Did Eric Arthur Blair Come Back from Catalonia Radicalized?
The UK raised its threat limit to “pee your pants” today, based on the assessment an attack on the country is “highly likely.” This is a response to the 500 or so Britons who have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS.
PM David Cameron said at least 500 people had travelled from the UK “to fight in Syria and potentially Iraq”.
He said Islamic State (IS) extremists – who are attempting to establish a “caliphate”, or Islamic state, in the region – represented a “greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before”.
New legislation would also be brought in to make it easier to take passports away from people travelling abroad to join the conflict, Mr Cameron said.
Which has me thinking — and not for the first time — of the large numbers of people who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
After all, it’s not like wanting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad is an ignoble goal. And while I think most Brits (and Americans) will grow disillusioned by the intolerance and ruthless discipline of ISIS, I can imagine the attraction, from afar, of moral certitude they offer. The 1930s, like today, are a morally confusing time, and those who fought the fascists in Spain ended up being vanguards of a necessary fight, even if they fought for an equally loathsome authoritarian force in the process.
The experience of fighting — and growing disillusioned — in Spain was chronicled by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. After his return, his views were suspect, but he did manage to return to the UK and warn of the dangers of absolutism.
I’m not the first to make this comparison. Boyd Tonkin wrote a piece in the Independent wondering whether those who traveled to Syria to fight Assad will be able to return to the UK without he specter of terrorism ruining their lives. (h/t to Gabe Moshenska who pointed me to it on Twitter)
Tony Blair’s third administration passed the Terrorism Act 2006. Section Five, as presently interpreted by the Crown Prosecution Service, makes it an offence to take part in military action abroad with a “political, ideological, religious or racial motive”. The legislation appears to forbid all training or action in a foreign combat. If so, its provisions would have criminalised every Briton who fought in Spain. It would have turned Lord Byron, whose commitment to Greek independence led him to arm and lead a raggle-taggle regiment prior to his death at Missolonghi in 1824, into an outlaw. As for the 6,500 veterans of Wellington’s armies who went off after Waterloo to fight against Spanish colonial rule in the battles that led to freedom for Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, how could the courts have processed such a lawless throng?
The 2006 legislation currently targets UK citizens deemed to have fought with Syrian rebel groups. Estimates of their number vary wildly but a figure of around 400-500 has gained currency. At least eight have died. The fear of radicalisation, with any link to al-Qa’ida-allied units and above all to Isis treated as a communicable virus, has propelled the hard legal line. In January, 16 Britons were arrested after returning from Syria. Further arrests have followed since.
[snip]
[T]oday’s security-led prism and its “radicalisation” model, with the automatic penalties in place for any returnee, appears blind to every nuance. One British volunteer in Syria tweeted a poster that read “Keep Calm, Support Isis”: a spoof of the already much-parodied Second World War campaign to beef up morale. What are the chances that the kid who wrote that poster had watched Dad’s Army? Pretty high. If so, he will be many things apart from a bloodthirsty future avenger dedicated to importing holy mayhem on to British streets.
The long-term significance of an overseas adventure for anyone may not be apparent to them, or to others, at the time. But every present or past volunteer in Syria now knows they bear an invisible brand marked “potential murderer”, stamped by the agencies of surveillance. In a BBC radio analysis, one British fighter thought it a “slightly surreal” notion to “go back to the UK and start a jihad there”. For him, at least: “As to the global jihad, I couldn’t tell you if I’m going to be alive tomorrow, let alone future plans.”
Just because you hear someone rashly cry “wolf” does not mean that wolves do not exist. Over the past six weeks, Isis in Iraq has shown to the world a savagery almost beyond belief. Its bloody stunts may have emboldened a few would-be butchers. They will have deterred many secret faint-hearts, already in too deep. However, if the near-certainty of UK criminal sanctions closes down your road to reintegration, why not rise to the fanatics’ bait? What have you then got to lose?
