This book, an eyewitness account of a small sliver of the Spanish civil war told by George Orwell, is probably my favourite of his books that I've read yet. I read it because of the admittedly-not-as-extensive-as-I'd-hoped parallels between the circumstances of Catalonia's workers' revolution (driven as much by anarchists as communists) in the midst of a complex civil war and the current situation in Rojava - and, somewhat appropriately, read the bulk of it during four days spent at a grassroots environmentalist training camp last week.
It is an enlightening and intriguing perspective on an aspect of one of the 20th-centuries' defining conflicts often airbrushed out of historical remembrance - the Spanish civil war is framed in mainstream memory as a straightforward conflict between the established republican government and an upstart traditionalist proto-fascist general; as Orwell so deftly explores, the reality was immensely more complex and convoluted than this,* but one of the largest precipitating events in the situation was this worker-led revolution in Catalonia - in which locals rejected what they perceived as the stagnant exploitative hierarchies of centralized organised religion and industrial capitalism, instead establishing secular egalitarian communities where decisions were made and work was done (down to the voluntary formation of militias to join in the fighting against Franco's forces) and resources were shared collectively - is not as widely known, despite being a key aspect of the scenario. Noam Chomsky argues that mainstream academia of the Spanish war neglected to pay sufficient attention to this part of the story because they were writing in institutions to some degree tied up in the perpetuation of nationalist or capitalist or otherwise status quo hegemonies - and so even mentioning anarchist revolutions, not least ones in which "one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable... a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism"; where George Orwell along with tens of thousands of Catalan and Spanish and international volunteers answering the conscience-call of solidarity had, if for only several months, and in the midst of a destructive and treacherous civil war (against not only fascists but against the machinations and subterfuge of other factions ostensibly on the same side), truly felt that they had breathed the air of equality that was the immediate aftermath of revolution, where all previously unquestioned structures of power and inequality had been levelled and there was nowhere to go but forwards, to win the fight against Franco and continue developing an experimentally bottom-up democratic socialist society, as hand-in-hand projects - obviously this isn't the kind of thing that mainstream academics would want to pay attention to for fear it inspire its recurrence, or even simply remind people of its possibility. Anyway, as expected, Orwell writes with an incisiveness and clarity, with a humbly-grounded-in-subjectivity yet attempting-to-make-substantive-claims-about-overall-situations approach to his perspective that is frank and honest and as educational as it is forthright; his descriptive and reflective passages on the nature of the conflict itself are lyrical, brutal, and bleak. One is left with a powerful and unpleasant aftertaste of the utter dank futility of war - yet also, in certain horrendously final circumstances, of its utter necessity. This was not straightforwardly a war of fascism against democracy - there are far too many twisted corners to the historical context for it to be framed as such - but ultimately Orwell, in this book, shows us the simple human grandeur of what we can achieve together when we try and how it is worth fighting for,** even when those efforts feel pointless given how far they are stilted by the actual fighting and despite the experiential drudge and vague terror of the fighting itself.
I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in European history, well-written eyewitness accounts of under-reported events, anarchism and democracy and socialism and fascism and whatnot; anyone who's read either of Orwell's best-known works*** will see just to what extent his experiences in Catalonia (especially the paranoia-inducing days spent floating about between rumours, misinformation, and secret police during the Barcelona fighting and the later repression of the anarchist militia) shaped his political consciousness, lending a great deal of colour and shape to what must have been an incredibly formative time in the life of a man who went on to write some of the most poignant fiction-fable takedowns of totalitarianism ever penned.
* Two chapters dealing in-depth with the twisted 'plague of initialisms' that became of Spain's political landscape during this time, and the endless spewage of rumour and treachery and propaganda between and about each of these, forms a helpful appendix.
** As a pacifist but with a fairly similar political outlook to Orwell in certain respects (at least chiefly those that form the thematic and topical nexus of this book), I was brought a few times into quite introspective consideration of what, if anything, I would deem worth fighting (in an actual violent warfare sense) for - and I'm still working on this answer.
*** I can't remember what they're called. 1973 and Animal House?
It is an enlightening and intriguing perspective on an aspect of one of the 20th-centuries' defining conflicts often airbrushed out of historical remembrance - the Spanish civil war is framed in mainstream memory as a straightforward conflict between the established republican government and an upstart traditionalist proto-fascist general; as Orwell so deftly explores, the reality was immensely more complex and convoluted than this,* but one of the largest precipitating events in the situation was this worker-led revolution in Catalonia - in which locals rejected what they perceived as the stagnant exploitative hierarchies of centralized organised religion and industrial capitalism, instead establishing secular egalitarian communities where decisions were made and work was done (down to the voluntary formation of militias to join in the fighting against Franco's forces) and resources were shared collectively - is not as widely known, despite being a key aspect of the scenario. Noam Chomsky argues that mainstream academia of the Spanish war neglected to pay sufficient attention to this part of the story because they were writing in institutions to some degree tied up in the perpetuation of nationalist or capitalist or otherwise status quo hegemonies - and so even mentioning anarchist revolutions, not least ones in which "one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable... a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism"; where George Orwell along with tens of thousands of Catalan and Spanish and international volunteers answering the conscience-call of solidarity had, if for only several months, and in the midst of a destructive and treacherous civil war (against not only fascists but against the machinations and subterfuge of other factions ostensibly on the same side), truly felt that they had breathed the air of equality that was the immediate aftermath of revolution, where all previously unquestioned structures of power and inequality had been levelled and there was nowhere to go but forwards, to win the fight against Franco and continue developing an experimentally bottom-up democratic socialist society, as hand-in-hand projects - obviously this isn't the kind of thing that mainstream academics would want to pay attention to for fear it inspire its recurrence, or even simply remind people of its possibility. Anyway, as expected, Orwell writes with an incisiveness and clarity, with a humbly-grounded-in-subjectivity yet attempting-to-make-substantive-claims-about-overall-situations approach to his perspective that is frank and honest and as educational as it is forthright; his descriptive and reflective passages on the nature of the conflict itself are lyrical, brutal, and bleak. One is left with a powerful and unpleasant aftertaste of the utter dank futility of war - yet also, in certain horrendously final circumstances, of its utter necessity. This was not straightforwardly a war of fascism against democracy - there are far too many twisted corners to the historical context for it to be framed as such - but ultimately Orwell, in this book, shows us the simple human grandeur of what we can achieve together when we try and how it is worth fighting for,** even when those efforts feel pointless given how far they are stilted by the actual fighting and despite the experiential drudge and vague terror of the fighting itself.
I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in European history, well-written eyewitness accounts of under-reported events, anarchism and democracy and socialism and fascism and whatnot; anyone who's read either of Orwell's best-known works*** will see just to what extent his experiences in Catalonia (especially the paranoia-inducing days spent floating about between rumours, misinformation, and secret police during the Barcelona fighting and the later repression of the anarchist militia) shaped his political consciousness, lending a great deal of colour and shape to what must have been an incredibly formative time in the life of a man who went on to write some of the most poignant fiction-fable takedowns of totalitarianism ever penned.
* Two chapters dealing in-depth with the twisted 'plague of initialisms' that became of Spain's political landscape during this time, and the endless spewage of rumour and treachery and propaganda between and about each of these, forms a helpful appendix.
** As a pacifist but with a fairly similar political outlook to Orwell in certain respects (at least chiefly those that form the thematic and topical nexus of this book), I was brought a few times into quite introspective consideration of what, if anything, I would deem worth fighting (in an actual violent warfare sense) for - and I'm still working on this answer.
*** I can't remember what they're called. 1973 and Animal House?
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