What the Spanish Civil War Can Teach Us About Ukraine

A forgotten John McCain tribute to Delmer Berg resonates today as reminder of the value in acting on our ideals.

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Last week, President Joe Biden posthumously awarded John McCain a Presidential Medal of Freedom, citing his service in Vietnam and long political career. But with the war in Ukraine settling into a brutal war of attrition, there is a forgotten John McCain op-ed that deserves our attention more than his Medal of Freedom.

When he was running for re-election to the Senate in 2016, McCain wrote a piece that he had to know in advance would be hard to swallow for Arizona voters. They had, after all, first elected him to the Senate in 1986 as the successor to conservative icon Barry Goldwater. McCain’s op-ed, which appeared in The New York Times, was a salute to Delmer Berg, who at his death a month earlier was thought to be the last living American to fight on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. 

Berg’s left-wing politics (he was a Communist most of his life) were not McCain’s, as he made clear in his essay. His tribute to Berg was based on his admiration for the “courage and sacrifice” Berg showed defending a cause he believed in.

What makes McCain’s forgotten essay particularly timely today is the news of American volunteers fighting with Ukrainian forces in that country’s battle with Russia. We know little about the vets (at least two of whom have been captured), but we can imagine the courage it took for them to go into a war zone and fight alongside men they had never known before.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    Another great account of the Spanish Civil war is George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia". He too fought for the Loyalists.

    Orwell's non-fiction, IMHO is every bit as good as his fiction.

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  2. Robert Hyde

    Both sides in the Spanish Civil War were awful. Both abandoned democracy and a Loyalist victory would almost certainly have led to a Communist Spain.
    But the parallel drawn in the article does have some relevance, however, it's solely military. The Loyalists had some small victories against the Nationalists, notably repulsing Franco from Madrid early in the war. But the war was a slow, grinding, conquest by Franco on all fronts.
    This seems to be the military pattern in Ukraine. Putin is winning, and, short of direct military intervention by NATO, he will win. Like Franco, Putin cares not at all about the brutal cost of war, he just wants to get the job done. Unless the Ukrainians can have a sustained set of victories against Putin, he will win, and it is up to him to decide what "victory" means.
    Our aid can slow him down, perhaps limit his goals, but he will not give an inch of the territory he's conquered.

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  3. Duane Truitt

    This essay is senseless. There is zero in common between the Spanish Civil War - you know, a civil war - and an invasion of one state of the state next door. None, zip, nada.

    There was not just one guy, Berg, who was a communist. The entirety of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was a communist front, organized by the Communist Party of the USA, which sought to overthrow our constitutional democratic republic, and supported by Stalin, brutal dictator of the Soviet Union responsible for vastly more human deaths and imprisonments than was Hitler.

    There were no "good guys" in the Spanish Civil War, and the Americans who volunteered were certainly not good guys, as they were fighting for the most murderous brutal dictator in all world history, in his attempt to fight with another brutal dictator for domination of Spain.

    I was not aware of McCain's tribute to Berg, but reading it now, it was clearly improper and is a stain on McCain's legacy. There was no honor whatsoever on Berg's part.

    Ukraine - why would you even besmirch Ukraine with a reference to either fascists or communists? What an insult. That's ludicrous.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Phil H

      It's impossible to know what would have happened had the Loyalists won. What is known is that they were viciously anti-clerical, killing Spanish priests and religious. That does not give me assurance that they would have been better than Franco. As you say, there were no "good guys".

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    2. Brian

      "This essay is senseless. There is zero in common between the Spanish Civil War - you know, a civil war - and an invasion of one state of the state next door. None, zip, nada."
      I don't know about nothing, it wasn't so long ago that Ukraine was part of the same state as Russia, just as Taiwan was of China (albeit, longer ago). In any event, both of these nations view what the West recognizes (officially in the case of Ukraine, at least) as rightfully theirs, and certainly not wholly separate. In light of the war that followed this conflict in Europe, I think it's hard to say that Azaña was not the lesser of two evils.

