ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Unity on the Frontline w/ Norah Lopez Holden

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

What can we learn from the women of the Popular Front? Ahead of an #ACFM Trip on Unity and Difference, Nadia Idle talks to actor and activist Norah Lopez Holden about the milicianas who fought in the Spanish Civil War. What brought these women together – and what pushed them apart? Lopez Holden has worked […]

Hello, and welcome to this microdose from ACFM. I'm Nadia Idol, and I'm coming at you with a fresh intro for this chat with Nora Lopez Holden on the Spanish Civil War, which was recorded all the way back in October 2020, because ACFM listeners, a lot has changed since then. Pablo Iglesias, co-founder of the left-wing party Podemos, resigned after they lost many seats, and we've had many more lockdowns here in the UK. The alpha variant is no longer the COVID rage. Nora and Sam are no longer together, and I, thankfully, am no longer suffering from labyrinthitis. And seemingly talking more than my guests on ACFM. Hmm. Yes.

I blame the drugs I was on, listeners. I will just blame the drugs. So, by way of introduction, Nora is an actor and activist. She has worked in various different theatres around the UK and is a voice artist for radio and video games. She is also an organiser and member of the Good Night Out Reading Group, a group of socialist theatre workers who meet monthly with curated discussions on structural inequalities in the theatre industry, including the building utopia for theatre workers' sessions.

She also does work with the Crossroads Women Centre in Kingscross London, particularly for the Support Not Separation Group concerned with better implementations of care for precarious mothers in social services sector and advocacy and organising for women against rape. In this episode, Nora and I discuss how those involved in the Spanish Civil War were united and where difference got in the way of common action, be it between left factions or between the women and men active in the struggle. I hope your 2022 is filled with joy, everybody. Enjoy the show. Nora Lopez Holden!

Hi! Welcome to ACFM. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about the Spanish Civil War. Very excited to have you here. So before we get on to talking about why you're passionate about this subject, maybe I should just let listeners know why I was excited to talk about this. That's a really funny story because Sam got in touch with me.

Sam is your partner. He got in touch with me and said that your birthday was coming up. Would I be happy to record a kind of spoof ACFM for your birthday? And I thought this was the funniest and most amazing thing ever. And so we recorded this spoof ACFM, which was hilarious, one of the best projects I've done. So well produced, I have to say, it was unbelievable. The production was the production values was great, yeah, it was so good. I couldn't believe that how it came out in the end.

But on that, one of the things that Sam mentioned was that you're really interested in the Spanish Civil War. And I thought, great, this could be something that we can do a ACFM microdose on. So I got in touch with you. And here we are. Just to say, I think, the reason for me, specifically on why I was interested in the subject of Spanish Civil War is as follows. One, I don't know much about it, but I think I have quite a romanticised kind of idea about Spanish Civil War. And then I read this book, and we'll talk about the book in a bit. But what's interesting for me is that I have this image, you know, which kind of speaks to.

to my socialist or communist or a left-wing identity of the Spanish Civil War being a thing that happened in history where there was all of this international solidarity. And what's interesting for me is that I don't have a kind of universalized feeling about international solidarity. Definitely my anti-colonial kind of Arabness comes up against international solidarity sometimes. And the example which I struggle with the most is Rajava, actually,

because I'm quite anti-Westerners going to fight in Rajava because I guess it sets me into a kind of Arab identity where I suddenly feel like, what are Westerners doing going to an ex-colony? That doesn't feel right, but then I think to myself, what do they think this is, the Spanish Civil War? And so, like, in my head, my reference, yeah. reference point is Spanish Civil War, yes I'm cool with that because they don't have a colonial relationship whereas you know England and Syria does and it is a real struggle for

me think about that so so maybe just on that kind of slightly away from the main topic but I'm just interested do you have specific feelings about like the international solidarity like do you feel more Spanish when you think about this Spanish Civil War or is that not a reference point for how things sit with you It's a really weird thing. So I was born in Madrid and lived there until I was eight and then moved to England. So my experience of like growing up as an adult in England, feeling like I miss home as a Spaniard, like identifying as a Spaniard. But then in Spain, identifying as a Spaniard feels very right wing and Francoist and nationalist and stuff. So like I had this weird balance of not knowing where to put that pride, like pride.

sort of like yearning for my country whatever that means until I sort of like new bits and bobs what my mum had told me about the the Spanish Republic but I didn't know that much because my Spanish family didn't talk about it didn't seem to know that much themselves about it being confused about that growing up and being like what is such recent history why does no one really talk about it at all and obviously now after sort of finding out about these structural reasons why that is But, yeah, I guess that was it. It was just a balance of, like, being young, missing Spain,

but also knowing instinctually that it just felt a bit dodge to, like, have things with Spanish flags on and stuff, because so recently that iconography, like, stands for, you know, quite repressive regime. And then from that, like, admittedly, from that, then having a very, like, layman's understanding of Catalan separatism, in being like, God, I love my country

and I love Spanish culture and I love Flamenco and I love the food and the and the way of interpersonal way of relating. So seeing like separatism, Catalan separatism as like, why would you want to separate from that because of course I missed it but not of like not knowing the ins and else of the political situation.

No, I can really identify with that thing of like where is home because you know you're half English half Spanish and I'm half English, half Egyptian and there's that funny kind of diaspora thing that hits your head and what I was trying to say with being set into an identity is that there's sometimes cultural phenomena or things that happen politically which set you back in or at least for me where suddenly I feel Egyptian

and I want to wave the Egyptian flag but I'm against flag waving you know I can't do that from the English side but I definitely want to do that from the Egyptian side but hang on a minute how does this work with my kind of socialism so yeah I was just interested in like whether So you experience that from a kind of, you feel more Spanish, or even if that's the thing, you know. Or what you were saying about how other people put identity onto you. So when I'm in England, I'm the Spanish person in England.

