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We remember Canada's anti-fascist veterans
62 Plays5 years ago
There's a group of Canadian veterans often overlooked on Remembrance Day--the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion who fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Kaarina Mikalson of the Canada and the Spanish Civil War Project joins us on the pod to tell us the story of Canada's original anti-fascists.
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Transcript
Introduction and Purpose
00:00:16
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host Duncan Kinney. We're recording here in Amiskwachee, Waskagand, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treaty Six territory. And today we're doing a podcast on people who deserve to be remembered.
Remembering the Mackenzie Papano Battalion
00:00:29
Speaker
We're going to be talking about words like courage and sacrifice, bravery, and it's going to be about soldiers, but it's probably not the soldiers that you think.
00:00:37
Speaker
On this Remembrance Day, we're going to remember the brave men and women who served in the Mackenzie Papano Battalion in Spain's Civil War during the 1930s. A part of Remembrance Day that we've gotten away from was bringing out the ruling class and pointedly reminding them that they murdered millions of innocent people under the most horrific circumstances possible for no good reason. There used to be a criticism and a politics to Remembrance Day, you know, a recognition that, like, war is bad.
00:01:02
Speaker
And that's been lost. And I propose that we bring it back by memorializing the Mackenzie Papanobe Italian, the MacPaps. They were ostracized by their own country for fighting the forces of fascism just a few years before Hitler invaded Europe. But time has proven them to be on the right side of history. And so here we are. Today, we remember the courage and the bravery and the sacrifice of the original anti-fascists, the original Antifa, the Mackenzie Papanobe Italian.
00:01:30
Speaker
To help us out with this discussion, we have Karina Michelson. She's based in Halifax, and she's the project manager and co-director for the Canada and the Spanish Civil War Project.
Canada's Role in the Spanish Civil War
00:01:39
Speaker
Karina, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having me. Before we get into it, why don't you just describe what the Canada and the Spanish Civil War Project is for our listeners? Because I definitely used it a lot when I was doing research for this episode, and it's a fantastic resource.
00:01:52
Speaker
Yeah, so this is a SSHRC funded kind of academic research project. It started out as a study of literature by Canadians about the Spanish Civil War and kind of expanded to be about Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish Civil War's effect on Canada's culture and history.
00:02:12
Speaker
Our research takes a lot of different forms and you can see a lot of them on our website. We have a series of print books. We've re-released old Canadian Spanish Civil War literature that's out of print. We have a podcast. We have a database of volunteers, so Canadians who are involved in the Spanish Civil War are there as soldiers, journalists, doctors, etc.
00:02:37
Speaker
We have a bunch of material written by Canadians about the Spanish Civil War that we've digitized and put on our website for you to view. So we kind of study the history and the cultural impact of the war on Canada.
00:02:53
Speaker
It's a really fantastic website and we'll have the URL in our show notes. So let's kind of give a quick cold notes of the Spanish Civil War. You know, especially for the people who maybe, you know, read homage to Catalonia 15 years ago, and maybe it aren't necessarily up on all the details.
Origins of the Conflict
00:03:08
Speaker
And if I correct anything, or if I make any mistakes, Karina, just feel free to jump in.
00:03:12
Speaker
In 1936, a left-wing coalition wins an election in Spain. They begin expropriating land from Spain's richest people and redistributing it to its poorest. And in response to the ruling class, a broad coalition made up of the military, the aristocracy, and the Catholic Church, they initiate a coup d'etat.
00:03:31
Speaker
That coup only half works, and the resulting stalemate is the start of the Spanish Civil War. On one side you've got the Republicans, and on the other side you've got the fascists. Eventually, and quite quickly, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy show up on the side of the fascists as well.
00:03:47
Speaker
On the other side of that equation, shortly after the Civil War starts, international volunteers start showing up in Spain, interested in fighting back against fascists. How important was anti-fascism to the people who were showing up, Karina? And what is this anti-fascist political project back in the 30s?
00:04:02
Speaker
So anti-fascism was very important to them. So the slogan of the Republican effort internationally was make Madrid the tomb of fascism. So the stance was that fascism was on the rise most places.
00:04:17
Speaker
including Canada, fascist parties, fascist politics, and that people had to resist as much as they could. And people believed that if they could stop fascism in Spain, then they could more easily stop it in other places as well. And they also feared that if they couldn't stop fascism in Spain, then it would spread. And they were right about that. So fascism, I mean, that's a big question. What was the anti-fascist project back then?
