this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Imma tread delicately here but using the CNT/FAI as an example of a classless, moneyless, stateless, anti-authoritarian society doesn't fit with a historically-grounded view of Revolutionary Catalonia and the larger Spanish Republic. At all.
You might take issue with this and say that it's unfair to expect a revolutionary movement under the conditions of open civil war against the forces of fascism to achieve their vision of statelessness and an anti-authoritarian society and I'd agree but... that's why I see seizing the state as an absolute necessity and not as optional.
I don't believe that any revolution is above criticism and I also hold the position that there are going to be excesses. I don't want to see them, I don't like to see them, but they are going to happen and if we don't have a ruthless criticism of all that exists then we will inevitably end up liable to repeat these excesses the next time around but we are also inclined to atrocity denialism etc. etc.
I'm going to avoid discussing the broader implications for the Spanish Republic and my ideological position on this stuff because I don't want to instigate any slapfights.
In the Spanish Republic, it's an undeniable fact that the Catholic church was targeted and subjected to a campaign of persecution. At certain points clergy were burnt alive inside their churches. Clergy were also simply executed. Skirting around the editorial commentary, this constitutes genocide in the formal definition.
A sorely overlooked facet of the history of the Republic is when a Moroccan delegation from the Spanish colonial holdings in Morocco sued the Republican government for independence, on favourable terms for the Republic. This was rejected. Even if the terms for independence were accepted with the exact terms given the Moroccan delegation, there would still have existed a very clear colonial hierarchy.
I will largely skip over military and government structures because that's all pretty obvious and most of it can be inferred.
The Republic operated forced labour camps.
The government took measures to nationalise infrastructure and struggled to do so especially with their electricity grid. To be clear, I think that a modern state especially under conditions of war must have national control over critical infrastructure like electricity. But doing so is an inherently authoritarian measure.
Likewise there were efforts at forced collectivisation of farms.
The CNT/FAI operated "Control Patrols"'; a sort of de facto police force which had a repressive character and was infamous for arbitrary arrests and summary executions by firing squad, as well as for refusing to be accountable to the government structures of the Republic.
In CNT controlled Puigcerdá, there was significant corruption and its mayor enforced collectivisation but continued to farm his own livestock privately. Puigcerdá was a hotbed of espionage and falsified passports due to its location and issues within its government.
The CNT-UGT collectivised telephone infrastructure and controlled the Catalonian telephone exchange. When military command sought to coordinate with the government via telephone, one particular call was interrupted by an exchange worker saying that there is no government but only a Defence Committee. When the President of the Government of Catalonia was speaking to the President of the Spanish Republic via phonecall, the call was interrupted midway by a phone operator who said that the phone lines should be used for more important purposes than talk between presidents. It was a widely-held view that this telephone exchange closely surveilled calls made through it and it's pretty obvious why that is.
On the ground level, the government took a very dim view of what they considered to be vice and took steps to discourage and curb it.
In factories, the Spanish Republic struggled desperately to balance the needs of war production against the demands of workers and their ideological positions. Ultimately this led to establishing far better terms for labour which often saw a precipitous drop in productivity and in response a course-correction of stripping workers' rights and a program of enforcing labour discipline as an attempt to meet production requirements. The most obvious example of enforcement of labour discipline was the establishment of the role of Distributor of Tasks. This was a government official who answered only to the highest levels of government and who had vast discretionary powers over workers. Workers who were not sufficiently productive, who were deemed absent without just cause, who were late to work too often, and who showed a defeatist attitude or a lack of revolutionary zeal could be sanctioned by the Distributor of Tasks and even imprisoned.
All workers were required to maintain a sort of journal of their employment history where their employers would record critical information about the worker's work and their general character. This record was necessary for finding work. It can be inferred that being fired by a Distributor of Tasks or being sanctioned would make finding future employment extremely difficult.