Same. In Spain, English. Yeah, who can't pronounce the things perfectly in all of this and get the piss ripped out of her because she sounds a bit English or whatever. Cool. Okay. So maybe let's start with you just telling us a little bit about why you're passionate about this or how you came to your passion about the Spanish Civil War

before we do the, like, let's define terms. God, yeah. So just a little bit about why you care about this subject. Okay, quite crassly, I think it's been my New Year's resolution, two years in the trot, to learn about Spanish politics. I think it was like that simplistic, just know a bit more about that. So read Spanish newspapers, like, know a bit more about the situation over there, mainly because, to be honest, I get into conversations with my dad

who, as all of a sudden, incredibly reactionary, hasn't been. ever I mean conflict with what he's talking to me about about the current situation over there and I just wanted to know more I just wanted more ammo for my like arguments as to like why there's a far right party now called Vox who gained loads of seats in the last election and they're the anti-establishment party and so a lot of people my dad included is sort of saying you know they're not Francoist then it's nothing to do with Franco blah blah they're very very very far right um but they're sort of like posing themselves as like not or whatever whatever i don't really

know but and he'd sort of kind of defend the the party and that it's anti-establishment and then we need something new because the government's so corrupt and all of this and i just didn't know enough background to like sort of like have a firm position on it and when i started to dig into like what was going on i just knew that it's it's yeah there's reasons why this has happened at this point in history that is so linked with the suppression and the dictatorship and why that had the mistrust in Spain of the left and like and the sort of conventional like right wing like leaning into right wing sort of conventions as a safety point and and I just you know when you start to uncover something you're like oh god where did that come from oh okay well that came from the coup and that this

and this and I just wanted to become a bit of an expert because I had sort of an emotional reaction to like, you know, the no passaran speech, the Doloresi Baruri speech where, you know, she's talking about the popular front and the, and the Republic, but I didn't know the ins and outs of it. And then I guess... And who is she just so, we'll go through this in a bit. Yeah, so she was the, I don't know what her official title was in the Communist Party, in the Spanish Republic during the Civil War, but she was kind of like the mother of the Republic and like was upheld as like, in a misogynistic way. as like the virginal like the mother of the republic the female the one like female woman who was

validated on the left the sort of like head female figure on the left and she did a speech Madrid was the last to fall under the Spanish Civil War and she was from Madrid and she did a speech the no passaran speech which is like obviously that got really famous and stuff um is that where the no passeran yeah that's where it comes from comes from yeah yeah yeah that's where it comes from and she's talking about, yeah, so they shall not pass, so that all of these places were fallen, and Madrid was the last place to fall, and she's, you know, saying they won't get here and will stand strong where, like, all the resources and everything have been eeked out, and there was no hope left that she gave this amazing speech.

And they, in this context, just for listeners who might be new to the subject, and they are the fascists. Yeah, the fascists, the phalanjists, right, as they call them. So I tried to find an acquitze, like, embarrassingly, messaged all my sort of, like, self-identifying politically on the left friends in Spain to say kind of asking is there a Navarra equivalent in Spain because I want to listen to what's going on there from a non from like from so from the left I just want to hear us like I want to follow like the news in Spain what's going on from a less left

perspective just wanting to know more about something that like my own like family's history with it's so recent and it just like baffled me that no one never spoke about it. So yeah, so then I read this book, like with all good things. They always start from, at the same time as well, I sort of got a bit obsessed with like the intersectionality between like sexism in the left. And yeah, just like how misogynist, like the left can be and how that, how, how we come up against that as women on the left that are supposed to be sort of standing shoulder to shoulder with our comrades who, I don't fall so short of like those things anyway so I read this novel called no turning back

is the English translation we'll put it in the show notes right no turning back no turning back which is a novel by a banish writer called Lydia falcon she's a writer she's an activist she's the leader of the feminist party she's Catalan and it's a novel about women who were imprisoned during the dictatorship who had fought as part of the republic and it's kind of about love and interpersonal, you know, how you experience sexism interpersonally in your relationships when you fall in love with a man and when that man happens to be a part of the communist left and like all of those weird contradictions and it just absolutely blew my mind, that novel. So from them, from then I was just, yeah, sort of obsessed and read

George Orwell's homage to Catalonia and kind of, yeah, became my hobby. Right. Let's define terms, just some basic stuff before we like get into more of this. Cool. And if you hear crackling listeners, this is because we're eating grapes and just loads of fruit bars. So you know, you'll hear the tea slopping, etc. Um, okay. So just just a quick rundown of history and we'll do this between us. So basically Spain was a kingdom. Is that right? Yeah. At some point. And then it became a republic. This is before the Spanish Civil War. Yeah. So then basically

as I understand it in 1936 this was the beginning of the military coup to try and basically eradicate the revolutionary potential. Yeah, yeah. Right. And then that stayed

until, well the whole Spanish Civil War went until 1939 and in 1939 it collapsed. And after that that was the beginning of the Francoist dictatorship and Franco was one of the leaders of the right wing coup is this correct something like that yeah yeah yeah the general the general and then basically it was from then it was 1975 his death until 975 effectively Spain was underneath a dictatorship but you've had this window which was only

three years which of which all of this including incredible and crazy sort of time in Spanish history where you had all of these different kinds of radical left forces came together and it's absolutely fascinating. Yeah, I didn't know anything about this subject beyond the kind of romanticised idea of this is when there were people from all around the world travelling to fight for socialism. Of course there was, well, socialism in the broadest sense, let's say, because of course there's so many different factions. get under that. While, of course, there's the rise of Hitler and the effect that that had on socialists in Europe, particularly going, if we don't go and do something about this in space, if we lose Spain, we'll lose basically the world. I think it was a lot of what people felt.

