Status Updates From Orwell in Spain

NOW we’re getting to the real stuff after trudging through Orwell’s remarkably boring stint as a soldier. His political analysis in Homage to Catalonia reads like the unmasking finale of a whodunit

The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the ‘change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system.

Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.

The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader,or some ruling clique,controls not only the future but the past.If the Leader says of such and such an event,‘It never happened’–well, it never happened.If he says that two and two are five–well, two and two are five.This prospect frightens me much more than bombs…

Why is it that autobiographical journalism of this type always has to be so chirpily facetious? As soon as I glanced into the book and saw the style in which it was written I began looking for the dog. Books of this kind almost always have a comic dog which is a great filler-up of paragraph-ends; however, the part is filled by Mrs. Johnstone’s husband.

For it is precisely to slaughter and terrify the civilian population – not to destroy entrenchments, which are very difficult to hit from the air – that bombing aeroplanes exist.

After what I have seen in Spain I have come to the conclusion that it is futile to be ‘anti-Fascist’ while attempting to preserve capitalism. Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism when the pinch comes.

A Government which sends boys of fifteen to the front with rifles forty years old, and keeps its biggest men and newest weapons in the rear, is manifestly more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists.

The ‘liberal’ bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop.

But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left.

The Communists hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this manoeuvre simply gives Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery.

..moderncathedral,one of the most hideous buildings in the world.It had four crenellated spires exactly the shape of hock bottles.Unlike most of the churches in Barcelona it was not damaged during the revolution–it was spared because of its ‘artistic value’,people said.I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance,though they did hang a red and black banner between its spires.

They were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. If that had been the only book they found our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however, they came upon a copy of Stalin’s pamphlet, Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers, which reassured them somewhat.

That was about as far as my thoughts went. I did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics – I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damned nonsense to be over.

Practically the law was what the police chose to make it.

The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies – unless one counts journalists.

One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.