In CNT/FAI administered regions, workers were paid in labour vouchers redeemable in their local village. To travel outside of your village required exchanging your labour vouchers for currency, which could only occur with the express permission of the council. You were required to provide an explanation for what you were going to spend your money on. This effectively meant that free movement of people was strictly controlled and monitored.
Ultimately it was the anti-communist coup would spell the end of the Spanish Republic.
To sum up with the purpose of this comment, there's a major problem in taking a team-sports mentality and projecting it onto history because you end up in what amounts to campism.
It irks me that the kind of person who posts this kind of image is the same kind of person who will level unprincipled criticisms of communists as being campists and of having a political orientation that amounts to being on the side that is anti-USA, that communists support the same repressive structures as long as it comes with different aesthetics, that they worship the state uncritically, and that they are apologists for atrocities, and that their only defence when faced with the excesses of the movements they uphold in history is whataboutism. (I believe that these people do exist btw, it's just not as common as it's made out to be.) The reason why this irks me is that all of these criticisms apply equally to unprincipled anarchists who engage in this sort of sectarian bickering.
I could create similar lists of criticisms of the actions of governments like the USSR, Cuba, and the communist faction of the Spanish Republic, for example, and I would be able to make these criticisms principled through a political analysis which I've largely avoided above because I wanted to illustrate a point about how some people engage with history through a primarily ideological lens and what implications that has for the consistency of how they apply their politics.
I wonder if the people who post these kinds of memes would be able to provide any principled criticism of the CNT/FAI, the YPG, or the EZLN?
Doesn't genocide refer to the targeted prosecution of an ethnic group? Clergy are not one, so why does their prosecution constitute a (formal) genocide?
You're not wrong and I should have been more precise in what I said there.
Under the UN and the ICC genocide doesn't cleave to the strict etymological meaning of killing a race of people but it includes certain acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
It's one of those terms that have expanded beyond their strict definition, so like forcibly taking children from an ethnic group and placing them in residential schools isn't the act of killing of anyone and as such it doesn't meet that definition but it's still recognised as genocidal in legal definitions, as it should be.
I knew about the expanded scope (e.g removing children from their families) but not that it included religious groups.
It must include religious groups or it isn't congruent and you could argue your way out of the charge of genocide against ethnoreligious groups like Yazidis or Jews and it would muddy the waters when discussing the ethnic cleansing of minority groups differentiated primarily from the majority by their religion.
The problem with the argument here is not that genocide does not include actions intent to kill a religious group, but that this was not happening
Article 6 is about genocide. Article 7 is about crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing:
The reason why religious groups is included in the definition of genocide is not because otherwise "it would muddy the waters when discussing the ethnic cleansing of minority groups differentiated primarily from the majority by their religion".
The only one who is muddying the waters here is the person who thinks they know international law well enough that they can provide commentary on it without being familiar with the international law they're talking about.
Why do you think they needed to add extra information in about religious groups to the definition of genocide when ethnic cleansing:
a) Does not in itself meet the definition of genocide
b) Has its own separate article to define what ethnic cleansing is?
Looking forward to the insults in your next smuglord reply.
I got confused at this reply. You say that ethnic cleansing does not meet the definition of genocide, but in your previous comment you said that
Isn't your example of taking children away an act with the intent of destroying a group, and therefore genocide? But then you mention that it's ethnic cleansing, which is a superset (instead of a subset) of genocide.
Can you clarify? When is an ethnic cleansing not a genocide? I thought it was synonymous. Also, why are religious groups included in the definition of genocide if not for the reason the commenter you're replying to mentioned?
You're all good, I was skipping over the specific actions they list as being genocide but it is a bit unwieldy so I trimmed it down to "certain acts" make my reply a bit more concise.
The full text is
So by forcing a group to transfer their children to another group (e.g. stealing the kids of one religion and relocating them to a different religious group or taking the children of indigenous peoples in Canada and putting them in residential schools) you are cutting the children's ties to their group of origin, which is basically to crush their cultural heritage and/or to "breed them out".
