‘Madrid’s barricades are at the end of our street’; Wales and Fascism in Historical Context

An ingenious recent novel by a young Welsh writer is set in the bleak winter of 1944-45. Some time before the action begins, the adult males of a farming valley on the Anglo-Welsh borderlands have committed themselves at all costs to resisting any invasion of Wales by the Nazis. So determined are they on this course that they keep the pact secret even from their womenfolk. On the opening morning of the drama the latter wake to find themselves abandoned, and with the enemy (literally) at their gates. Indeed, the novel’s title does not refer to the men – who, the reader subconsciously assumes, have gone to join up with the Welsh maquis somewhere in Eryri – but rather to the fraught, confusing, and ultimately tragic fate of the girls they’ve left behind them.^[1]

 

This week on Click on Wales For decades Plaid Cymru have stood accused of sympathising with Fascism during the 1930s. The publication of Richard Wyn Jones’s book on ‘Welsh Nationalism and the Accusation of Fascism’ in English earlier this year challenged the charges against Plaid. Throughout this week Click on Wales will be examining this debate with a series of essays culminating in a free event on Wednesday evening. Fascists! Fascists? Plaid Cymru and the charges of extremism will take place on October the 1st in Conference room 24 at Ty Hywel, National Assembly for Wales. Limited places are still available. Please visit our Eventbrite page to book.

In the decade leading up to this fictional catastrophe, the real historical Wales of the 1930s was not confronted by a ruthless Fascist invader, but was certainly oppressed by the Great Depression, the Means Test, and what many regarded as a proto-fascist government intent on appeasing Nazi Germany. Along with London’s East End, greater Glasgow, and parts of middle and northern England, the South Wales mining valleys enthusiastically embraced the notion of a popular front against Fascism. In Swansea, Tonypandy, and one or two other townships, ‘bourgeois’ supporters of Oswald Mosley’s B.U.F. organised public meetings. Several riots resulted. In Cardiff, members of William Joyce’s National Socialist League (aka ‘Brownshirts’) – an anti-Jewish splinter-group which made Mosley seem moderate – attempted by force to board dockbound vessels on behalf of the Franco government, which claimed to own them.^[2] No less a figure than Aneurin Bevan, MP for Ebbw Vale, gave serious attention to organising a secret army; a kind of suitably subterranean ‘miners’ brigade’ (or maquis) which might act to stiffen anti-fascist ‘resistance’ amongst the public at large. But the locus classicus of Wales’s struggle against ‘International Fascism’ was the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).^[3]  Fervent partisanship on both sides gave birth to one of the most enduring legends of our history: that of a politically-conscious and conscientious Wales which played an unique role in the history of ‘anti-fascism’ in the British Isles.^[4] 

In our close neighbour, the Irish Free State – where, as in Wales, a majority labouring underclass was dominated by a property-owning minority – matters in this respect were radically different. Across that narrow if stormy sea, people were not fashed about Fascism but rather haunted by the spectre of socialism. So manifest was the grand peur irlandais that Professor Hogan’s pamphlet Could Ireland Go Communist? sold out in numerous reprintings. The ‘Irish Christian Front’ (as its name suggests, designed as an antidote to the ‘Popular Front’) emerged as a major bi-partisan force. Some Catholic prelates gave their support to General O’Duffy’s volunteer brigade bound for Spain to fight for Franco in 1936. Above all, O’Duffy’s organisation, the Blueshirts (aka ‘Army Comrades Association’) which claimed nearly 50,000 members, became the largest Fascist party in Europe which was not actually in government.^[5]

Indeed, for some years the Toiseach himself, Eamon de Valera, was distinctly nervous about a possible Blueshirt coup d’etat. Many feared a relapse into the civil war situation of 1922-23, a bitter and often atrocious affair in which O’Duffy and de Valera had been on opposing sides, and which still goes some way to defining political allegiances in contemporary Ireland. As often risibly remarked in pub conversations, the Free State exercised its freedom most notably in 1939, by refusing to stand up to the Nazis, opting to announce ‘The Emergency’ rather than declare ‘The War’. In a deeply ironic development, Irish Catholics thus found themselves in a murky territory, not far from that occupied by British Communists, who likewise – though in their case acting on the orders of Hitler’s ally, Stalin – rejected the ‘imperialist war’ of a ‘plutocratic’ ruling class.^[6]

