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Orwell in Catalonia: joining the POUM militia :​

In January 1936, a few days after his arrival in Barcelona, George Orwell made a decision that would mark his subsequent participation in the Spanish Civil War: he decided to join the military, because " at that time and in that environment it seemed the only logical thing to do ."

Orwell travelled to Spain with the firm intention of " killing fascists because someone has to do it ."
These were years of great tension and political radicalisation, where the liberal systems collapsed in the face of the rise of Nazi and fascist authoritarianism. In 1922 Benito Mussolini acceded to the government of Italy with the approval of his king, Victor Emmanuel III, and in 1933 Adolf Hitler did the same in Germany, helped by the conservative right.

In an international climate of tense polarisation, south of the Pyrenees a battle seemed to be taking place between opposing ideals: the II Spanish Republic, which represented democracy and a system of rights and freedoms, or the authoritarianism of the military who rose up against it.
On one side was Joseph Stalin's USSR, on the other the Nazi-fascist axis, and in the middle, fearful of igniting the flame of a new conflict on a global scale, were the liberal powers, especially France and Great Britain, which adopted a neutral policy, thereby condemning the Spanish republican government, in which Soviet influence was decisive.

Orwell arrived in Barcelona on December 26, 1936 with a letter of recommendation from the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a British organization with a Trotskyist orientation that he joined in 1938, after his experience in the Spanish Civil War.

Independent Labour Party - Wikipedia

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It is therefore not surprising that he chose the militias of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), whose political line was similar to that of the ILP, as his space for fighting against Spanish fascism.

Communist Left of Spain - Wikipedia

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Workers and Peasants' Bloc - Wikipedia

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POUM - Wikipedia

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His entry into the militia, although described with a certain romantic air, is presented to us in a crude way, close to the reality that he knew so well.

« How easy it is to make friends in Spain! Within a day or two there were already twenty militiamen who called me by my first name, taught me all sorts of tricks and overwhelmed me with their hospitality. This is not a propaganda book and I do not intend to idealise the POUM militia. The organisation of the militia had serious defects and among the men themselves there was everything, because at that time voluntary isolation was beginning to diminish and many of the best were already dead or at the front. Among us there was always a certain percentage who were totally useless. There were fifteen-year-old boys who had been enlisted by their parents for the ten pesetas a day of wages and for the bread that the militiamen received in abundance and could sneak home. But I challenge anyone to mix with the Spanish workers as I did - although perhaps I should say Catalans, because apart from a few Aragonese and Andalusians I only associated with Catalans - without being impressed by their basic honesty and, above all, their frankness and generosity .
Homage to Catalonia (1938), George Orwell

George Orwell (el más alto al fondo a la izquierda), cuando formaba parte de la milicia del POUM en 1937 en Barcelona

In early January, Orwell entered the Lenin Barracks, the centre of operations of the POUM militias, where new members were being trained.
Six months had already passed since the outbreak of war and some things, so characteristic of the first moments of the conflict, were beginning to change, including the military participation of women, which was decisive in July 1936, but disdained in January 1937.

« There must have been about a thousand men in the barracks and about twenty women, not counting the wives of the militiamen who cooked. There were still women serving in the militia, although not many. In the first battles they had fought side by side with the men without anyone being surprised, because in a revolution it seems the most natural thing to do. But ideas were beginning to change. When women were doing training, the militiamen were not allowed to go to because they were laughed at and distracted. A few months earlier no one would have thought it funny to see a woman holding a rifle .»
Homage to Catalonia (1938), George Orwell

Orwell spent his first days as a militiaman undergoing training.
Soon, the time would come to leave for the front.

Orwell, en el centro, con bigote y el brazo derecho cruzado, con un grupo de milicianos en el frente de Aragón.

Orwell en Cataluña: ingreso en la milicia del POUM

En enero de 1936, a los pocos días de su llegada a Barcelona, George Orwell tomaba una decisión que marcaría su posterior participación en la guerra civil española: decidió ingresar en la milicia, pues «en aquel momento y en aquel ambiente parecía lo único lógico».Orwell viajó a España con la...

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Orwell, soldier of Josep Rovira​

(by Josep Pané) ​

Josep Rovira - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Josep Rovira i Canals - Wikipedia

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Josep Pané (1910 – 1979) was a trade unionist and militant of the Workers and Peasants' Bloc and the POUM. During the civil war he was part of the POUM militias. The present text reproduces a large part of chapter 5 of the book he wrote together with Josep Coll, entitled "Josep Rovira, una vida al servei del socialisme (Josep Rovira, a life in the service of socialism)" , Ariel, 1977. Some passages have been removed. The translation into Spanish has been done by Margarita Díaz :


The great – and therefore controversial – English writer arrived at the Huesca front in mid-February 1937. He came from the Alcubierre mountain range sector where he had spent two months facing an invisible enemy and other more tangible enemies, such as the cold, fleas, mud and dirt –typical Spanish- and boredom. There he began to study and to get to know, in addition to the disconcerting attitude of the Spanish, the characteristics of a war conflict that for many days had been going around in his head… and which was about to make him literally turn around, really, when a bullet went through his neck, a neck and head that were perhaps too high up in trenches built for soldiers of an average height much smaller than the British.

