 Now, it is well known that that history is written, always written, by the victors and they will write history from their particular class point of view. This book, on the other hand, is based upon the actual truth the actual experience across generations, thousands upon thousands, of people, men and women and young people without a name. In the history books you'll read names after names of kings and prime ministers and generals and presidents and dictators. You will never read the names of the real authors, the real ond amser o'r ysgol. Rwy'n dweud i fy nghymru. Rwy'n dweud i hynny. Rwy'n dweud i fy nghymru, rwy'n gyflawn. Ymgyrch yn gweithio'r ysgrifennu, ymgyrchu allan, yng nghymru a'r ysgrifennu hefyd, yr unig yma yw'r rhaglen, yr ysgrifennu, yr ysgrifennu, yr ysgrifennu, their health and in many cases their lives in this titanic struggle. But what we have here in effect is a hidden history. It is a history that has been buried. Yes. Bered along with tens of thousands of corpses ysgol y gall narchwy a'i gw months wneud am y llwych i'r hyn. Wel, arall hyn yn glaubeneth, fe wnaeth y byddai'n bwysig y fanyl i'w ni'r olevero ac mae'r hyn sy'n gweldio yng Ngwyrol Marxist yn cael ei digwydd i ni ysgol â'r hyn o'r Sfannes yma o'r reyflwyll. Yr ysgol ar gyfer 1930, yn Gweinol Lleon Trotskyn sefydlu The Spanish working class would be capable of making not one revolution, but ten revolutions. And if they did not succeed in the last analysis it wasn't any of their fault. What more could you ask of the Spanish workers and the peasants and youth more than what they did in those marvellous revolutionary years to change society. If they did not succeed, the problem was not with them, the problem was with the leadership, or the lack of leadership, or more correctly, bad leadership, on the part of all of the mass organisations of the working class from the anarchists through the source list to, in particular, the Stalinists who played an absolutely penis and so on, but that's not the subject of tonight's discussion. There's a very good book by Felix Morrow, which you can read, which will give you all the information you need to know. Yes, but people know something about this, but how many people in this room know anything or knew anything about what happened subsequently after 1939, when Franco marched his fascist hordes into Madrid in 1939? Was that the end of history? It wasn't the end of history for the Spanish working class. You think the clock stopped in 1939? Of course it did not. You know, how many people, here's a question for you to consider, how many people were killed in the Spanish Civil War against fascism and the Republic? How many people were killed? Well, I can't answer that question. Nobody can answer that question. I've seen estimates from anything from a quarter of a million to one million. It's impossible to say. I guess the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Somewhere approximately half a million people were slaughtered, butchered, killed in that terrible conflict. Yes, but the slaughter, the butchery, the tortures, the imprisonments, the concentration camps did not end in 1939, quite the opposite. Franco took a terrible revenge on the Spanish working class. Tens of thousands of people were shot without trial. They were buried, as I say, all over Spain. You know, the next time you go on holiday to that wonderful country, which I encourage you to do, it's a beautiful country, my second home, you'll find it's a beautiful country, beautiful mountains, beautiful olive groves. When you look at this scene that you bear in mind that you may well be looking at a graveyard beneath those mountain sites, beneath those olive groves, there are countless graves which to this day have not been dug up. There's an attempt to do that now. Oh, the other day you probably noticed, if you were following the television, two days ago, this interesting timing, two days ago a coffin was carried from a large grave, some, I don't know how many miles, 50 or so miles outside of the dead, in what is known as the valley of the fallen. This is a sinister place. It's a dark place. It's an obscure place, deservedly so, because it conceals a very obscure and dark history. The valley of the fallen, in this very somber, dark mountainous region outside of Madrid, next door to an equally sinister looking catholic monastery in El Escorial, is a huge cement cross, I think it's made of cement, it's fast. You can see it for miles and miles and miles, across to the fallen, to the martyrs, yes, not of course the communists, anarchists, socialist republicans, oh no, this is exclusively a fascist monument, and it's still there, 80 years after the end of the conflict, it's still there as an insult, a collective insult to the Spanish people and the memory of the fallen. Oh yes, now just think of this, in Germany, in Italy, you will not find any fascist monuments, they've been demolished, systematically demolished, they've been destroyed, but there's one country in Europe where this huge, immense fascist monument still exists and only after an extreme battle in the resistance of the Roman Catholic Church, which of course bear in mind, cored Franco's counter-revolution at Crusade and backed it 101%, the Roman Catholic Church, solid support for the regime for 40 years of this appalling dictatorship. Spain is the only place where the dictator 40 years after his death was still in this place being visited as if it were some kind of religious sanctuary. Finally, with the socialist government, they succeeded in getting the corpse removed to be re-buried in some churchyard somewhere in Madrid. But what I want to put to you is this. When I say there's a hidden history, don't you believe that it's just hidden from you? It is equally hidden in Spain, or more so in Spain 80 years later. This whole period has been blanked out and particularly the period which I dealt with in this book, the period 40 years ago, so-called democratic transition in Spain, which was of course nothing of the kind. This regime, I haven't got time to go into it. It was a very brutal regime. Overnight, the Spanish workers found themselves deprived of every single democratic right, no right to strike, no right to have a trade union, no right to assemble, no right to speak, no right to think, no right to worship in the way that you wished. Every single right was taken away and the workers were reduced to a kind of slavery. Literal slavery in many cases, this monstrosity in the value of those kingdoms, was built by slave labour, forced labour of republican and socialist, anarchist prisoners, very often worked to death. Many of them died in the process and are buried in unmarked grave on that particular place. The notorious prison of