Homage to Catalonia

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Summary: A partly personal perspective of a highly misunderstood war
Review: Attracted by the idea of fighting against Fascism, the English journalist, Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, went to Spain in late 1936 to cover the fight against Fascism and found himself in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia in north-east Spain, joining the militia of the anti-Fascist "Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista", the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification - or POUM, for short. Yet Orwell himself, in a literary work praised by many for its - or its author's - honesty, admits to have joined without any pretence of knowing or caring what it meant to be part of any particular anti-Fascist militia. His take on all the squabbling, which existed at the time between the various anti-Fascist factions, was much the same as anybody who was ignorant of the facts; that is, "Can't we put this political stuff aside and get on with the war?" As a result, the consequences of being in the POUM militia - if not a party member himself (which he was not) - would become all too obvious later on when it was almost too late for him personally.

The book is a mixture of a personal, eyewitness account of the fighting on the Aragon Front, in which he participated actively, and of the background to what he called the "internecine" nature of the infighting between the anti-Fascist factions which was to lead to back-stabbing by rival factions, including the Communists, with the POUM as the main target for attacks in the press, both Spanish and foreign.

Orwell describes life in the front line in language that is meant to convey in an honest - some might say too honest - way just how things were: the ways in which pathetically ill-trained and ill-equipped militiamen were thrown into the front line without even having been shown any weapons of any kind, the privations of life in the trenches, the sheer boredom of being on guard-duty with only the occasional firing from enemy positions, several hundreds of meters away, to break the monotony, the sight of destroyed buildings, the fertile lands being turned into a wasteland, and fear of the cold being greater than fear of the enemy.

For him, the most memorable incidents were the night attack against the Fascist lines, in which he participated, and the moment when he was shot in the throat, albeit at a later date. His descriptions of both incidents are lively and vivid. The crawling through no-man's-land, trying to make as little noise as possible, the firing of shots in unison, the throwing of hand-grenades, the deafening noises, the shouting of attackers and defenders, the bullets zipping overhead too near for comfort, and even Orwell himself chasing a Fascist up a trench trying (and failing) to bayonet him - all are described in language that he keeps as objective as possible, even to the point of regretting trying to kill anyone, even those trying to kill him.

This is due to the fact that people like him were caught up in a war whose political ramifications were either misunderstood or else not understood at all, thanks largely to their being kept deliberately ignorant of the propagandist mud-slinging and governmental back-stabbing behind their backs. The militiamen (Orwell hardly ever uses the word, "soldiers") only knew that they were fighting, whether by choice (as in Orwell's case) or not, for causes which turned out to be somewhat dubious once one had a grasp of what the war was really supposed to be about.

Orwell devotes a considerable amount of space to trying to explain the political background to all the war, yet he sends a caveat to the reader: "Beware of my partisanship", indicating that his account is necessarily one-sided, if only because he had been fighting allegedly against Fascism. At times, it can seem utterly confusing to a reader who, like him, knows nothing of the politics prevailing in 1930s' Spain. It seems that, if Franco was not trying to overthrow the Republican government, the various left-wing parties, representing socialism, anarchism and communism, were vying for power in the most brutal manner.

The one thing that was most misunderstood by the foreign press, Orwell notes, was that there was a revolution going on in Spain, yet the Communists allegedly did NOT want revolution to happen, if only because revolution could only come once the war had been won. Instead, the POUM ended up as the political scapegoat, as it was viciously attacked in the press as a subversive organization that was allegedly pro-Fascist, even though the opposite was true. The party was suppressed, and it was a cat-and-mouse game for the wounded Orwell to avoid arrest and detention without trial by the police. His disgust at the way his fellow militiamen were treated is clear - these people had risked their lives at the front yet, once back in Barcelona, they were being thrown into prison.

Orwell neatly puts propaganda and the war into perspective. What Spaniards and foreigners alike wanted to believe depended upon their prejudices being reinforced by whatever was being told in the press, and Orwell quotes many sources which were written in a way designed deliberately to mislead and mis-inform. Even British pro-Communist papers swallowed what Orwell points to as "lies" spread by the Spanish government in order to ensure that the main reasons for the war in Spain were never fully explained.