And of course, that didn't happen because the Allied forces won the Second World War, but there was this incredible surge of kind of internationalism. I suppose that's one of the reasons why, even from the small bits of imagery or, you know, the quotes like no passarana or whatever, we, I think, hold on to bits from the Spanish Civil War. So just to say, before we get into the details, by complete coincidence, Freedom Books, they're an independent anarchist bookshop in East London, published this book called Fighting Women, which I'm holding in my hand, which is. is a series of interviews by a lady called Isabella L'Rousseau with women who lived during the Spanish Civil War. And this book has literally just come out, and we had already agreed to have this chat. But then we both went on the Zoom meeting that was about the launch of this book, because even though these interviews, some of them were done in the 90s and the naughties,

it's never been translated into English. But I picked up this, I ordered the book because I thought, I want to support, freedom books and by the way you can't get this on any of the other like Amazon etc you need to buy this from freedom but we'll put a link in the show notes but I thought oh just get this and read it and I was absolutely blown away by this book and I know you haven't read it now I'm so excited I'm going to give it to you after this and just I guess at the top of the show I just want to say a couple of things about what I learnt from this book and then hopefully you can tell us if any of that resonates with you and then we can

talk about the detail of the Spanish Civil War from that perspective. The first thing I thought when I finished reading this which I finished in a few days is I never want to read another book which is not just interviews with a group of women who are involved in something. Yeah. Yeah. Because it is just incredible and just a completely different way of understanding history to read interviews with people, especially women, and you realize the extent at which it's a story that wasn't told, or isn't told in a kind of top line way anyway. So I really recommend this book fighting women. I think that, that is the thing when I was on the Zoom and hearing about the book that I was like, oh, it's like how you experience these structural things, literally

how you experience them day to day. And I think that's the thing about that no turning back novel that I read that it was all structural huge political things that they were discussing but the human like thing that was driving it because that's the experiential thing so the reason that my

family don't talk about politics around the table or don't talk about Spanish civil war, don't talk about the repression is like a structural reason but like you experience it on a personal level so that's exactly how I want to learn and read about these things is like like you're saying just an interview with people who have experienced it rather than

sort of like outside academic analysis of a bit this this book involves interviews with people who are on the Stalinist side the the the who were you know the baddies yeah the baddies of the left the bodies it has interviews with a lot of women in the poem the poem yeah the poem which are the anti-Stalinist left sort of anarcho syndicalist and also with the anarchist and also with Mujeris Libres and I mean what a great name

like the free women is that a good translation? Yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean the hair is standing on the end of my skin now just thinking just reading the stuff on Mujeris Libris from this book but there's interviews with all of these women or many of whom you know had really strong disagreements

with each other for sure yeah during the Spanish Civil War but they all said and different personalities and you read the interviews and some women give one minors and some give you know pages and they all said the same thing, which is that we were fighting two revolutions. We were fighting the revolution with our male comrades on the streets

and in the meetings, and we were fighting the revolution at home against them because of patriarchy because all of these men and these comrades who spoke all of these words in politics and ideology about egalitarianism, but when it came to the home, they were like, no, of course I'm not doing it washing up.

And they're against the church. in a sort of political sense because the church represents the right way, but the sort of conditioned patriarchal notions that they had towards their mothers or their wives or whatever is something that was explored in that book as well. And like all of these women that were in the book that no turning back book, these women that were imprisoned by the Francoists who were part of the communist parties and all of these were like how they upheld patriarchy in that like, no no my interpersonal relationship with my husband isn't important because the fight is more

important and the fight and the fight and just like sort of regurgitating um top heavy sort of party lines from the top of these like men and they were experiencing like rape and whatever in these prisons and being like my womanness isn't important I'm going to put that to the side because the important thing is a struggle is a struggle is a struggle from a like male perspective the intersection of that is just yeah fascinating I'm so excited to read this book, oh my God, oh my God. I'm excited to give you to stuff. This was going to be one of my questions, I guess, to you, even though you've not read this yet. You mentioned rape in the prisons, and one thing that doesn't come up, and I don't think it's because of the translation,

although you can read it and let me know, but rape isn't mentioned once in this book. And that was actually something that I was interested in, because there's very kind of eloquent and expansive explanations of, you know, how patriarchy manifested itself, but rape isn't mentioned. And I'm just interested in that. I don't know if you have anything to say about that, about why all of these really militant women, I mean, we're talking about there's a woman who's a hundred and two years old who is about ten times more militant than I can ever imagine to be. What a legend. It was just so inspiring and also completely nuts. But nobody mentions rape. Right. The women, the red women that were imprisoned during the dictatorship

experienced the oppression of them being the sort of like the communist or the wives of communists or whatever, both on the sort of like political spectrum and then on the gender spectrum that it was not just their ideologies or whatever they landed on the political searcher but also their bodies that were then like to be punished for it. One thing that is that you rarely hear about in the general discourse, I mean, whether it's left or right, to be honest, about the Second World War, is what happened to German women, you know, when the Russian and other allied forces came in and the amount of rape. You just don't, you know, it's like the number one thing that happens, the losing side, you know, women lose the right to have their bodies as theirs, which of course is horrific. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One of the biggest discipliners of women. And that also that the second wave feminist movement was happening in Spain at a time also when it was like, during the dictates. So it's this weird conflict of like, women around the sort of political consciousness shift of women in the liberation movement globally. With Spanish women were experiencing it under a sort of like oppressive Catholic regime dictatorship. So, yeah, there's just loads going on, loads going on that's still. Very interesting that you bring that up because one of the first interviews in here, I don't know if I'll be able to find it. So Mojeres Libres, okay, is a group, it's an anarchist woman. organization that was set up my understanding is at the beginning of the Civil

War or maybe just just before that and it was a women women's only kind of organizing space and there was this debate between and this is one of the questions that's asked of all women in this book is like were you organizing with did you think it was important to organize with women only or were you organizing in spaces that was kind of women and men so so yeah so this is a whole discussion about whether their role was to fight on the front, which their different groups of men felt different things about.

