Chronicling his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia is one of George Orwell’s lesser discussed or written about works. It is for me, though, arguably the most interesting. This is because it is the beginning of one of the most recurrent themes throughout both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: the writer’s obsession with truth and lies.
Orwell begins the book as the same left-wing idealist he was in The Road to Wigan Pier, noting that he was extremely pleased to arrive in Barcelona to see that “the working class were in the saddle”. Originally intending to be a journalist and to observe the war, he joined the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), an anti-Stalinist militia, to fight against the forces of Francisco Franco (who had aligned himself with the governments of Hitler and Mussolini) and was quickly sent off to fight just behind the front lines in Zaragoza. Nearly immediately, however, the reader gets a sense of the chaos of the organisation he was in. A large number of the men he was serving with on the front were underage, while the militia that he joined had nearly no equipment of use with which to fight. The guns which they did have were mostly old German ones used in the First World War, and Orwell gives a continuous sense of feeling let down by this.
The most gripping part of his account comes when Orwell discusses how the POUM and the Civil War more generally are being portrayed. He quickly realises that both the pro-Franco press as well as the pro-Republican press are lying about and propagandising events. Orwell is also disgusted by the way that the POUM is portrayed by the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), a pro-Stalinist, USSR backed communist militia, that was in power in Catalonia at the time, writing: “The POUM was declared to be no more than a gang of disguised Fascists, in the pay of Franco and Hitler, who were pressing a pseudo-revolutionary policy as a way of aiding the Fascist cause. The POUM was a ‘Trotskyist’ organisation and ‘Franco's Fifth Column’”. Indeed, one of the most striking lines in the book is when Orwell writes that “as time went on, the Communists and the POUM came to write more bitterly about one another than they did the Fascists”.
As the war continued, Orwell instead quickly became rather cynical, believing that the USSR was using its influence over the PSUC to actively prevent a leftist revolution from occurring, rather than to help such a thing happen, to protect its alliances. He became increasingly disgusted with the conduct of the PSUC, particularly their change to a “non-revolutionary policy” whereby the war would be fought on strictly military terms, rather than with the goal of restoring a leftist government in Spain.
The aforementioned in-fighting between the PSUC and POUM eventually descended into guerilla fighting between the two groups on the streets of Barcelona. The POUM fight on the side of the anarchists, whose weapons the PSUC and the Civil Guards of Spain have been ordered to seize. Again, the comments in the press do not at all match what Orwell has seen occur, as “in the communist and pro-communist press the entire blame… was laid upon the POUM”, rather than the PSUC who actually led the attack upon anarchist forces.
The book ends with a crackdown upon all other parties by the PSUC. Orwell and those he fought with became wanted by the Civil Guards. The most harrowing part of this is the plight of Jorge Kopp, who was Unit Commander of the contingent Orwell was in. Kopp was arrested by the PSUC upon his arrival in Barcelona, and Orwell does everything he can to free him from prison, to no avail. Although Orwell presumes he is to be immediately killed, Kopp lived on for another decade after being arrested, escaping prison and eventually moving to England, where he and Orwell rekindled their friendship.
Nonetheless, the book has an extremely bleak ending which reflects the changed man that Orwell became after the Spanish Civil War. No longer the revolutionary idealist that he was in The Road to Wigan Pier, where he in fact encouraged readers to vote for the Communist Party of Great Britain, he instead became far more cynical towards communism as an ideology. The idea of the ousting of Snowball in Animal Farm was of course modelled after Leon Trotsky, but I would contend that what Orwell saw as the lies of the PSUC in Spain were also a large influence on both this character and the overall plot of the novel, as Napoleon (the pig that represents Stalin and Stalinist communists) subsequently alters the truth about Snowball’s contributions to the Battle of the Cowshed.
Furthermore, the idea in Nineteen Eighty-Four of repetitive lies becoming accepted by the general populace was likely shaped by Orwell’s experiences in Spain, due to the fact that he highlights the importance of propaganda in shaping the war several times throughout, such as when he returns to Barcelona on leave from the front. At this point, the voluntary militia system had been dispatched of and was replaced by the Popular Army. Despite this, Orwell notes that “there was going on a systematic propaganda against the party militias and in favour of the Popular Army”, stating later on that “any credit that happened to be going was automatically handed to the Popular Army, while all blame was reserved for the militias.”
I find Homage to Catalonia to be an absolutely fascinating insight into the mind of George Orwell. His experiences during the Spanish Civil War led to an awareness of the power of propaganda and lies, the focus on which shaped his most seminal and influential works. Equally, it shows how a wide-eyed, idealistic man was changed to a far more jaded one, becoming someone that treated both communism and fascism with equal suspicion, a wisened development to his youthful enthusiasm towards radical communism.
