Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell

4 ideas

1. Barcelona May Days and POUM's suppression

   In May 1937 fighting broke out in Barcelona after government Assault Guards tried to seize the anarchist-held Telefónica, and Orwell, on leave from the Aragon front, spent days guarding the POUM building from a cinema rooftop. Within weeks the Communist-influenced Republican government outlawed the POUM, branded it a Trotskyist-fascist fifth column, imprisoned its members, and its leader Andrés Nin disappeared in custody. Orwell, recovering from a sniper's bullet through the throat, had to hide by sleeping rough before escaping to France.

2. War propaganda rewrites events faster than truth

   Orwell saw newspapers in London and Spain report the Barcelona fighting as a planned fascist rising by the POUM when he had watched the opposite happen. When a party controls what gets printed, the official version becomes the record and eyewitnesses cannot correct it. A falsehood repeated across friendly papers ends up counting as history.

3. Revolutionary equality as a lived atmosphere

   Arriving in Barcelona in December 1936, Orwell found waiters refusing tips, formal address abolished, and the militias run without rank-based pay or saluting. The worth of the revolution showed first in daily manners and the absence of servility, not in its programme. When the bourgeois look of the city came back months later, that was an early sign the revolution was being reversed.

4. Front-line war as boredom and dirt

   On the Aragon front Orwell found that trench life was mostly cold, lice, hunger, firewood and waiting, with obsolete rifles and trenches too far apart for real fighting. Looking at a war through its material routine instead of its battles shows how little the heroic stories on either side match what soldiers actually live through.

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