It could not have been easy for Orwell, reading about how he and others like him were being portrayed as "Trotskyists in Fascist pay" when they were, in fact, in the bitterest fighting against the Fascists, yet such was the nature of the contemporary reporting of one of the least understood wars of the 20th century, not least because the politics behind it was badly understood. The attitudes that prevailed in Spain simply did not exist in England, something that Orwell points out, and this state of affairs simply contributed to the indifference to, and lack of understanding of, the war by people in his native England, to which he returned soon after his escape from Spain in June 1937.

Said to be one of the most vivid examples in 20th century English literature of the futility of war and its consequences, "Homage to Catalonia" may be regarded as a combination of a personal memoir and an anti-war polemic, yet it has only been really understood and appreciated properly in the light of events which occurred since the book was first published in 1938. It is, indeed, still a powerful work where Orwell shows that he has the ability to be objective about what was happening, neither attacking nor defending the events around him, the hallmark of a true journalist.


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Summary: The Spanish Civil War
Review: This book deserves five stars because it is honest -- and few contemporary writings about the Spanish Civil War are. (Ernest Hemingway's novel, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is another.) The Spanish Civil War was an intensely ideological conflict between Right and Left and adherents of both sides told outrageous lies in pursuit of victory. Orwell was of the Left but he still saw the war clearly and wrote about what he saw without adornment.

In "Homage to Catalonia" Orwell tells the story of his seven months as a volunteer soldier with the Loyalists fighting against the Fascists in 1936-1937. The first half of the book is about his life as a common soldier on the front lines near Barcelona. It is unvarnished and unheroic and often amusing. In the second half of the book he describes the chaotic events in Barcelona when the Loyalist factions, especially the Anarchists and Communists, fought pitched battles against each either and pretty much ignored their common enemy, the Fascists of General Franco. Orwell himself ended up fleeing Spain to avoid being arrested by the people he had come to Spain to help.

Orwell makes clear that his sympathies are with the Anarchists who favor the creation of an equalitarian worker's government. He was appalled by the evil and incompetence he saw and his experience in Spain probably contributed greatly to his later cautionary novels "1984" and "Animal Farm." If you want to learn about the Spanish Civil War, "Homage to Catalonia" is the first book to read. You will get a high standard of truth that you can use to judge other works.

Smallchief

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Summary: One of the greatest war books of the 20th Century.
Review: It's been said that George Orwell is every conservative's favorite liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book likely did more to create that sentiment than any of Orwell's other works.

"Homage to Catalonia" is the story of Orwell's experience fighting in Spain, during 1936 and 1937, against Franco's forces that were seeking to overthrow the Spanish government. Orwell originally traveled to Spain simply to report on the war as a journalist, but falling in love with the people of Catalonia and their revolutionary, honestly egalitarian spirit, Orwell joined the Workers' Party of Marxist Unity (POUM) militia.

Once enlisted, Orwell traveled to the front lines of the fight in Catalonia. His observations of life on the front-line and the daily struggles for a soldier during war are at times funny, fascinating, and depressing. Remarking on war, especially the politics of war, Orwell writes, "I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful;" yet Orwell seems supernaturally honest throughout this book.

