'Homage to Catalonia' by George Orwell
notes by Joan Zimmerman

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Real War, Real Trenches, Real Rats
Joan Zimmerman on
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.

	One of the best books read in 2004. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938).
	Support us - buy what you want at Amazon!

Homage to Catalonia is a riveting book, and one of the few to clarify the mysterious Spanish Civil War. While it is not a comedy, it is often funny because Orwell and his companions were able to see some of the humor in their dire circumstances.

In 1936, Eric Blair (the novelist, critic, and political satirist who used the pseudonym George Orwell) went to Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War, and to enlist in a Socialist Republican militia. He said he went to Spain "to fight Fascism" and that he was fighting for "common decency". Throughout Homage to Catalonia, one gets a sense of Orwell's commitment to honesty.

During 1936 and 1937, he fought with the "Trotskyist" P.O.U.M. in support of the Republican government. In the trenches in the Catalan section of Spain, he battled against the attempted take-over by Franco's Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Despite the sacrifices by the Spanish and volunteers from Britain and the United States, Franco and his fellow-Fascists defeated the legally elected socialist Republican government of Spain.

Orwell has said: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it."

See especially Chapter Five. Some quotes:

"His [Franco's] rising was a military mutiny backed up by the aristocracy and the Church, and in the main, especially at the beginning, it was an attempt not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism." "One of the most horrible feature of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting." "It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours." "Every move [by the Communists in Spain] was made in the name of military necessity, ... but the effect was to drive the workers back from an advantageous position and into a position in which, when the war was over, they would find it impossible to resist the reintroduction of capitalism."

Orwell writes about his first-hand experience of the textures and sounds of war that few other writers have given us, including:

In the barn where we waited the floor was a thin layer of chaff over deep beds of bones, human bones and cows' bones mixed up, and the place was alive with rats. The filthy brutes came swarming out of the ground on every side. If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness. [See also Orwell's 1984 for his feelings about rats.] When an aeroplane swoops down and uses its machine-gun the sound, from below, is like the fluttering of wings.

We highly recommend Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.

	One of the best books read in 2004. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938).
	Support us - buy what you want at Amazon!

Links to other good books: Book recently read and assessed. Books read in 2003. Books read in 2004. On Harry Potter. On Buddhism. On How to Write Poetry. On Handwriting. Spanish: Books On Learning Spanish. Comments on Spanish Movies (en español). El Herido de Alfredo Zalce. Los Aztecas: sus números, sus días y sus dioses.

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