Review of "The Anarchists of Casas Viejas" by Jerome Mintz See Vernon Richards' "Lessons of the Spanish Revolution" for a critique of Hugh Thomas' "The Spanish Civil War", and Jerome Mintz' "The Anarchists of Casas Viejas" for a withering criticism of both Eric Hobsbawm's "Primitive Rebels" and Hugh Thomas' work. Both Hobsbawm and Thomas, Marxist and conservative historians respectively, treat the Spanish anarchist movement as rural and backward. In fact, Jerome Mintz' work is a fascinating example of how a distorted view of an event becomes accepted as historical fact; in this case, an abortive uprising in 1933 by the members of the anarchosyndicalist trade union, the C.N.T., in the Andalusian village of Casas Viejas. This ended in tragedy with the shooting of some participants and bystanders in the house of a C.N.T. member called Seis Dedos ('Six Fingers'), and subsequent summary executions of more bystanders by the Assault Guards; the government of the day fell as a result of the recriminations. Mintz spent three years in the village cautiously approaching survivors of the incident (it was still in the time of Franco). He discovered that the commonly accepted view of the incident, that Seis Dedos himself lead the uprising, was quite simply false; Seis Dedos did not participate at all, but was killed along with the rest of his family after several of his family had taken refuge in his house (they did participate). As Seis Dedos was dead, the survivors who were arrested sensibly pinned the blame on him, and so he entered history. The combination of a six fingered Anarchist dying with his family in the blazing ruins of his house under artillery and air attack from the Assault Guards (another myth) was too tempting for both Hobsbawm, Thomas and almost every other historian, and the uprising was written off as another hopeless isolated attempt by millenarian Andalusian peasants at effecting the revolution, an interpretation which suited both the Marxists and the conservatives. Whereas, as Mintz points out, it was part of a national uprising somewhat rashly called by the C.N.T in Barcelona on the occasion of a national railway strike. Other C.N.T. local groups nearby called it off shortly beforehand, but the anarchists of Casas Viejas did not learn of this.