Word: nelsons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first thing one notices about the 74-year-old Nelson is the gentle but active physical presence of a kindly man. Though genuine, this appearance seems somewhat incongruous after one looks a moment longer and notices the long scar, left by a fascist bullet, which runs down his neck. An activist in the American Communist Party for 30 years, Nelson is, above all else, a Marxist and a fighter. These two characteristics made it almost inevitable that Nelson would join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and go to Spain...
...Nelson arrived in Spain in February 1937 and fought for more than a year until the International Brigades were sent home by the republicans in 1938. In Spain, he served as the brigade's second-in-command, the political commissar. But only a small part of his career as a Marxist actively seeking change was spent in Spain. Born in Yugoslavia in 1904, Nelson emigrated to the U.S. and became a radical worker in the 1920s, soon joining the Communist Party and becoming embroiled in the battles of the American left. As a party member, Nelson agitated for unions, civil...
About 3300 Americans (most of whom were party members, Nelson says) went to aid the republicans. The volunteers, all young, single men, left the U.S. with passports marked "Not Valid for Spain," because of the U.S. neutralist policy...
When they got where they were not supposed to be, "they had to storm the fortresses" for many of their weapons, Nelson says. He adds that the bravery "was the kind you can only visualize in the Hollywood movies." Hitler sent German tank and aircraft divisions which technologically outdistanced the republican forces, enabling the fascists to bomb Guernica, Madrid and other large population centers in republican control...
Beyond the military actions, political questions about the Civil War have split leftists. In Homage to Catalonia. Orwell claims the Communists rejected the opportunity for socialist revolution, and instead allied with the bourgeois classes against the anarchists and lost the support of the peasants. Nelson calls Orwell's book the worst work on the civil war any says. "Orwell gave a distorted view of what the forces were in Spain. He expected socialist revolution. Actually the struggle in Spain was to defeat fascism and save the Republic...