turned him down.

The most notorious component of the subsequent transactions was the
remission by Orwell to Kirwan of a list of the names of persons on the
left whom he deemed security risks, as Communists or fellow travelers.
The notoriety stems from the fact that Kirwan worked for the Information
Research Department, lodged in the Foreign Office but in fact overseen
by the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6.

When Orwell's secret denunciations surfaced a couple of years ago, there
was a medium-level commotion. Now, with the publication of Peter
Davison's maniacally complete twenty-volume collected Orwell, the topic
of Orwell as government snitch has flared again, with more lissome
apologies for St. George from the liberal/left and bellows of applause
from cold-warriors, taking the line that if Orwell, great hero of the
non-Communist left, named names, then that provides moral cover for all
the Namers of Names who came after him.

Those on the non-Com left have rushed to shore up St. George's
reputation. Some emphasize Orwell's personal feelings toward Kirwan. The
guy was in love. Others argue Orwell was near death's door,
traditionally a time for confessionals. Others have insisted that Orwell
didn't really name names, and, anyway (this was Ian Hamilton in the
London Review of Books), "he was forever making lists"-a fishing log, a
log of how many eggs his hens laid-so why not a snitch list?

Christopher Hitchens hastened into print in vanity Fair with a burrito
con todo of these approaches. "Orwell named no names and disclosed no
identities." Actually, he did both, as in "Parker, Ralph. Underground
member and close FT [fellow traveler]? Stayed on in Moscow. Probably
careerist." Presumably these secret advisories to an IRD staffer whom
Hitchens describes as not only a "trusted friend" and "old flame" but
also-no supporting evidence offered for this odd claim-"a leftist of
heterodox opinions" had consequences. Blacklists usually do. No doubt
the list was passed on in some form to American intelligence agencies
that made due note of those listed as fellow travelers and duly
proscribed them under the McCarran Act.

Hitchens speaks of Orwell's "tendresse" for Kirwan. He insists Orwell
"wasn't interested in unearthing heresy or in getting people fired or in
putting them under the discipline of a loyalty oath," though as opposed
to the mellow tendresse for secret agent Kirwan, he had "an acid
contempt for the Communists who had betrayed their cause and their
country once before and might do so again."

Here Orwell would surely have given a vigorous nod. Orwell's defenders
claim that he was only making sure the wrong sort of person wasn't hired
by the Foreign Office to write essays on the British way of life. But
Orwell made it clear to the IRD he was identifying people who were
"unreliable" and who, worming their way into organizations like the
British Labor Party, "might be able to do enormous mischief." Loyalty
was the issue.

There seems to be general agreement by Orwell's fans, left and right, to
skate gently over Orwell's suspicions of Jews, homosexuals and blacks,
also over the extreme ignorance of his assessments. Of Paul Robeson he
wrote, "very anti-white. [Henry] Wallace supporter." Only a person who
instinctively thought all blacks were anti-white could have written this
piece of stupidity. One of Robeson's indisputable features, consequent
upon his intellectual disposition and his connections with the
Communists, was that he was most emphatically not "very anti-white." Ask
the Welsh coal miners for whom Robeson campaigned.

If any other postwar left intellectual was suddenly found to have
written mini-diatribes about blacks, homosexuals and Jews, we can safely
assume that subsequent commentary would not have been forgiving. Here
there's barely a word about Orwell's antiSemitism-"Deutscher (Polish
Jew)," "Driberg, Tom. English Jew," "Chaplin, Charles (Jewish?)," on
which the usually sensitive Norman Podhoretz was silent in National
Review and which Hitchens softly alludes to as "a slightly thuggish
side"-or about his crusty dislike of pansies, vegetarians, peaceniks,
women in tweed skirts and others athwart the British Way. Much of the
time he sounds like a cross between Evelyn Waugh, a much better writer,
and Paul Johnson, as in Orwell's comment that "one of the surest signs
of [Conrad's] genius is that women dislike his books." The racist drivel
about Robeson and about George Padmore--"Negro. African origin? Expelled
CP about 1936. Nevertheless pro-Russian. Main emphasis anti-white"
--arouses no comment.

Then there's the IRD, an outfit that, at the time of Orwell's
listmaking, was strenuously reaching out to Ukrainian nationalists, many
of whom had enthusiastically assisted the Nazi Einsatzgruppen as they
went about liquidating Jews and Communists. One IRD man working in this
capacity was Robert Conquest, a big Orwell fan and Kirwan admirer. I
discussed his role in an exchange with him in The Nation in 1989, one I
remember Hitchens said he'd read closely, which makes his studiously
vague reference in The Nation to "something named the Information
Research Department" disingenuous. Conquest, in the TLS, cites a letter
of Orwell's to Koestler as evidence that Orwell was well aware of what
the IRD was up to with the Ukrainians and approved.

When someone becomes a saint, everything is mustered as testimony to his
holiness. So it is with St. George and his list. Thus, in 1998 we have
fresh endorsement of all the cold war constructs as they were shaped in
the immediate postwar years, when the cold war coalition from right to
left signed on to fanatical anti-Communism. The IRD, disabled in the
seventies by a Labor Foreign Minister on the grounds it was a sinkhole
of right-wing nuts, would have been pleased.
And, here's an article that refutes the idea that Orwell was ever a socialist:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200005290038

None of this has anything to do with refuting Orwell's account of the Spanish Civil War--it could still be true, because truth is independent of politics. But it does expose the reactionary views expressed in Animal Farm and 1984, which are works of fiction.