After risking his life for the socialist cause he believed in, even being shot in the neck, Orwell eventually realized that many people he once assumed were fighting for the same anti-Fascist cause as he were really no different than the enemy he was fighting. The anti-Fascist soldiers were generally divided into Anarchists (who believed that a Marxist revolution should be the immediate goal) and Communists (who believed that the Fascists must be defeated first and the Marxist revolution addressed after that). Orwell originally sided with the Communists in believing that the Fascists should be defeated first, but over time he came to realize that all the Communists were really wanting was the installation of their own totalitarian system. This left Orwell to fight with and support the Anarchists who were far more genuine than the Communists and simply wanted to be free from any oppressive rule. After months of political bickering, the pro-Stalin Communists in Spain began to arrest and remove the Anarchists with whom they had originally partnered in the fight against Franco, and many of Orwell's friends and brothers-in-arms were arrested and executed. Orwell, still recovering from his gunshot wound to the neck, barely managed to escape from Spain and avoid being caught in the brutal purge of the Anarchists. Knowing he had done nothing morally wrong or anything for which he should logically be arrested, Orwell inititally wanted to stay and help free his friends arrested in the Communist crackdown. But he soon came to realize, "It did not matter what I had done or not done. This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of terror. I was not guilty of any definite act, but I was guilty of `Trotskyism'. The fact that I had served in the P.O.U.M. militia was quite enough to get me into prison. It was no use hanging on to the English notion that you are safe so long as you keep the law. Practically the law was what the police chose to make it."

Orwell wrote "Homage to Catalonia" seven months after he escaped from Spain. By then he had time to consider the politics of the war from a distance and relate what he had seen and heard from people who never experienced life on the front-line of a war. The parts of the book in which he addresses these people are the most fascinating. In several of these passages Orwell writes of how he came to the realization that many of the people driving the Marxist ideas he once supported were every bit as dishonest and treacherous as the right-wing Fascists he always hated. As he writes of the press covering the war, "One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right." Orwell's scorn extends beyond the left-wing press to wealthy English travelers through Spain at the time who were oblivious or apathetic to the widespread misery around them. Writes Orwell, "Some of the English visitors who flitted briefly through Spain, from hotel to hotel, seem not to have noticed that there was anything wrong with the general atmosphere. The Duchess of Atholl writes, I notice (Sunday Express, 17 October 1937): 'I was in Valencia, Madrid, and Barcelona... perfect order prevailed in all three towns without any display of force. All the hotels in which I stayed were not only "normal" and "decent", but extremely comfortable, in spite of the shortage of butter and coffee.' It is a peculiarity of English travellers that they do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels. I hope they found some butter for the Duchess of Atholl."

It must have been hard for Orwell to come to terms with the fact that many people he once supported were no less repugnant than his enemies. When faced with such a situation, human beings have a natural urge to deny or make excuses for what they are seeing or hearing, for whatever their reasons. It is hard for people to admit when they are wrong, especially regarding something they care deeply about. Orwell faced this situation, and he chose honesty over ideology. Sadly, many of his contemporaries did not.

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Summary: Beautiful Thoughts, Ugly Circumstances
Review: Orwell's book is a chronicle of the Spanish Civil War through the author's eyes, but it is far more interesting as a meditation on war, politics, journalism, and idealism. Orwell's real strength lies in candid self-analysis, and his experiences sitting in the miserable trenches of Catalonia and witnessing political squabbles in Barcelona are vaulted from their particular dated circumstances and given universal significance. This is not a work of genius, but it is a personal and very human look at war, probably more relevant now than it was when it was written. Spain has changed considerably, as has the art of war, but human nature in times of conflict is very much the same.

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Summary: Journalistic Integrity
Review: What I enjoyed most about this book was that Orwell pointed out that in times of war - where news and descriptions of events are usually reported with great amounts of partisan spin - the only "real" truth that one can know is what one sees with his own eyes.

I enjoyed his scientific observations of being in battle and the political manifestations of war. What I disliked about this book was trying to keep track of the many different acronyms which made up the different parties in Spain, having no a priori knowledge of these parties or their political differences.

I think our embedded journalists in Iraq could use a lesson from Orwell's humanistic approach to war-reporting.

All in all, I think this is a great book.

