Oh to be in Spain, now that war is here...

books:


	• Homage to Catalonia (Penguin Modern Classics) George Orwell Penguin Classics, 2003 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Oh to be in Spain, now that war is here...

Not long after George Orwell wrote HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, a famous friend of his remarked to him, "You've turned what could could have been a good book into journalism." Orwell, who could take it as good as he could give it, agreed that this was the case, but added that if he hadn't been thinking journalistically when he wrote it, it never would have been written at all. In an essay called "Looking Back on the Spanish War" he later admitted that his motivation for writing HOMAGE was not to relate his experiences as a volunteer foot-soldier on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, but rather to blow away the fog of lies which surrounded the conflict and tell the unpleasant, politically incorrect truth: that the Loyalists, darlings of the political Left and supposed champions of freedom, were nearly if not equally as villainous as the Fascists, and were, even as Orwell was writing, murdering in large numbers many of the foreign volunteers who had come to help them fight, merely over a difference in political orthodoxy. HOMAGE was written objectively as possible, but also in great anger. If it is journalism, it's muckraking of the very best sort.

HOMAGE begins with Orwell, in Spain to cover the war for a Leftist newspaper, abruptly deciding to throw in his lot with a Loyalist milita group called the Party of Marxist Unification, or P.O.U.M. In the early stages of the civil war, the democratic government relied very heavily on militias formed from the ranks of the Spanish trade unions to supplement its regular fighting forces (most of the Spanish Army had sided with the Fascists), but its relationship with the militas, were Socialist, Anarchist or Communists in persuasion, was strained and uncertain. Sent to the front at Aragon, Orwell quickly discovered that the mistrust of the government was preventing the militas from being properly equipped - he describes them as virtual rabble, lacking uniforms, sort on rations, and using outdated weapons. On leave, he also discovered - a recurring theme not only in HOMAGE but all his later writings - that there was a substantial difference between what was actually happening at the front and what was being reported both in and out of Spain. Objective truth seemed to be fading out of existence; each political faction, including all of those on the Left, had its own version of what was really happening, with actual events being rewritten or ignored depending on one's leanings. When his own group, the P.O.U.M., fell afoul of the government, Orwell was appalled and infuriated at how quickly Leftist university professors in England declared everyone fighting for it to be a Fascist spy and refused to be persuaded otherwise. He saw cowards lauded as heroes, heroes denigrated as cowards, major battles reported where there had been no fighting, and heavy fighting subjected to complete historical blackout. The idea that a completely fraudulent history of the war was being written frightened him, but not merely so much as the idea that an "accurate" history was not going to be possible, because regardless of who won, the winning side would write only lies, and those lies would, to the future generations raised on them, become the truth.

HOMAGE is partially a battle memior, but Orwell's fighting experiences, which included being shot by a sniper, were secondary to the grinding realities of trench warfare on a neglected front - lice, cold, hunger, exhaustion, and boredom. He paints a vivid picture of war on a shoestring budget, but the book is most notable for his description of the Loyalist's suppression of the P.O.U.M. by force, an act which led to street fighting (a civil war within a civil war) in Madrid and very nearly cost Orwell his life. Slipping into journalism mode, Orwell tries to trace the causes of the fighting and the motivations of the government, while simultaneously documenting his own desperate struggle to escape the police and get out of Spain alive. The atmosphere of political orthodoxy, hatred, lies, hypocrisy, privation and terror he experienced during this time were fuel for the fire that later became "1984."

HOMAGE isn't a perfect book by any means, but it is classically Orwellian - tactless, penetrating, honest, thorough, and decent. It provides the reader with a depressingly clear picture of how petty political rivalries on the Left helped to hand victory in Spain to their worst enemies, the Facists.

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