Talk:Land and Freedom

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[edit] Nice cinema, shame about the facts!

Ken Loach’s Land And Freedom seems to be the first major film about the Spanish Civil War since Hollywood made For Whom The Bell Tolls. Which would have been good, if it hadn't chosen to bang the Trotskyist drum and ignore the real fighters.

It starts with an historic blunder—the rising was not led by General Franco. It was organised by General Mola, with General Sanjurjo as the acknowledged leader until his mysterious death in a plane crash. General Franco sat on the fence till the last minute. But the Military-Rightists—not all fascists—had the sense to rally round him as their most successful leader.

The important front was Madrid, which held off the enemy till the very end. POUM, whose tale is told in this film, were a small force on a front that barely moved throughout the war.

The film has a member of the Communist Party member accidentally join POUM, which is ridiculous. The Communist Party had a well-organised network taking members and sympathisers to the International Brigades. POUM had a smaller network, which in Britain was linked to a body called the Independent Labour Party—that’s how George Orwell got there. The hero's adventures in Spain shadow Orwell's, but have been reinvented to make a more likeable character than the upper-class ex-policeman.

Most of those who saw the war or study the war see POUM as an irrelevance. Most of them blame them for the fighting in Barcelona. Hemmingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls has the following:

The POUM was never serious. It was a heresy of crackpots and wild men and it was really just an infantilism. There were some honest misguided people. There was one fairly good brain and there was a little fascist money. Not much. The poor POUM. They were very silly people."

--GwydionM 19:24, 29 November 2005 (UTC)