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Summary: Extraordinary account of the Spanish Civil War
Review: I was put off Orwell at an early age by reading 1984 and Animal Farm, both of which I found terribly depressing. Thirty years later, I finally got around to reading 'Homage to Catalonia' and I wish I hadn't waited so long because it is absolutely fascinating. Orwell's account of fighting on the front line during the war is really reamrkable. It is astonishing to earn what an absolute shambles the war was, with soldiers armed with hopleessly antiquated weapons. The Republican and Nationalist front lines were so far apart that most of the time they can't even fire at each other, being too far apart to score a hit, so they are reduced to shouting propoganda at each other through megaphones. I had no idea Orwell could be funny, at times reading this book is like reading a scenario for a farcical comedy. You get a good sense of the privations and squalor of life in the front line, also, surprisingly, the cold (it had honestly never occured to me that Spain was ever cold). There is an incredibly vivivd description of how Orwell felt when he got shot in action. Away from the front, Orwell is shocked to discover that the Republicans seem to be more interested in fighting each other than the Nationalists. The Communists begin to act vindictively towards the Trotskyists and members of POUM, the organisation under whose banner Orwell had fought. He describes his horror as he sees men who had given up everything to go and fight for the Republic, treated as criminals by the Republican army. There is a very funny scene where he describes how his hotel room is searched by police looking for evidence of subversive activity. they search the room for about an hour, looking everywhere, but they never touch the bed, because his wife is lying in it, even though,as Orwell reflects, there could be a ton of Trotskyist literature under the pillow, and machine guns under the mattress. Hilarious in parts, heartbreaking in others, this is an unforgettable book.

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Summary: Getting Shot in the Neck in the Name of Anarcho-Syndicalism
Review: Ever wonder what it is like be shot right through the neck? Ever wonder what it is like to stare over open sights at an enemy soldier with his pants down (literally) relieving himself? Would you shoot? Ever wonder what it is like to fight with allies that may be as worse than the common enemy?

Orwell experienced all of this and more as a member of one of the more obscure Spanish militias fighting for the Spanish Republic during the bloody internecine Spanish Civil War. He also became incredibly dissillusioned in the process. Finding his beliefs in revolutionary socialism, he was already jaded by communism and the cynical use it was put to serve Stalin's interests. He opted for a more loose organisation and therefore choose to enroll with the Anarcho-Syndicalists as a foreign volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. His particular group was called the POUMists (an acronym that I need not summarize here).

Ill-equipped and with no training, they showed what raw idealism can do against Franco and his fascist oppression -- they stopped fascism cold on the battle field and were never found wanting in terms of courage. What did defeat them was the United Front launched by the Cominterm against International Fascism. For those that did not tow the line, Stalin's advisors and compadours inside the Spanish Communist Party sacrificed. Denied weapons, ammunition and food, the coalition --- made up a broad spectrum of liberal-democrats, progressives, socialists, communists, anarchists (and every shade between) --- were defeated in piece-meal battles. Orwell was shaped and scarred by the experience. Although always a social progressive, he realised that idealism in its most extreme forms could be as bad as the fascism one was fighting against. This shaped his eternal mistrust of Communism (but not as some rightist's bizaarly claim, push him into being some kind of conservative demigod).

This book has it all: a trenchent analysis of political history, a serious war biography, a good slice of military narrative, and a chronicle of idealist growth, development and abandoning of a former way of thinking...

Without a doubt one of my top 5 war biographies and one of the top 25 reads of my entire life, so far....

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Summary: Shattered Bodies, Shattered Ideals, or: Revolution Redux
Review: In the essay that prefaces this publication of *Homage to Catalonia*, Lionel Trilling declares that George Orwell was "not a genius [...] but a figure," in other words, an individual who presided over certain historical ideas and attitudes and was able to express these conceptions in a simplistic, general way, seeking and finding the truth of the matter and subsequently scribing it without undue embellishment, overt bias or brain-taxing philosophical meta-quandary - making difficult issues palpable for mass comprehension. I cannot say I fully agree with this hypotheses, though it certainly does make for an interesting read after completing Orwell's account of the Spanish Civil War - introductions, it seems, should always be read _last_ in order to avoid spoiling the interior text - for in my definition, `genius' is one who is able to perceive, in some fasion, the patterns and cycles generally unseen by the common multitudes, even (especially) if focused on a particular path; more importantly, genius is how this perception is then channeled and reflected to the world at large, and in that regard, Orwell's ability to penetrate the pompous falsehoods and intentional ambiguities of political discourse, via hard truths and internalized experiences, especially given the chaotic era in which *Homage to Catalonia* was written: to pierce through and then pen a novel such as this, simple but oh so telling, `easy' but incredibly effective - this certainly takes a particular type of genius. All of Orwell's novels share this sort of rolled-up-sleeves ethic. Trilling may find *Animal Farm* to be over-rated (as do I, with reservations), but as a metaphor it is one of the greatest of the first half of the 20th century - easily the most influential and public-schooled - and certainly the product of a genius perception internalized and painstakingly realized.

