TRADE unionists and International Brigade supporters will gather in Manchester this Sunday to remember one of the greatest speeches of modern times. 

It was delivered on October 28 1938 — exactly 80 years ago — by Dolores Ibarruri, better know as La Pasionaria. 

The occasion was the farewell parade of the International Brigades through central Barcelona as the Spanish civil war was drawing to its tragic end.

Maxine Peake will read La Pasionaria’s words on Sunday, at an event organised by PCS, Unison and Unite, along with the International Brigades Memorial Trust and other groups. 

There will also be a screening of Unsung Hero: The Jack Jones Story — a documentary tribute to the Liverpool docker and veteran of the British Battalion in Spain who became a trade union giant of the postwar years.

“You can go proudly,” Ibarruri told the International Brigades, knowing that those who had gone to Spain following the fascist-backed army revolt in July 1936 had written a special chapter in the story of humanity’s struggle for emancipation and justice. 

“You are history, you are legend,” she declared. “You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality in the face of the vile and accommodating spirit of those who interpret democratic principles with their eyes on hoards of wealth or corporate shares.”

Over 35,000 volunteers from around the world had answered the Spanish Republic’s cry for help, including 2,500 men and women from Britain and Ireland. Nearly one in four of them gave their lives for the cause. 

Battered by more than two years of war against the military might of Europe’s fascist dictators, the Spanish government had decided to withdraw the international volunteers and fight on with its own people’s army. 

It was a forlorn attempt to convince Britain and the other Western powers to put pressure on Hitler and Mussolini to withdraw their forces from Spain. 

Conservative prime minister Neville Chamberlain refused to help. Having betrayed Czechoslovakia at Munich a few weeks earlier, he was happy to see General Franco and his fascist friends crush Spain’s elected Popular Front government. 

As historians have concluded, Britain’s ruling elite preferred to put their class interests ahead of the national interest. Their failure to stop fascism in Spain helped plunge Europe and the world into war — just as the International Brigades volunteers had predicted.

A fiery speaker, Ibarruri was a communist deputy in the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, and one of the Republic’s foremost war leaders. 

The farewell parade at which she spoke was an emotionally charged event. Bystanders heaped flowers on the international volunteers, and many present were in tears.

Her oratory on that day caught the mood of sadness and defiant gratitude. 

“A feeling of sorrow, an infinite grief catches our throat,” she admitted. “For the first time in the history of the people’s struggles, there has been the spectacle, breathtaking in its grandeur, of the formation of International Brigades to help save a threatened country’s freedom and independence.” 

Communists, socialists, anarchists, republicans, “men of different colours, differing ideology, antagonistic religions,” but all of them “fired with a deep love of liberty and justice” had given themselves unconditionally to the anti-fascist fight in Spain, she declared. 

The International Brigades “gave us everything — their youth or their maturity; their science or their experience; their blood and their lives; their hopes and aspirations — and they asked from us nothing at all.”

La Pasionaria’s words, which, thanks to Maxine Peake, will ring out again on Sunday, capture the essence of true international solidarity — and are the reason why her speech, and the International Brigades, still inspire people to this day.

Jim Jump is the chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust. You Are Legend: 80th anniversary of the International Brigades’ farewell parade takes place from 1pm to 5pm at the Mechanics Institute, 103 Princess Street, Manchester M1 6DD. Entry free.