00:04:47
Speaker
That kind of has to do with what fascism was back then, right? But kind of crackdowns on democracy and investment in capitalism, conservative values, things like police brutality. Yeah. So how did the message get out to Canadians who
Canadian Volunteers and Their Journey
00:05:02
Speaker
were interested in volunteering to fight the fascists in Spain who was doing the recruiting and the organizing of these folks?
00:05:08
Speaker
um it's kind of sneaky so we don't know a ton about it so you kind of had to be screened by the communist party uh in order to get sent to spain um and it was very shady you had to meet people at certain places and even once they began the journey to spain it was like okay take this ticket and someone will find you in new york and then once you got to new york someone would be like take this ticket someone will find you in paris so it was
00:05:35
Speaker
We don't know a lot about how they were recruited. Mostly they self-nominated and they connected mostly with the Communist Party to get there and with other organizations like the Canadian Association to Aid Spanish Democracy that were mobilizing to get help to Spain. And there were good reasons why it was such clandestine cloak and dagger stuff, right? The Canadian government was doing its level best to stop people from volunteering to go fight in Spain.
00:06:00
Speaker
Yes, so the Canadian government had taken a stance of neutrality on the Spanish Civil War, as had many other Western countries, including the United States, France, and Great Britain. And the Canadian government brought forward the Foreign Enlistment Act, which said that Canadians could not fight in foreign conflicts, and it was specifically about the Spanish Civil War. And even though nobody was ever charged under that act, it meant it was difficult to
00:06:25
Speaker
get into Spain, people had to go through France, they had to lie about what they were doing there, and many people's passports passports were stamped not valid for Spain because of this act.
00:06:37
Speaker
But despite all this, around 1,700 Canadian volunteers did show up to fight for the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War. And it's an interesting collection of folks. You got a lot of communists. As far as ethnic backgrounds of the people who did end up going, there were a lot of Finns, a lot of Ukrainians, a lot of Jewish folks. But really, it was anyone who was highly motivated to bash the fash and who wanted to fight back against fascism. Those were the kind of folks who ended up in Spain, right?
00:07:01
Speaker
Yes, yeah, for sure. And they identify in a lot of different ways. They were asked what their politics were when they got to Spain, and many of them explicitly identify as anti-fascist.
00:07:11
Speaker
So these Canadian volunteers end up in Spain. So how did the Mackenzie Papano Battalion come about? So once Canadian volunteers got to Spain, for the most part, they were sorted into the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. There was also the Washington Battalion. For time, they were separate battalions and they were collapsed into one. So they get referred to in confusing ways. But the Lincoln Battalion was primarily Americans, American volunteers.
00:07:36
Speaker
And Canadians got sorted with them, or sometimes they ended up in the British Battalion. And many other Canadians ended up, because they were recent immigrants, they ended up in their home battalions, so Hungarian, Eastern European battalions, Ukrainian battalions, things like that. But there was enough Canadians in the Lincoln Battalion that they wanted their own kind of place. They didn't want to be confused with Americans anymore, and they wanted something
00:08:03
Speaker
for Canadians back home to rally around in their support of the Spanish Republican effort.
00:08:10
Speaker
MacLeod A. MacLeod was a Canadian who traveled to Spain and rallied. He gave an impassioned speech to the Lincoln Battalion about the Mackenzie and Papano Rebellion of 1837 and how important it was and Canada's revolutionary past. And they voted for a Canadian named battalion. But even when the Macpap Battalion existed, it was primarily American and Spanish volunteers because there were never enough Canadians to form their own battalion.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, a battalion is a lot of people. But interestingly, there was this tension between what is this internationalist socialist project and this kind of branding effort to have this explicitly Canadian part of the international brigades.
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah and that tension comes up in a lot of weird ways like a lot of these Canadians as I said most of them were recent immigrants so they didn't necessarily identify as Canadian and Canada didn't necessarily identify them as Canadian right? Canadian citizenship wasn't a legal category at that point but these were people who were often in danger of being deported back to their home countries.
00:09:10
Speaker
Now, even when we study it, sometimes other scholars from other countries will say that we should study all of the Spanish Civil War literature and we shouldn't be limiting ourselves to Canada, but often they are limiting themselves to their own country. But it's also useful to think of Canada as having a rich history of anti-fascism. And so associating anti-fascism with the name Canada is, I think, helpful.
00:09:31
Speaker
Yeah, and the anti-fascist part of this is so interesting, right? Because a lot of these people were also anti-war organizers who had anti-war sentiment. And this tension between kind of wanting world peace, but also recognizing that you're going to have to go to war to fight the fascists is another tension at the heart of this project. Yeah, for sure.