Caravanshire, where prisoners, trade unions in particular, were tortured, shot, garrotted, that's nice to the Spanish invention. It's a pleasant medieval method of execution, where the prisoner is tied to a stake, something is tied around his neck and he strangles from behind. The Garoteville, the last person that died in that manner. I remembered it because I was in Barcelona at the time, was, what was his name? I can't even remember. Pugantich, a young kid, anarchist, opposed to the regime he was killed in this brutal way. And the old man whose house I was staying at in the underground in Barcelona, he was an old anarchist, a marvellous old man. And almost in tears he gave me a little tourist keepsake written in Catalan, Dios Guard, God preserve you. And this man had carved very carefully with a knife on this little keepsake, the name of Pugantich, this martyr of the Spanish youth and the Spanish working class. Now, you see, if you think of all the terrible obstacles, the terrible defeat, and of course you pay for a defeat, the defeats don't come easily priced. It took a long time to recover from that defeat. And under almost an imaginable, I think people will assume you can't imagine, you can't imagine what it was like. You dare not go and strike or have a demonstration for fear of your life in effect. And yet you think it's impossible, wouldn't you? You think it's all up, it's finished, no more. You know, Ted Grant, my marvellous old friend and teacher and comrade, he used to say to me, you know, in ancient mythology, in Greek mythology, there was a giant called Anteas. This giant struggled with Hercules and many times Hercules threw him to the ground. And each time you think that it was finished, this giant was defeated, but every time this giant rose up to continue the battle because he drew strength from his mother, the earth. And Ted said, the working class, our class is like that giant. You must never forget those words, comers. I just think in spite of all these terrible horrors, the Spanish working class did recover under unimaginably difficult conditions. And they launched the biggest unprecedented strike wave in history, I think of any country in Europe. You will find nothing remotely resembled this either in Hitler's Germany or in most of Italy, but in Spain there was. Under a fascistic leadership, beginning, well there were strikes before this, there was a big strike in Barcelona, I think it was in 1950. There was another strike about that time also in Bilbao, but these were more or less isolated incidents. The real fight back began in 1962, I remember it, I remember Ted Grant picking up a copy of the Communist News. I think it was still the daily worker at that time, became the Morning Star. Look at this, look at this, strikes in the Asturias, the Asturian coal miners. Now I know from my own experience that coal miners are a very special breed they are because of the conditions of work, the danger and so on. It breeds a kind of comradeship and a courage and the militancy you won't find in many other places. So no surprise to me that it began in the Asturias, the glorious Asturian coal miners of 1934 rose up against again the threat of fascism and organized the heroic Asturian commune, October 1934 that was. They were crushed by Franco and his moves, this is before the Civil War. These same heroic miners were the children or the grandchildren, stage this wonderful strike. Despite all the repression, the threats, the danger that they knew that they were on, it didn't make any difference. Once the miners say that's it, finish, nothing will stop them. And of course because they lacked trade unions, trade unions are not allowed except for the one union. Oh yes, the vertical trade union, the syndicator as it was called, the only legal union containing both bosses and workers, work it out. In effect it was a kind of police organization to control the workers to prevent strikes. Because there were no trade unions, the workers again showing enormous creativity, same as the Russian workers in 1905. It wasn't Marx or Lenin or Engels who invented the Soviets. It was the spontaneous creation, the creativity of the Russian workers in 1905 based on their own class, instincts and experience. Same in the Asturias. They said it was under the workers' commissions, elected bodies in each mine and so on and so forth, got together to lead the strike. And despite the repression, it was repression of course, many people were arrested, beaten and so on and so forth. But nevertheless the strike movement continued and it continued every year. The figures are in the book, I don't know them by memory. But they increased by hundreds of thousands, eventually by millions of workers involved in strikes. Once it started there was no stopping this marvelous movement. Now I have to cut the story short but I can't speak to some extent from my personal experience. I first went to Spain in 1972, that was in underground conditions. My first underground work was in Barcelona in a working class area called Santa Coloma de Graminet. And it was extraordinary to see the militancy, the courage of the young people in particular, young people like yourselves. They get up in the middle of the night with the paintbrush and whatever the other influence, paint slogans on the wall, down with the dictatorship, death of Franco and so on and so forth. The next day the cops would come and they would paint it over or they'd join up the letters so you couldn't read it. In vain the next night the slogans would be back again and that happened every single night, despite the threat of arrest and imprisonment. I remember the first time I attended a May Day demonstration in Spain, it was May 1, 1973, that was in Barcelona. It was a big demonstration, proceeding down the streets with the huge banners at the front and the roar went up, slogan, viva la clase obrera. Long live the working class. I think that that demonstration, I can't remember if it lasted five minutes or ten, not much more than that because the police sirens would be here, the cops, when I referred to cops. You guys complain because you suffer cattling and stuff like that or some policeman speaks to you in not a polite fashion or whatever. These are armed police, armed with automatic weapons machine guns. They're there to kill you, they're not there to cattle you or to talk impolitely to you. That just scattered, the moment that the cops arrived, the demonstration dissolved and this happened many, many, many times. Now Franco died in 1975, in November. The regime of Arias Navarra became the prime minister, declared national mourning, it was a terrible thing, it appeared in tears on the television and so on and so forth. Well, how effective that appeal for