Read Online Operation Garbo by Juan Pujol Garcia - Free Book Online
Authors: Juan Pujol Garcia
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wasn’t until there was a break between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, around 1848, that Marx and Engels propounded systematic modern socialism, the one we now call Marxist. Even since then, various socialist tenets have taken root in different countries. A great many people have yearned to make the word their own, hoping to attract the huge dispossessed masses who long for a better life which they feelthey have been denied. Some call themselves social democrats, others Christian socialists, and those who are attached to the communists declare themselves to be Marxist socialists. Some just call themselves socialists, while there are those who borrow the name of the doctrine but succeed in distorting it to such a degree that only the name prevails. The Germans called it National Socialism; the Italian Fascist movement was defined as ‘political, social, corporate and hierarchical’; Portugal’s Corporativismo was described as a ‘method of collegiate political and social unity where the body politic intervenes in a qualitative , but not quantitative, manner in the policy of the nation’, a rule defended by António de Oliveira Salazar.
The Spaniards, not to be outdone, proclaimed themselves falangistas, from phalanx, thereby creating for themselves a party as full of long-winded words in its definition as it was devoid of coordinating principles. Its name was as allegorical as it was contradictory. It was a monster of a name: Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista , the last stretch being abbreviated by its followers to JONS. Some socialist winds even reached America, initiating such parties as Acción Democrática in Venezuela and APRA, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, founded by Haya de la Torre in Peru in 1924. In Argentina, Perón’s followers too laid claim to socialism, underlining their claim by calling themselves ‘The Ragged’. I could go on naming the various branches and twigs of what is a very old notion, but I won’t; I will just point out the curious fact that all these systems have both very strong dictatorial and liberal connotations within their different theories. The term socialism has been borrowed by dictators and democrats alike, which has resulted in definitions as complex and various as the night is from the day.
Two dogmatic and important politicians of this century took up socialism and transformed it into Nazism and communism . Both systems were implanted at the expense of countless victims. The first ended with the death of its leader at the endof a war which he himself had brought about; the other still prevails, hovering over the whole world, still dreaming of an empire of submissive nations subject to its power and authority . I do not mean to offend anyone who might profess these ideas as, above all, I am a man who loves democracy, which makes me respect, even if I do not share, these doctrines of theirs. I have friends who are communists; others who are anarchist in their outlook; yet other friends of mine support right-wing dictatorships which are such common phenomena in South America. ‘Each one to his own taste,’ I say. It is their choice. I too have my own ideas, many of which people will not share. Am I the odd one out? Am I wrong or are they?
Let us return to history. Concentration camps for political prisoners started in Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. At first they were meant to re-educate or eliminate anti-Nazi Germans, that is to say, they were for communists, social democrats, Jews, Catholics and Protestants. After the occupation of Poland, which sparked off the declaration of war in 1939, camps of this type proliferated. Thousands of Poles and people from other countries occupied by the Nazis began to fill these camps, creating a huge reserve of servile workers for the German war machine. To use an expression coined at the Nuremberg Trials, it was ‘extermination through work’, with
The Spaniards, not to be outdone, proclaimed themselves falangistas, from phalanx, thereby creating for themselves a party as full of long-winded words in its definition as it was devoid of coordinating principles. Its name was as allegorical as it was contradictory. It was a monster of a name: Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista , the last stretch being abbreviated by its followers to JONS. Some socialist winds even reached America, initiating such parties as Acción Democrática in Venezuela and APRA, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, founded by Haya de la Torre in Peru in 1924. In Argentina, Perón’s followers too laid claim to socialism, underlining their claim by calling themselves ‘The Ragged’. I could go on naming the various branches and twigs of what is a very old notion, but I won’t; I will just point out the curious fact that all these systems have both very strong dictatorial and liberal connotations within their different theories. The term socialism has been borrowed by dictators and democrats alike, which has resulted in definitions as complex and various as the night is from the day.
Two dogmatic and important politicians of this century took up socialism and transformed it into Nazism and communism . Both systems were implanted at the expense of countless victims. The first ended with the death of its leader at the endof a war which he himself had brought about; the other still prevails, hovering over the whole world, still dreaming of an empire of submissive nations subject to its power and authority . I do not mean to offend anyone who might profess these ideas as, above all, I am a man who loves democracy, which makes me respect, even if I do not share, these doctrines of theirs. I have friends who are communists; others who are anarchist in their outlook; yet other friends of mine support right-wing dictatorships which are such common phenomena in South America. ‘Each one to his own taste,’ I say. It is their choice. I too have my own ideas, many of which people will not share. Am I the odd one out? Am I wrong or are they?
Let us return to history. Concentration camps for political prisoners started in Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. At first they were meant to re-educate or eliminate anti-Nazi Germans, that is to say, they were for communists, social democrats, Jews, Catholics and Protestants. After the occupation of Poland, which sparked off the declaration of war in 1939, camps of this type proliferated. Thousands of Poles and people from other countries occupied by the Nazis began to fill these camps, creating a huge reserve of servile workers for the German war machine. To use an expression coined at the Nuremberg Trials, it was ‘extermination through work’, with
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