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't know how many, I know the cultural figures from the 1930s were often involved in anti-war efforts. I don't know how much the working class men who, most of whom went to Spain were involved in anti-war efforts. I think they were more anti-capitalist as a group.
00:10:07
Speaker
And that can be tied into anti-war and anti-fascism, right? And also anti-police was a big part of what they were mobilizing against. So a lot of these big violent institutions of authority. Yeah. Well, it was the Great Depression and I guess there was a lot of bashing of heads of poor people going on at the time. Yes, exactly. Yeah.
00:10:26
Speaker
But Karina, you've done a lot of work cataloging and researching the folks who volunteered. There's a lot of interesting people. And one of the people that came up off pod when we were chatting about this episode before recording was someone named Jim Watts. So who was Jim Watts? And why are they so interesting?
Jim Watts: The Multifaceted Activist
00:10:43
Speaker
So Jim Watts, also known as Jean Watts, also known as Myrtle Eugenia Watts Lawson, she goes by a lot of names, makes her slippery in archival research. She was an upper-class woman from Toronto. She was very much involved in cultural organizing through the 1930s. So she was best friends with Dorothy Livesay, who's a well-known Canadian poet.
00:11:07
Speaker
And she was working closely with all of the writers who are kind of the canon of Canadian literature in the 1930s. She herself was a journalist and a scientist and an organizer with the Communist Party. And she ended up in Spain as the foreign correspondent for the Canadian Communist newspaper, The Daily Clarion.
00:11:28
Speaker
Well, in Spain, she wrote articles. She broadcasts daily from Madrid over the shortwave radio. So she was one of the people responsible for daily English broadcasts about the war. She was a censor. She worked in the censor's office. She was an ambulance driver. And she supposedly also
00:11:53
Speaker
was enlisted in the International Brigades. And she also served with Norman Bethune's Blood Transfusion Institute. So she was all over the place doing a lot of interesting things. And she was also an openly bisexual woman. And she is pretty freaking fascinating. So we're always trying to learn more about her. And we have a lot about her on our website as well. We definitely need a Canadian Heritage Minute on Jim Watts, I think.
00:12:17
Speaker
Yeah, we've talked about that so many times. Yeah, just like the openly bisexual, genderqueer, anti-fascist communist who was just in and around the who's who of Canadian literature at the time. And there are some other like, you know, interesting human interest stories that are out there too, right? We were talking about this Danish guy, and you could kind of see his correspondence over time, and you could see him becoming more and more radical until he went and volunteered, right?
00:12:39
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a great article in a Canadian history journal about Ivar Anderson, better known as Tiny, and he was Danish immigrant. He came to Canada in I think 1930, and we have a bunch of his letters that he sent home. And they kind of catalog his radicalization from, you know, hardworking immigrant ready for the Canadian dream to anti-capitalist, anti-fascist who ends up in Spain.
00:13:09
Speaker
And he's super fascinating just because his family who lost track of him were later contacted and they had no idea that he became a communist and they didn't believe it because it was so out of keeping with the man they knew in the 1920s.
00:13:28
Speaker
But so much happened to him during the Great Depression that his ideology totally changed. And you can just see it in his writing, right? From this humdrum, upwardly aspirational guy to someone who was an anti-fascist and who went and volunteered in the Spanish Civil War.
00:13:45
Speaker
You know, the sad part of this podcast is that, you know, ultimately it didn't end well for the Macpaps and, you know, Spain was not the tomb of fascism. And, you know, the Spanish Republicans ended up losing in early 1939. The last holdouts in Barcelona kind of fell. The international volunteers kind of went home in late 1938. And then kind of as we all know, in 1939, later on in 1939, Hitler invades Poland and we all know what happened there.
00:14:15
Speaker
But ultimately, how many MacPaps gave their life for the cause?
Legacy and Recognition of the MacPaps
00:14:21
Speaker
We think around 600. It's really tricky to track based on who was missing in action, who just was missing totally, who ended up in various prison camps, who wasn't allowed back into Canada. So there was actually a Canadian government agent who was sent to Spain to decide who was allowed back in the country and who wasn't. And he didn't allow many people back in the country.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah, so it's confusing, but probably around 600 people died in Spain. And are these people memorialized in Spain? Is there markers and memorials for them or what? Yeah, there's memorials for sure for international brigades. They often come under attack. And there is a lot of people in Spain who work hard to remember the international brigades. And there's some people in Spain who want to destroy those memorials.
