DEAN PARKER REPLIES

Dean Parker has responded to the post 'We Will Not Cease' (April 26) and I thought it was worth highlighting. Here it is:


I'm a bit late in seeing these comments, but I'd just like to add my own to Joe Hendren's. The piece that was in the NZ Herald comes from a longer account of Tom Spiller I wrote for Kiwi Companeros, edited by Mark Derby and published by Canterbury University Press this month. In the longer account appears the following:

"I don’t want to make too much of this but you could put up an argument of how two contrary fighters for freedom, George Orwell and Tom Spiller, reached their final political destinations, or had their political dispositions reinforced, by way of the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell saw the threat of Stalinism, witnessed it at first hand in Spain extinguishing its rivals and thought the way to fight it was to maintain a critical and largely individual socialism while collaborating, where necessary, with the British state -- in his case, compiling dossiers for the Foreign Office. Tom Spiller in the chaotic and bloody trenches at Jarama and Brunette, saw the necessity of a ruthless unity, of a centralised command where orders have to be carried out. And this can lead to a mentality where you lose sight of what it is you’re fighting for and where the means becomes the endless end."

All the best.