And apparently there were very, there were more women that went to the front, but not necessarily fighting. Right. And there's different opinions on that. And there are some women in this book who are like, how can a woman kill another person's children is her quote. Wow. And felt really strongly that women, you know, you'd go and you'd support your side, but as a woman,

She didn't understand how you could kill someone else. And there's other people on the other side, other women in this book going, no, I was very happy to have arms when we could get them and do this thing. But recognizing that women had to organize themselves and that they had to fight patriarchy alongside this progressive revolution that was trying to happen.

And if you didn't have women organizing in their own space, they wouldn't be able to participate in trade unions because they wouldn't be able to have a voice because the men would dominate the meetings and then they would be stuck at home and so whereas there are some women in that movement who were like, no, it was better for us to be doing more of the mutual aid stuff

but exactly what they were doing I think there's different views on it basically but they were very well organised it seems yeah. So I read this novel and then afterwards you know the seminal piece of writing that is held up his George Orwell's Homash Catalonia and I started reading

it and I was a little bit like oh yeah what has this like like intellectual like English man got to say about like the front line of the Spanish of a war like after just reading that thing and then so I read that and because the there's a Ken Lodge film called Land and Freedom which comes up a lot in this book yeah yeah so and that's got women incredible female characters in it who have really really interesting arguments political arguments throughout it but I didn't know because I'd seen that film a few years and thought it was brilliant, but I didn't know that it's literally a dramatization of Homart, Catalonia.

It's that character, he's changed the character to be a working-class Liverpoolian, but it is his story of fighting with the bomb in Catalonia, and there's an incredible, have you seen it, Nadia. I have a few years ago. There's a scene for anyone who hasn't seen it, where I think the sort of factionalism and the complexities with, like, what's going on with the Stalinist. and the poem and everything is all experienced in like

a sort of town hall meeting scene and the politics of it all expressed Yeah, yeah but it's so good It's so good I was like The way that he's sort of summarized

In a real like human level In a brilliant truthful scene Between like seven, eight people Around this table The whole sort of footnotes that George Orwell wrote At the back of the book Of like the ins and outs

Of like the contradictions With the suppression of like that particular group and the union movement being surprised by the Stalinists and stuff but it all comes out in this one scene around this table it's brilliant but then I read a book after that called Doves of War

which is about four women during the Spanish Civil War two from the right and two from the left and I was like I started reading that I was like oh it's going to be one of them that's like everyone's the same and like the human I don't know that I was just like filled with like Republican anger so I like wanted to read more sort of like

George Orwellie type stuff but it was just fascinating it was just fascinating the two women on the left was Nan Green who is my knitted doll so she's called Nan Green and she was an English member of the Communist Party who went over to fight

she went over as a nurse like trained up in the medical side as part of the Republic and then did loads of incredible amazing things I mean that's a whole podcast on Nan Green on her own she's amazing and then a woman called Margarita Nelkin who was the leader of the so became one of the leaders of the

socialist party during the Spanish Civil War but was a part of the sort of um the bourgeoisie like she was very much a part of like the sort of upper middle classes but part of the republic so you saw that factional split there and then there was like priscilla something something that was a part of the english aristocracy who went over to fight on the franco side as part as a nurse but as part of the phalanjists but was from England and then obviously the second World War came after

Franco won and then she was like in conflict because she was like obviously I have to fight for my country in England now but I'm fighting against the people who I've just been fighting for on the Francoist side. It's just a mess and then a woman who was the wife of again all of these people

are like wives wives of like prolific people and the wives of a really big leading figure in one of the Francoist armies who he passed away and then they upheld her as the sort of like mother Teresa of like the right wing and she did loads of like philanthropist like charitable work in the rebuilding after the Spanish Civil War but from Francoist side it feels like it feels like there was this space that opened and you know it was funny because I was talking to my mom about this book and my mom

lived through the Lebanese Civil War. And we were talking about it. And as I was talking about it, I was like, actually, this does sound a bit like the Lebanese civil war, even though it's quite a different context, but in the sense of there were all these different factions won. And then what happens is that when a space

opens, you suddenly get all of the global players going, and I'm going to get a foothold in this. And that's basically what happened, is it was an opportunity for both ordinary people to get involved on the right side and the left side, but it was also, of course, for global politics in terms of like arms and influence

and whatever, which is what happened in Lebanon, but also what happened in Spain. But maybe let's just at this point define a couple of things just for people who are listening. So things that we've talked about. So you had, you know, the right wing, fascist, anti-Republican side fighting everyone else. But the main issue is that only everyone else, and this is what Landon Freedom is really good at articulating the Ken Loach film is that the official party which is Partido Communista de Spainia which is the PCE that is the authoritarian party. The Spanish Communist Party. Yeah they are the pro-USSR. Women in this book and what we will generally call like the Stalinists, they are the left

badies which probably gave communism a bad. Big time, yeah. Bad name, big time that were still paying for today, you know. And they, by the way, had all of the resources, because they were backed up by the Soviet Union. So in England, the English Communist Party obviously had alliances with the

Communist Party in Spain, so how they were talking about the sort of Trotsky rebels that were trying to dissuade the progress of the Spanish Civil War, as opposed to like he was living it and he was like experiencing it. But who's like, back, who's like, back

who in which country is like really interesting because obviously like before social media or before whatever yeah the the English comrades who went over the international brigades are getting all the information from like the English communist papers so the way that they're framing the bomb or the like yeah that are going away from the party line or whatever is very specific do you know what I mean as opposed to I think that was his experience of it right is that like he was like he got back after having lived it and then read the sort of of revisionism of it from the communist side all will you're talking about yeah so as in so when

he went over to fight who who what was his entry point he fought with the poem with the pole yeah he did he signed up as part of the record just again so this is the anti-starlinist communist party which was the union the workers union and the left of the communist party like came together um and they were they formed in 1935 it says but they were suppressed by 1937 yeah yeah um And I think the romanticised idea that you were talking about at the beginning about the sort of Spanish Civil War and they're like, is definitely, well, I mean, you're sort of biased by what you read and whatever, but like how George Orwell, like, explains, like, fighting in that army. He was like, we had nothing, like the arms, we had no resources. It was crap. No one was trained up.