mourning was, I don't know. I do know because the statistics are there, that there wasn't a single bottle of champagne available in Spain. All the sales of carvers sold out. I think that tells you something about it. The guy I was a poor old chap, I was staying with this poor old anarchist, very nice man, he did a little dance before the death. He would dance every time. Franco was desperately ill, I think they were keeping him alive deliberately because they were afraid of the effects if his death were announced and they were quite right about that. But every time the report from the hospital came he did a little dance, came where I am, came where I am, I hope he dies before I die, I hope he dies. Well, his wish was granted. Who says there isn't a God? His wish was granted. But of course, when Franco died that really opened up the floodgates and the workers poured through. Now, just one little observation because there's a bit of confusion about this. Some people believe wrongly that Etter, the Bas terrorist organization played a major role in this movement. That is false. It's entirely false. The role of Etter was marginal, completely. It's a small group, it was marginal. And in so far as they did anything, it was counterproductive. They did have one success, however. They blew up Franco's second in command, Admiral Carrero Blanco. That was quite a spectacular operation. Wonderful. Wonderful, Anna says. Wonderful. That's revisionism comedy. Well, all right, all right. I will accept that emotionally it was wonderful, yes. In the Bas country, they even invented a little dance with a blanket throwing a dummy up in the air. But yes, it was quite amusing in that very effective. This is a dictatorship. They planted a huge bomb in the street and when the admiral's car passed, he was the second in command after Franco. Such a huge explosion, the car ended up on somebody's balcony. Somebody had a surprise guest for breakfast. He was a little bit overdone. But yes, but. We have to adopt a sober mind and attitude towards this. Even when the terrorists succeed, they fail. Because you cannot destroy the state of the capitalist class by killing individuals. You can't do that. You kill one reactionary bastard, he's replaced by another reactionary bastard immediately. And the repression, of course, hits not just the terrorist, it hits the work as it did. The arrested many workers leaders were sent to jail, leaders of the workers commissions and so on. So that didn't really play that much of a role. The real role was the working class. And this is spectacular. I've got time to deal with this. These examples in the book I quote, one particular instance in Pamplona. By the way, here's an interesting example of dialectics. Now you've all heard of dialectics, of course. And dialectics teaches us that sooner or later things change into the opposite. Things do change into the opposite. You better believe it. In the Civil War, the main force that Franco had, the shock troops, if you like, was on the one hand the Moors, the Moroccan troops from Morocco, which was a Spanish colony. On the other hand, the Red Berets, the Recates they were known in. The Carlos, the Carlysta militia. The Carlystas were an ultra-reactionary, ultra-catholic, ultra-religious, ultra-monarchist, although they supported another pretender to the throne, Don Carlos, hence the name Carlysta. But at that time Navarra was an extremely backward agricultural province. We're talking about backward peasants here. In order to reward the people of Navarra, Franco poured investments into that area, and it became transformed from a backward rural province to a heavily industrialised one. Hence the growth of the working class, a new fresh militant working class, like the Russian workers in the 1890s. And throughout the dictatorship, Pamplona was one of the centres, one of the main centres of the reds of the revolutionaries. They were the most advanced sock troops, no longer a fascism, sock troops of the revolution. Here's an even more striking example of the dialectics. I said that the Catholic Church, and it's true, the Roman Catholic Church played a horrible role. A scandalous role of supporting Franco both in the Civil War and afterwards. Absolutely criminal in education and so on and so forth. Yes, but Jimmy Dean used to say to me, you know, we must learn from the Catholic Church. He said, well, any institution that's been around for 2,000 years, and has made a transition from slavery to feudalism to capitalism without any problem, and become very rich, you could learn a few tricks from them, and it's true. We shouldn't be ashamed to learn from our enemies. The Catholic hierarchy realised that they were in deep trouble. And they were getting reports from the lower orders of the Church, who were in contact with the workers. They were known as the worker priests, they were ordinary priests, ordinary guys from the seminaries. They could see the bad conditions, they could see the low wages, they could see the suffering of the people, and they became radicalised. Many of them, I'll give some examples here of one that I interviewed in detail, he gave his experience in the book, you can learn all about it. Broke with the Church and became revolutionary. In the case of Navara, the priests in Navara, not only broke with the Church, not only moved to that, they became Maoists. And set up a Maoist trade union, quite a big Maoist trade union, the ORT. Some unkind people said that they'd swapped one pope for another, but that's a matter of opinion. Mao Tseitung instead of the pope. But in other words, what I'm describing to you, already at that stage, is that the foundation of that regime was becoming very, very shaky. And who layers of the population were becoming, starting with the workers. It was the working class that was the main motive for it. There is no question about that. But then, of course, the students were drawn in. Students, young people are always the most radical elements in society, most open to revolutionaries. That was the case. Andy Dran, and at that time, was a student in the Comprehensive University really in the Sociology Department. And she described to me, it's in the book, she described to me, how the whole university was buzzing, it was electric. Every single day mass meetings, illegal mass meetings. Students couldn't care, same as the workers couldn't care. Bugger them, let them do what they want. Mass meetings, placards, posters, banners, decorating the students. Of course, the police, they'd be spies present, of course. The police would soon come, armed police, vicious police. And you could expect a severe beating at least. And she described to me that she's seen students jump through plate glass windows in order