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One of the best books read in 2004.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938). |
Homage to Catalonia is a riveting book, and one of the few to clarify the mysterious Spanish Civil War. While it is not a comedy, it is often funny because Orwell and his companions were able to see some of the humor in their dire circumstances.
He describes his own personal experiences, primarily, but adds many sprinkled comments about the larger political issues, to which he also devotes 2 complete chapters. In those, he unscrambles the alphabet soup of party names, and clarifies what (from his experience) actually happened in Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain, for part of 1936 and 1937.
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Who was George Orwell?
George Orwell on some of the motives for the Spanish Revolution George Orwell on war George Orwell on urban warfare George Orwell on being shot Mrs. Eric Blair? |
In 1936, Eric Blair (the novelist, critic, and political satirist who used the pseudonym George Orwell) went to Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War, and to enlist in a Socialist Republican militia. He said he went to Spain "to fight Fascism" and that he was fighting for "common decency". Throughout Homage to Catalonia, one gets a sense of Orwell's commitment to honesty.
During 1936 and 1937, he fought with the "Trotskyist" P.O.U.M. in support of the Republican government. In the trenches in the Catalan section of Spain, he battled against the attempted take-over by Franco's Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Despite the sacrifices by the Spanish and volunteers from Britain and the United States, Franco and his fellow-Fascists defeated the legally elected socialist Republican government of Spain.
Orwell has said: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it."
George Orwell on some of the motives for the Spanish Revolution
See especially Chapter Five. Some quotes:
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"His [Franco's] rising was a military mutiny backed up by the aristocracy and the Church,
and in the main,
especially at the beginning, it was an attempt not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism."
"Every move [by the Communists in Spain] was made in the name of military necessity, ... but the effect was to drive the workers back from an advantageous position and into a position in which, when the war was over, they would find it impossible to resist the reintroduction of capitalism." |
Orwell writes about his first-hand experience of the textures and sounds of war that few other writers have given us, including:
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"In the barn where we waited the floor was a thin layer of chaff
over deep beds of bones, human bones and cows' bones mixed up,
and the place was alive with rats. The filthy brutes came swarming out of the ground
on every side.
If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness."
[See also Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four for his feelings about rats.] "When an aeroplane swoops down and uses its machine-gun the sound, from below, is like the fluttering of wings." "One of the most horrible feature of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting." "Every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency." |
George Orwell on urban warfare
Hopefully, a military strategist confronted with urban warfare has read Homage to Catalonia:
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"I think few periods could be more sickening, more disillusioning or,
finally, more nerve-racking than those evil days of street warfare."
"What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom and who was winning, was at first very difficult to discover. The people of Barcelona are so used to street-fighting and so familiar with the local geography that they know by a kind of instinct which political party will hold which streets and which buildings." "No one who was in Barcelona then, or for some months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs of armed men." |
George Orwell on war journalists
Orwell is conscientious in reminding us that his views are personal and limited to a particular area of Catalonia in a few months near the start of the Spanish Civil War. However, these comments are worthy of special attention:
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"It is the same in all wars;
the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting,
and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours."
"Throughout the fighting I never made the correct 'analysis' of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles away." "I watched him [a 'fat Russian agent'] with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies -- unless one counts journalists." |
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"No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients --
failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it
is the luckiest creature alive.
I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier
not to be hit at all."
"... my right arm was paralysed. [British spelling] Not being in pain, I felt a vague satisfaction. This ought to please my wife, I thought; she had always wanted me to be wounded, which would save me from being killed when the great battle came." |
In December 1936, Eric Blair joined the P.O.U.M. militia in Barcelona. He had married recently, and had traveled from England with his wife, who lived in Barcelona while he was at the war front.
She remained there until he eventually was shot in the throat, which partially paralyzed him, and made him mute (from which he recovered, despite predictions to the contrary by physicians). Then she helped him visit colleagues in prison and eventually to escape.
Homage to Catalonia makes little mention of his wife, except for the above, plus:
We highly recommend Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.
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One of the best books read in 2004.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938). |
| Copyright © 2004-2016 by J. Zimmerman, |