Revising History - 5

More Orwell

And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word--in Spain at this moment you can be thrown into jail and kept there indefinitely, without trial, on the mere rumour that you are a Trotskyist--is only beginning to be bandied to and fro in England. (Spilling The Spanish Beans)

I have recently re-read Homage to Catalonia  (admittedly, very rapidly). Reading this, and his other essays on the war in Spain, it is impossible to escape the impression that here was the inspiration for his 'classics' - 1984 and especially Animal Farm. But this is not often fully acknowledged. For example, for a recent dramatisation of Animal Farm, the programme notes say merely, 'as the political situation worsened, Orwell and his wife narrowly escaped arrest and returned to England.'

As Timothy Garton Ash's East European contacts once asked him, how did Orwell know 'about everything, from the shortage of razor blades to the deep psychology of doublethink?' Of course, there were the Moscow show trials and Stalin's purges, but Orwell was not there for those. He was there for the 'May Days' (Barcelona, 1937), observing and even participating (to an extent which, again, is often overlooked).

If Spain matters for nothing else, it matters because it was such a formative experience for one of the most seminal writers of the twentieth century.

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Here is the passage that Fernández-Armesto quotes Orwell from (see Part 2):

'Those are the Socialists' (meaning the [communist-controlled] P.S.U.C.), I was puzzled and said: 'Aren't we all Socialists?' I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their lives should have separate parties; my attitude always was, 'Why can't we drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?' This of course was the correct 'anti-Fascist' attitude which had been carefully disseminated by the English newspapers, largely in order to prevent people from grasping the real nature of the struggle.

Whatever new material has come to light, I doubt whether much shakes Orwell's summary:

The Anarchists probably saved the situation in the first two months, but they were incapable of organizing resistance beyond a certain point; the Communists probably saved the situation in October-December, but to win the war outright was a different matter. ( Homage to Catalonia , Chapter 5)