to get away from the police, being cut down, ending up in hospital and so on. But terrified of falling into the hands of those forces of repression. But there's nothing, there was no stopping this movement, no stopping it. And it was in that situation that I arrived in Madrid, I went with my family at that time, with my first wife, Pam, who unfortunately died recently, and two young children. And we set up our home in Madrid in Carabanchel, Carabanchel Alto. That's near the infamous prison where the workers' leaders were held, tortured, shot, garotted and so on and so forth. I could see the prison doesn't exist anymore, they demolished it. That was also built by slave labour. I could see that from one of the windows of my flat. But when I arrived in Madrid, this was January 1976, the whole place was on strike. Madrid was in a general strike, everybody, the postal workers, the metro workers, the train workers, the car workers. Every sector was on strike. I had a little experience when I arrived. I was sending reports back to the militant newspaper, some of which are reprinted in the book, because they give a genuine eyewitness account, the flavour of the events. I went to post one of these reports, I went to the post office, and I will never forget the response of the chap behind the counter. I said, can I post this to Britain? He said, well, you can. He said, but he won't get there. I said, why not? He said, because they're on strike. You can see his face was bleeding. He was beaming because they're on strike. He was so pleased. The whole of Madrid was on strike. That was typical. The whole of Spain was moving in that direction. That was in January 1976. Actually, there were a number of peaks to this movement. The works moved up and down, of course. But one of the key developments took place on the 3rd of March of that year. That was a fateful year, 1976. 3rd of March. Now, if I say to you, the 3rd of March, Victoria, how would you react? I think you'd be puzzled, what is this? What's the 3rd of March? It's a tragedy that even today in Spain, that's why I say, they've silenced the whole thing, they've tried to bury it, and that's that people don't remember. Spain has been subjected for 40 years to what I would describe as forced collective amnesia. Forget, forget, forget, forgive and forget. You know. And they've tried to eradicate this. In spite of that fact, the 3rd of March, I think, in Spain, among activists, certainly it means quite a lot, but among most people maybe not. That was a turning point. Now, in general, the parties, the only two parties that counted it, only one party really counted in Spain, there were many parties, many left parties, all illegal, but it was the commonest party that undoubtedly had a crushing superiority, particularly among the workers and in the factories in the years. No question about that at all. The sources party was far weaker. We were more in contact with the sources party through our work in the Labour party, through the militant at that time. And then there were many other smaller left groups. They counted for a good few thousand, however, in underground conditions. But the Communist Party actually exercised, how shall I say, a paralysing role. The leaders of the Communist Party had no desire whatsoever for a revolution in Spain, none on the country. What they were striving for and had been striving for from the very beginning, but as early as the 1950s, when they launched in exile in Moscow, the so-called Freedom Pact, the Pact of Parlibertad, the idea was to do a deal with the regime, or rather with the left, the progressive elements of the regime, in order to reach some kind of a compromise, you see. No question of socialism, no question of revolution, no question of workers' power. And they played a paralysing role. But the Communist Party had no base whatsoever, or very little base, anyway, in the Bas province of Alivar, capital of that is Vittoria, the town of Vittoria, industrial town. There was a mass strike taking place in Vittoria, beginning in, I think, December of the previous year. It was continuing right through 1976. And it culminated in a general strike on the 3rd of March, 1976. Now I went there, of course, in order to try to build this organ of this tendency, which we succeeded in doing, by the way. But that's a separate story. But we were in contact with the leaders of the socialist union and the young socialist in Vittoria. But in the middle of this hill's movement, they didn't have anything. They didn't have even a duplicate to print leaflets and so on. So the Communists pressurised the trade union bureaucracy, the UGD bureaucracy, in order to give us a small duplicate complicated to take to help the Communists in Alivar. But they kept us waiting. There was a car full of young socialist and myself. They kept us waiting and that's a bad thing. Because in the underground you do not arrive late. Shouldn't arrive late anyway. You know, I mean, don't make a habit of coming late, Communists, it's a bad habit, you know. Turn up on time, it's a good policy. But in the underground it's not just a good idea, it's an absolute necessity because you can get into serious trouble by coming late. And we didn't arrive until one o'clock in the morning to Vittoria. Which was an armed camp. The regime concentrated the police, the civil guard and so on. All the repressive forces were concentrated. We were nearly arrested on the way in. Should I give the reason for it? It's a tragedy when a dear friend of mine and a dear comrade and a very important revolutionary leader, Alberto Areghi died this January, suddenly. I was with him in Christmas. He was supposed to come and visit Angela and myself in March and he dropped dead of a heart attack. But I never realised Alberto, he had, now he was one of the leaders of the United Left in Spain. At that time I didn't realise that he had an artificial leg. He assimilated it quite well. He lost his leg in a train accident as a child. But the duplicator was put in the passenger seat covered in a blanket. And to make us allow himself a little bit of leg room to move, he put his artificial leg on top. I didn't realise yet. I said, good girl, what's that? I didn't know. That artificial leg saved our life. Because as we were driving into Vittoria, we were stopped by the police. The armed cop came up, looked inside, suspiciously. I remember exactly the words he said, where have you come from? The driver said, as non-solently as you could, from Madrid. There must have been only a few seconds, but it seemed like hours that chap was looking into the car. Then suddenly his eyes fixed upon this artificial leg and he said, oh, okay, drive on. So we did. That's the story of the artificial leg. We got