They Don't Make Anti-Fascists Like This Anymore

Once upon a time, Americans opposed to fascism didn't spout racist hatred into a microphone while masturbating furiously under the desk.

Seventy-three years ago, Americans opposed to fascism put their bodies in the line of fire to protect Democracy.

Clarence Kailin, a son of the Midwest whose lifelong commitment to social and economic justice led him to become one of the first Americans to take up arms against the fascist forces that swept across Europe in the years before World War II, has died at age 95.

Kailin was one of the last survivors of the 2,800 American volunteers who fought from 1936 to 1939 as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in defense of the elected Spanish government against a coup engineered by Generalissimo Francisco Franco with the backing of Germany's Adolf Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini. His role in "the good fight" of the international volunteers -- as it was immortalized by Ernest Hemingway and W.H. Auden -- gave Kailin, a scrawny kid from Madison, Wisconsin's multi-ethnic Greenbush neighborhood, a place in an essential chapter of 20th century history.

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Quick-witted and passionate to the last, Kailin laughed with his friend and comrade Bob Kimbrough -- as only old socialists could -- at the notion that a centrist Democrat from Chicago named Barack Obama was somehow turning the United States hard to the left. "If only Obama was a socialist!" Kailin mused. "But, you know, real change never comes from the top. It comes when people get organized and decide that they're going to make the change happen – no matter who the leaders are."

That was not just rhetoric. Kailin lived his politics.

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It would have been easy for Kailin to rest on his laurels on that sunny Sunday in 1999. Instead, he reminded everyone that "they shouldn't see this as a memorial to old soldiers. They should see it as a reminder that the struggle we joined in Spain, the struggle for economic and social justice, goes on. We're still a part of it."

That was how Clarence Kailin saw himself, as a part of a movement for economic and social justice that began before his birth and that will extend beyond his death. But what a remarkable part he played.

The great Spanish radical Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, told the international brigades as they withdrew from Spain late in 1938: "You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of the solidarity and the universality of democracy."

Those words, uttered more than 70 years ago, when Clarence Kailin was a young idealist fighting fascism in Spain, were the ones he chose to emblazon on the monument to the Wisconsin volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade. They remain his most fitting epitaph.

Read the whole thing. It's a genuine American adventure story.