At the same time, a prominent Welsh Catholic was reacting to the war  not altogether unlike a loyal Stalinist, and in coincidental alignment with the Dublin government. Saunders Lewis, co-founder and President of Plaid Cymru, whom many regarded as its soul and conscience, exhorted his compatriots to stand aside from the war against Germany. Lewis was no blanket ‘bleeding-heart’ pacifist – though many of his fellow-countrymen conformed to some such description. He had fought in the seemingly endless trenches of the apparently endless ‘Great War’ of 1914-18. Yet it was not (mainly) this experience which moved him to call on the Welsh people to resist conscription and all that smacked of belligerency and militarism. His inspiration was the inner light of independence from England, the transcendant need to establish a palpable zone of difference, even if more ontological than physical, between Wales and Westminster.

The stand taken by Lewis in 1939 was the occasion of a painful upheaval in the ranks of his party.^[7] The decade leading to the war of 1939 had seen many people of a liberal-socialist persuasion (including veteran Plaid activists) understandably tempted by the severe material plight of the working masses to flirt with ‘popular front’ and ‘anti-fascist’ solutions. In 1936, Lewis and two colleagues had procured unprecedented attention for the party by their headline-grabbing action against the London government’s construction of a RAF training school at Penyberth. The occasion intensified public anxieties about rearmament; but more significantly – arguably for the first time – excited widespread interest outside Wales in the issue of the Welsh language’s status and future. Serving their consequent heavy term in Wormwood Scrubs endowed ‘Y Tri’ with a halo (or at least a half-halo) of martyrdom.

Yet paradoxically, during the 1930s – at least in Lewis’s case – the half-halo came to be cancelled out by one diabolical horn. Lewis’s support for the dictatorships inaugurated first by Portugal’s Salazar and then Spain’s Franco became a subject of concern to Plaid members and voters. The deeply traditional, even reactionary, character of Lewis’s thinking was shared by close colleagues like Ambrose Bebb and J. D. Daniel. But only up to a point. Certainly, all three contemplated an utopian Wales of a pre-industrial society free from notions of ‘class war’. Theirs was an ethnocentric version of the rural idyll widely (even ubiquitously) cultivated in the decade following the industrially-driven mutual massacre of the Western Front. Moreover, Bebb and Daniel (like Lewis) firmly believed the Welsh language to be the natural – even indispensable – medium of communality, empathy, and co-operative action in our tiny nation.

However, Lewis’s utopia had historical and intellectual sources which differed significantly from those of his closest collaborators. Where the others envisaged a peculiarly pan-Celtic future with an essential ethnic-linguistic dimension, Lewis looked more broadly, to the history of Christian – in crucial aspects specifically Catholic – Europe. Whilst all three admired French civilization and were au fait with its political culture, Lewis’s wider and deeper vision derived from the radically contrasting attitudes of the reactionary Pope, Pius IX (1846-78) and his comparatively liberal successor, Leo XIII (1878-1903). He accepted the former’s dire warnings against socialism in all its forms, but he also embraced Pope Leo’s notions of a consensual, close-knit, egalitarian society inspired by the Sermon on the Mount. Yet unlike de Valera and O’Duffy – both of whom were in some ways frustrated priests – Lewis was in no wise a clericalist creature. His ideal state was not a theocracy, but rather one derived from the medieval (Thomist) conception of secular civic virtue, in the established constitutional environment of Christian Democracy.^[8] Along with others who had spent time in France with the (at least immediate) aim of defending in arms its democratic independence, Lewis was an avowed francophile. Like Bebb, he acquired familiarity with the writings of Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras and other fin de siècle political writers. But, again diverging from the others, the range of Lewis’s political mind was much more ample, embracing a pan-Europeanism arguably closer to the world of Monnet than that of Maurras.

