There’s a moment in Jerry Maguire when his ex-fiancée forms two fingers into a letter ‘L’, to tell Maguire just how little she thinks of him. How little, that is, since he became a loser. Because, it seems, that nothing is worse than a loser.
Preston Kelly telling Tom Cruise he’s a loser
in the film Jerry Maguire.
Well, the only trouble with disliking losers is that you end up having to admire winners. They include some pretty unappetising people. Vladimir Putin, say. Or Boris Johnson.
Personally, I prefer the underdog and losers are pretty much by definition underdogs.
Living in Spain has taught me a lot about living with losing. The Spanish lost a lot. Within living memory.
They set up a Republic in 1931. There was plenty wrong with it but, boy, was it better than the dictatorship that preceded it. And immeasurably better than the far harsher dictatorship that followed.
A group of army officers decided in 1936 to overthrow the Republic. They launched what they hoped would be a coup to bring them to power. What they got instead, to their astonishment, was a three-year civil war. With most of the officers on the side of the rebels, they hadn’t expected the Republican side to put up much of a fight.
The rebels, or nationalists as they liked to be called, were led by Francisco Franco, who held dictatorial power over Spain until his death in 1975. During their uprising, they quickly attracted the support of Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy and Hitler’s Nazis in Germany. That was a huge boost to Franco, since they provided not just soldiers (mostly from Italy) but also tanks, artillery and powerfully equipped and skilfully flown aircraft (mostly from Germany).
The Republic received help, but far less of it, from the Soviet Union. The democracies, notably Britain, France and the United States sat on the sidelines. Instead of helping, they bleated about non-intervention, even though Franco’s supporters were intervening the hell out of the war effort.
That was a first betrayal of Spanish democracy.
With most of the officers deserting to the other side, the Republic had a problem building a disciplined and effective army. The Republic had to depend on people like Anarchists and Trotskyists who were committed to overthrowing it, from the left, and only fought on its behalf to prevents its overthrow from the right. Not the most reliable of allies…
What’s more, how do you organise an army on Anarchist lines? You can imagine the indiscipline that reigned and the damage that caused.
One organisation, though, had just the discipline needed. That was the Communist Party of Spain, or PCE. It also drew strength from the fact that the only nation helping the Republic at all was run by its political masters, in the Soviet Union.
The most effective units of the army were led and organised by the PCE. Gradually, the sheer necessity of having to depend on them, gave the Communists increasing sway on what happened on the Republican side of the fighting.
And how it used that sway is the second betrayal of democracy in Spain. After all, PCE behaviour was driven by Stalin in Moscow, and he was as committed to democracy as his predecessor, Ivan the Terrible. Besides, just like the Anarchists and Trotskyists, the Communists knew they had a monopoly on the truth, so anyone opposing them was obviously a living lie and deserved to be crushed.
The Soviet Secret Service came in with the aid from Russia. To give you a sense of how they operated, they tortured to death Andreu Nin, leader of the Spanish Trotskyist POUM, even though it was in the front lines and fighting as hard as anyone for the Republic (one of its soldiers was the English volunteer, George Orwell).
The historian Anthony Beevor argues that the Republicans, with their inferior military resources, should have opted for guerrilla war. Moscow and the PCE were having none of that, and insisted on conventional set-piece battles. Having lost the last of these, the Battle of the Ebro, in 1938, they went on to lose the war in April 1939. Imagine. Had they been able to hang on another five months, i’'s likely that the outbreak of World War 2 would have deprived Franco of some or all of the support he was receiving from Italy and Germany. That would have made the fight more even. But insistence on the impossible task of defeating the Nationalists on the battlefield killed that possibility.
That was the third betrayal of Spanish democracy.
Hundreds of thousands of anti-Fascists, whether Republican soldiers or civilians, fled Spain for France. There they were interned in what were little more than concentration camps.
Betrayal number four.
