We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War by Paul Preston
Constable, £9.99
This is a fascinating book – on two levels. It’s a great political adventure story laced with sex, politics and death but it is also a profound book about journalism that raises crucial questions about objectivity and commitment. Paul Preston has meticulously researched the work (and play) of an extraordinary group of committed journalists who reported the Spanish Civil War, mainly from the Republican side. This group reads like a roll call of the 20th century’s greatest journalists and writers: George Orwell (of course), Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, Claud Cockburn, Martha Gellhorn and many, many others.
This war was a defining moment of the last century. Would Spanish democracy (disgracefully abandoned by fellow democracies in Europe) survive an army-led coup d’état backed by the fascist powers of Germany and Italy? The answer, regrettably, was no, but not before this struggle of the Spanish people had captured the imagination of the progressive world, but also had led to much heartache and bitterness among those who reported it.
The bitterness resulted from a multitude of factors. Of course the brutality and ultimate victory of the fascist Franco was at its core but this was fed by the indifference of Western governments, and much of the Western media, to the sufferings of the Spanish people. But, and this comes through very clearly in Preston’s study, there was also the bitterness engendered by the ambivalent (and some might say treacherous) role played by the Soviet Union, as the communist state sought to ensure it wasn’t just the Spanish Republic as such that prevailed but the Spanish Republic led by the Spanish Communist Party, and which in the process treated social democrats, Trotskyists and anarchists as much as an enemy as they did the Francoist forces. The bitterness that this created was clearly not unique to George Orwell and did immense damage to the European left for a generation.
On another level the study raises profound questions about the nature of journalistic “objectivity”, particularly in time of war. Arthur Koestler, who reported the siege of Madrid for the Hungarian press, wrote: “Anyone who has lived through the hell of Madrid with his eyes, his nerves, his heart, his stomach – and then pretends to be objective, is a liar. If those who have at their command printing machines and printers’ ink for the expression of their opinions, remain neutral and objective in the face of such bestiality, then Europe is lost.”
And Europe was lost – or at least a goodly chunk of it, that subsequently laboured under fascist, or neo-fascist, regimes for the decades that followed. To what extent the defeat of the Spanish Republic can be blamed on the “neutrality” of the press, as such, is a moot point; on the other hand the guilt of the European democracies that clung to an artificial “neutrality”, fed by the press, that created the conditions for Franco’s victory, is clear.
But lessons of history are rarely learnt. Sixty years on, the Western powers again clung to a phoney neutrality which left the (largely Muslim) Bosniaks of Bosnia-Herzegovina exposed to the genocidal ravages of the Serb and Croat forces that sought to destroy the nascent state. An arms embargo, which only affected the Sarajevo government, was imposed by the West and only lifted, reluctantly, as a result of the pressure from the international media – pressure that was initially arrogantly dismissed by the then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd as the “something must be done” school of journalism.
Noteworthy in his efforts for “something to be done” was the then BBC correspondent Martin Bell, who made himself immensely unpopular with his fellow journalists by arguing for a “journalism of attachment”. He strenuously argued that it was simply not good journalism to suggest that Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats were all equally responsible for the outbreak of the war and for the atrocities that followed in its wake. The Bosniaks were the wronged party and Bell, and a few others, said so, loud and clear. But, alas for the remainder of the British media, and for the Conservative Government at the time, the graphic lessons of the Spanish Civil War were not learnt and, as a result, we live today with its consequences. For as young Muslims in the West looked on at Europe’s apparent indifference to their co-religionists’ sufferings in Bosnia, the seeds of violent Islamism were sewn.
Bell, like his predecessors in Spain, saw just what a phoney god was “journalistic objectivity” – a god that conceals more than it reveals, in the words of Herbert Matthews, who covered the Spanish Civil War for the New York Times: “Those of us who championed the cause of the Republican government against the Franco Nationalists were right. It was, on balance, the cause of justice, morality and decency.” Or as Martha Gellhorn, the greatest woman war correspondent of the 20th century put it: “All that objectivity shit.” Eloquent it might not have been; accurate, it certainly was.
Ivor Gaber