If people aren't allowed to propagate their cultural heritage and pass it down to their children, with things like language and food and dress, then it's a way of doing genocide by less direct methods than straight-up killing them because the intent is to take a race of people and, perhaps in a generation or two, to have people with black skin who are culturally entirely the same as the white population, for example.
Same for taking their kids and putting them where they aren't going to procreate with someone from within their own group - you aren't killing anyone but you're essentially diluting their ethnic group out of existence.
It's worth mentioning that this usually happens in tandem and not in isolation.
The UN definition of ethnic cleansing doesn't actually exist under that name but it's known as the crime against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer of population. (This also explicitly refers to forcible displacement.)
This is where it gets confusing and the media and mainstream discourse makes it even more confusing.
So you know how "purges" mean expulsion from the party in a formal sense, almost always in reference to communist parties, but people talk about purges in the sense that it's a euphemism for being executed by the state?
Ethnic cleansing is one of those terms. Some people who were purged were also executed but not all of them.
Ethnic cleansing often happens under conditions of war or civil war, but not exclusively. What this means is that, like with some purges, you can get a lot of killing or death and these deaths are used to ethnically cleanse an area by making the rest of the group flee, or an area gets ethnically cleansed and then direct evidence of genocide is established later on. You also get an ethnic cleansing that itself causes mass deaths thus also making it genocidal, like the Trail of Tears. So in effect people hear ethnic cleansing alongside genocide so often that it blurs and becomes a sort of euphemism for genocide. Which tbh is pretty understandable.
So that would be where a government rounds up the people in an area and forces them to leave their homes or territory but without killing them, to give a simple and straightforward answer. (But it could mean something like cutting off a water supply to a region so that the people are forced to move.)
It gets more hypothetical because the definition of genocide per international law doesn't set a number of deaths that you need to achieve before you are committing genocide but rather it looks at intent and action, and most historical examples of forcible transfer of population come with deaths as some people choose to resist which leads to killings. So if the government says "Clear the lot of them out, kill them if you have to" to the military or the police or a group like paramilitaries or gangs and they resort to killing some of the people who are being forcibly relocated then that's going to qualify as genocide.
If the government says "Clear the lot of them out but don't kill them" and one or more of that group resist and die in the process due to use of force then it's forcible relocation but not genocide. (Unless there's an order given by the leader of the forces and it can be established through witness testimony or some other evidence, then that leader is guilty of genocide but the government that issued the order to forcibly relocate them is not.)
A lot of this comes down to how the law functions.
If you have a law for murder but you don't have one for manslaughter then a lot of murderers will get off free because there's insufficient evidence to establish that the killing was premeditated, even if it was actually premeditated.
If genocide includes ethnic groups but it excludes religious groups then you're creating a legal loophole where a government can say "Kill all the... Muslims" and then when they get brought up on charges in the ICC they can show all the evidence that they never meant to kill all the Arabs (wink, wink) - it was just all the Muslims!
If the definition of genocide requires that a government issues the orders to the military then governments will just use paramilitaries instead and they'll use the loophole. Or the government will issue orders to the military by saying "I don't want a single person from that group left in that region" and the government won't be liable for actual genocide, even though the military is going to do what the military does and shoot people, so without having forcible relocation as a sort of back-up "manslaughter" charge then the government will get away with it.
This also explains why there aren't specific numbers attached to genocide or forcible relocation - because if it was set at 500 then governments would issue an order but limit it to 450 people and then the government would smile coyly and shrug their shoulders at the judge.
Often things like genocide can be extremely difficult to establish evidence for, or at least they used to be before modern technology. There might have only been footage of an armed group killing one single person before the person with a videocamera fled or was knocked to the ground but that footage along with the testimony of survivors might be deemed sufficient as evidence of genocide because the court can directly link one death of the targeted group to whoever carried out the genocide.
I hope that makes more sense now.
