There have been a good few letters on this page in recent times about Irish volunteers in the International Brigades during the latter's alleged "fight for freedom" in the Spanish Civil War, to which one can only reply: Yes indeed. And the purpose of the GAA is to promote loyalty to the British Empire, the Confraternity in Limerick was formed to give sex tips to youngsters, and this diary is being written by Ghenghis Khan, the well known cricketer and personal masseur to Oscar Wilde.
The International Brigade was not formed to protect freedom and democracy. It was founded as a tool of the Comintern, to promote the interests of the Soviet Union - and thereby of Joseph Stalin, the butcher of millions. It made political sense for the International Brigade to recruit non-communists - useful fools was what Lenin had called such people in an earlier manipulation of gullible decency - but of course most were then vetted by the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police.
Ruthless follower
The brigade's first recruiting officer was Karol Swierczewiki, an NKVD colonel and professor in the Moscow Military School. "Walter", as he was known, was a loyal and ruthless follower of Stalin, who survived purge after purge and whose ultimate reward was to be assassinated in 1947 by Ukrainian partisans.
The upper echelons of the International Brigade consisted of people like "Walter". From the outset, one of the worst of these was AndrΘ Marty, a French communist who regularly executed volunteers in the brigade who wanted to go home or had not done their duty to his satisfaction. The most shameful of these many, many killings was of Major Gaston Delasalle, of Marseilles, after defeat in battle.
The action which led to that killing provides a curious Anglo-Irish dimension to the war. One of the British members of the International Brigade serving with Delasalle was George Nathan, who - as a member of the RIC Auxiliaries - is said to have murdered the Lord Mayor of Limerick, George Clancy, and the latter's predecessor, Michael O'Callaghan. And now alongside him in the Spanish firing line were the Irish members of the International Brigade, including many IRA men, including Frank Ryan.
Ryan's non-existent commitment to freedom and democracy was memorably captured by Al Connolly of Dundalk in a recent letter to this newspaper. "No matter what anyone says to the contrary," Ryan declared in 1932, "while we have fists, hands and boots to use, and guns if necessary, we will not allow free speech to traitors." This fine fellow went on to be an agent for the Third Reich, in which noble band he perished in 1944.
Pathetic mimic
Now almost none of these people are recognisable as democrats in any modern sense of the term; yet equally, from the evidence available, Eoin O'Duffy emerges not as an authentic fascist, but rather as a pathetic mimic of things, forces and hatreds he knew almost nothing about. Beleaguered by IRA violence far more fascist than anything he had to offer, he uncomprehendingly copied European organisations, very possibly unaware of what he was doing or meaning; and as history was soon to show, the organisations he opposed were actually far more pro-Nazi than he was.
O'Duffy's historical tragedy was that he represented forces which had no power in the creation of the central Irish narrative. That narrative dismisses as fascist the simple, misled country boys who joined the Francoist forces at the their church's bidding, and who at war's ending were ruthlessly abandoned. That same mythology applauds "republicans" who in effect served the cause of murderous international communism in Spain.
That cause which had invented techniques of industrialised mass murder in the Soviet Union - ones which were to be refined and improved in Nazi Germany - in Spain went on to butcher innocents by the thousand. Unchecked, and within a decade, violent and dictatorial communism had spread across eastern Europe, to the unrestrained joy of the jackboot communists who remained so unapologetically within Irish life.
Nor Irish only. One of the most eminent veterans of the International Brigade was Walter Ulbricht, the German Stalinist whose wall of 1960 not merely divided Germany but the entire world. Thousands perished at his command - but perhaps not so many as were killed by another veteran of the International Brigades, Enver Hoxha, the savage who ruled Albania, and who raped prisoners, men and women, before their state execution. Another veteran of the International Brigade was the Hungarian Gero, who assisted in the bloody suppression of his own people after the uprising in 1956.
Diehard veterans
Countless other faithful Stalinists from the International Brigades, of all nationalities, were murdered in the Gulag over the following years by their ultimate master, Stalin. When he was gone, the last diehard Stalinist veterans of the brigade, such as the brutal Etinton (or Kotov), were themselves finally murdered.
And what was then left of the International Brigade? Myth mostly. For no benign outcome was possible from the Spanish Civil War. Right-wing fascists or left-wing fascists were going to be the victors, not democrats, as the Mazaryk family could testify. Thomas Mazaryk was the architect of Czechoslovakian nationality and statehood, and it was in his honour that the Czechoslovak battalion in the International Brigades in Spain was named.
In 1948 his son Jan, the democratically elected foreign minister, was killed during the Stalinist overthrow of democracy within Czechoslovakia. And Stalin being Stalin, a comparably Mazarykian fate would certainly have awaited Spanish democrats had the International Brigade been triumphant there in the 1930s. So please: no more about the International Brigade and its fight for freedom, thank you.