After contemplating Zaragoza at night for hours and hours as “a narrow strip of lights, which looked like ship portholes, about twenty kilometers in a southwesterly direction” (1), he would now contemplate the old city of Huesca, days and days, among the trees of the orchard, right there, before his nose.

In the new sector, which Orwell expected to be much more lively –exciting, he would say-, since the two opposing lines were much closer, the writer-militiaman would receive a new disappointment, in addition to the effects produced by the harshness of the living conditions which, together with the after-effects of the serious wound he received later, and the privations to which he submitted himself –also voluntarily- [before] (2) the war in Spain, working as a dishwasher in the suburbs of Paris to write on the spot about the misery of the humble people of the big cities, would contribute to the worsening of a precarious health that would end prematurely –too prematurely- with a pen that would have still given much trouble in this shocked, disoriented and contradictory world in which we live. “The war meant for me –he confesses at the beginning of his book-, whistling projectiles and flying fragments of steel; but above all it meant mud, lice, hunger and cold. It is curious, but the cold frightened me more than the enemy” (3).

He was going to change the mud, the lice and the dirt of the Alcubierre mountain range, for the lice, mud and dirt of the positions near La Granja de Monflorite, southeast of Huesca, between the Flumen river and its tributary Isuela.

Tall, thin, with a dreamy and distant attitude, he immediately showed a desire to observe, like a curious child. However, his introverted air was not an obstacle, because he soon established a warm and open human relationship.

No militiaman - most of them tender and playful teenagers, as he himself describes them - would have suspected, seeing and dealing with him, that this long-legged and phlegmatic foreigner, who always had to bend down more than the others to walk through the trenches, was an intellectual, a writer who did not let any small detail of everything that surrounded him escape him, including the psychological traits of the human beings with whom he lived in open company.

Despite having received very few encouraging impressions about the character of the Spaniards, their lack of order, punctuality, neatness and discipline, the newcomer to the front sector could not hide his surprise and the profound admiration that these militiamen, not yet adapted to military schemes, without uniforms and with command posts without stripes, caused him when, in the course of one night, they carried out a rectification of the line that brought their positions to a short distance - too short for the physical integrity of Orwell himself, as will be seen later - from the enemy trenches.

When Orwell spent a few days in the Brigade hospital because of an infection in one of his hands that had to be opened, he said:
"The day I returned from the hospital we advanced the line about a thousand meters, to where it should have been, next to the stream that ran about two hundred meters from the fascist lines. The operation should have been carried out months ago. The reason for doing it now was that the anarchists were attacking along the Jaca road, and advancing on our side forced the enemy to use troops to confront us.
We hadn't slept for sixty or seventy hours and my memories are blurred, or rather, reduced to a succession of images."

Listening in no man's land, a hundred metres from the Casa Francesa, a fortified farmhouse that was part of the fascist lines. Seven hours lying in a horrible marsh, in water that smelled of reeds and into which I was slowly sinking: the smell of reeds, the numbing cold, the motionless stars in the black sky, the unpleasant croaking of the frogs. Although it was April, it was the coldest night I remember having spent in Spain. A hundred metres behind us the work teams were busy, but, except for the chorus of the frogs, the silence was absolute. Only once in the whole night did I hear a sound: the familiar sound of a shovel levelling a sandbag. Strange as it may seem, the Spanish manage to organise themselves very efficiently from time to time. All that movement was carefully planned. In seven hours, six hundred men built twelve hundred yards of trench and parapet, sometimes one hundred and fifty yards from the enemy lines, sometimes three hundred, so quietly that the Fascists heard nothing, and there was only one casualty all night. More fell the next day, of course. Every man had a job to do, even the kitchen staff, who came out with buckets of wine mixed with brandy when they had finished.