The PCE leaders fled too, some to Mexico, others to Moscow. They decided to leave control of the PCE organisation in France, where many of its members were stuck, to a young woman hopelessly unprepared for the task, a former party typist called Carmen de Pedro. Perhaps they hoped she’d just keep things ticking over through the bad times, which got a lot worse when the Nazis rode their tanks into France. Once the leaders could return safely, they’d simply take back control.
Betrayal number five.
Enter onto the scene an extraordinary man, highly intelligent, massively ambitious and above all colossally seductive, turning women into lovers and men into devotees. He was Jesús Monzón. He quickly made Carmen de Pedro his lover, and had her willingly release the reins of the PCE into his hands.
He reorganised the PCE in France, turning it into a highly effective fighting force, thousands of whose members joined the French resistance. Then he headed back to Spain and reorganised the Communist Party there, making it a mass clandestine organisation which operated against the dictatorship clean through to the death of Franco and the return of democracy that followed. It did that despite the many members who were tortured, imprisoned or even executed.
Then in 1944, with German forces in France reeling and heading for defeat at the hands of the Allies and the French resistance with its Spanish fighters, Monzón took a gamble and launched an invasion of Spain. There may have been as many as 7000 resistance fighters involved, moving into the Val d’Aran, the only part of Spain north of the Pyrenees. Monzón had claimed the civilian population would rally to the invaders, and a general strike would spread throughout Spain.
Neither thing happened.
The fighters’ objective was the regional capital of Vielha. Had they captured it, a provisional government might have been formed there, and possibly, just possibly – though it’s a long shot – the Allies, who were winning a war against German and Italian Fascism, might have supported it against Spanish Fascism too. But faced with 50,000 soldiers advancing to destroy them, the Republican soldiers decided they hadn’t the strength to capture Vielha. Within eight days, the invasion was over and the Allies could breathe again, freed of the need to move against Franco, whom they could instead make into a friend for the coming Cold War against the Soviet Union.
The sixth betrayal of Spain.
Finally, the exiled leaders of the PCE returned to France, taking back control of the movement. Had the invasion of Aran been a success, they would doubtless have claimed if for themselves. But it had failed. One of Monzón’s allies was murdered in Spain on the orders of the party leadership. Monzón himself was summoned to answer before the party in Toulouse. He was however arrested by Franco’s police before he could get out of Spain, and that probably saved his life: it seems that the PCE leadership planned to murder him too, as soon as he reached France.
Monzón was the black sheep of a strongly right-wing and wealthy family. It was able to prevent his execution. Even so, he spent fourteen years in Franco’s prisons. While there, funnily enough, he remarried by proxy his first wife. They’d divorced years previously and she, indeed, had since married and divorced a second husband. After his release, he joined her in Mexico. They spent some time there and in Venezuela, and then moved back to Spain where, of all things, he became a Professor of Business Studies.
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| Monzón in his prison days |
Some of the testimony against him was provided by his ex-lover and ex-leader of the party in France, Carmen de Pedro. The leadership, who’d decision to have her run the organisation was a major act of irresponsible misjudgement, subjected her to a barrage of psychological torture – and I’m sure, had they got her to Moscow it wouldn't have been psychological only – until she broke down, confessed to whatever they wanted from her, and implicated Monzón in whatever charge they wanted to bring against him.
The seventh and final betrayal in this cheerful little story.
Well, I don’t know if I would have had the guts to stand by Monzón, working in the clandestine organisation inside, but against, a Fascist dictatorship. Or whether I’d have it in me to stand up on his behalf when his own party turned against him. I was never put to that test and it’s perfectly possible I’d have failed it.
All I can say is that from my distant, and safe, vantage point I find him a strangely attractive figure. Overall, at any rate, despite the many reprehensible moments in his past. But what human has none? So not just my sympathy but my admiration goes to one of history’s great losers.
It wasn’t just him, of course. There were millions of losers in Spain, including people who’d backed Franco and found later he delivered none of what he’d promised them. A bit like the victims of Britain’s Brexiters.
I realise we’re all supposed to admire winners. But I find them often pretty toxic. I prefer to line up with their victims, the losers.
They can be a great deal more attractive.
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