Homage To Catalonia - Aftermath

Aftermath

Barcelona under the Anarchists would remain with Orwell. "No one who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that strange and moving experience. It has left something behind that no dictatorship, not even Franco's, will be able to efface." In the words of a recent biographer, Gordon Bowker, "the people that had effaced that reality, the Soviet Communists, now had an implacable enemy they would come to regret having made." Christopher Hitchens: "The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937. Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM upon arriving in Spain he became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch Moreover, he came to understand that much of the talk about discipline and unity was a rhetorical shield for the covert Stalinization of the Spanish Republic."

On 26 April 1937 when Orwell and his ILP comrades had returned to Barcelona on their leave they had been shocked to see how things had changed. The revolutionary atmosphere of four months earlier had all but evaporated, and old class divisions been reasserted. Similarly, as he had headed for the French border on the train to Port Bou Orwell noticed another symptom of the change since his arrival—the train on which classes had been abolished now had both first-class compartments and a dining car. "Orwell mused that coming into Spain the previous year, bourgeois-looking people would be turned back at the border by Anarchist guards; now looking bourgeois gave one easy passage." A simple hostility to Stalinist Communism became a "deep-dyed loathing of it". Animal Farm, "his scintillating 1944 satire on Stalinism" would be part of his response to the Spanish betrayal. "He had learned a hard lesson,especially about the new political Europe. Totalitarianism, the new creed of 'the streamlined men' of Fascism and Communism, was a new manifestation of Orwell's old Catholic enemy, the doctrine of Absolutism" - "the ghost of Torquemada had arisen, imprisonment without trial, confessions extracted under torture with summary executions to follow." "The essential fact about a totalitarian regime is that it has no laws. People are not punished for specific offences, but because they are considered to be politically or intellectually undesirable. What they have done or not done is irrelevant."

Even after Hitler had repudiated his non-aggression pact with Stalin by launching Operation Barbarossa and most left wing intellectuals were to "laud the virtues of the Soviet Union at the tops of their voices even on the right, keeping Uncle Joe sweet was regarded as mandatory - Orwell went on insisting that the Soviet regime was a tyranny. Even as the Red Army battled the Panzers to a standstill on the outskirts of Moscow. At this distance, it is hard to imagine what a lonely line this was to take. But when it came to a principle Orwell was the sort of man who would rather shiver in solitude than hold his tongue."

Apart from the betrayal of the POUMists, the terror and the murder of Nin and Smillie, Orwell had been depressed by the attitude of the British press. "In Spain..I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts..I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various party lines." "He was appalled at the treatment of the May days as a 'Trotskyist Revolt' in papers like the News Chronicle which simply swallowed uncritically the Communist line; or Ralph Bates report in The New Republic that POUM militiamen were playing football with Fascist troops.... Given this supresio vero by interested parties, how could true history be written? Propaganda would pass as truth; 'facts' could be manipulated. Those who monopolized communication could create their own history after the event—the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four." Orwell attacked sections of the left wing press for suppressing the truth about Spain, indicting the Communists for instigating a 'reign of terror'; and he never forgave Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman who turned down his articles on the Spanish Civil War on the grounds that they 'could cause trouble'. Malcolm Muggeridge remembered : "Once when we were lunching at a Greek restaurant in Percy Street he asked me if I would mind changing places. I readily agreed but asked him why. He said that he just couldn't bear to look at Kingsley Martin's corrupt face, which, as Kingsley was lunching at an adjoining table, was unavoidable from where he had been sitting before." "Ten years ago it was almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Communism; today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or "Trotskyism"," Orwell wrote bitterly in 1938.

Yet Orwell "had felt what socialism could be like" and unlike the writer John Dos Passos for example, "who also had a friend killed in custody by the SIM (Servicio Investigación Militar/Spanish Secret Police) in Spain, and reacted by deserting the Communists and shifting decidedly to the right, Orwell never did abandon his socialism: if anything, his Spanish experience strengthened it." "At last I really believe in Socialism which I never did before." (George Orwell, Letter to Cyril Connolly, 8 June 1937). A decade later he wrote: "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."