It will be clear enough from this that the Communist thesis of a POUM ‘rising’ under Fascist orders rests on less than no evidence. I will add a few more extracts from the Communist press. The Communist accounts of the opening incident, the raid on the Telephone Exchange, are illuminating; they agree in nothing except in putting the blame on the other side. It is noticeable that in the English Communist papers the blame is put first upon the Anarchists and only later upon the POUM. There is a fairly obvious reason for this. Not everyone in England has heard of ‘Trotskyism’, whereas every English-speaking person shudders at the name of ‘Anarchist’. Let it once be known that ‘Anarchists’ are implicated, and the right atmosphere of prejudice is established; after that the blame can safely be transferred to the ‘Trotskyists’. The Daily Worker begins thus (6 May):

A minority gang of Anarchists on Monday and Tuesday seized and attempted to hold the telephone and telegram buildings, and started firing into the street.

There is nothing like starting off with a reversal of roles. The local Assault Guards attack a building held by the CNT; so the CNT are represented as attacking their own building – attacking themselves, in fact. On the other hand, the Daily Worker of 11 May states:

The Left Catalan Minister of Public Security, Ayguadé, and the United Socialist General Commissar of Public Order, Rodrique Salas, sent the armed republican police into the Telefónica building to disarm the employees there, most of them members of CNT unions.

This does not seem to agree very well with the first statement; nevertheless the Daily Worker contains no admission that the first statement was wrong. The Daily Worker of 11 May states that the leaflets of the Friends of Durruti, which were disowned by the CNT, appeared on 4 May and 5 May, during the fighting. Inprecor (22 May) states that they appeared on 3 May, before the fighting, and adds that ‘in view of these facts’ (the appearance of various leaflets):

The police, led by the Prefect of Police in person, occupied the central telephone exchange in the afternoon of May 3rd. The police were shot at while discharging their duty. This was the signal for the provocateurs to begin shooting affrays all over the city.

And here is Inprecor for 29 May:

At three o’clock in the afternoon the Commissar for Public Security, Comrade Salas, went to the Telephone Exchange, which on the previous night had been occupied by 50 members of the POUM and various uncontrollable elements.

This seems rather curious. The occupation of the Telephone Exchange by 50 POUM members is what one might call a picturesque circumstance, and one would have expected somebody to notice it at the time. Yet it appears that it was only discovered three or four weeks later. In another issue of Inprecor the 50 POUM members become 50 POUM militiamen. It would be difficult to pack together more contradictions than are contained in these few short passages. At one moment the CNT are attacking the Telephone Exchange, the next they are being attacked there; a leaflet appears before the seizure of the Telephone Exchange and is the cause of it, or, alternatively, appears afterwards and is the result of it; the people in the Telephone Exchange are alternatively CNT members and POUM members – and so on. And in a still later issue of the Daily Worker (3 June) Mr J. R. Campbell informs us that the Government only seized the Telephone Exchange because the barricades were already erected!