For the clear majority of Lewis’s compatriots, and significant elements of his own party, the exotic ingredients of this compound hardly mattered in themselves. When put to the taste, the recipe smacked unpleasantly of nothing Welsh – or even British – but rather of foreign Fascism. That test came in 1943, when Saunders Lewis was selected by party members to fight the parliamentary seat for the University of Wales. This event, coming as it did at a time when the fate of all Europeans hung in the balance, the moment of greatest fear and greatest hope, forced to the surface of Welsh politics a surge of resentments, fears and suspicions. More to the point, this magma of anxieties had potent agglutinating features. Only a year earlier, a well-known pacifist minister, Gwilym Davies, had published a devastating assertion of Plaid’s fascist sympathies.^[9] Now, acting against the mainstream of his previous political life, Professor W. J. Gruffyd , a greatly influential Plaid mandarin, decided to challenge his party’s decision and accepted the Liberal Party’s offer to stand against Lewis in the by-election.

Gruffydd’s own reasons were rooted in the forbiddingly immovable base of Welsh prejudice against Roman Catholicism. This phenomenon was the grand-daddy of Welsh grands peurs, notably spawning the consciously contemptuous phrase which not too long ago was used to describe members of that particular Christian denomination: ‘Eglwys Babbyddol’.^[10] Hardly less than their Elizabethan era ancestors, a majority of Wales’s citizens four centuries later looked upon Catholics as a sort of enemy within. This (by the 1930s) largely unspoken but nonetheless real concern was of course, an insidious product of the Protestant Reformation. The conflictual heritage of this profound sixteenth-century event was hugely reinforced in Wales by the Nonconformist revolution of the mid-1700s. Then, a century later, its negative power was suddenly and unexpectedly revived by the arrival of thousands of economic migrants from Catholic Ireland. In terms of modern history, the ‘Great Hunger’ of the 1840s, Ireland’s most devastating event, coincided with ‘the Industrial Revolution’, Wales’s most dynamic phase. Finally, from the 1880s, anti-papism gained a late access of intensity through the growing support of Welsh socialists for its fundamental aversions. This extraordinary coincidence of antipathy lay behind Plaid’s crise de conscience of 1939-43.

At the time of the 1943 election, W. J Gruffyd – one of Wales’s leading intellectuals, founder of the career-molding scholarly journal Y Llenor – was renowned for his almost unrestrained hatred of the Romish religion, often paraded as a patriotic badge.^[11] Given the explicitly papist proclivities of his recent colleague and leader, Gruffydd’s one-issue platform was all too easily supplemented by a complementary agendum. It was widely – and this time, not unreasonably – believed that an existential link bound Catholicism tightly amongst the fasces, the nominative symbol of Italian fascism. During the Spanish War, the Catholic Church in Wales was frequently accused of proselytising not simply in search of conversions but also in aid of potential political tyranny. Despite the fact that a only a tiny minority of Catholics in Wales was aware of Saunders Lewis’s existence, leave alone his public significance, hundreds of non-Catholic clerics – Church in Wales as well as Nonconformists – were driven to denounce the ‘Franco-Fascist’ side more because of its explicit Catholicism than its alleged Fascism.^[12]

Thus Gruffydd’s campaign of 1943 tapped (advertently or otherwise) from the ancient well of anti-papism into the fresher and larger pool of anti-fascism. From this broader and fuller perspective, Lewis and his closest associates could be seen as little short of traitors to the true Welsh way of life. And in this unexpected manner, an ideological bloc, wider in its remit than the ‘People’s Front’ itself, was erected across Plaid’s – and, in particular, Lewis’s – progress. In the minds of members of the broad Left-Liberal consensus, who saw Mussolini’s State as a by-product of Rome, or had noted the Catholic background of (e.g.) Messrs Hitler and Goebbels, the charge of ‘Fascism!’ seemed both logical and appropriate. Morever, as everybody knows, when (to use a necessary euphemism) mud is hurled at the palimpsest wall of History, at least a residue is inclined to stick.