I think that points to one real concern (thanks to the Intercept publication of the terrorist watchlist, we know anyone traveling to Syria without a known purpose will be treated as a terrorist). What will happen to those who traveled to fight Assad — who, after all, the US also considers a key enemy — but subsequently realized those fighting the war are equally loathsome? Will they have a way to come back and chronicle it for us, explain the dual threat, without being imprisoned as a terrorist?
I also think there’s a larger issue. Certainly since the Iraq War, but even just our larger approach to the war on terror — up to and including outsourcing some of our torture to Assad — the US has lost what moral high ground it might have once claimed. That is the cost of the last 10 years. Even its intervention in Erbil can more easily be explained by a need to protect Kurdish oil than the Yazidis. ISIS is surely going to increasingly play to that modeling our orange jumpsuits and waterboarding, to undercut our claims to exceptionalism.
I’m not advocating further US involvement. We’ve been selectively picking extremist thugs to support or oppose for so long, I can’t imagine how we’d ever reclaim the moral high ground.
But it seems necessary to recognize that there’s a draw to combatting evil completely separate from a draw to adopting Islamic extremism. And given the moral uncertainty of the day — caused in part by US complicity — I’m not sure what the outlet the US permits people.
The US is losing ground in an ideological fight for justice, and that’s significantly because of its own actions. Without realizing that, it’s not going to succeed against ISIS.
Yet another buried lede:
Now that it’s out in the open that going there – wherever “there” is, depending on the governmental whim du jour – subjects the traveler to prison on arrival in the UK, what indeed does the traveler have to lose. Not one damn thing.
I cannot believe that the people in governments (and in the circles around them where “policy” discussions get made into policy and law) are so stupid as to have not thought through the implications of their decision, in this instance and likewise in so many other areas. These are intelligent people – they have to be to get the credentials and ticket-punches that got them into the jobs they have. So we are faced with intelligent people adopting policies which cause more conflict, give inspiration to those who would take the conflict to “the next level” (get out the beheading and crucifixion gear!), and feed further generations of the same cycle of increasing hate and violence.
I can’t wait for the time some “serious person” bloviates on a public-policy-oriented TV show that just whipping out a couple nukes and irradiating the survivors will be the way to deal with ISIS. The clowns in government – seeming to be the majority these days – will turn into remoras on that idea.
But the government officials are not stupid, nor are they ignorant of history nor of human nature. So, we have to conclude their actions are taken after careful consideration, not only of the immediate effects but also with the longer-term in mind. And we similarly have to conclude that the effects which arise and results which obtain are the effects and results they intended.
This is what the policymakers and politicians wanted. This is what they got.
They’re not ignorant of human nature but they are disinterested in how humans of a nature or skin color of faith unlike themselves would act — or indeed, how they themselves would act if circumstances were different.
That’s why I’m trying to get to the justice issue, if a bit awkwardly, with this post. Because we’ve given up giving a shit about justice for people who don’t immediately serve our interests. And that’s a problem from the standpoint of ideological battle.
Truth, justice, and the American way, they used to say. A fiction even then, but no one says that anymore.
I think we agree; recall I concluded:
You wrote, “The 1930s, like today, are a morally confusing time, and those who fought the fascists in Spain ended up being vanguards of a necessary fight, even if they fought for an equally loathsome authoritarian force in the process.”
Orwell fought for the POUM. He never renounced his participation with them. Orwell and the POUM were fighting on behalf of the Spanish Republic against the fascist Falange. There was really no moral ambiguity here. Orwell never fought for a “loathsome authoritarian force,” and neither did most who fought the fascists.
I imagine you must be talking about the role of the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party, which warred against both Falange and anarchists and political parties they abhorred, including the POUM and other Trotskyist parties. The full story is told in Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia, or even better yet, in Hugh Thomas’s classic history, The Spanish Civil War.
