Review of "The Anarchists of Casas Viejas" by Jerome Mintz

See Vernon Richards' "Lessons of the Spanish Revolution" for a critique of 
Hugh Thomas' "The Spanish Civil War", and Jerome Mintz' "The Anarchists of 
Casas Viejas" for a withering criticism of both Eric Hobsbawm's "Primitive 
Rebels" and Hugh Thomas' work.  Both Hobsbawm and Thomas, Marxist and 
conservative historians respectively, treat the Spanish anarchist movement
as rural and backward.

In fact, Jerome Mintz' work is a fascinating example of how a distorted view of
an event becomes accepted as historical fact; in this case, an abortive uprising
in 1933 by the members of the anarchosyndicalist trade union, the C.N.T., in
the Andalusian village of Casas Viejas.  This ended in tragedy with the shooting
of some participants and bystanders in the house of a C.N.T. member called 
Seis Dedos ('Six Fingers'), and subsequent summary executions of more bystanders
by the Assault Guards; the government of the day fell as a result of the 
recriminations.

Mintz spent three years in the village cautiously approaching survivors of the
incident (it was still in the time of Franco).  He discovered that the commonly
accepted view of the incident, that Seis Dedos himself lead the uprising, was
quite simply false; Seis Dedos did not participate at all, but was killed along
with the rest of his family after several of his family had taken refuge in
his house (they did participate).  As Seis Dedos was dead, the survivors who
were arrested sensibly pinned the blame on him, and so he entered history.  The
combination of a six fingered Anarchist dying with his family in the blazing 
ruins of his house under artillery and air attack from the Assault Guards 
(another myth) was too tempting for both Hobsbawm, Thomas and almost every 
other historian, and the uprising was written off as another hopeless isolated 
attempt by millenarian Andalusian peasants at effecting the revolution, an 
interpretation which suited both the Marxists and the conservatives.  Whereas, 
as Mintz points out, it was part of a national uprising somewhat rashly called 
by the C.N.T in Barcelona on the occasion of a national railway strike.  Other 
C.N.T. local groups nearby called it off shortly beforehand, but the anarchists 
of Casas Viejas did not learn of this.

