On this day, 16 February 1936, elections were held in Republican Spain and the left-wing Popular Front emerged victorious. But despite the Republic having been in place for five years, Morocco was still not freed from colonial domination. The Republic would eventually pay for this, when the nationalists made use of Moorish troops to defeat them in the civil war.
Trinidadian communist George Padmore wrote at the time in response to left-wingers internationally decrying Moroccan soldiers often in racist terms: “It is not the politically backward Moors who should be blamed for being used by the forces of reaction against the Spanish workers and peasants, but the leaders of the Popular Front, who, in attempting to continue the policy of Spanish Imperialism, made it possible for Franco to exploit the natives in the service of Fascism…
“Had the Popular Front Government, immediately it assumed office, issued decrees granting the colonial peoples economic and political reforms as a gesture towards self-government and appealed for their support against France, it would have been assured… For the Moors have no particular ideological interest in Fascism. They, like most colonial peoples, are not concerned with the conflicting political conflicts going on in Europe. To them all whites are alike – a feeling which can hardly be otherwise when Labour and Popular Front Governments oppress and exploit them in the same way as Tory and other reactionary Capitalists… Not until the European workers’ movements, especially in countries with great empires like Britain and France show more solidarity in deeds and not words will this distrust and suspicion be removed.”
Learn more about the civil war in our podcast episodes 39-40: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/06/17/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/
Pictured: Moroccan troops in Spain, 1936 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1922250087960132/?type=3
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