Of course, I have the hindsight benefit of half a century, whereas Trilling wrote his essay a mere two years after Orwell's death... such is the advantage of time! Orwell makes note of this as well, concluding that his theories would either stand or fall when re-examined from afar. Time has tested his experiences, indeed, and the breadth of clarity and caustic recognition is just as pertinent now, at the beginning of the 21st century, as it was in the late 1930's.

When the Spanish Revolution broke out in 1936, the country was torn between the utopia-seeking leftist radicals/anarchists and the old-form power structure still fighting for control, allied with the notorious Generalissimo Franco and his Fascist-funded army. Although Orwell initially traveled to Barcelona as a journalist, he was so impressed with the fact that the Spanish were fighting Fascism - something incredibly rare in that pre-WW period of European history - that he hung up his press-cap and picked up a rifle, impelled by what he called "common decency" to naïvely join one of the many leftist factions without a hard inquiry into the political realities of the conflict. Luckily he did not put down his journalist's pen: after the fallout, Orwell scribed his experiences in concise, articulate form, remarkably free of the prevalent propaganda shrouding the fiasco...and that is why this book has lasted, while the forked tongues and tabulations of that period have all `withered on the vine,' so to speak.

*Homage to Catalonia* describes two experiences of violence: the outer violence, being Orwell's wry, almost nostalgic reflections of serving in the trenches for some five months in 1937 - coping with starvation, winter cold, boredom and the occasional pot-shot from the opposing side; and the inner violence, being his eventual disillusionment of Communism as a political ideology. The first violence is, naturally, the most entertaining to read, with its adventures and unexpected conflicts, its hardships and absurdities all lovingly infused with Orwell's dry wit, set in stone via his very-English style, full of humility, human awareness and healthy skepticism. The second violence is more complicated, convoluted (due to the political particulars), and both harrowing and illuminating in detail. Already a committed Socialist, Orwell was stunned and gratified to discover how, under extreme duress and remarkable isolation, his militia-sect of revolutionaries achieved, for a short time, a truly "utopian" society, Marx's theory made true: and how this was betrayed and irrevocably shattered by opposing forces, namely, the rest of the world. Revolution was not in the interests of anyone outside of Spain, as it threatened vested interests and stability; even Stalinist Russia, so-called bastion of the left, sabotaged its red brethren with shoddy munitions and double-dealing. After defending Spain from Fascism for month after bloody month, Orwell returned to Barcelona to find he and his fellows demonized by journalists, called "traitors" and "pro-Fascists," transformed in the public eye from men fighting for `common decency' to pawns maneuvered by power-brokers, via their propagandist lap-dogs, into a stalemate position. This internal fracas climaxed with pitch battle in the streets of Barcelona; after the smoke cleared (physically, at least), all members of the radical sect, be they native or foreign, were rounded up and jailed as insurgents. Forced to flee the country in disguise, Orwell left behind the ruins of a once-potential anarchistic prosperity, but his memories of that brief, classless equality among men, amidst the bullets and bombs of confused carnage, linger tellingly in the text.

*Homage to Catalonia* warns us to take all information with a grain of salt, to look behind the curtain and view the puppeteer jerking the strings of those talking-head mouths - a message most important in this complex, (mis)information-glutted era. The book also serves as a vital element in Orwell's oeuvre: *Homage* can be seen as a continuation of the Socialist ideals espoused in *Down and Out in Paris and London*, and the framework experience that inspired the allegory of *Animal Farm*.

Highly recommended for enthusiasts of both history and literature.