footnote for chapter one

* Were "many, or most"" of the brightest in the working class of Montreal communists? Perhaps that's an exaggeration, hyperbole. I'd have to ask Ted.
      That's one of our themes. Veracity. How precise, how approximate is any picture. History is always fiction. In his film-script of Lies My Father Told Me, a lyrical story about Ted's grandfather, Ted lightened the portrayal of his crazy father, "to make him more palatable for an audience".

1. Followers of Leon Trotsky, the former leader of the Soviet red army and the chief rival of Stalin, Trotskiyites, were thought by orthodox Communists to be traitors and likely to be spies. "They were worse then vermin, in our opinion. I remember Bethune saying they ought to be shot." says Ted.

2. On the right, the National Front, an alliance of Church, Military, wealthy landowners and business, and monarchists. On the left, the Popular Front: the "proletariat", industrial and agricultural working class with their organisations (notably the Socialist unions (the UGT) and the Anarchist unions (the CNT)), along with the educated middle class.

3. Elections in October 1931 ushered in a government of left. The anti-clericalism of the left consolidated the right wing, while the left fragmented. Elections in November 1933 brought a right wing government.

4. Arturo Barea, The Forging of a Rebel, part three, The Clash.

5. Meanwhile, however, the British and French Governments had instigated the policy of "nonintervention". On the surface they were denying arms to both sides of the conflict. In practice it was a denial of arms to the left, and an isolation of the "democratic" loyalist Republican government, for fascist Italy and Germany eagerly supplied the Nationalists with arms, and Italian troops and German planes and pilots.

6. Bernice Kert, The Hemingway Women: Those Who Loved Him - the Wives and Others.