[NYTr] Galloway: John Cornford and the Fight for the Spanish Republic
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CounterPunch - Jul 21, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/Galloway07212006.html
[Seventy years ago this week General Franco launched his attack on the
Spanish Republic, backed by Hitler, Mussolini and, tacitly, by the US and
other Western powers. Across the next days and weeks we will be publishing
articles on this pivotal struggle. We launched the July 18 anniversary with
a overview by Vicente Navarro of the enduring significance of the Fascist
onslaught and the malign tenacity of Franco's admirers to this day in
burying his crimes while seeking to renew his objectives. Here now is
British Member of Parliament George Galloway on one Englishman who gave his
life for the Republic. We thank London-based CounterPuncher Omar Waraich
for his initiative in helping set up this series. AC / JSC. ]
John Cornford and the Fight for the Spanish Republic
"The most glorious page in the history of the British left"
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.
The International Brigade was the working class (and their other class
allies) answer to the policy of non-intervention by the British and French
governments towards the bestial murder of the Spanish Republic by the
Fascist hordes of Franco and his friends Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
The British Section, organized as the Saklatvala Batallion, sent 2100 to
fight in Spain. Five hundred of them came back in boxes, hundreds more of
them on crutches and stretchers. The war effort was supported by a huge
movement throughout the British left and the trades unions. Aid to Spain
was a rallying cry which resounded throughout the world. Some of the
greatest writers, journalists and photographers -- Ernest Hemingway, Claud
Cockburn, Robert Capa, Laurie Lee and Orwell himself -- amplified the cry
through newspapers pamphlets Left Book Club tomes, newsreels, and at huge
public meetings throughout the country.
Most of the martyrs -- and the vast majority of the heroes -- were coal
miners, carpenters and boiler-makers, shop stewards and industrial
militants. But others were brilliant academics like the mathematician David
Haden-Guest, or writers like Ralph Fox and Christopher Caudwell. One of
these was John Cornford. Some of his poetry reflected the socialist realism
style of the times and has little potential popularity today (though, who
knows, it may yet come back into fashion). His writings from the front line
however match the very best of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves or Siegfried
Sassoon. And his piece de resistance Heart of the Heartless World, written
to his great love Margot Heinemann (who became a great Communist luminary
herself writing such agitational work as Wages Front and the Case for Coal
-- she worked closely throughout her life with the National Union of
Mineworkers -- and who eventually married J.D. Bernal the crystallographer,
the only scientist to win both the Nobel prize and the Stalin prize for
science) was both his last and greatest work.
Too late for Cornford, the mobilization of the flower of the movement to
Spain, where many were cut down, was discontinued. Harry Pollitt the
party's legendary general secretary observing, brutally perhaps but
rationally, that the Communists had plenty of Welsh miners but not as many
great intellectuals.
Until now the knowledge of the meteor that was John Cornford has been
buried under the sands of time and prejudice. He flared briefly but
brilliantly and burnt out in the flash of a Fascist musket in a now largely
forgotten battle. It is a duty, for me, to see his name and those of his
comrades are inscribed in a properly glorious firmament of the British
section of the greatest internationalist movement of its, or any, time.
[GEORGE GALLOWAY is a Member of the British Parliament, representing the
Respect coalition . He is the author of, Mr. Galloway Goes to
Washington (New Press), I'm Not the Only One (Penguin UK), and the
upcoming Fidel Castro Handbook(MQ Publications). GallowayG @parliament.uk]
*
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