It gets really, really specific and intensely debated. This is also why I haven't dug deeper into the details because you could bathe a group of Muslims in pig blood for example and, if you go into the elements of genocide by by causing serious bodily or mental harm, as the UN defines it, then you're probably getting really damn close to the mark without actually killing a single person especially if it's done repeatedly or it's part of an established and proven pattern of inflicting mental harm on that same group of Muslims or other Muslims.
Like it or hate it, this is why there's so much work that goes into writing laws and interpreting laws and enforcing them. This is why legal studies and religious studies exist - you start with a simple law or commandment like "Do not kill" and then it becomes:
"...humans"
"...except in self-defence"
"...unless you used unreasonable force"
"...or if you had reasonable suspicion to believe that your life was under imminent threat, even if it is proven to be false later like if they convinced you that they were going to stab you but they were concealing a stick to make it look like a weapon"
"...or in war"
"...or if you are killing someone who is in extreme suffering that cannot be reasonably expected to be relieved"
"...except if they don't want to die"
"...except when they are unable to express their desire to die but their extreme suffering can be proven"
"...unless the person intended to cause harm to others by killing that person who is in extreme suffering"
"...or if there is a prohibition on killing that person (see: other law/religious edict)"
And it just goes on. And on. And on.
Thanks for the detailed reply, I get what you were trying to say.
You aren't worth more of my time. Delete your fucking account.
What a courageous response!
You can't back up your position, you can't argue a point, you clearly haven't done the reading, and when you get called out for your bullshit in a way that's completely incontrovertible you can't even admit that you're wrong.
All you can do is attack people that you disagree with. You're boring.
It fucking doesn't. It especially fucking doesn't when the clergy were active participants in the civil war on the side of the fascists.
Yep. Some of the clergy absolutely were active participants in the civil war on the side of the fascists.
Your comment illustrates exactly why religious groups are included in the legal definition of genocide and it dovetails directly into legal stuff on collective punishment.
Look, I'm not going to armchair quarterback history and I'm not about to defend the legacy of the Catholic church or historians like Preston or Beevor but what I have illustrated in broad brushstrokes above is there is a idealised notion of an immaculate revolution that some people blindly cling to while they hypocritically denounce the excesses of other revolutions which they deem to be from the wrong team.
I explicitly avoided discussing matters like the checas and the assassination of the journalist Josep Maria Planes i Martà by the FAI forces (because they didn't appreciate his investigative journalism into the links between anarchists and organised crime in his work Els Gà ngsters de Barcelona) because of the likelihood of inciting partisan bickering by talking about it and because this stuff requires people to actually dig into the historical scholarship surrounding these events and you can't arrive at a position on the matter especially from English-language historical sources by just reading one author - it requires a historiographical approach to the literature because most of the major historians are libs.
In the same way that I don't engage in discussions with people who invoke the Kronstadt Rebellion or the Great Purge or the execution of the Romanovs with people who don't understand anything beyond the name of the event and the spoonfed, boogeyman narratives about them, I don't engage with discussions about the details of the Spanish Civil War because people approach these moments in history as static, isolated moments with a partisan lens and they make their minds up about what happened before they even understand what happened and the context surrounding it.
The point of my comment isn't about arguing that the good side was actually bad and the bad guys were really the good guys. That's the one of the exact mentalities that I reject, and I'm trying to illustrate the lack of engagement with history when people fall into this way of thinking.
The original meme was clearly made by the type of person who is ideology-first when engaging in history: communist bad, anarchist good therefore whatever communists did was bad and whatever anarchists did was good.
A deeper level of this same mentality is to engage with history but to then retreat to an ideological position: Catholic church bad therefore whatever was inflicted upon the Catholic church is good.
That's still a problematic way of approaching history. It's still idealism, inherently.
If you're going to be a historical materialist then you need to engage with history on the terms of history and then to develop a political ideology from that point. Marx didn't start Capital from the position of "Capitalism bad therefore everything capitalism does is bad", far from it, and he also didn't start with the position of "Capitalism bad therefore whatever opposes it or seeks to replace it is good". He started by examining capitalism as it functions and developed political analysis from that place.