It was ridiculous, but it was as close to a sort of, like, democratic army. Everyone who fought there knew why they were there. There was no, like, politics of fear. there was no, you know, if you were, like, disciplined by the person above you, it wasn't because he was above you, it's because it was just as close to, like, an egalitarian army as you could get, which as soon as, like, that got suppressed, then, yeah, the sort of bureaucracy of, like, then the communist part, the Stalinist, that became so much more rigid.

I've gone off track there, but, yeah, I just find that really interesting about, like, again, the Soviet Union funding, like, the communist publications around, Europe so like how this factionalism got revised after that with like sort of vested interest within the sort of communist party line and if you yeah yeah yeah and they said and they talked about that

in that Doves of War book that I mentioned before that Nan Green who's a member of the British Communist Party again went there, went to the front and saw the complete hypocrisy of what was going on but couldn't speak out against it or as she did got like called a trade zone and all of this. Yeah. So the other two things I was going to say I took from this book,

apart from the fact that I only want to read books that are interviews with women who went through shit and did shit, which is amazing. The second thing is, oh my God, the factionalism. It's the same now as it was then massive face palm. Is this ever going to end? Can we just work together, despite our differences, clearly not. Why? Recently, someone said to me, God, it's just like the left. is such an echo chamber, blah, blah. I was like, do you have any idea? Like, there's no echo chamber.

What is it like inside here? I wish it was an echo chamber. It's not at all. Jesus Christ. And then the third one is the point that I brought up earlier, which is that the patriarchy, there was two revolutions.

It was one, you know, outside on the streets, some on the front, and another one at home. So, so yeah, so I'm just going to read different bits as we talk about. Is that all right?

Please, please, yeah. So this is part of an interview with Pepita Carpena, I think I pronounce that right, who was an anarchist and she was interviewed in March 1997. This is her picture. You can't see it, listeners, unfortunately, but you have to buy the book for that. And she was in Mojeres Libres, and she, it says here, issued propaganda from Mojeres Libres, the feminist group. And so this is just a passage where she's just talking about various things, and I thought

this was an interesting passage, so I'll read it out. So she says, I've already told you that I started working at a factory, and it was there that I met women of Mocheris Libris who are looking for new militants. I believe that women and men should fight together. I wasn't interested in a female movement. This is how it should be from a logical point of view. As it happens, within the anarchist movement, there is no distinction. based on gender, social class, race, or whatever.

But theory and practice are not the same thing, and human beings are not infallible. I'm especially referring to men. Whether they are anarchists or not, they are all the same. At the time, I had not yet joined Mujeres Libres. And then she goes on to explain that she joined Mujeres Libres because she found that there was this massive disjoint between theory and practice in terms of how the men behaved.

And then she goes on, and then they talk about a little bit about machismo, and then so the interviewer Isabella's asking her there was a lot of machismo in that period wasn't there and she says

yes undoubtedly at that time during the revolution many women wanted sexual liberation as well I think that there should be

no difference between men and women also from a sexual point of view one day a guy who belonged to the libertarian youth told me

you act like a libertarian but if I ask you to have sex with me you won't go with me luckily I was quick on the draw and replied I only have sex with the men I like and I wouldn't kiss your mouth for all the money in the world I was so upset that

eventually I left and added from now on I will work only with women so that was the turning point for her of that moment of like you know and I think we all know someone who's been there and it's like we're not in 1935 but it's so so familiar, you know, and, you know, as are all of the stories of how amazing it was, you know, working alongside men, but it's this constant thing of your being reminded that you're a woman because it comes up at a point and then you're not equal because you have this double, this double job to do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, big time. And the other thing that that jumped out at me is that most of these women got politically active when they were in 13, 14, 14, 15.

like by the time they were in the 30s you know they had been through some serious shit yeah yeah absolutely well it was that thing of seeing the sort of movement that was like anti-Catholic anti-church because a lot of the Republic so they'd when the

the Republic liberated a town one of the first things that they do is they'd go into like the church and like take down the iconography and whatever that the women were seeing that and fighting it on a sort of like yeah we can see how really like oppressive these that like Catholic regime is on our bodies and all of these things but that the sort of liberation thing only moved so far

and that a lot of these women women as part of the left were like vilified as women as well as like being on the left even by their own side so that Margarita Nelkin who I mentioned before or who was like one of the leaders of the socialist party was like vilified for for not being for not being married for like having children outside of a marriage and like and it's like hang on a minute aren't we anti-

aren't we anti sort of like repressive Catholic values but the misogyny's just still seeping into the sort of like factionalism with it all the undermining of like what kind of woman tell us about politics but then also the sort of like yeah yeah we're all fighting for freedom but you should probably

like be married before you have children or do not I mean like actually yeah yeah I won't respect you unless you're having yeah exactly there are different views on marriage in this book And she does press that, the both of the interviewers, quite a bit, that thing of like, but did you marry him, we didn't? And some women are like, marriage is totally pointless. And others were like, mm, it was practical.

And others like, no, actually, I do believe in marriage. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's this bit here where Pepita's saying, she's talking about another person, she said, so Pepita's saying about her, she said that childless women are like trees without fruit. Well, nobody should, nobody should say that. especially a woman like her and she said this only because she had three children.

What does this mean? I'm fed up about discussions about children. Some comrades of mine used to say anarchist blood flows in my veins. This is very stupid. Anarchy is not hereditary. Anarchy derives from a revolutionary attitude from willingness to fight against injustices and you're an anarchist if you chose to be such, right? You cannot be an anarchist just because your father was one. Do you understand? I absolutely love that passage because I am also sick to death of and I understand why people do it. It doesn't mean I'm not sick to death of it, of people saying my father was in the Labour Party and his father before that was in the Labour Party and I've been in the Labour Party for 500 years.

