Thread by @PeterGelderloos

There's a great morass of misinformation around yesterday's "anarchist gulags in Catalunya" crap, which is not surprising, given it came from authoritarian socialists deflecting from their history of systematic repression and murder.

Thread: Repression in an anarchist revolution

The most true thing about the shitposting is that anarchists generally responded: if anarchists really did set up gulags in 1936, that was wrong of them;

whereas the authoritarian socialists could neither offer a self-critique of their own history nor an honest critique of their opponents. This openness to analysis and self-critique, the insistence on uniting means and ends, is why I am an anarchist.

Now onto the historical facts. I have found no documentation whatsoever that the CNT-FAI operated gulags, prisons, or forced labor camps. If anyone has such documentation, please share.

Sections of the CNT-FAI did, however, engage in a number of statist activities that have been rightly criticized and rejected first and foremost by the anarchist movement.

And these supposed gulags? In fact, the Republican government in the Spanish Civil War did set up forced labor camps for fascist POWs. Some CNT-FAI members did join that govt, but it was controlled, in alternation by Stalinist and non-Stalinist socialists.

Most of these POW work camps were created by the Dirección General de Prisiones, and were therefore the responsibility of Garcia Oliver, the anarchist Minister of Justice (much criticized for his collaborationism), but not of the CNT itself.

The most brutal of the camps were created in Catalunyaby the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, under orders of Prieto, a Socialist. Not only were these not created by any CNTistes in the government, they were used to imprison many anarchists.

Even media sympathetic to the far Right acknowledge that these camps were not particularly deadly, and their goal was to reinsert fascist troops in society. elconfidencial.com/alma-corazon-v…

For these reasons, and the fact that people were not imprisoned here for their ideology (with the exception of anarchists and dissident Marxists falsely accused by the Stalinists of being fascist spies), comparing them to the Soviet gulags is a cynical exaggeration.

The other org that deserves scrutiny is the Comisión de Investigación, a counterintelligence service set up by the CNT in Catalunya primarily to track down German Nazis infiltrating Barcelona, and their collaborators. As researched by Agustín Guillamón and Dani Capmany,

the CI abducted and interrogated Nazis, sometimes deporting them, sometimes handing them over to the Republican authorities, sometimes killing them. There are documented cases of them protecting and releasing ideological enemies like members of the Church with

no proven connection to the fascists, as well as documented cases of the Stalinists and Catalan Left running their own, much more brutal, much more large scale counterintelligence services, and blaming their extrajudicial killings on the anarchists.

The anarchist position was never in support of prisons. Mujeres Libres and the construction union (CNT) destroyed the Barcelona women's prison early in the conflict. The CNT position, decided at the Zaragoza Congress in May 36, was in favor of making the social revolution

and abolishing the State. The problem is, a relatively small number who had risen as bureaucrats and charismatic leaders (like Marianet, Garcia Oliver, Montseny, Abad de Santillan) sidetracked this collective decision in favor of antifascist alliance with the Republic,

a failing anarchists have answered for in decades of debate and critique.

There still remains a hard question for anarchists regarding repression in open warfare. If the State is organizing armies against us, we need to destroy those armies.

As much as possible, we can favor unconventional warfare, sabotage, and mutiny, but there will be the question of capturing enemy soldiers (a reality that has come up recently in Rojava), at which point there are no easy answers:

killing them, imprisoning them for the duration of the war, injuring them and releasing them,or releasing them and facing them on the battlefield again.

War is the health of the State. It is not a terrain in which anarchy flourishes. We did not choose the war, we cannot wish it away.

We need to be as honest as possible about our contradictions, and put as much emphasis as possible on revolution as a social transformation and not a military conflict.
And never give in to the cynical, greasy, self-serving manipulations of Macchiavellian socialists.

(Adding the clarification that anarchist militias on the front did have to organize for captured combatants, but this was a temporary measure and nothing similar to a gulag.)