I assume you find the role of the SCP to have been “loathsome.” But looking backwards always makes things look clearer. But in 1936 things were not so clear. The SCP and their rank-and-file supporters, including those who came from afar to join their struggle against Franco, including the American Abraham Lincoln Brigade, were sincere anti-fascist fighters who also believed in socialism or communism as preferable to fascism. The KGB-linked heads in the Spanish CP had other ideas, spiking the social revolution in Catalonia so Stalin could cozy up to the US and UK, part of a “popular front” against fascism, whose most successful proponent was Hitler. Only with the collapse of “popular front” politics did Stalin turn to his temporary pact with Hitlerite Germany. The US and UK, of course, were passively pro-Falange.
Orwell was already radicalized when he went to Catalonia. The example of the workers republic in Catalonia was something inspirational to him, though the actions of the Stalinists did disillusion him. But not for the reasons you imagine. At the time, anyway, it was not because he saw Stalinism as a new totalitarianism; that idea would come later. But because he understood that the Stalinists were sabotaging the workers revolution.
I don’t know what you mean by “abolutism.” You are being opaque here. I presume you mean Stalinism, or perhaps you mean fascism. Or perhaps you do not distinguish between the two. You should be clearer: Orwell was “suspect” because he was sympathetic to the workers and to revolution, and appeared to have become, for the time anyway, a Trotskyist who believed in the world socialist revolution. Whether he was a Trotskyist or not is something one can debate (I’d say he was not, though he may have sympathized some — the POUM after all was seen at the time as a Trotsky-friendly political party, the only one with a large following in Europe at the time).
So, under current laws George Orwell would be a terrorist.
Imagine how much intellectually poorer our society would be if he had been treated as a terrorist in his day.
And then consider people like H.D. Thoreau and the many many others who have enriched the world by educating that masses about the dangers posed by policy that Governments tend to lean towards as they become entrenched and self-serving.
Perhaps ensuring there are no more Orwell’s or Thoreau’s is exactly the objective the Governments are trying to achieve.
On the historical point, Jeffrey Kaye is correct, Orwell fought with the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista), a leftwing Communist group that closely allied itself with anarchist groups. The POUM and the anarchists had a shooting battle with in early 1937 with the Soviet-line Communists and Catalan “autonomists,” which the latter alliance won. The Communists then provoked a crisis in the national Republican government over its unwillingness to outlaw the POUM. The result was a new government headed by Juan Negrín which did outlaw the POUM.
But I hadn’t thought of the conceptual similarity of the situation of revolutionary tourists like Orwell in Spain and those in Syria today until I read this post. You raise a very good question. I’m not sure that the British government at the time would have regarded Orwell’s fighting in a militia that regarded itself as more communist than the Communists as more benign than directly supporting the pro-Spanish-Republic Communists. But your point is a very good one. The fact that a young person decides to go fight against a Syrian regime that even the Western media demonized for months until the Obama Administration recently decided we may need to ally with them, that in itself doesn’t mean they will be incorrigible terrorists for life.
Consider France, with double troubles, who has some of its Islamic citizens going off to fight in Syria or with IS, plus has some of its “volunteers” (soldiers of fortune) fighting in Eastern Ukraine, on the pro-Russian separatist side. Although this may be true of other countries, France is the only one I’ve seen in the news with unofficial fighters in both conflicts.
For French in IS, see many examples like .
For French in Ukraine, search for “nom de guerre Frantsuz, or the Frenchman” or many examples like and .
Consider France, with double troubles, who has some of its Islamic citizens going off to fight in Syria or with IS, plus has some of its “volunteers” (soldiers of fortune) fighting in Eastern Ukraine, on the pro-Russian separatist side. Although this may be true of other countries, France is the only one I’ve seen in the news with unofficial fighters in both conflicts.
For French in IS, see many examples like here.
For French in Ukraine, search for “nom de guerre Frantsuz, or the Frenchman” or many examples like here and here.
Sorry for the double post – feel free to delete the first one, where I messed up my link urls. No preview nor any editing of posts anymore? Can’t clean up my honest errors, but at least I know now.