Homage to Catalonia

Orwell’s memoir of his time spent fighting in Spain in the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War, is a superb read. Sure, you could read something inane and pointless like The Great Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye, but why would you want to do that?? Get a copy of Orwell’s Homage, and you’ll be in for a much richer reading experience.

Recently republican Spain fell victim to a rightwing grab for power. The fascist Francisco Franco, an admirer of Adolf Hitler, consolidated power, enjoying Western support. He ruled Spain as a dictator from 1939 to 1975. Orwell went to Spain to join in the fight against fascism.

Politically, Orwell was quite taken with the anarchists while in Spain. Anarchism, I hasten to add, is a coherent political philosophy based in the writings of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and others—not chaos and violence. The noted linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has done much to promote this philosophy. He says this about Homage to Catalonia:

Yeah. I was interested in anarchist cooperatives in Spain [when I was younger]. You get a sense of it from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which I didn’t read at the time—actually, when it came out in the 1930s, it was suppressed. The reason was because it was anticommunist. You weren’t supposed to be anticommunist yet. It came out later on, as a Cold War document, which Orwell would’ve hated. But what impressed him—and he was not in favor of the anarchists; he didn’t like them but was impressed by them—he gives a very moving picture of the personal relationships, the elimination of authority, the fact that people talk to each other as equals. He said that there was something beautiful about what they were constructing and developing, and that’s the sense that I had as a child, too—though he didn’t like it.

Orwell has a beautiful passage in “homage” (p. 88) that really bears full quotation:

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. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before. Partly, perhaps, this was due to the good luck of being among Spaniards, who, with their innate decency and their ever-present Anarchist tinge, would make even the opening stages of Socialism tolerable if they had the chance.

“In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact.” Ain’t it the truth. Americans cannot even think the thought. “Socialism” is a sinister term that evokes images of Lenin and the sounds of Russian male choirs. And anarchism?? Perish the thought.

Americans have been trained to think red or blue. The culture is locked in a binary prison, incarcerated between two parties that do not represent their interests. This is an astounding achievement of the doctrinal system. The irony is deep: We view Soviet Communism as an enemy of individualism and liberty, and yet it is we who have been essentially programmed into obedience. The Soviets never dreamed of greater conformity than one finds in these United States.

I appreciate Orwell’s comment on the second to last page: “Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.” Given all he saw and experienced, one couldn’t have blamed him for taking a darker turn here. But Orwell doesn’t disappoint. He has the moral strength to see the good in people. Cynicism is born of weakness. It’s easy to take a dismal view of people—to adopt the “people are stupid” line.

Homage to Catalonia is an inspiring read, one that will—if you allow it—leave its impression on you.

https://www.amazon.com/Homage-Catalonia-George-Orwell/dp/0544382048