Homage to Catalonia
Breaking Big Brother - Chapter 6
This is Chapter 6 of my book Breaking Big Brother. To read from the beginning, click here.
All quotes in this chapter are from Homage to Catalonia (1938).
"I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do."
This was George Orwell’s reasoning for going to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. It’s the same reason my grandfather cited for why he decided to pack up at the age of eighteen and enlist in the navy during World War II. “It was what you did.” There didn’t seem to be any other option.
George Orwell’s choice to fight for a revolutionary militia in a foreign war was largely influenced by the media. He’d read a lot of newspaper articles (and talked to a lot of people who had also read a lot of newspaper articles) about what was happening in Spain—about how Francisco Franco, the fascist usurper, had forced himself into power, ousting an elected left-leaning government (all true), and how the war that was happening in Spain was a war between good and bad, freedom and oppression (a viewpoint that is far more complicated).
In reality, while the young men who Orwell was fighting alongside were certainly earnest, the greater war was between self-interest and other, differently-branded self-interest. Orwell would not learn this until he was already there, living a life-altering experience that would have him cold and hungry in trenches on the Aragon front, shot in the neck by a sniper, and pursued by police officers as a political criminal.
The Orwell that we know of today—the unorthodox socialist, the intense skeptic, the guy who died an unbridled optimist while simultaneously outlining all of the problems that plague the world until this day—was conceived during the Spanish Civil War. He went into the war naively politically-motivated, and he left with his characteristic distrust of media, propaganda, and government.
Why? In order to answer this question, we need to take a look at what happened.
Orwell went to Spain in December of 1936. He was thirty-three years old, had just finished writing The Road to Wigan Pier (although it wouldn’t be published until March 1937). And while he had certainly had an interesting set of experiences—growing up amongst English upper-class society, enforcing the law in British Burma, then living in the slums of Paris, the streets of London, and shadowing the coal miners of Northern England is certianly not the makings of a sheltered life—up until this point his activism had been somewhat one-dimensional. He was a socialist (albeit a very critical socialist), but, despite being very critical of the party, he hadn’t yet conceived of the idea that despots might hide their political self-interest under the guise of righteousness. He was an idealist; in many ways, he saw the world in black-and-white.
This changed in Spain. When Orwell first arrived in Barcelona, he had wanted to fight with the anarchists (a political movement that he had identified with up until his sympathy towards socialism, which began sometime around the writing of The Road to Wigan Pier). He wound up fighting for the socialist POUM militia (Partido Oberero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) largely due to circumstance:
“As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists; if one became a member of the I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party] one was almost bound to join the P.O.U.M., with which the I.L.P. was affiliated.”
Although relatively widespread in influence for its size, the POUM was a relatively small organization. The militia was made up almost entirely of untrained boys, many of whom had never held a weapon before in their lives. Orwell had spent a great deal of his time during the war badly clothed, and lacking food, weapons, and other supplies. There were other parties which dwarfed the POUM in number, wealth, and influence. The Soviet-backed Communists, for example, were a much larger and more sophisticated group.
At this point, you might be asking yourself what Russia has to do with any of this, and the answer, basically, is that the Soviet Union wanted to expand its influence. Having influence over a socialist Spain would be very good for the Soviet Union, while a fascist Spain might cause problems.
Of course, workers’ control would also have been pretty bad for the Soviet Union, whose objective was power, so they eventually attempted to stamp out the more revolutionary militias such as the POUM (but more on that later).
The shift in attitude during the war from revolutionary to ordinary, pre-revolutionary attitudes actually begs comparison to Orwell’s novel Animal Farm. Note the feeling that Orwell witnessed at the beginning of his time in Spain:
“Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and reedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.”
Barcelona at the start of the war took on an entirely revolutionary character. There were no hierarchical distinctions during this period. The upper-class did not feign superiority over the lower classes as they normally did—in fact, they did their best to disguise their wealth so as not to draw attention to themselves. There were no honorifics among the military—commanders and footsoldiers alike addressed one another by the term ‘comrade.’
This faded quickly. Soon, the elites were comfortable to brandish their wealth around Barcelona again, and ranks within armies returned. A major reason this happened is because of the Soviet influence over the Republican side.