This ideological crisis, which had a resonance far wider than Plaid Cymru (and Welsh Nationalism generally) forms the dialectical crux of Professor Jones’s remarkable exercise in historical polemic. His tour-de-force of revisionist writing, inevitably and consciously controversial, yet as logically rigorous and thoroughly-grounded as any master-barrister’s brief, is unique in professional Welsh historiography. It has even attracted the vitriolic disapproval of one Welsh intellectual exiled in Australia, who lays claim to the extraordinary achievement of never having succumbed to socialism.^[13] Jones’s basic objective was to retrace the original accusation of Plaid’s alleged tendency to Fascism to its original 1930s context and sources. This procedure fairly establishes it as a convenient tactic of a ‘popular front’ of the party’s democratic rivals. In its day this was perhaps inevitable and even understandable: but its continual and cynically opportunistic revival since the effective extinction of Fascism in 1945 is another matter. As Richard Wyn Jones’s strikingly fresh perspective demonstrates, the canard of a ‘Fascist Plaid’ tells us much more about the need to preserve the bankrupt gerontocracy of ‘Labour Wales’ than it does about Welsh Nationalism or about Saunders Lewis

For the present writer, Dr Tim Williams’s intervention has spotlighted the kangaroo in the room of the ‘Plaid and Fascism’ debate. What – we must now ask – is the opinion of historical scholarship on the matter? The short answer (so far as the present writer’s search extends) is that the subject has an impressive absence of profile in our historiography. Most general approaches to modern Welsh history are not moved enough to spare it a mention.^[14] An objective observer might regard this as being produced by embarrassment over such a shabby episode in Wales’s political history. The problem here is that (as Jones demonstrates) it has resembled a basso ostinato more than a one-off obligato in the ongoing concert of Welsh politics. Perhaps our historians have a genuine unconcern about the matter; even a certain ingenuousness cannot be entirely dismissed. In any or all of these cases, the near-silence of university libraries adds up to a noisy endorsement of Richard Wyn Jones’s conclusions. There are – nonetheless – four books which command our attention. These are commented in inverse order of relevance and importance.

Any reader of the monumental monograph history of ‘The Fed’ by Dai Smith and Hywel Francis cannot avoid concluding that Fascism was a serious and imminent threat to personal freedom in inter-war south Wales. Indeed in this book, Wales seems to have been the birthplace of ‘premature anti-fascism’ – as it post-maturely became known. Even in the 1920s, miners’ leaders talked in military terms (to men who had fairly recently been in uniform) about armed defence against police-backed strikebreaking. In the immediate wake of Hitler’s access to power, ‘activists in the coalfields … began to view their localised preoccupations in international terms’. As noted above, a paramilitary project to counter Fascism was proposed by Bevan and others as early as the spring of 1933. Thus, it seems, anti-fascism came to Wales almost before Fascism itself, when we recall that Mosley’s B.U.F. was formed in October 1932, and that Hitler took power in Germany in January, 1933. The Fed also devotes much space to inter-factional negotiations for the formation of an anti-fascist front – a notion which dominated left politics, possibly even before a black shirt or an armband was ever spotted in Wales. But not a word is ventured in The Fed about a covert Fascist penetration of Plaid.^[15]

In what has become the standard survey, John Davies’s History of Wales, close attention is paid to the 1943 by-election. But the contextual furore over Plaid’s ‘Fascism’ fails to attract the author’s notice. In his view (surely correct) it was ‘the passions aroused by the challenge of fascism in mainland Europe’, much more than any domestic version, which marked Wales’s history in the 1930s. True to his word, he simply ignores the latter phenomenon. But also, in a paragraph insisting on the foreground impact of the Spanish Civil War in Wales, he neglects to mention the roles of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Spanish Catholic Church as Franco’s allies.^[16]

D. G. Evans’s textbook contains the most concise and effective treatment of this essay’s main concern. Its description of the B.U.F.’s presence in Wales contains detail not available elsewhere. It reveals (for example) that the party claimed to have branches in no fewer than seven south Wales townships. The author has also unearthed the ephemeral success in Cardiff of a Mosleyite competitor to the (Labour) Trades Councils. For all this, ‘hardly any [Welsh] Fascists were interned in 1940, apart from one Pembrokeshire farmer and his daughter’. On the key issue too, Evans is concise and definitive: ‘Plaid was frequently accused of leaning towards Fascism …Lewis was alsounfairly accused of showing sympathy for Mussolini’s corporate state…’^[17]