00:15:09
Speaker
But Spain itself had its pact of forgetting after the death of Franco in 1975. So the country decided that they weren't going to talk about what happened and they weren't going to prosecute crimes or look for people who went missing either during the Civil War or during Franco's dictatorship. So it's only a lot of the work around memorializing has happened more recently as people start to push back against the pact of forgetting.
00:15:37
Speaker
The one really interesting thing right now is that they're against some laws.
00:15:44
Speaker
Exuming mass graves of people who died either under Franco's rule or during the war. And they're trying to figure out who those people were. And some of them are Canadian. Many of them are not. So yeah, that's a whole effort in Spain that has a lot of legal context. And Spain is reckoning with this too right now. They're reckoning with their fascist past. I remember reading something recently about how General Franco's body was being moved. His body was just exhumed, yeah.
00:16:13
Speaker
The other interesting part of this is the story of the Spanish Civil War here at home in Canada. You know, how did the Canadian media and political establishment view the volunteers?
00:16:26
Speaker
So during the war, obviously, they weren't supported. So the Foreign Investment Act said they shouldn't go. After the war, their communism was not liked by the government. So they were labeled premature anti-fascist. So they were anti-fascist, but they were anti-fascist too early. And once Canada as a whole became anti-fascist kind of in entering World War II,
00:16:54
Speaker
Some of them were refused entry into the Canadian military, some weren't, some were accepted. Many of them were tracked by the RCMP for years and decades afterwards, but nobody ever ended up in jail for defying the foreign enlistment act, but they were definitely under surveillance. Well, premature anti-fascist is a hilarious kind of Canadian bureaucrat construction. It is.
00:17:22
Speaker
Well, it's not just Canadian. That was a phrase used in the United States as well. So I don't know where it originates, but it's a ridiculous phrase that my brain always seizes on. It's just, it's absurd.
00:17:36
Speaker
You know, fascists are bad because, you know, World War II and Nazis and all that, but you were just, you know, two years too early. It's as absurd as labeling yourself anti-antifa and not realizing or refusing to recognize that that means you're a fascist, right? Yeah.
00:17:52
Speaker
And so these premature antifascists didn't get pensions, right? They were harassed and spied on by the state security apparatus when they returned. And so did we eventually come around on these folks here in Canada? Was there ever any recognition of these folks' bravery and sacrifice and courage in fighting fascism? Not by the government, not by Veterans Affairs. So one of the reasons we took up this project is because the Canadian War Museum is not interested in the Spanish Civil War.
00:18:21
Speaker
They were recognized in Spain. So in the 1970s, after the death of Franco, several Macpaps were invited back to Spain. And actually one of them died on his trip back to Spain within like a few hundred meters of where many of his friends had died in 1937, which is very beautiful and sad.
00:18:44
Speaker
But for the most part, their recognition has come from academics, from artists, from writers, and from their relatives and leftist groups.
00:18:54
Speaker
So ultimately, if we want to remember these folks, it's up to us, right? You know, Stephen Harper has done a lot of work in talking up Canada's military history, you know, things like the War of 1812, you know, before Canada was even a country, and a lot of messaging and work around Vimy Ridge in World War I. So is this work around the Spanish Civil War and the Macpaps, is this a project that the left needs to take up and consider this history and consider who we remember and who we valorize?
00:19:18
Speaker
Um yeah maybe uh I mean I think some of the left already has so uh I am currently working on my actual personal research or my dissertation research is on Canadian comics so right now I'm writing a chapter on or writing an article about English language comics about the Spanish Civil War and there's quite a few recent Canadian comics that take up uh either individuals who fought in Spain or uh
00:19:45
Speaker
situating the Spanish Civil War in broader Canadian histories of leftism. So I think that is already happening and I think it should keep happening, but I also would love to chart a longer trajectory of anti-fascism in Canada because the Spanish Civil War is interesting and fascinating as it is. It's still a lot of like white men and anti-fascism has to look like more than that.
00:20:12
Speaker
for it to be successful, especially now.
Proposed Changes to Remembrance Day
00:20:15
Speaker
So this episode is going to be released on Remembrance Day. And I don't speak for all leftists, obviously, but I have mixed feelings about Remembrance Day. I feel like we've gotten away from the original purpose and spirit of the day, which let's remember is a statutory holiday, a whole day off across Canada for everyone.