“Everyone who has made two visits, at intervals of months, to Barcelona during the war has remarked upon the extraordinary changes that took place in it… the thing they said was always the same: that the revolutionary atmosphere had vanished.”
"The Communists stood for discipline, centralized control, and the militarization of the trade unions; roughly speaking, for turning the war into an ordinary war instead of a revolutionary war.”
Could this be why Orwell was so hostile towards the Soviet Union? Perhaps. Regardless, it can’t be denied that the trajectory of the revolutionary aspects of the Spanish Civil War—from near-complete workers’ control to the pre-war status quo merely brandishing the same name—is almost identical to the plot of Animal Farm. The only thing missing is the propaganda tactics (the origins of which we will examine in later chapters).
Eventually, Communist influence got so strong that they succeeded in suppressing the POUM. The communists gained control of the police force and outlawed any association with the organization. POUM leaders (including ones that Orwell served under) were put in jail. Orwell and his wife were targeted as political criminals, and just narrowly escaped arrest by using fake documentation to flee the country.
Oh, and shortly before this Orwell was shot in the neck—an experience he likened to “being at the centre of an explosion”—and was still recovering his ability to speak.
In short, it was a perilous time—a near-death experience followed by near-arrest, followed by, well, not much at all:
“Down here in the milder zones of the world, people are still sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
Much of England was blissfully unaware of how perilous the global political landscape had become, but Orwell would never again be swayed by such willful ignorance (and while World War II would prove his comment “till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs” to be quite prophetic, once again, his statement rings true in much of the Western world).
Nevertheless, the most obvious effects of the war were not his heightened sense of realism—although learning the gravity of such conflicts was certainly a result—but his distrust of media and propaganda. During his time in Spain, Orwell witnessed many disturbing things, but one of the things that disturbed him most was the way that the media distorted the truth, turning small conflicts into devastating battles and glossing over tragedies as it suited their narrative:
“One of the horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
“The Spanish war has probably produced as much lies as truth; it is difficult enough even to discover what is happening within a few hundred yards of you, but much more difficult to discover what is happening in the whole country.”
“I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”
The last quote is by far the most powerful. Orwell had witnessed firsthand a truth that many of us know to be evident today but that, back then, was relatively unknown—that the people who report the news have not actually witnessed the news, that their words are tailor-made to fit an agenda, and that you can read hundreds of newspaper articles and still never really know the truth.
When Orwell returns to England, he will take a job as a newscaster for the BBC, reporting to people in India the exact type of tailor-made propaganda that he loathes. For now, though, he is safe at home, recovering from a bullet wound and still kind of shocked as to just how boring ordinary life is compared to the exciting travesties of battle.
It’s kind of ironic. When reading Homage to Catalonia, the overwhelming feeling is boredom. Orwell spent most of his time during the war sitting in trenches waiting for something to happen, hungry and cold and withdrawing from tobacco, which was always in short supply. However, hindsight is a powerful thing, and the things he witnessed that were most egregious surely seemed to be the ones that stuck with him the most.
Perhaps this is the same for us as readers? Regardless, we will be talking much more about the themes of media manipulation and political disillusionment in later chapters. Stay tuned.
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Very Powerful Melissa, such a great breakdown on many things I have not thought of for years. You could be describing the situation in a few countries now.
This is good. He went to fight fascists and then became wanted by the Communists who had the same objectives but would not tolerate anything that looked counter-revolutionary. Deeply ironic. In '1984' the three main world powers are at war and change allegiances but each time they do, the past is reinvented so hide the fact it was ever any different. His books are largely concerned with the fungibility of truth and how it is traded and converted. The state, culture and class crush the individual, by first making them the enemy. Things are never as they seem and repeatedly, idealism and rebelliousness give way to circumstantial acceptance, sometimes complete conversion. It is what he observes in his non-fiction and it is a theme that recurs throughout all his fiction. There always seems to be a sad recognition that it was all for nothing somewhere near the end.
Reporting and propaganda are difficult to distinguish during war because information is also a weapon. This is also why factual reporting can make a person an enemy of the state or be made to appear treasonous. I think that made him realise how dangerous that could be in peacetime too - 'Aspidistra' explores perceived hypocrisies in advertising for example. Much of what we know about this is what he showed us. That is why we are still talking about Orwell.