I don't care. It doesn't mean anything, yeah. It doesn't mean anything and I think it doesn't matter whether you know you're defined as an anarchist or a communist who don't define as anything. like we don't choose what we're born into and you can borrow from that and you know in your case you know you're very inspired by your family but i think it's that important thing about values is that we have to be agents in being able to choose our values there's this amazing scene in the novel in that no lydia falcon novel where um so it's a women's women's uh war part of the prison for all the women that fought in that's part of the republic and this one woman comes in and she's sort of like slightly more liberated in a sense than the rest of them and she starts and they're all a bit like overwhelmed by her or her sort of like weird rebellious ways even though they're all like supposed to be like sort of anti-establishment like women as part of these

parties but you can tell that they're all wives of people high up in these unions whatever and um she comes in one of the night she like starts masturbating and the women are like absolutely like so embarrassed and like disgusted by it and there's this incredible scene that happens where she's like where they're like you know we've got husbands and they're in

they're being tortured in other prisons in whatever part of Castilella Mancha or whatever and this woman's like what you think they're not masturbating so like you're keeping yourselves pure in these prisons because your husband's like yeah exactly exactly but the irony is like it's all these women that have fought on the battlefield

for like liberation like class liberation but then like the sort of gender liberation goes out because that's the coping mechanism isn't it is for you to believe

that women can be free you've either got two choices you either have to go with it and do it or you buy the idea that you have to not masturbate at home because your husband in jail

is clearly not masturbating at all because you know or you know like whoever this other famous guy in here who goes away to Soviet Union and comes back with another wife and kids or whatever that that fulfills a function for us psychologically and when you're all doing it as a group of women you're like no we are we're staying at home we're doing the right thing because we're on the same side because that's our

responsibility in the struggle and it's easier even though you're suffering yeah it's kind of easier to do that and you know we've all done that and poised in our life and we do that over history in these moments of crisis where you just think you know it's better that I just do this because it takes so much of your brain power and your energy to step outside and say, actually, this is fucking bullshit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, an emperor's new clothes, kind of.

Yeah. Like, this is ridiculous. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because the same thing was happening with the factions of, like, as far as I understood it with, like, the sort of, what is it, C&T, the Partio Communista in Spain,

the Communist Party, and the union movement and the sort of let, and the workers' parties, and stuff that they were kind of like let's just win the Civil War first. Let's just do that first and then we'll talk about revolution or then we'll

talk about like more right well but even before there we'll get dishwashers we'll start importing the dishwashers and you know I'm a child care but let's just win this one maybe that's what was happening like alongside it because like even take the sort of gender

politics out of it that the sort of like right of the republic were saying let's just win against the fascist first and then you'll get your rights and then you'll get your living wage and then you'll get your better conditions but then at the same time

that's what they were saying to the women of like well let's just win liberation first and then we'll talk about free, exactly like you just said and then we'll talk about free childcare and then we'll talk about multiple sexual party whatever whatever it is and it's also the linear view of change yeah right? The theory of change

when it comes to kind of dogmatic authoritarian parties is that there is an order of things. There's a proper order of things and we have to do them in the row which actually obscures the vantage point and the gaze which from where you're sitting because it can only be authoritarian males who can afford to do that. So I thought on the question of abortion I would read out just a little bit of text from this first interview in the book Fighting Women with Pepita who is explaining the context is that abortion was legal, was made legal in Spain in 1936,

which was very early. And then this was rolled back by the dictatorship when Franco got in in 1939, which is very early compared to other countries because France only got abortion legalized in 1976. But this is the context of the conversation that the interviewer Isabella is having, with Pepita, but I thought this was a nice passage just to read, to give listeners a flavor of why Mojeres Libris was set up and what it was like as a working woman. So this is

from an unpublished story of the struggle of a free woman. It's Pepita saying this. So the need for a specific female movement was very strong in 1936, thanks to the feverish political and social activity during the civil war. However, many women had already become aware of their condition of slavery, both as workers and as women, and started to join the CNT, so that's the syndiclist union, workers' union, C&T movement, which represented the most appalling ideology. This is the reason for their name, Mojeres Libres, that's the free women, which means women without prejudice. Our trade union struggle continued within the FI.L., which is the Iberian Liberation

Federation, where we discussed all the problems concerning the status of women, including sexual and social issues. Culture covered most of our activities because at that time only a few women were able to study while most of us could just read and write. Almost all the women from the age of 12 had to work. The conditions of the workers were so miserable that we managed on our own to learn basic ideas and we were unaware that we were unaware of. Most of us joined Mukheris Libres and believed that men and women could fight together. The most urgent struggle concerning workers, and we had to fight in our own area of competence, at home in our daily environment.

We had to eradicate the prejudices resulting from so many years of Christian education. We joined the trade unions as militants, however. The total emancipation of the individual was an entirely different story. Unfortunately, our comrades who were good militants put the issues of women aside stating that women weren't able to understand problems. Their attitude was

condescending. They behaved as if they were doing us a favour. During our discussions we clearly realised the separation between men and women was due to prejudices which were difficult to be eradicated. So that's the piece. And that's in the context of

having a chat about the fact that abortions were taking place anyway but it was an important moment. and that it was legalized and of course that was something that was taken away. Yeah.

And I was just saying how similar and scary that feels at the moment with this, like, the rise of the far right in Spain that they're really rolling back on like feminist policies that have been so hard for

after Franco's dictatorship. Like Vox, particularly, one of their things is to like revoke the rape within a marriage law. So Vox? Who is Vox? So Vox is a new party in Spain that gained

loads of seats in the last election, contrary to what anyone thought was going to happen, because they were sort of anti-the-separities movement, they are anti-the-separities movement, and they're just, yeah, really, really far-right, nationalist. Separatist as in Catalonia, separatists, yeah. And blaming the years of austerity since the financial crisis on a whole upheaval of things rather than the sort of like cuts

exactly the same as like this country is experienced rather than putting the blame where it is which is on that austerity measures they're saying that it is like the migrants or the Catalonia that's like wanting to like do you know what I mean but yeah that they're revoking

a lot of their policies are like revoking loads of progressive feminist policies that are relatively new like since the 70s since Franco Franco's regime ended. But that's, like, really scary. Yeah, it is really scary. And also, like, the big learning is

you don't stop struggling for your rights. Like, you cannot take things for granted. You cannot take the minimum wage for granted. You can't take the right to vote for granted. You can't take the right to control your body for granted. Like, these things... It's a linear thing, is it? No, but also it can just flip.