inside of this city, which was an armed camp. In the book I carried the report which I sent to the militant of that day. It was an enormous experience. Now these workers, not under the influence of the Stalinists or the reformers, set up their own representative committees, elected the Soviets. I think that's the only time in my life I can say that I attended a meeting with a Soviet in Victoria, of course, but where in Victoria? Where could you meet? Where could you have a meeting of several thousand people? It's only one place you could meet that was in a cathedral, in a church. Oh yes. We had our meetings and congresses and central committees and churches and monasteries. They're the only places that the police normally couldn't intervene. It's supposed to be not permitted. By that time, there were such cracks opening up in the church that very often the local priests were quite friendly or at least neutral. They would let you use their premises. This was a very important name. The Church of San Francisco was a big church. There were several thousand people inside that church. Men, women and children. This was the day before the general. It must have been on the second of May. Now, I know Spain very well. I know its people, I know their character. I love Spain, I love the Spanish people, I love their character. But they got one slight defect, you know. I don't take offence of what I say, if the Spanish government is present. They are rather noisy. Not as noisy as the Italians, however. But they are slightly. And normally a meeting of that character would be difficult, controlling that. People interrupting and shouting and demanding the right to speak. No, no, no, this was different. You could hear a pin drop. Absolute silence, absolute discipline. And from the platform, I've never heard such revolutionary speeches. Marvelous speeches, I wish that I had a tape record, I didn't have such a thing. These guys were not talking about wage increases or anything like that. They were talking about revolution and workers' power. The power belongs to the working class, we create all the wealth, we must take the power. People, everyone agreed. Men, women, old people and so on. Coloss, I remember this one woman stood up, ordinary working class housewrapping. She said, well, if I had to tell my children there's only dry bread to eat, I would tell them, eat your bread because we've got to win this strike, no matter what. That was the mood that existed. Coloss, a courageous mood of the working class. The following day there was demonstrations. The workers marched with great discipline in platoons from the factories in the outline districts to the centre of Victoria where there was like a cat and mouse game all day long. The cops would come hoping to beat people up, the workers would disperse, then they would reassemble and this game went on all day. Actually, the police were going crazy and that was evident. Now, at tea time we had to leave because we had another meeting in Pamplona. We assumed that the strike was finished. It was all over. There was another meeting held at the same church the following evening. At about six o'clock the police were there, but they allowed people to go into the church. They didn't stop people doing the church. When the church was absolutely full, I repeat, men, women and children, they surrounded the church and they lobbed tear gas and smoke canisters through the windows. People inside were terrified that there was an explosion. They could hear explosions. The gas canisters hit the floor and the whole building was full of smoke and tear gas. People couldn't breathe. People were suffocating. As the people struggled to get through the doors to get out of the church, the police opened fire with automatic weapons. They killed five people and wounded hundreds. It was a massacre. That event in itself would have been sufficient to call an all-out general strike through outspending. It caused an impact, a tremendous effect, but that call never came on the contrary. The Communist Party did its level best to conceal what was happening, to hide what was happening, to prevent any movement whatsoever. That was the general tactic. That was what was proceeding. The struggle continued despite the leaders trying to stop it. It continued. In January 1977, that was another turning point. Another turning point. I hope Anna doesn't mind if I mention something that affected her personally. In the university there was a young girl from a working-class family, Maria Luth, a beautiful young girl. Never been on the demonstrations, she went to Anna and said, Will you take me to the demonstration? This was quite close to Anna. She agreed, took this young girl to the demonstration. The police, of course, attacked viciously. By the way, the purpose of this demonstration was to protest the murder of another student. Arturo Reith was murdered shortly previous to this, the day before, as Anna reminds me. The police attacked with the usual vicious, and this is real vicious stuff. Even at that time in Spain it was supposed to be illegal to shoot a gas canister direct at somebody. It was to shoot it into the air, it falls down the gas, then does the work. This is a lethal weapon if it's aimed at somebody's head. In the chaos of the dispersal, Anna lost contact with this young girl. She didn't know anything about it. Subsequently she learned that a young girl had been killed on this demonstration. It was the same, Maria Luth. Some bastard policeman aimed directly at her head and fired at her, her head exploded. Killing this young girl. To this day the family worked, they still have ceremonies to mark this terrible event. What happened to that policeman? Nothing happened to him. The same as nothing happened to any of these torturers and murderers. For 40 years nothing has happened. And that's the great crime, that's the point I'm coming into. You see, that sadden, that tragic incident was in a way, it was over saddled by an even more, you could say, if it's possible to say, an even greater tragedy. In the Cair de Aertotcher in Madrid, central of Madrid, there was the office of Labour lawyers, they actually were members of the Communist Party, and they were defending workers that had got into difficulty with the law and so on and so forth. A gang of fascists turned up, armed fascists turned up, burst into the headquarters, lined up these lawyers against the war and shot five of them dead, and there was another worker who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I spoke to his brother, I interviewed him for the book. But that murder of the Aertotcher murders, it really caused, I'll never forget, that day I came down from the flat in Carabanchel and there was a man, his name was Felipe, he