The International Brigades from the Spanish Civil Warr and the International Legion in Ukraine both have the same number of people (about 30,000) and yet the International Brigades remain far more famous than the Legion, why is this?
>>65156084Because they didn't have to be there.
>>65156084Are the spanish international brigades famous? The only piece of news I remember related to them was that George Orwell involved in them and hated it
Spain is exceptionally gay
>>65156125That's true of both
>>65156154He involved himself with the republican ones before they became ultra retarded I believe. He also became a huge anti-stalinism guy afterwards because of how dangerous he saw the communists becoming. He also despised the monarchy/racist guys as well
>>65156277Sounds like he became quite the misanthropist.
>>65156154Eric Blair learned nothing from his time fighting with the communists. The moment he returned to the UK he tried organizing more socialist groups.First "not REAL communism" retard.>>65156277Francoists were unequivocally the good guys.
>>65156277Facist* I meant. But Orwell at the time was basically one of those naive "Kill all facists" pro-socialist/anarchist people. However, the political incompetence and political backstabbing of the left-leaning militias basically turned him into a anti-authoritarian generalist after he saw what the communists were getting up to. >>65156290100% agree. However Orwell was naive and young and his experience in Spain completely changed how he looked at things because he was forced to deal with the realities of geopolitical maneuvering from nation states that had actual power and a means to throw their weight around. >>65156288His book about the war is genuinely a really good read and explains the how, why, and what of why he went to Spain as well as the why he became so disgusted by the left-leaning militias and communists that were fighting in the war
>>65156084They really aren't. I would say for most people, the piece of trivia that orwell, hemingway and picasso all fought in the spanish civil war is the only reason they know the spanish civil war ever happened.
>>65156290>Francoists were unequivocally the good guys.how's that?
>>65156487Putting and end to the raping and murdering of nuns is hard to portray as the bad guy unless you are a judeo bolshevik.
Because nobody wants to think of this retarded ass war. Nobody thinks about it unless someone on the internet brings it up.Media was also way different back then
>>65156640>Because nobody wants to think of this retarded ass war.It's literally the most discussed topic on /k/ and on European subreddits
>>65156288Hating actual communists doesn't make one a misanthrope
>>65156643Yeah, that's the internet world. Also, euro reddit? Either way, irl, no one is talking about Ukraine.
>>65156277It's been a while since I read Homage to Catalonia, but IIRC wasn't the P.O.U.M group he was with basically already the lowest of the low, knew they wouldn't be captured, top of every fascist's shit list rape bastards?
>>65156084The Republican cause was a huge thing for liberal and leftist writers and intelligentsia in 1930s. Ernest Hemingway traveled there and wrote a famous novel about it. I think they had a big influence on making it famous, compounded by the fact that people read more back then. The pen isn't mightier than the sword (which they discovered during the war) but it does have an effect on historical memory.>>65156300Homage to Catalonia is not a long read either. You can breeze through it during a few shitting sessions. I think it tends to work pretty well because Orwell was a normie leftist who was thrown into a sectarian conflict (a real one which involved leftists murdering each other) and he doesn't presuppose knowledge on the part of the reader about sectarian leftist squabbles in the 1930s. The Nationalist forces don't figure that much in the book, they make a few appearances in the fighting and them knowing an attack was coming because they'd hear church bells off in the distance (because the Nationalists went to mass to pray before attacking).
>>65156084They don't have their Hemingway or Orwell to romanticise their struggle and the commies are squarely on Russia's side on this one and they are always the best at propagandising
>>65156626Oh boo-fucking-hoo church is evil anyway and Stalin had the right view of how to deal with it
>>65156768That was a LOT of left leaning groups to be fair. I just know that Orwell bailed when Spain banned the group that he was rolling around with because he believed that he'd be hanged if caught by the authorities
>>65156797I remember Orwell was shot in the neck. He had the whole "British officers don't duck under fire" mentality that Lindybeige made a video about
>>65156768Are you talking leftists raping nuns? It wasn't really one group, it was early on like Syria where a bunch of militias were sprouting up, also uncontrolled mob violence. Also there was a large presence of anarchists which, at the time, were more similar to Pancho Villa's army than what you would typically run into regarding anarchists in a North American or Western European city in the 21st century, because we're talking about Spain in the 1930s which still had a large number of illiterate peasants working the land with wooden plows. More like this:https://youtu.be/cKZAQzwNmU0The group Orwell joined was a relatively small Marxist group that was at odds with the Stalinists for being authoritarian and bureaucratic. The Communist Party in Spain (which was Stalinist) literally murdered the people in this group. He linked up with them through ties via the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in the U.K. which Orwell associated with. They were an offshoot of the Labour Party. A group in the U.K. today that most resembles this might be the Alliance for Workers Liberty, which is also small. They're very pro-Ukraine BTW which is unusual for a "red" group.
>>65156804> a red group that actyally opposes imperialismWell I'll be
>>65156805It's pretty exotic, I know. But I think where Orwell was coming from is that he encountered communists (including in Britain) as people like George Galloway. Some people here might know who this is (he actually lives in Russia now because he's apparently afraid he might go to jail for some shit). And he has been this figure on the tankie left for ages, but he's just a scumbag and a crook. He even created a party called the Workers Party that has an Orwellian (ha ha) logo and is mostly supported by Islamists btw. Is this really "socialist?" I don't really give a shit, but in any event, he saw a lot of communists in the U.K. as frustrated middling intellectuals and broadcasters (or teachers) who felt cramped by the English class system, but they really (secretly) became attracted to socialism the MORE totalitarian and criminal it became, because they saw it as a way to set themselves up as new ruling class based on pure and unrestrained power worship as opposed to the hypocritical and buffoonish Tory ruling class, which was actually not as bad as these people. Also they were huge jingoists for Russia at the time, like even more malignant than they would be for their own country. You can see where he got the inspiration for his dystopian sci-fi novels:https://youtu.be/2QrhhaWp-0o
>>65156820Not enough people read Road to Wigan Pier and know the wheeling and dealing it took to get published, or the criticism and opposition it generated, because half the page count is Orwell laying out why the working class ignores and rejects socialism for being the ideology of detached, classist twits.
The International Brigades were full of communist celebrities from arts and culture or communist sympathizers who created the popular narrative about the war which was further reinforced by the communist victory in WW2. That's how that whole legend was created which persists to this day.
Tankies love astroturfing the International brigade as if half of that brigade wouldn't hate them.
