Review: Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

...there were sensational details about
secret messages in invisible ink, a mysterious document signed with the
letter N. (standing for Nin), and so on and so forth.

- Homage to Catalonia

This audio edition includes errata and commentary discovered in Orwell's effects making it, perhaps, a definitive edition. This is a memoir of Orwell's idealist venture to fight in The Spanish Civil War out of some sense of obligation to combating Fascism, visit a worker-run country, etc. Beside Orwell's details of military life in undisciplined and adequately supplied militia, some things that jumped out at me:

1. Anarchists (really anarcho-syndicalists) were more feared than Trotskyists (internationalist socialists)
2. "The whole process is easy to understand if one remembers that it proceeds from the temporary alliance that Fascism, in certain forms, forces upon the bourgeois and the worker. This alliance, known as the Popular Front, is in essential an alliance of enemies, and it seems probable that it must always end by one partner swallowing the other. The only unexpected feature in the Spanish situation— and outside Spain it has caused an immense amount of misunderstanding— is that among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme Right. In reality this should cause no surprise, because the tactics of the Communist Party elsewhere, especially in France, have made it clear that official Communism must be regarded, at any rate for the time being, as an anti-revolutionary force."
3. Lot's on contemporary political minutiae that Orwell folds into identified chapters that he offers the reader to skip. Such is the jaded writer looking back on his younger, idealistic self!

View all my reviews