was from the Asturias, he was a porter, a caretaker, and he was cleaning the floor with his broom, primitive broom. I said, Felipe, have you heard the news? Now these porters are politically backward people, many of them work for the police as informers, this was known. I'll never forget, this man must have been an Andalutha, from the south anyway. I can see the look of absolute rage on his face, he picked up his broom as if he was a weapon. He said, if I could get my hands on those bastards, I would kill them. And this was general, there was a rage and explosive mood existed. One word from the Communist Party in particular, there would have been a generalist, it would have been the end of things I can assure you, there's no question of it. Yes, but that word never came. Santiago Carrillo, the leader of the Communist Party, would have been suroptist if he had allowed to return from exile and was inside Spain, although theoretically he was illegal, made statements in the press interview, interview the best, saying, we must support the government, we must be responsible, we must show them we're responsible. That was he said, those were his precise words. We must support the government at this time. This was the argument. In the funeral of the lawyers, which happened the next day, they don't waste any time in Spain with funerals. It turned into a mass demonstration, I don't know how many people are on the streets, how many, a million I can't imagine. A huge, huge demonstration, yes, but no slogans allowed, no chanting allowed, no flags, no banners, nothing. You walk in silence. So hundreds of thousands of workers had to file through the streets, choking on their anger, choking on, because the word came to the Communist Party. And there was a reason for that. Santiago Carrillo was not interested in what the workers thought about this. He was interested in the new man that had taken over the government, Adolfo Suarez, and the king, the king of Spain who was behind him. Now, of course, Spain had not been a monarchy since 1931, since they kicked out King Alfonso. Even under Franco, even the fascists didn't dare to restore, they didn't want to restore the monarchy. And Franco was quite happy holding power, so he didn't want a monarch either. But when he died, he appointed the grandson actually of the old king, although his son was still alive. So I won't bore you with monarchical niceties. But even from a monarchical point of view, Juan Carlos had no right to be the king of Spain. His father, who was in Portugal, should have been the king actually, but his father didn't get on with Franco. Franco, pay attention to what I'm saying, Franco named Juan Carlos as the king of Spain and his successor when he died. Now, listen carefully to what I'm about to say. That is the only legitimacy, the only legitimacy that the Spanish monarchy has ever had, that it was nominated by the dictator Franco. It has no other legitimacy, zero. There was never a referendum, it was never agreed, but it was imposed upon the Spanish people. How was it imposed? I will come to that in a moment. Adolfo Suarez, the new prime minister. Quite a smart man, I must say. He's not profound, but clever, smart, trickster, and so on. Who was Adolfo Suarez? Adolfo Suarez previously had been the general secretary of el Movimiento. The movement was the only political party in Franco's Bay, and he was the general secretary. That is his democratic credentials. Never fought against the dictatorship, never fought for democracy. His democratic record is nil, zero, zilch. And this is the man that Santiago Carrillo and Felipe Gonzárez, the leader of the Socialist Party, who by the way organized my first trip to Spain, but that's another matter. I'm ashamed to mention that. I'm only joking. Anyway, so that is the man that he wanted to do a deal with. And he did. They entered into discussions, particularly after this business in 1977. They entered into conversations in which Suarez was completely astonished. Here is this notorious communist from Moscow. This red, this revolution, this dangerous man. And he's smoking and talking quite naturally, like a friend that he's been friends all his life with Suarez. There's one detail that Suarez kept picked up on. This communist leader, I suppose, obviously he must be an atheist, was continually saying, thank God, God be praised. I said, thank God for this, thank God for that. He was trying to impress Suarez at how moderate he was. What a nice man he was. Not really a communist at all, which is true. He wasn't. Can you not hear me? Can you hear me now? I should have said so before. You shy or what? Can you hear me at the back? Yes, they can hear at the back. Can't you hear me on the front? They negotiated. And Suarez, what did Carillio want? He wanted the CP to be legalised. Full stop. The communist party must be legalised. Suarez said, well, you know that's rather difficult road, chap. A lot of people would be very hostile to that. There would have to be conditions. He said, what conditions are there? Well, first of all, accept the monarchy. Now you must understand. I remember, Anna will remember. Darryl will remember. At that time, nobody in Spain supported the monarchy. Nobody. It was anathema. Who ever heard of this? Absolutely. If there was one principle, one fundamental principle of the democratic movement, if you like, is that they were republicans, at least. That was a fact. Yes, yes. What was Carillio's? Yes, that's okay. What's the next point? Oh. That was a surprise. You must accept the national flag. Franco's flag. The flag of a million dead. Oh, yes, that's all right. I say, are you sure? Oh, yeah, that'll be okay. Yeah, that's okay. Don't worry about that. You must prohibit that the republican flag must not be seen in any communist public meeting. Yeah, don't worry. We'll take care of that. At this time, it was becoming a bit suspicious. I say, look, are you sure you can convince your comrades of this? Don't worry about my comrades. I'll take care of them. Which you did. All these things. A few other little points. No one has to be put on trial for crimes committed under the regime. Everything has to be forgiven and forgotten and amnestyd and all the rest of it. These questions must not be raised. Oh, yes. And the state apparatus must remain as it was. No generalist should be removed. No police chief is to be removed. They're all to be the same state apparatus. Yes. Santiago Carrillo agreed to all these things. Now, you would expect a certain amount of resistance, wouldn't you, from the comments? Santiago Carrillo was quite a... He knew. He knew his comrades. He knew his Stalinist party. He knew some people in this room. We've got the comrades Jim Brooks out the back. Perhaps