00:20:31
Speaker
It is important to remember the dead and their sacrifice, but now it feels like it's more about policing poppies, reciting Flanders Fields, watching a 21-gun salute solemnly. Instead of talking about things like world peace, or that war is hell, or even the history of the First World War, which is the reason for the holiday, especially the material conditions that led to it.
00:20:53
Speaker
The ruling class of Western Europe essentially murdered around 15 million people for no actual definable good reason. And so many of these people died in some of the worst, most terrifying circumstances ever cooked up by man. And then the war largely ended because the ruling class saw what happened in Russia in 1917 and wanted to head that off at the pass.
00:21:15
Speaker
And, you know, also the First World War demobilized a huge swath of internationalist socialist organizing, right? Like nationalism was and continues to be a hell of a drug. And remembrance these days feels very nationalistic, very pro-military, with none of the criticism of the state or the ruling class that are originally held, right? The whole war is bad part of Remembrance Day, doesn't seem to get much play these days, and I think we need to say that out loud.
00:21:42
Speaker
The deep societal scar that the First World War left on society has pretty much hilled over, and it's gone from our memory. I think finding new stories is important. If that's the case, I'd argue that we should inject a little anti-fascism into Remembrance Day and spend some time remembering the sacrifices of the brave men and women of the Mackenzie Papano Battalion. I'm curious, what do you think is the best way to go ahead and do that?
00:22:05
Speaker
Oh, there's so many ways. So one is that you can go visit the grave of a MacPAP, and I think you're going to provide a link to a map in your show notes. So Pam Vivian and Rehoff, Pam Vivian's making a documentary about the MacPAPs, and Rehoff is a kind of a historian outside of the academy who helps us a lot with our work.
00:22:28
Speaker
um they have found a whole bunch of graves and they ask that people go visit them and lay a white rose and an international brigades flag and November has terrible weather so they also recommend doing this at other parts of the year not just Remembrance Day which I think you know extending our uh rumination on war outside those one day is important too. Other ways to think about anti-fascism and Remembrance Day um
00:22:53
Speaker
read Gord Hill's Antifa comic book and think about how anti-fascism in Spain led into World War II and how that led into anti-fascism now and see those kinds of trajectories. Instead of thinking, oh I'm gonna think about this war instead of that one, like think about them together and start making those connections. Read Charles Yell Harrison's General Stein bed which was a
00:23:20
Speaker
He was a veteran of the First World War and he wrote a very anti-capitalist, anti-military, anti-nationalist novel about it that was censored by the Canadian military and is a really horrific and meaningful read. And go visit our website and learn about anti-fascism and also support present-day anti-fascism.
00:23:42
Speaker
Always, yeah. Yeah, recognize that anti-fascism outside of wartime is good, too. You don't have to just fight Nazis in a uniform to be a good anti-fascist, right? Yes, support your local anti-fascists, folks. Karina, what's the best place for people to find you online if you've got like an online presence for people to follow you? What's the URL of the website, too? I mean, we'll have it in the show notes, but you may
Resources and Call to Action
00:24:06
Speaker
as well give it out now.
00:24:06
Speaker
Yeah, our website URL is super easy. It's spanishcivilwar.ca. So think the Canadian URL route and Spanish Civil War. You can find us on Twitter at CanadaSCW.
00:24:21
Speaker
I don't really want to be found on Twitter because I talk about romance novels and things like that, and maybe you don't. It is a cursed hellset. That's not what you're expecting after keeping me talking about this episode. You don't have to be chasing clout or anything. That's fine. You've got the project.
00:24:40
Speaker
Yeah, but our website has so much to offer and you can get in touch with us either through Twitter or through our website and we love talking to people. I also love helping people find stuff. So if you have a question about the Spanish Civil War and Canadian involvement, I will help you find the answer. It's my favourite thing to do.
00:24:57
Speaker
Well, yeah, and thanks so much again, Karina. To everyone who's listening, thanks so much for listening to the podcast. If you like this podcast and you want to keep hearing this podcast, one of the things that really helps this podcast continue is your financial support.
00:25:13
Speaker
If you go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card, you become a monthly donor five, 10, $15 a month. That really does help us continue. If you don't have the cash, it's cool sharing this podcast, reviewing this podcast, you know, smashing that like button, leaving a review on Apple podcasts. All those things are also very, very, very helpful in order to get this podcast into more people's ears.
00:25:38
Speaker
And yeah, it's easy as just like texting it through your Apple Podcasts app or through whatever you use on your Android phone to be like, hey, this is a really interesting take on Remembrance Day that you should listen to. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, I'm on Twitter at Duncan Kinney and you can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communist for the amazing theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.