Yeah. And, you know, at any point in time, and then you look back and you think, how did we get here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I just think it's really interesting, all the stuff in abortion, the fact that it was so high on the feminist agenda at that time, and it was temporarily won, and it was taken away.

And having had such riches and then into a, what is it, for 50, 60 years dictatorship after that, after having experience, like, relative liberation is just even more heartbreaking than never having experience. having experienced it at all in a sense like to know that it's possible as opposed to the sort of capitalist realism of like well this is how it is this is how it is yeah and and that makes then it makes sense why people would not want to talk about it but we thought before we we talk about I think what might be our final point about the silence pact um do you want to talk about

stolen babies god yeah so it relates to the silence pack so a reason why I why I feel really connected to all of the things that we're talking about is because, like, no one in my life or in my so far in my family and my friends seems to be able to talk about it with any kind of clarity or experience or whatever. And it is this structural problem that I mentioned at the beginning about this, like, after Franco died, a way to rebuild a society was this, like, silence pact that the government decided upon which, like, things were going to be forgotten and we're going to move on because otherwise, like, how do we even begin to, like,

heal the wounds of, like, six years? And you're talking about your family, and this is your family in Spain? Well, these are just, like, my family, a family of, like, yeah, working class people, normal people, having lived through the dictatorship and then starting experiencing, like, relative liberation, that still now in 2020 can't seem to... It's not like a sort of Brexit

where everyone's, like, talking about it over the dinner table and people have their different views. There's just a weird silence with anything to do with, like, dictatorship particularly or how it was. There's an amazing documentary as part of Storyville on BBC Eye Player that Almodova produced and it's called the secrecy of Franco's crimes or something and it's about all of these campaigns and movements that have been working to like achieve like reparations and justice for like the families of people who were imprisoned and tortured and stuff

and that there's been like no justice even since he died but I met a Spanish lady only last week actually who's like a really good friend of my partners and she was like I think she was like 70 or 18 we were talking a little bit about

lockdown and I just said about how I'd been researching all of these things and she said to me and she was so embarrassed she was like I don't know anything about it they didn't teach us anything at school families were like encouraged not to talk about the ins and outs of politics and stuff and what was going on because it was illegal so like if like the left the suppressed left wanted to meet during the dictatorship obviously

they had to meet like in clandestine like bars and talk about what was going on and stuff but yeah as part of this that they mentioned on that documentary was these things that started coming out that like during the dictatorship these women uh who would give them birth in these hospitals had gone all this time thinking that their babies had died um when they were born that they'd miscarried in the moment of like birthing and actually what had happened is that like the the hospital had got these children these newborn babies and put them up as part of this like adoption network that that were like babies of left wing women to like breed the communist ideology like out of them and then like were sort of like plucked into families like military families and like it's so

dark crazy it's crazy it's like a random idea of that the but Going back to the quote that we said here, it's like, it's such a strange idea. I mean, it's really, I mean, obviously it's really horrific. But just even the premise of that, that you can breathe. Like ethnic cleansing. Yeah, you can breathe leftism out to take the babies of lefties and put them in right-wing families. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if you didn't, then they would automatically be lefty.

It's just very strange, it's both strange and obviously incredibly dark. It's so dark. And that it fell in these sort of things have happened in war. But that on this documentary, you're seeing the movement of women now, now, like in 2015, 2014, 2016, as part of these campaigns to, like, get information on their children that are still alive that they thought died at birth, because it all happened at this cross-section of,

we need to move on from society, so let's forget everything. So all of this dark ship just got put in a filing cabinet and, you know, the hospital or whoever was responsible for it never got sued or investigated or whatever because we're just rebuilding Spain from a democratic point of view and all of this crazy shit that's going on in this dark room has never even been

like opened because in the name of like forward momentum and moving yeah progress which is crazy how you and you know they it's amazing they talk about like these like left wing people part of the like you know people who fought for the republic or like sons of and sons and daughters of people

who fought for the republic having to grow up in streets in Spain that are like like named Caillé Generalism or whichever general from the Francoist regime and like walk into school

seeing that every day as part of the democracy but like there's no reparations there's no justice being made so it's like this weird national like

swallowing of like injustice it's like an internalizing completely completely and then seeing that this is like to tie the whole conversation

the effect that that's having now with like the sort of complete fractured sort of political stuff because no one trust the government because in Spain the centrist and the right have always been so so corrupt and in terms of like like tax evasions and all of this and like eking like money out of

the public funds and stuff but there's also a sort of like not knowing like intrinsically why this scary looming far right can just come and swoop in complete like sort of national ideology because there was never true political education about what happened and why it happened and so it's really scary how fraught that is that people can so quickly reach for... Because you know

you can't learn from the past if you don't know what your past is. Exactly, exactly. But like what we was just saying that like progress is not a linear thing that it just gets better and better and better and better and better and more liberated. That like it just works in cycles completely that a Spain

in 20, in 1935, 6 was more liberated than Spain in like the early 70s. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And it was really interesting what you were saying about how, you know, second wave feminism was happening all around the West, at least, you know, while Spain was going through the dictatorships, so women were relating to it on a very strange way. And I think in the break we were having a chat that there was also that even at the point of the civil war itself, there were women who were saying, we don't want to define as feminist because we see feminism as the thing that