By far the most extensive (ditto repetitive) treatment of our main theme occupies more than five pages in G.A. Williams’s When Was Wales? A lifelong communist who nevertheless joined Plaid Cymru in the course of writing his book, Gwyn Alf was in an agonising ferment of mind over its alleged 1930s fascist-flirting.^[18] He beats the bushes of the period’s cultural production, being struck by ‘the degree to which the rival European sectarianisms commandeered the world of Welsh-language writing’: but adding specifically that ‘writing in Welsh was suddenly invaded by Europe and by a particular, right-wing, traditionalist and often Catholic Europe’. Despite inbred ideological disastes for both Catholicism and Nationalism, Williams cannot disguise a certain admiration for Saunders Lewis himself. For all this, whilst avoiding explicit endorsement of the ‘pro-fascist’ charge, his cogitations force him finally to observe that

In view of what happened in Europe at the time, not least in Brittany, to its Nationalists, its Communists, and to plenty of people who were neither, it was as well for Wales that there was an English Channel in 1940.^[19]

The implications of this dark remark may be spelled out. Wales’s greatest twentieth-century historian – at the time, an active Nationalist – suspected that in circumstances approximating to the plot of Owen Sheers’s Resistance, Welsh Nationalists might well have become Quislings, just as so many (Catholic) Breton Nationalists actually did.^[20]

A final question cannot be evaded: what was ‘Fascism’? Why does this defunct mode of political activity, even colder in its grave than Soviet Communism, still have the incantatory power to blacken the reputations not only of certain personages of our past, but even of contemporary politicians (pace Mr. N. Farage!). Modes of discourse about violent political change, class war, expropriation of property, proscription and elimination of dissidents, all in the context of revolutions of both Left and Right, became ubiquitous in the interwar decades. It was a fearful era, when the two competing monsters of Communism and Fascism – a ferocious fight to the death between Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops – dominated public consciousness and inspired fear of civil war and/or class war across Europe’s national boundaries. Any fourteen-year-old today can point out the differences between the two creatures just metaphorically denominated. However, they may also have been taught that both belonged to the same genus; that is, they shared a perceptible number of genes. In 1936, year of the Spanish Civil War, the great majority of politically-conscious Europeans were convinced that Communism and Fascism were as opposed as the Minotaur and the Matador, endorsing an irreconcilable and violently antipathetic antithesis about the future of humanity. But when examined in terms of historical evolution, as well as political practice, these equally frightening, totalising phenomena are found to be strongly interrelated.^[21]

To understand Fascism we need to trace its origins. This is an appropriately positivist procedure, because we must now re-locate to the nineteenth century; to the dizzy culminating years of European Romanticism; to be precise, to 1848. This was the year of revolutions, spreading over Europe’s face like an infectious rumour on Facebook. Even in London, only the happenstance of a day of heavy rain thwarted a long-planned Chartist insurrection. Elsewhere, rusting iron crowns and noble rumps trembled as barricades and rockets went up. Crucially, it was the moment when the idea of freedom ceased to be indissolubly linked to the individual – whether peasants or middling sorts, liberated by the French Revolution (1789) from feudal dues and clerical charges – and was finally transferred to The Nation; that is, to the collective destiny of a (self-perceived) unique community. These communities had defining, exclusive characteristics which were historical, geographical, and ethno-linguistic. Thus, in Paris, Vienna, Dresden, Budapest and even Rome the mortmain of old regimes was ended and a now-mature capitalist middle class – led by representative intellectuals and artists – succeeded to power. Thus, ‘Fraternity’ became the primary key to political progress, whilst ‘Equality’ and ‘Liberty’ took less equal and less libertarian roles; both, over time, becoming subsumed in and subordinated to the national will-to-power. Freedom now meant national fulfilment. Alex Salmond, like Vladimir Putin, is a long-lost son of 1848.

Gwlad! Gwlad! Plediol wyf i’m Gwlad!