we'll understand what I'm trying to say. That many of these people, I mean, someone like Carrillo, he's been in Moscow. He's a big man. He's the leader and so on. The argument will be this. Oh, yes. Don't worry, comrades. It's only a tactic. It's only a tactic, you know? I'll give this in public and we'll be all right. Just leave it to us. The leader's no best, you know? The workers would not be happy with me. They'd be very unhappy about it. Especially when they tried to stop strikes, which they did. They gave orders. No more strikes. No more calm things down and so on and so forth. There was resistance. There was resentment. But, at the end of the day, what are you supposed to do? As a disciplined, loyal communist, you're going to say, OK, yeah, the leader's no best. Leave it, leave it. And that's what occurred. Now, this was, the name of the book is not an accident. The Great Betrayal. This was the Great Betrayal. You can't think of any other name. I thought of other names. No, no, no, no, no. There's only one possible name. When you think of the tremendous sacrifices of people, people gave their lives in the fight for democracy. Never mind about socialism. And it was all thrown away. The signing of a bit of paper. Mike Currillo, and of course, there's no difference between him and Gonzalez. They're the same. Philippe Gonzalez was the leader of the sources party. Absolutely no different to that. What occurred? Now look, I think you realize I've been in this movement for many years. I first joined in this organization, that is to say, in, what's that say? You're lying. All right. You see I'll be disciplined. I joined this organization in 1960 when I was 16 years of age, when I was young and handsome and thin like you guys. You know what I mean? Dara will remember. Dara was I thin. There we are, you see. Dara says I was thin, I was thin. But what I'm saying is that in my life I've seen all kinds of situations. I've seen good situations. I've seen bad situations. I've seen victories, I've seen defeats. I've seen euphoria and I've seen despair. And we have to learn how to deal with those situations. You must not be carried away either by too much euphoria or by too much depression. We have to learn in the words of the great philosopher Spinoza, that Trotsky liked to quote neither to weep nor to laugh but to understand that's the question. Neither weep nor laugh but try to understand what is occurring. I've seen all kinds of situations but I'll tell you this. I've never in my life either before or since witnessed such colossal demoralisation as what I saw in 1978, 79, 80, when the rankard-file workers, communists and such, began to understand what was happening. Communist public meetings, they were big, they were loud. Communist party was legalised. That's all that Santiago Carrilla was interested in. When young people came with republican flags, they were beaten up, savagely beaten up by communist party stewards and the flags were confiscated or destroyed. When people saw this and they realised what was occurring, then there was a colossal collapse of morale, colossal demoralisation. People were leaving the party, in particular, also the sources party, left, right and centre, tearing up their cards. There were many tragic cases but I'll quote one that's a particularly tragic case. I said earlier, I pointed out to you, that Pamplona passed from being a bastion of Franco reaction in the Civil War to be a bastion of the red proletariat in the period which I'm describing. At that time we had, when the government joined us, his name was Raphael, Rapha is for short. He was an old man, I think he was probably in his 70s. Raphael had in his pocket the number one membership card of the sources party of Navarra and the number one membership card of the sources trade union in Navarra, the UGT. One day, he was also, yes, he was also the president of the Casa del Pueblo, that was like a place that workers would come to meet and discuss and to play chess or whatever, he was the president. He was a man with a long history. One day, without saying anything to us, he walked into the headquarters of the sources party, he took out his party card, placed it on the table, without saying a word, he turned around and walked out. He then went to the sources trade union, the UGT, took out his UGT card number one, placed it on the table and with great proletarian dignity turned around without saying a word and he walked out. Do you know what that means? You know what these things are, these are not scraps of paper. This was the man's whole life that he sacrificed and struggled and worked for all his life for decades facing repression and imprisonment and all the other horrors. Gone. Like that. Like Raphael, there were many cases. Thousands all over the space, people just left. Of course it collapsed. The movement collapsed, the strikes went down, the demonstrations went down and of course the opportunists, the careerists, of course they were in there having a few days. People were queuing up to join the sources party in particular the communist party also at that time but on an opportunist basis. Not people joining to struggle, to change society, people looking for a job, a parliamentary position, an MP, you know, I think you know the type. We've met them, haven't we? And that was the end of it really. They passed the constitution, it was put to a referendum, it was passed, of course. Yeah, why? Well because at that stage people could see no other alternative. That was the propaganda, either this or nothing. You want a dictatorship, you want freedom, you want to vote in elections, people said yes, I want to vote in elections. Yes, but that was the end of the communist party. They thought they were so smart, so clever, they were not. Incidentally, by doing what they did the pendulum in Spain swung sharply to the right, of course. Of course. It swung from far to the left to far to the right. And that expressed itself inevitably in the growth of reactionary forces. They did not purge the state to this day, that's the case. And what occurred? In February, what's the 23rd, no? 23rd of February 1981. I remember I was in our headquarters in Madrid. The executive was meeting in one room. The print shop workers were working to produce the newspaper. Clary that. One of them came in and said the parliament was meeting to elect a new government to appoint a new head of state. They came in and said there's shots being fired in the parliament. We gathered on the radio, the radio was silent. We thought, well, one of two things. Either it's a terrorist attack or it's a coup. We'll know in five minutes, we'll know soon enough. So we waited, there was still no news. It's a coup. So we cleaned all the stuff out of the centre, we scattered the safe addresses all over the mid and we agreed to meet again at the safe venue in the early hours of the morning. Now, I was firmly convinced at the time that the king himself was behind this coup. Juan Carlos was. I was convinced of it. I said so, I wrote articles to that effect. And yet, you see, at about in the early hours of the morning the king came on the screen of the television saying making very peculiar speech saying all units are to remain at their place and stay there until further orders. That's all he said. He didn't condemn the coup. He didn't condemn it because he was behind it. And yet, immediately the day, by the way there were mass demonstrations on the streets after that. But immediately Carrilio and Gonzalez came out to praise the king. He saved democracies, the savior of Spanish democracy. The complete opposite of the truth. And for 40 years these lies have been maintained. 