cares about the voting, whereas we're talking about... Bourgeois, the middle-class women. And it's interesting, and they were like, no, we're the feminine movement. And it's just interesting how, you know, there's these different, like, how women are experiencing their liberation from different points in history and, like, juxtaposed also what's happening in different parts of the world. And also that anything that doesn't follow the party line is, like, cancelled as opposed to, like, you know, a more sort of intersectional, like,

complex critique of what your material conditions are as a woman, as a working class woman in Spain, if that goes against the Communist Party line, then it's bourgeois or it's liberal or it's fascist. I mean, both of those words have been so overdone just in my lifetime. I almost don't, even though, no, I'm going to stop. I'm saying now that I'm not going to call anything liberal or bourgeois again, because I think it's lazy, even though it might be true. I just think it's interrogate it first. Yeah, yeah. It's just lazy. It's a, it's a non, it's, and also something, often very lax generosity and I'm kind of really bored of politics that doesn't

have generosity. And the sad thing is I'm reading this book and I'm so inspired by these women but also I'm looking at the factionalism and like people weren't generous there either. People were being dicks to people who they agreed with 99.9% of and like killing each other. It's like how

what do we learn from this as leftists? How can we not do this? No, it's so long. I'm so over it already. It's so over it. It's cartoonish. It got to a point where like the communist party were accusing the pom who were dying at the battlefield trying to defend the republic every single day of being fascist spies yeah yeah yeah it's just bizarre it's like bizarre it's bizarre you know you read this book um and you think about these things and you think

well how how do you balance the need for action effective action with a kind of pluralism yeah how do you do that and we come up against that all of the time it's like on one hand it's like you can't just constantly have like nice circle discussions where everyone's views are taken into consideration as a replacement for action. You do at some point need to take action. But how do we balance out that thing, those two things? It feels like a lot of the time it is just acting within the best interest of the most precarious, which in this case was like the workers as opposed to the sort of petty bourgeois people who were like spearhead

in the sort of communist socialist movement in Spain it was to protect their relative bureaucracy and wealth as opposed to like... But how do you get those people? How do you fundamentally structurally get those people from that vantage point once you're in the bureaucracy to see that? Yeah, yeah. Do you know what I mean?

And that is the... The question about power. And you know, this is the ageal question and we're always trying to, you know, mitigate for that when we're working in our kind of left-wing spaces, but you read this and you're like, oh, fuck, right, yes, we've been doing this for a long time. But it's also, I mean, the really inspiring thing for me is just reading about the conditions under which these women were doing such inspiring work. It's just mind-blowing. It's so inspirational.

So I know we've spent most of the time in this chat talking about a lot of the shit things and the difficult things. but really it's just you read this and these are interviews with women who are like 80, 90, you know, one of them's 102 and you just think they have the same spirit as, you know, the most militant activists I know and I think it's such a reminder

that you don't melo, you do, this narrative that you mellow out, i.e. become more right wing with age, is just such a load of bollocks. I mean, I've become more militant the older I've got definitely a lot of things definitely on feminism

and it's not you know it yeah I don't know there's something about older women saying this stuff

and you're just like yeah yeah sister I get it man I get it a woman yeah yeah yeah just before we go

unless there's something else you want to talk about tell us just a little bit more about the knitted doll I feel like the knitted doll has not had enough this is what everyone really wants to hear yeah

this is what we've been building up to I just to be like the best part of the story is that like it came out of me and my mom who is an expert on the Spanish Civil War and it's like hardcore we just have huge conversations about politics and stuff we had a huge argument about something completely different and we just couldn't sort of be in the same room with each other and then I went into the living room she was knitting quietly on the sofa and I wasn't speaking because I was being like stubborn and she was like sit down I'm going to teach you how to knit I was like I don't want to learn how to knit she was like sit down I'm going to teach her how to knit so I was like oh And I sat there and we both sat in silence while she taught me how to knit. And then I just got completely obsessed with it. And she gave me this book that was like dolls. So I started knitting this doll and I was like, I'm going to really personalise this. And then I just read about this niche pot like person. And then it's a civil war called Nan Green, like I mentioned before,

who went to fight as part of the medical aid, the international medical aid. And then like did loads for like other like causes, like global causes afterwards. And I was like, yeah, she's going to be called Nan Green. So I knitted her a jumper that was red, yellow and purple, which is the Republican colors. Little pants and then Sam, my partner bought me like these badges that were like Spanish anti-fascist badges, one that said no baseran and one that said like the anti-fascist movements. So I'd like pinned a little badge on her. And there she was, Nan Green, knitted little Nan Green.

Well, thank you Nora Lopez Holden. You have to say it all three. Yes, it has to be said that way. That's how we did it on the Spoof podcast. If you don't mind, I'm going to end by reading a short passage from an interview with Theresa Rebul. This is her. There's a picture of playing a guitar looking like a guitar.

So this is an interview. So she was in POM and this is an interview with her in France, I think. Oh yeah, on the French Catalonia border in June 2010. And this is how she ends the interview. So this is an interview between Marta and Teresa, Teresa, sorry. So Marta says, you have clear ideas about politics as they are today. You are not stuck in the past, but you started a process to bring your thinking up to date. You defended your work as a woman and as an artist.

Are these two natures somehow intertwined? I mean, has this to do with your spirit of rebellion? And Teresa says, these things go hand and have. hand. They cannot be separated. However, there is no presumption. I've always done what I wanted. I sang what I wanted. I said and I thought. I've always expressed my ideas with the utmost freedom. I've never accepted any compromise. In Paris, I was told once, if you sing in French, we'll organize some concerts. But I said no, because this is dangerous. This reminds me of a Portuguese girl who came here to sing. She had a lot of success and got a big head, but she lost everything in a few days

because she acted as a diva, as a duchess. I don't like this ephemeral world. I never wanted to be an artist. I am a militant first and foremost. I sang, I danced and I painted, but I always remained a militant. That's deep far out.