Dawn came and the Fascists realised we were there. The squat white mass of the French House was two hundred yards away from us, but it was as if it were right above us and the machine guns in the upper windows, protected by sandbags, were pointed at the bottom of the trench. We all held our breath, wondering why the Fascists didn't see us. Then we were hit by a furious shower of bullets, and we all fell on our knees, digging desperately to make the trench deeper and to make holes in the walls. As I still had my arm bandaged and could not dig, I spent most of the day reading a detective story; it was called The Missing Moneylender. I do not remember the plot, but I do remember, and very distinctly, the act of reading it; the wet clay at the bottom of the trench, having to continually move my legs out of the way to make way for the men running bent at the waist, the whistling of the bullets a foot or two above my head. Thomas Parker was shot in the upper thigh, and, he said, was nearer a DSO than he himself wanted to be. There were casualties all along the front, but they were insignificant compared with those that would have occurred if we had been caught in the middle of the night. A deserter later told us that five fascist sentries had been shot through negligence” (4).

According to Orwell, the Spaniards had accomplished a feat. Then it was the English and other internationals in the group who taught a lesson that the militiamen were in no hurry to learn; after a few hours of digging the trench, Orwell and his English companions did not put down their pick and shovel until they had dug a few holes that could accommodate two or three men. With a few logs and branches, the room was completed with seats and a table made of poles. On the back wall were hung portraits: the fiancée, the wife, the children…

Quite unlike the other foreign volunteers incorporated into the militia – and, needless to say, also the other volunteers from the country, including some from workers' organisations – Orwell had not come only to take part in the struggle – for him quite uncertain, problematic – as an adventurer eager for honours or distinctions. To begin with, during the entire time he was at the front he never left the trenches, except when he was wounded or on short leave, that is to say, he never sought contact or relations with the military and/or political leaders or with the media that were in each column, more or less close to the line of fire. Those who lived near him during the six or seven months he was at the front never saw him approach the command posts of the column (or of the brigade or division into which it was later structured). If, as he states in his book, “he had gone to Spain with the vague idea of writing newspaper articles” (5), it seems that once he had become acquainted, in practice or in reality, with the life in the trenches and the human types with whom he had been living, the most natural thing would have been to do everything possible to change his place as observer, exchanging the discomforts – and I am not even going to say the danger, which we already know he despised (some malicious person would say that he despised it completely) – for the relative comfort of a top brass, as so many others had done during the course of our highly internationalised civil war. There is no doubt, for example, that from the heights of the Siétamo General Staff, where the printing press and the editorial office of Alerta, the newspaper organ of the POUM forces, were located, he would have been able to gather enough material for his articles.

But George Orwell was something more than an observer. One of the best definitions of the personality of the writer-combatant we have read in a doctoral thesis (we do not know if it is still unpublished), by JM Russell, a student at the Sorbonne, under the title "La France et le continent dans l'oeuvre de George Orwell", which says:
“Orwell reproached many intellectuals for closing themselves in an abstract world, isolated from physical reality. These men who call themselves Marxists, or socialists, or even anti-imperialists, are not emotionally tied to any party. They are word factories, without any deep emotion, because they are not prepared to fight for their ideas. This explains why they so easily change camp. Orwell knew how to avoid this trap by keeping in touch with the world of things, this world where “a flea is a flea and a bomb is a bomb, even if the cause for which one fights is a just cause.
(…) Against the condemnatory judgments of the society of the well-born, Orwell's criticism this time points its weapon towards that world where young people feel no other ideal than that of obtaining a lucrative occupation and that of “making their way.”
His absolute lack of pretensions, his genuine austerity and his total physical and moral dedication to the role of front-line soldiers meant that Orwell did not personally meet the commander of the 29th Division, Josep Rovira, during his time in Spain. This explains why he only mentions him once in his book, and only when Orwell was preparing to leave the country with the police on his heels, which was when Rovira was already in prison or in hiding.
The head of the POUM militias did not meet Orwell while he was in Spain. They met briefly in France, after the end of the World War, when the writer, a former combatant of the 29th Division, gave Rovira the book Homage to Catalonia in its English edition, which had had so little success. Published in 1938, the second edition did not arrive until 1951. Today, already translated into various languages – the Catalan version has been produced with impeccable fidelity and style by Ramon Folch i Camarasa and published by Ariel – it is the clearest and most convincing exponent and defence of the quixotic military adventure of men who were reviled, persecuted, slandered and murdered for the sole fact of having been members of a party or a military unit that had a history of brilliant and heroic actions, with a large number of comrades killed fighting against the enemy. A history comparable, if not more so, to that of other workers’ organisations that left Barcelona for Aragon just after having defeated the military insurrection, which the POUM had faced with open chest and where they also had their victims, the first of them being the secretary general of the [Iberian Communist] Youth, Germinal Vidal.
All the POUM militants, all the militiamen who fought in the 29th Division until it was dissolved under a host of infamous accusations and its commander arrested, therefore have a debt to the ex-combatant writer that they will never be able to repay.
As time goes by, many of the truths and reflections contained in Orwell's book become clearer and more compelling. Even many of those who, having fought alongside the POUM men, had some doubts about the justice, reason or opportunity of some of the party's political attitudes - there was no doubt about military actions among the militants and those who were at the war front - have been unravelling these doubts by reading or rereading what Orwell wrote - as the critic Lionel Trilling states in the book's prologue (6), when he refers to the defamed events of May - explaining "objectively what he saw, as objectively as it is possible to see things."

