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Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia Is Instructive on Many Levels, and It’s a Good Read as Well
I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. — George Orwell
After reading Thomas E. Ricks’ Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, I knew I had to read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, the book Orwell wrote preceding Animal Farm and 1984. To paraphrase one Amazon reviewer, a lmost no war is both more pivotal to 20th century history and less understood by young and old alike today.
I’ve long been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War without fully comprehending what really happened there. Picasso’s Guernica was inspired by an event in that conflict. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls provides images of horrors that took place at that time, placing a microscope on the characters interacting in a specific event.
When I was in high school I took an interest in Leon Trotsky (because my first name is Leon) with very little understanding of Communism, socialism or any other ism. I knew that he was assassinated in Mexico but I didn’t know why he was living there.
When we went to Mexico in 1980 to work at an orphanage in Monterrey, I was only partially surprised to see the hammer and sickle insignia painted on walls there. By then I’d already known that 40,000 communists fled Spain after Franco took power. I did not understand that the communists and socialists were splintered into additional factions, one of them being the Trotskyites. These were the ones who fled to Mexico because of Stalin’s efforts to eradicate adversaries and consolidate power.
In short, this book helps illuminate a somewhat confusing period of history.
On a larger scale, the Spanish Civil War was a place where modern technology was used to subdue opponents in a new destructive way as never before. Hitler and Mussolini helped arm Franco and the Fascists. In return they gained many insights that would be applied in the coming global conflict
The big surprise for me as I began this book was learning that Orwell went to Catalonia not as a journalist but to fight. Most of the book is about his experiences in the…
