In Catalonia, this weekend we commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Social Revolution (the period of collectivisation and workers' organisation of society known in English as Revolutionary Catalonia).
On the 17th of July 1936, the fascists in the Spanish army started a coup against the democratically-elected Republic government in Melilla (one of the Spanish-controlled cities in the coast of Northern Africa). This coup spread to the Iberian peninsula the next day, July 18th. Catalonia was one of the places with a strongest resistance (together with the Valencian Country and Madrid city), which managed to stop the coup in their homelands thanks to the workers' antifascist organisations (anarchist, pro-Catalan, and communist unions, parties, social centres, and other grassroots organisations).
From the places where the coup had been successful, the fascists kept trying to expand their dictatorial rule through military invasion of everything they considered should be Spain, met with resistance. This is how the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was started.
With the emergencies of war, workers saw the need and opportunity to create an equal society based on the principles of anarchism. Factories and farms were collectivised, luxury hotels and restaurants were turned into shelters and community kitchens, and the mansions of the bourgeoisie and nobility who were fleeing to fascist-controlled areas were shared by working class families. The hope, cheerfulness, and conscience of collaborating with the creation of a better future for all is what explains why people look so happy in the photos taken in the earliest days of the war in Catalonia. Workers excitedly took up arms to go fight against fascism and assist the creation of the future.
The other European countries signed a pact of no intervention, saying that it was an "internal affair" and they would not assist the legitimate democratically-elected government against the army who wanted to impose a fascist dictatorship. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy violated the pact and strongly helped Franco, trying out new weaponry (specially aerial bombing of civilian villages, towns, and cities) for the first time, techniques which some years later they used against the civilians of those same democratic countries who had refused to help fight fascism, during the Second World War (1939-1945). The only country who gave some help was the USSR, but with nowhere near as much involvement as the fascists. Still, thousands of antifascist volunteers came to join the International Brigades.
The war was very unequal when it comes to the resources, weaponry, and international support of its sides. In the end, the anarchist dream of an equal society with respect and dignity for all came to an end with the fascists' victory in the war, giving way to a nightmare 40-year-long fascist dictatorship that killed, jailed, and tortured the opposition, where speaking leftist ideas set a danger to your life, where speaking our languages (Catalan, Basque, Galician, Aranese, Asturian) was forbidden, where the imposition of Catholicism and women's control was absolute. A regime of terror and psychological control that has left many of our older relatives still unable to speak of parts of their life without breaking down.
We have never recovered from everything that was lost. The lives, the hopes and dreams that were cut short, the children that were stolen by the dictatorship and the Catholic Church, the interiorized self-hatred of national minorities where many have been left to believe we have no place in the modern world and must completely assimilate and abandon our culture for the supposedly superior Spanish one, the workers' organisations' buildings and libraries and budgets that were given to the Church or burned down, the records of our history and language and literature that were purposely destroyed, the trauma always present in the ones who were arrested, tortured, publicly humiliated, even the children beaten by the teachers for being heard speaking their mother tongue. The institutions that are still inheritors of the fascist ones: police, judicial system, the main Spanish political parties, the companies whose owners are as rich and powerful as they are because of their implication with the dictatorship. The way that Spain is, still, a fascist state.
And yet, the memory of the Social Revolution has lived on, same as our language has. Sometimes whispered at home or at clandestine meetings, sometimes shouted in the squares and recklessly at the police at the torture cells. It has inspired people all around the world. Now, with a global rise of the far-right again which has also reached here and many young men turning to it, it is a time to remember what happened, what can be done, and what we cannot ever let happen again.
We still carry "a new world in our hearts".
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