I have tried to write objectively about the Barcelona fighting, though, obviously, no one can be completely objective on a question of this kind. One is practically obliged to take sides, and it must be clear enough which side I am on. Again, I must inevitably have made mistakes of fact, not only here but in other parts of this narrative. It is very difficult to write accurately about the Spanish war, because of the lack of non-propagandist documents. I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest. But it will be seen that the account I have given is completely different from that which appeared in the foreign and especially the Communist press. It is necessary to examine the Communist version, because it was published all over the world, has been supplemented at short intervals ever since, and is probably the most widely accepted one.

In the Communist and pro-Communist press the entire blame for the Barcelona fighting was laid upon the POUM. The affair was represented not as a spontaneous outbreak, but as a deliberate, planned insurrection against the Government, engineered solely by the POUM with the aid of a few misguided ‘uncontrollables’. More than this, it was definitely a Fascist plot, carried out under Fascist orders with the idea of starting civil war in the rear and thus paralysing the Government. The POUM was ‘Franco’s Fifth Column’ – a ‘Trotskyist’ organization working in league with the Fascists. According to the Daily Worker (11 May):

The German and Italian agents, who poured into Barcelona ostensibly to ‘prepare’ the notorious ‘Congress of the Fourth International’, had one big task. It was this:

They were – in co-operation with the local Trotskyists – to prepare a situation of disorder and bloodshed, in which it would be possible for the Germans and Italians to declare that they were ‘unable to exercise naval control of the Catalan coasts effectively because of the disorder prevailing in Barcelona’ and were, therefore, ‘unable to do otherwise than land forces in Barcelona’.

In other words, what was being prepared was a situation in which the German and Italian Governments could land troops or marines quite openly on the Catalan coasts, declaring that they were doing so ‘in order to preserve order’…

The instrument for all this lay ready to hand for the Germans and Italians in the shape of the Trotskyist organization known as the POUM.

The POUM, acting in co-operation with well-known criminal elements, and with certain other deluded persons in the Anarchist organizations planned, organized and led the attack in the rear-guard, accurately timed to coincide with the attack on the front at Bilbao, etc. etc.

Later in the article the Barcelona fighting becomes ‘the POUM attack’, and in another article in the same issue it is stated that there is ‘no doubt that it is at the door of the POUM that the responsibility for the bloodshed in Catalonia must be laid’. Inprecor (29 May) states that those who erected the barricades in Barcelona were ‘only members of the POUM organized from that party for this purpose’.