EL VANO AYER

Discuss the use of parody in El Vano Ayer

Discuss the use of parody in El Vano Ayer

Today it is possible to see the civil war, Spain's contribution to the tragic history of that most brutal of centuries, the 20th, in its historical context. It was not, as the neoliberal François Furet argued it should have been, a war against both the ultra-right and the Comintern - a view shared, from a Trotskyist sectarian angle, by Ken Loach's powerful film Land and Freedom (1995) (Graham, 2005, pp. 48-54). The only choice was between two sides, and liberal-democratic opinion overwhelmingly chose anti-fascism. Hence, asked in early 1939 who they wanted to win in a war between Russia and Germany, 83 per cent of Americans wanted a Russian victory. Spain was a war against Franco - that is to say, against the forces of fascism with which Franco was aligned - and 87 per cent of Americans favoured the republic. Alas, unlike in the second world war, the wrong side won. But it is largely due to the intellectuals, the artists and writers who mobilised so overwhelmingly in favour of the republic, that in this instance history has not been written by the victors (Kosovo, 2001, pp. 3).

The Spanish civil war was both at the centre and on the margin of the era of anti-fascism. It was central, since it was immediately seen as a European war between fascism and anti-fascism, almost as the first battle in the coming world war, some of the characteristic aspects of which - for example, air raids against civilian populations - it anticipated. But Spain took no part in the second world war. Franco's victory was to have no bearing on the collapse of France in 1940, and the experience of the republican armed forces was not relevant to the subsequent wartime resistance movements, even though in France these were largely composed of refugee Spanish republicans, and former international brigaders played a major role in those of other countries (Graham, 2005, pp. 48-54).

To situate the Spanish civil war within the general framework of the anti-fascist era, we have to bear in mind both the failure to resist fascism and the disproportionate success of anti-fascist mobilisation among Europe's intellectuals. I am referring not only to the success of fascist expansionism and the failure of the forces favouring peace to halt the apparently inevitable approach of another world war. I am also remembering the failure of its opponents to change public opinion. The only regions that saw a genuine political shift to the left after the Great Depression were Scandinavia and North America (Kosovo, 2001, pp. 3). Much of central and southern Europe was already under authoritarian governments or was to fall into their hands, but insofar as we can judge from the scattered electoral data, the drift in Hungary and Russia, not to mention among the German diaspora, was sharply to the right. On the other hand, the Popular Front's victory in France was a shift within the French left, not a shift of opinion to the left...