If you aren't able to hold that two things can be true at once then you aren't going to get very far.
Was the assassination of Planes by the FAI bad? Yes.
Was the assassination a violation of anarchist political principles? Yes.
Was the assassination a political necessity? Maybe. I know that I don't know enough to come to a conclusion on that.
Were the deep connections between the FAI and organised crime bad? Yes.
Were these connections a political necessity? Yes.
Were the conditions that produced these political connections bad? Yes.
Was the overthrow of the system and the conditions which produced these political connections by the FAI good? Yes.
Good guys do bad things, bad guys do good things. This is even more true when you expand that to groups such as organisations.
Did the clergy in Spain actively participate on the side of the fascists? Yes.
Did all of the clergy in Spain actively participate on the side of the Fascists? No.
Was the suppression of the Catholic church a political necessity? Yes.
Was it a political necessity to burn clergy alive in their churches? No.
Did every member of the clergy who was killed by the Republic deserve to die?
I don't know enough to make that call but you'd have an easier time convincing me that there were people who were killed that were essentially innocent than you would convincing me that no innocent clergy were killed, especially if we draw upon historical scholarship surrounding this.
Soup for brains, your claim was not merely that there are complexities to the issue of violent reprisals towards a cultural institution, but that it was genocide. The answer to that is that it fucking isn't.
I don't really care if you disagree with the modern definition of genocide as established in international law and plenty of examples of national law. That's your prerogative. As is whether you agree or disagree with the persecution itself. The contents of your head aren't my concern.
It does meet the definition of genocide though.
Does the UN & ICC definition of genocide state that "Genocide means any... acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such killing members of the group"?
Were the members of the clergy killed by people in the Spanish Republic targeting a religious group with the intent of destroying it?
Were FAI defence committees operating ghost cars that targeted clergy for assassination using blacklists?
No it doesn't, you're just wrong. People were not targeted for being catholic, but for being part of an institution that was feeding kill lists to fascists and had participated in the systematic repression of people for centuries. No one but you considers this a genocide. I am not arguing with the UN, international law, or scholars, I'm arguing with one person who has soup for brains.
People weren't being targeted for being catholic, they were being targeted for being catholic religious leaders. Okay?
I guess it must have felt really important for you to make that distinction.
I said that it meets the definition of genocide. I have provided the definition of genocide that I'm referring to.
You can't tell the difference between a statement of fact and a statement of opinion. I literally said "skirting around the editorial commentary, this meets the formal definition of genocide" to say that I'm not engaging in statements of opinion on this.
The point was obviously lost on you there.
If I said "The execution of the Romanov family by the Bolsheviks meets the formal definition of regicide" do you think I'm saying "I personally condemn the act of executing the Tsar" or do you think I'm saying "This act met the criteria for regicide"?
You're shadow-boxing and you've convinced yourself that you're actually engaging in argumentation.
it is in fact very important to make the distinction between the crime of genocide and revolutionary violence targeting an institution that is itself engaged in genocide, yes. That's important. I don't know why this is confusing to you. The majority of the people involved in revolutionary violence against the fascists were themselves of the same population group as the targeted priests, sharing the same ethnic and religious background.
Again, this does not meet the definition of genocide. It is not genocide. No one but you thinks this is genocide. The fascists have not made that case, the catholic church have not made that case, historians don't make this case, the UN doesn't make this case, the ICC doesn't make this case, no one but you. You are sitting on an argument so fucking stupid that you are possibly the only person who has ever made it, and declaring how actually if you call this argument dumb you're arguing with consensus reality.
You're an idiot and trying to flip the script on who the idiot here won't save you from being a fucking moron.
Where have I said that "targeting an institution is genocide"?
The Catholic church was suppressed through legal and extralegal means. In many cases churches and religious orders were liquidated. Nowhere did I mention these things as being part of genocide.
Hutu militias targeted Hutu moderates during the Rwandan genocide.
