BRIGADISTES: Lives for Liberty, heartening and inspiring reminder that fighting for your principles is a worthy endeavor

BRIGADISTES: Lives for Liberty
JORDI MARTÍ-RUEDA (foreword by Jordi Borràs; tr. Mary Ann Newman)
Pluto Press
$17.95 trade paper, $10 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: 'A real treasure that we can't stop exploring'—La Republica (Barcelona)

Fanny Schoonhey was said to be the bravest woman in Barcelona. Felicia Browne decided it was time to put down her paintbrushes and pick up a rifle. The Nielsen brothers took three bicycles and pedalled from Copenhagen to the Pyrenees...

In 1936 something extraordinary happened. As the threat of fascism swept across the Iberian peninsula, thousands of people from all over the world left their families and jobs to heed the call—No Pasarán! History has never seen a wave of solidarity like it. The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with the Republic crushed, but the revolutionary dream of the International Brigades has never burnt out.

Through these 60 illustrated profiles, Brigadistes embroiders an epic story of political struggle with the everyday bravery, sorrow and love of those who lived it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read the following in The New York Times's "The Morning" newsletter:

Many factors have contributed to this {present political} turmoil. Decades of stagnant living standards have caused voter frustration. Social media, along with the rise of a cable television network willing to promote falsehoods, has inflamed discourse. The decline of institutions — churches, labor unions, once-dominant local employers — has left Americans feeling unmoored. And aging political leaders have failed to groom strong successors.

But the single largest source of the chaos is the Republican Party. {...} The Republican Party...is both fractured and increasingly extreme. Tens of millions of Republican voters have embraced beliefs that are simply wrong: that Obama was born in Kenya, that Donald Trump was cheated out of re-election, that Covid vaccines don’t work, that human beings aren’t causing climate change. A crowd of Republican-aligned protesters violently attacked the Capitol in 2021, assaulting police officers and causing several deaths. Prominent Republican politicians, including Trump, have spoken positively about that attack and more generally about political violence.

Kevin McCarthy’s downfall as speaker is the latest sign of the party’s drift toward radicalism. He lost his job because a group of hard-right House members was furious with him for conducting policy negotiations that are inherent to democratic governance. “The ouster captures the degraded state of the Republican Party in this era of rage,” wrote The Wall Street Journal editorial board, a reliable voice of conservatism.— ©David Leonhardt

There's no more mainstream voice than the Times. They sort-of define mainstream in US media, whatever you might think of their editorial bias. It is a mainstream outlet, therefore, sounding the alarm about extremism taking over a once-mainstream political party with the support of tens of millions of angry people.

If this isn't ringing every alarm bell you possess, you're not paying attention. Ignoring the very real threat to the entire flawed, screwed-up, but still HUGELY better than dictatorship, electoral representative democracy we're constantly arguing about and trying to improve is unacceptable.

In the 1930s, capitalism failed. The immiseration of millions led to radical action against the banksters and rentiers running the casino economy. They didn't like that. Their response was to beat back reform everywhere they could, and Spain was the test case. Much of the tactical expertise deployed by the Nazis at the start of World War II was honed in their support role during the Spanish Civil War. Fascism's victory there was resisted by fractured, in-fighting groups of very idealistic people. The stories of the thousands of Brigadistes, youthful (usually) volunteer fighters determined to resist the ugliness and viciousness of fascism already on display in Italy and Germany, come into soft focus in this illustrated series of biographical sketches. Because the young people weren't famous, or interesting in and of themselves, they usually left little public trail...barring outliers like Jessica Mitford and Esmond Romilly. The authors don't, then, rely on the usual biographical resources to tell their stories. The journals and letters and scraps of stories here presented are all the more effective for it.

These young people, my parents' ages more or less, believed in their cause of resisting the hegemonic and totalitarian agenda that defines fascism, enough to go and stake their lives on a foreign country's future. They believed, correctly, that one battle won was one too many in an existential war for freedom, however flawed, versus repression, however seductive its illusion of security.

Young people today are inspiringly angry at their elders again...are vocally angry about our generational failure to confront climate change and economic injustice, and the other manifold disasters we've left them to clean up. This book should remind all the older folk to review their consciences in the face of the crises facing us, remember our moral principles and shun our anger-clouded impulses towards cruelty and, at long last, start doing the right thing.

For younger people, this is your proof that this is a fight worth fighting. Your Great-grandparents fought and lost. You see around you the consequences of that loss. Do not give in to despair! The battle needs fighting, the penalty for inaction is hideous.