7: ‘Dirty Tricks Department’?

FAI members have also been accused of being ‘other worldly’, criminals or psychopaths. On closer examination these charges prove to be nothing more than highly subjective, untestable conjectures intended to suit the author’s prejudices. In the few cases where ‘proof’ is adduced it turns out to be hearsay evidence from hostile witnesses. The criminal pathology of Spanish anarchism can only be refuted by empirical study rather than the abstract theories of indolent or malevolent historians.

George Woodcock, for example, apparently unaware that the FAI consisted in the main of rank-and-file cenetistas, states that apart from ‘hard working trade union leaders and the theoreticians of Spanish anarchism’ (most of whom didn’t join the FAI until 1934, by which time it had ceased to be a revolutionary instrument) it also contained a ‘dubious contingent from the Barcelona underworld’. The latter allegation was an idea picked up and repeated from Borkenau. This unholy alliance, Woodcock claims, proves the Bakuninist connection:

‘It was he [Bakunin] who laid most stress on the alliance between idealists and the marginal social elements necessary to overthrow the state and prepare the ground for the free society.’ The FAI’s founders ‘mingled idealistic devotion to a cause with a taste for conspiracy, a justification for illegality and tyrannicide, and… a leaning toward social experiments of a primitive communist nature.’ [52]

Gabriel Jackson believed ‘the FAI combined anarchist idealism with gangsterism, often in the same persons.’ The FAI is presented as the Mafia and the CNT as a Spanish Teamsters Union:

‘They collected the dues of the CNT unions, forming prisoner funds, buying arms, “protecting” the workers from the police.’ Jackson portrays the ‘Zaragoza’ anarchists as being divided into three types. ‘There were a handful of self-educated idealists, readers of Bakunin and Tolstoy, sometimes mystical pacifists, sometimes vegetarians or nudists. They lived esthetically, on the proceeds of their own proud but ill-paid labor, and believed literally that the declaration of comunismo libertario throughout the Peninsula would lead immediately to a peaceful, prosperous, egalitarian society. Then there was the mass of unskilled and semi-skilled workers… Before the days of the FAI, these people might easily have been cajoled into settling their strikes… But the class consciousness and the revolutionary mystique which had been inculcated by the FAI, made them determined to show their bosses that society depended upon them, the workers. They enjoyed demonstrating their power by tying up the city and looked upon their general strikes as a rehearsal for the eventual revolutionary achievement of comunismo libertario… Finally, there were a small but important group of professional gunmen, by no means all Spaniards.’ [53]

The ‘foreign’ gunmen, the ‘storm petrels’ so beloved by conspiracy buffs, were, in Jackson’s view, an important element in the FAI. The sources on which this view is based were ‘businessmen’ who had had ‘repeated dealings’ with the CNT and FAI in the 1920s and 1930s:

‘When the residents of Zaragoza observed 20 or 30 strangers with foreign accents selling ties on the streets, they knew that another general strike was coming.’[54]

Frank Jellinek took a slightly more sophisticated view of FAI members. He described them as ‘killers’ rather than ‘mere gunmen’ who were ‘entrusted with what may be called without intention of insult, the CNT’s dirty work’, It recruited ‘from among the most skilled and intelligent workers at one end and from the Murcians and Almerians who are engaged in the great cities at the other. Naturally, lumpenproletariat elements inevitably creep in, but are sooner or later liquidated. [55]

For Gerald Brenan, the advent of the FAI brought with it an increasingly noticeable trend in Spanish anarchism: ‘the inclusion within its ranks of professional criminals — thieves and gunmen who certainly would not have been accepted by any other working-class party — together with idealists of the purest and most selfless kind.’[56]