But even whilst acknowledging this, we hear the discordant voice of another revolutionary stream, sounding underneath the noise of populist revolution and the clamorous cries of infant nations. That same year, two seriously unrepresentative German socialists, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published The Communist Manifesto, summoning the working class (if not yet the class struggle) onto the stage of progressive politics. In so doing, they indelibly characterized nationalism as false consciousness, not only misguided and misleading but also inimical to human progress. The outcome was that by the 1930s, nationalism and communism were coming to be seen as eternal enemies, and their opposed aspirations had local habitations and names; Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany on the one hand, Communist Russia on the other. On cinema screens all over the western world, increasingly famous (or notorious) faces, places, flags, salutes, parades, marches and all manner of semiotics were diurnally displayed. It was a concentrated, mutually-exclusive, no-holds-barred competition between Coca and Pepsi.

A distinguished American historian once divided his profession into those who stressed the differences between political and social groups in any given era or location (‘Splitters’) and those who were more impressed by the similarities (‘Lumpers’).^[22] One present-day cyberspace ‘Splitter’ has attempted to annihilate all diachronic and pragmatic differences by issuing an online decalogue – actually, fourteen rather than ten commandments – of Fascist uniqueness. However, when scrutinized in comparative context not a single one of the features described is more pervasively characteristic of Fascist than of Communist regimes.^[23] Here, the present writer is not proposing that Fascism and Communism were identical. (Such an interpretation would be excessively Lumperproletarian.) Rather, it is argued that they were branches of totalitarianism which grew from common historical roots.^[24]

Several French writers admired by 1930s Plaid leaders, and often regarded as precursors of Fascism, actually considered themselves to be anarchists or socialists rather than nationalists.^[25] The binary discourse of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ itself did not come into common use until upheavals in Russia and Italy in 1917-22 created the first Marxist and Fascist governments. Communism and Fascism had far more in common than advocates of either side dared to contemplate. Indeed, in the last analysis, only one inalterable element divided them: their national-geographic origins and affiliations. Both nurtured socially-conscious elements in scripture and practice; both were powerfully concerned with dirigiste economic planning as a way out of the giddily destructive capitalist cycle; both were obsessed with theatrical display and pageant; both revelled in their contributions to the arts and sports of peace; and both tended irresistibly towards a horizon dominated by a war for survival – eventually, a war of extermination.

In early 1930s Britain, the intimate overlap of ‘Communist’ and ‘Fascist’ notions of progress is vividly illustrated by the experience of the ‘New Party’ founded by Oswald Mosley to advance his radical ideas on economic reform. This, of course, was the period of acute disillusionment with the Labour leadership’s ‘betrayal’ in forming a National Government. In the brief period which intervened between this event in March 1931 and the establishment of the B.U.F. in October 1932, a spectrum of dissident Marxists shared a tendency towards Mosley’s platform. These included six Labour M.P.s (including John Strachey), an equal number of  I.L.P. stalwarts, and the ex-T.U.C. General Secretary, A.J. Cook. Even Aneurin Bevan – within a remarkably short interval the hammer of Fascism in Wales – helped to draft the ‘Emergency Programme’ which later (mutatis mutandis) became the Mosley blueprint for a Fascist Britain.^[26] Somewhat in contrast, neither Saunders Lewis, nor any other Welsh Nationalist of note, evinced a glimmer of interest in this or later manifestations of Mosleyism.^[27]

Evidence suggests that Germans generally did not welcome war in 1939 any more than did Saunders Lewis or the vast majority of Britons. Nonetheless, the Third Reich had given the former back their national pride. For good measure they (or rather, the complaisant ‘Aryan’ majority) also got full employment, improved wage-rates, a raft of public amenities, and subsidised summer holidays on Baltic beaches. Conversely, those who chanted ‘Fascism means War!’ in the 1930s had conveniently forgotten that the Soviet Union was born not – like the Nazi regime – via democratic elections, but on the contrary by means of violent overthrow of an apprentice democracy.^[28] Furthermore, it was baptised in the blood of atrocious civil war and went to school in the fire of its unprovoked attack on Poland. At the very moment (in 1939) when observers believed them to have reached a climax of mutual loathing, Nazi Germany and the USSR became allies. Both sides immediately issued enthusiastic appraisals of the others’ achievements, to the extent of welcoming them as ‘comrades’ in political belief as well as in the forthcoming war. The vast majority of contemporaries found this event startling. Millions were profoundly shocked. But war – as the sages say – is the acid test of both nation and truth.