40 years people have been fed on these lies in Spain and internationally. Except that now, at last, things are beginning to emerge. Things are beginning to emerge which proved conclusively what I said at the time. That Juan Carlos was behind this coup. There are no two ways about it. His private secretary published his memoir shortly before he died. He maintained silence all these years. He spilt the beans. And it's quite the damning stuff, but I haven't got time to read it if it's in the book. Now, we've got an iron shaman here tonight. I'm pleased to see. Tovages Glyniewski. You can't see this, but he's kicking me under the table. I will report you to the control commission. But no, seriously. We must draw the threads together. You see, history for us is not something that's meaningless. Like these idiots in the universe, these postmodernist morons. They say that history has no meaning. History has a meaning. And you know it was the American philosopher, Santa Ana, who said, he who does not learn from history will forever be doomed to repeat it. Commonly we don't want to repeat history. We must not repeat history. And therefore it is an obligation on our shoulders to study carefully the history, particularly of revolutions and the class struggle of victory and of defeat. That's the purpose of this. Now, to this very day, the people of Spain are paying the bill for this betrayal. Look what's happening in Catalonia now. Part of the betrayal was the refusal to accept the right or self-determination of the Catalans and the Basch. Now you see the consequence. It's like civil war. That means, of course, that the old monsters have not been laid to rest. They tried to bury it. They tried to make people forget it, but people do not forget. How can people forget? When the old judges, the old generals, the old bureaucrats are still in their place, as they were before, just decorated with a little bit of a pseudo-fassade so-called democracy. The former torturers have walked in the streets to this day. There was a man I remember. This person had never met him, fortunately. Anna will remember him well. Also, he didn't meet him. Did he, when he was in the prison? No, he didn't meet him in the dungeons. Called Billy the Kid. Billy El Nino. Sounds like a joke. It's no joke. This man was a vicious torturer and sadist who delighted in inflicting pain to the nth degree on his victims. This man was never prosecuted for his crimes because he was not allowed. You were not allowed. Look, even in South Africa, where you had a miserable betrayal took place also, but even there, you had the so-called truth, what's it called? Truth commissions. People are supposed to tell the truth. In Spain, you try and tell the truth about the past. You go to jail. It's a criminal offence. People have gone to jail for this, for trying to tell the truth. Billy El Nino was not only not arrested, not only imprisoned. He was promoted. He just had his pension increased and the attempts by his victims to bring this man to the trial have been thrown out of court. Not allowed by this wonderful democratic constitution of ours. By the democratic transition. Now I want to finish one on a positive note. I'm a Marxist and therefore positive and optimistic by nature. Marxism does not allow us to be the luxury of being pessimists. Are there any circumstances? You see, there's a new generation now in Spain. There's a new generation coming forth. It reminds me in a way, I must give this little incident, in 1940, when Hitler's army marched into Paris. There was a conversation between a German officer and a French officer. The defeated French. German officer, of course, was arrogant and swaggering and so on. And the French officer said, yes, my friend, yes, it's true. The wheel of history has turned. It will turn again, he said. It will turn again. And it did, of course. It did turn again. It was a revolution. We had the experience. We've had 40 years of deceit and a terrible cover-up, if you like. But the wheel of history has turned. Now in Spain you see huge movements of the women on the 8th of March. Colossal mass demonstrations. Marvelous. Movements of the pensioners, which I certainly didn't expect that. And on these mass demonstrations of pensioners against pensioners, the old faces, people that were active at that time would come back to life and are also joining the struggle. But above all it's the youth. The youth of Spain are no longer prepared to live with a lie. They want the truth. They demand the truth. That's why this colossal movement is developing, to dig up the corpses, to discover where people have been killed and to tell the truth about this monstrosity. In the context that our organisation has a role to play and I would like to think in a modest way, in a small modest way that this book which I have written, but it's not just me, it's other comments and many other comments. This is our, what we saw, what we lived through and in writing this book I can say that my intention was I don't know whether I succeeded. I was intending that anyone who reads this book be a dry narrative of the facts should have feel as if they've lived through these events and experiences themselves. It was, Cymru, a marvellous revolution to this day I'm proud of the fact that I had the honour of living through these great events and witnessing the potential of our class. That memory will still stay with me till the day I die and above all we must struggle and ensure that that unfinished revolution because that's what it was will eventually be carried to a successful conclusion. Cymru, that depends on one thing and one thing alone. Our ability to build the IMT, to build our forces of revolutionary Marxism in Britain, in Spain and on a world scale Cymru, forward to the victory of the international socialist revolution.