Sharing an "ethnic and religious background" isn't some escape clause for genocide. Most of the people on this site have a "Christian background", however the fuck you're actually going to define that tortured phrasing, but that doesn't mean that they are Christians.
Regicide is different to genocide but go off.
Like I said, it meets the definition of genocide. Why are you still confused between statements of fact and statements of opinion?
I can tell you what beliefs are heretical to the Catholic church. I can literally tell you whether something you believe would meet the definition of heresy to a Catholic. That does not mean that therefore I think that your beliefs are heretical or that you are a heretic.
[CW: SA]
Up until recently in law it was legal in most countries to have unconsensual sex with your wife.
If someone asked me "Do you think that in America, a husband forcing his wife to have sex in 1953 met the definition of rape?" I would say no.
If you asked me if I believe it was rape, I would say yes.
Yelling out loud meets the definition of ejaculation. I don't think that people exclaiming things is ejaculation.
Are you so incapable of grasping the distinction between statements of fact and statements of opinion or are you just unable to hold two separate positions on a topic as being true in your mind?
Yep. I sure did say this and I sure did claim that the consensus reality is that it was genocide. Good point, shadow-boxer!
Clergy is not a class.
You can call yourself a Marxist or you can call clergy a class but you can't do both.
It isn't even that guys. During the entirety of the red terror somewhere between 6000 and 7000 clergy were killed according to sources sympathetic to the fucking nationalists, and that's counting women religious, monks and priests. The priests were part of the white terror that killed over a quarter of a million people in violent political purges.
It wasn't classicide.
Absolute baby brained nonsense. Not reading any more after that absolute embarrassment of a statement. Nope. Fuck off.
Guys nooo, you can't target the fascists for violent reprisal, you have to let them murder you nooooo
So you're going to tell me that every member of the Catholic church in the Spanish Civil War was a fascist who was killing the people fighting on the side of the Spanish Republic?
I can give you examples of when Catholic clergy attacked people on the Republican side. Can you?
If you're going to accuse me of having a baby-brained take then give me your biggest brain take on why the Catalan Generalitat put in extensive effort to protect Catholic clergy.
Was the Generalitat defending fascism?
Have you got a better source on this than Lawrence Fernsworth which I haven't come across, one that disproves that the Generalitat protected the clergy?
How do you feel about the protection extended to the Franscan monks by basically all of the Republic? Why would everyone go defend fascists like that?
But try not to use too many sources because I've only got a little, tiny baby-brain so let's agree to keep it to just 3-4 or otherwise I won't be able to keep up with you and your big brain and all that history reading you must have been able to do with it.
Or you can take your own advice and just fuck right off.
I'm going to tell you that it isn't genocide to target an institution that is openly siding with a fascist regime trying to murder you, actually. The fact that people have a strong attachment towards a major cultural institution doesn't change that one iota. You are the one sitting on a massive burden of proof here that you absolutely do not engage with, instead doing the most obvious motte and bailey bullshit ever seen on the internet.
Yeah, tell me more about motte and bailey bullshit.
I have explained that it meets the definition of genocide.
Now you're saying that you don't think it's genocide but you've retreated from the point about it meeting the formal definition of genocide to a point that it doesn't meet your personal definition of genocide.
There's a term for that.
You've retreated from the point that killing clergy isn't genocide to the point that targeting an institution isn't genocide.
There's a term for that too.
Okay. Who is arguing that? How does this point change the fact that these actions meet the definition of genocide?
Is this your way of asking for a source?
You're doing your best imitation of a Redditor wringing your hands and using debatebro terms and being as edgy as possible, you ignore anything that I have said which is inconvenient to your argument, and you throw a whole bunch of stuff at me that you expect me to answer while you dodge any questions that I ask you.
If you can't find it in you to have an actual discussion then, as I said before, take your own advice and fuck right off.
There is no discussion to be had, you're wrong. You're not the target of dishonest argumentation, you're just arguing something stupid, badly. I have not retreated from anything, I have called you an idiot and wrong, and I stand by that because you are.