Andrew Sage

You know, so the Marxist-Leninists will talk about these revolutions in a very fawning and agitating way.

But then you also have the anarchists who talk about the Spanish Civil War, they talk about the Paris Commune, they talk about these different projects as if they weren't serious flaws in their structure and their analysis and their methodology.

It's very easy for nostalgia to take over.

Yeah, definitely.

Like something I think about a lot.

Like I translated a piece for the strangers in a tangled wilderness zine a few months ago, maybe even a year ago now by an anarchist fighter who'd fought in the international group of the Daruti column.

who went by several names, Charles Riddle with his first name.

But he has this whole thing about how anarchists tend to write hagiographies, which is the life of a saint, right?

They've tried to make the Spanish Civil War into these exemplary saintly people, as opposed to actually looking at the mistakes people made.

And his...

stance is that like his friends died for nothing if we don't learn anything.

And so if we don't acknowledge the very real compromises and mistakes and failures,

But if at least we can learn from it, then at least there's something we can take going forward, which is something I always thought was a, a great way of phrasing something kind of like a, quite an admirable way of, uh, of looking at something that he himself participated in.

And it was obviously a defining and a very traumatic experience of his life.

Yeah.

It's something that I've rallied against that sort of great amount of Bruce history.

Yeah.

But I suppose that brings me to my first critique, which is something that plagued Grenada both before, during, and after its revolution.

When you have a political culture dependent on a maximum leader, or a personality cult, or just a grouping around a personality, whether that's Bishop or Gary or Cord, for one, it's a continuation of the colonial politics.

of the British, in that sort of governor position.