Neocons' Weird Love for the Spanish Civil War

Matthew Pennekamp

Politics, Europe

The right-wing hawks' favorite communist guerrillas.

Sometimes when the very old die, it baffles the mind to recall how their lives spanned contrasting ages. Harriet Tubman, whose visage we now know will grace our legal tender, lived until the year after the sinking of the Titanic. Madame Chiang’s life touched three centuries, and that old curmudgeon George Kennan survived long enough to see the advent of the flip phone. So when Del Berg, the last remaining American veteran of the Spanish Civil War’s Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died in March at the age of one hundred, John McCain found cause for graciousness, writing in the New York Times of Berg and his comrades-in-arms, “[They] believed they were freedom fighters first, sacrificing life and limb in a country they knew little about. . . . You might consider them romantics, fighting in a doomed cause for something greater than their self-interest.”

One can almost picture McCain trying to sneak mention of “Iraq” past the Times opinion editor, for there has been a long-standing fascination among neoconservatives with the Spanish Civil War and its bunting of moral absolutism. This, for instance, was not the first time McCain has paid his own version of homage to the Catalonia that Berg knew so well. The title of his book Worth the Fighting For is cribbed from the last words uttered by Robert Jordan, Hemingway’s iron-ribbed protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and reminiscent of those put to paper by George Orwell after disembarking at Barcelona: “I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.” His friend and Senate colleague, Joseph Lieberman, went further in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute, telling the neocon mothership in 2007 (while sharing the dais with a nodding McCain) that Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia should be viewed in the same ominous light as the fascist flare of forewarning sent up from capsizing 1930s Spain.