      "There were no "good guys" in the Spanish Civil War, and the Americans who volunteered were certainly not good guys, as they were fighting for the most murderous brutal dictator in all world history, in his attempt to fight with another brutal dictator for domination of Spain."
      The "most murderous brutal dictator" by what metric? On first glance your post mentions more than one dictator I take to be both more murderous and more brutal.

      Edit: On re-read, I think you are referring to Stalin in the second quote. If so, I agree with your assessment of Stalin, but I would still argue without any shadow of a doubt the Second Republic would have been preferable to Franco's regime.

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      1. Duane Truitt

        Ukraine was not part of Russia, Ukraine was a member republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. Culturally Ukraine has always been a separate nation from Russia- Ukrainians have their own language, their own church, their own history. Russia was populated mostly with slavs and Huns from the steppes of central Eurasia, while Ukraine was populated by the Viking Rus, from Nordic lands. They actually have very little in common other than the fact that Peter the Great conquered Ukraine in the 18th century, and lorded it over them for most of the next 2 1/2 centuries by Tsars and Soviet Commissars.

        Ukraine is to Russia what Ireland is to the UK.

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        1. Avatar photo
          Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

          There is a legitimate debate about whether Ukrainian is a different language from Russian (I lived in Ukraine when we adopted our daughter from there). IMHO Ukrainian is to Russian is like Catalan Spanish is to Castilian Spanish.

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        2. Brian

          "Ukraine was not part of Russia, Ukraine was a member republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic"
          You are right, though I never said otherwise.

          "They actually have very little in common other than the fact that Peter the Great conquered Ukraine in the 18th century, and lorded it over them for most of the next 2 1/2 centuries by Tsars and Soviet Commissars."
          And that is all fine and dandy, but doesn't change the fact that Russia believes that those 2 1/2 centuries of subjugation give it fealty, just as China of Taiwan. The simple reality is that Ukraine has been under Russian rule in modern times much longer than it hasn't. I don't disagree with you on the merits of Ukraine as a nation. What matters is how a dictatorial neighbor sees these distinctions, and whether there is any relationship to a Civil War in the 1930s.

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          1. Duane Truitt

            Nobody cares what Russians think. They are worldwide pariahs, an outlaw state, despised by all the rest of the world but a couple of former Soviet satellite states. What Russians think about anything is 100% irrelevant to Ukraine.

            Who cares if some Brits believe they they should still own Ireland? Who cares if Russians think they should still dominate all of eastern Europe? Who cares if Chinese believe they should own the entire South China Sea? Who cares if some unreconstructed rebels living in the former Confederate states think they still have a right to secede, and have the right to retain slavery?

            The answer to all those questions is: nobody (except you, apparently).

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  4. Randall Briggs

    The Loyalists were not the good guys in the Spanish Civil War. Neither side had a just cause; neither fought in a just manner. The best that can be said about the Loyalists is that they were somewhat less bad than Franco's Nationalists. The International Brigades, in which many Americans fought, were under the strict control of a Communist leadership cadre, and to run afoul of that cadre was to risk waking up dead, as George Orwell and his wife nearly found out.

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  5. Token Liberal

    The good news is that that Ukraine is not our *Munich. " Of course, the rest is a lot of bad news.

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  6. Avatar photo
    DougAz

    Agree agree agree

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  7. Brian

    Loved the article. I have said that Russia and Chinas' territorial moves are reminiscent of the 1930s, and I worry that another World War is the inevitable result of these powers metastasizing if western powers again abdicate responsibility.

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  8. Avatar photo
    John D. Wright

    I really love that book too! Good article.

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  9. Avatar photo
    Pat @ Tavi Hall

    One correction, Donne did not put the bell line in a poem, but rather a devotional work written while he was extremely sick, at the time it was thought from the black death, but now it's thought to have been "just" typhus. Interestingly the same individual devotion in the work also includes his no man is an island line.

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