July 19th is the anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 -- the beginning of the last significant attempt at an anti-capitalist revolution in the period of revolutions that began in Mexico in 1915 and accelerated after the Russian Revolution of 1917. The revolutionary movement in Spain was defeated by a counter-revolution spearheaded by the Stalinist Soviet Union and it's global puppets and public relations hacks. (See George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' for the best brief introduction to the events surrounding the revolution and counter-revolution in Spain.)

A public art work celebrating the role played by the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the US dupes of and cannon fodder for the Stalinist counter-revolution in Spain from 1936 to 1939, was dedicated this past May on San Francisco's Embarcadero, behind the fountain on Justin Herman Plaza at the foot of Market Street. Sometime this past week, some person or persons unknown gave this monument to one of the big lies of 20th century history an appropriate makeover. The Stalinist art work was grafittied with the message, "Viva Durruti Y Orwell," in what appears to be red and black spray paint.

Workers Memory Project

We now have excellent photos of the criminal deed by this gang of hoodlums, doing the work of the police state in which we currently live. It is on Indybay (the San Francisco Bay Area's Indymedia website), dated July 21, 2008, at
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/07/21/18518486.php
The criminal, muderous outlook of this hoodlum gang is best described by the defenders of this heinous defacement of art at
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/07/19/18517813.php?show_comments=1#18518348 and is quoted herewith, demonstrating that this is an utterly reactionary, criminal, murderous gang:
"Regardless of subjective intentions, and many of them were hard-core Stalinist stooges, the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were utterly exploited by their Stalinist commisars. They sustained a high casualty rate because their commaders were incompetent -- and let's not forget that some number of them were murdered by their commanders as well, in many cases for political deveation fromt he counter-revolutonary Stalinist line. Any non-Stalinist study of the Spanish Civil war shows that the Lincolns were organized and run by the Moscow franchise CPUSA, as were the other national sections of the misnamed Inrenational "Brigades;" most of the national sections were more like battalion strength."

"The role of the Stalinist counter-revolution in Spain was to save capitalism, the bourgeois state and the class power of the bourgeosie. This was successful, and was done through police terror and large-scale murder against vast numbers of working class revolutionaries and accompanied by lies afterwards and ever since."

"The authentically revolutionary elements in the anarchist movement should have butchered the Stalinists wholesale; that would only have meant killing a few thousand of these counter-revolutionaries at the very beginning of the war, and it might have precluded a million deaths and the defeat of the revolutionary movement during the subsequent war."