And furthermore, we add, with a clairvoyance, a depth and an indisputably extraordinary scope.

Orwell's book-testimony is essential for a thorough study of some of the dark points or apparently strange events that occurred during the course of a war that was undoubtedly the prologue and the field of experimentation for the world war that followed almost without interruption. Reading what the writer-militant (militant against all oppressions) wrote, the answers to many of the questions that many anti-fascist people and organizations were already asking themselves appear in a clear light. And so he says (we highlight some of the points that we consider most interesting or eloquent):
"That is why, when comrades with more political education than me told me that one could not have an exclusively military attitude towards war, and that one had to choose between revolution and fascism, I used to laugh. In general terms I accepted the communist point of view, which was to say: "We must not talk about revolution until we win the war," and not that of the POUM, which was to say: "We must continue forward in order not to retreat. When I later came to the conclusion that the POUM was right, or at any rate more right than the Communists, it was not for theoretical reasons. On paper, the Communists' position was defensible; however, their behaviour made it impossible to believe that they were defending it in good faith. The oft-repeated slogan "First the war and then the revolution", although accepted without reservation by the average PSUC militiaman, who sincerely believed that the revolution would continue after victory, was a hoax. What the Communists were after was not to postpone the revolution until a more propitious moment, but to prevent it from happening. (…)
But ultimately, even if the revolution was lost, the war was worth winning. And in the end I came to doubt that Communist policy would make for long-term victory. Very few seem to have thought that a different policy could have been pursued in each period of the war. The Anarchists certainly saved the situation during the first two months, but their capacity to organize resistance was limited; the Communists certainly saved the situation in October-December, but getting the enemy to surrender was another matter entirely. In England the Communist war policy has been accepted without question, because almost all criticism has been censored and because its general line - eliminating revolutionary chaos, speeding up production, militarizing the army - seems practical and effective. Let us point out its intrinsic weakness.
In order to contain revolutionary tendencies and to make that war look as much like a normal war as possible, it was necessary to defenestrate the strategic opportunities that already existed. I have described […]how we were armed, or disarmed, on the Aragon front. There can be little doubt that the arms were deliberately withheld so that they would not fall into the hands of the anarchists, who might later use them for revolutionary purposes; consequently the great Aragon offensive, which might have driven Franco out of Bilbao and possibly also Madrid, was not launched. But this was nothing. Of greater importance is the fact that once the conflict had been reduced to a “war for democracy”, it was impossible to make large-scale appeals to the working class in other countries for help. Looking back at the facts, we must admit that the international working class has viewed the Spanish war with coldness. Tens of thousands of people went to Spain to fight, but the tens of millions who did not go remained indifferent. It is estimated that all the British gave during the first year of the conflict through the “aid to Spain” funds was a quarter of a million pounds, probably less than half of what they spent on the cinema a week. The means by which the working class in democratic countries could have really helped their Spanish comrades was industrial action: strikes and boycotts. Nothing came of it.
The Labour and Communist leaders everywhere claimed that this was inconceivable; and they were doubtless right, since they also shouted at the top of their voices that “red” Spain was not “red.” From 1914-1918 the expression “war for democracy” had a sinister ring. The Communists themselves had been telling workers in all countries for years that “democracy” was the civilized name for capitalism. To say first “Democracy is a swindle” and then “Fight for democracy” is bad tactics. If, backed by all the prestige of the Soviet Union, they had appealed to the workers of the world not in the name of “democratic Spain” but of “revolutionary Spain,” it is hard to believe that they would not have received a response.
But the most important thing of all was that with a non-revolutionary policy it was difficult, if not impossible, to strike at Franco’s rear. In the summer of 1937, Franco, with an army of similar strength, dominated an area more populous than that controlled by the Republican government, much more so if we count the colonies. As everyone knows, with a hostile population in the rearguard it is impossible to have an army on the battlefield without another equally large army in charge of protecting communications, repressing sabotage, etc. However, there was no popular movement worthy of mention in the Francoist rearguard. It was inconceivable that the inhabitants of this territory, or at least the urban workers and the humblest peasants, sympathized with Franco, but the superiority of the government was reduced with each step it took to the right. The case of Morocco explains everything. Why was there no uprising in Morocco? Given Franco's intention to impose an infamous dictatorship, did the Moors prefer him to the Popular Front government? The simple truth is that nothing was done to promote an uprising in Morocco, because by promoting it a revolutionary model would have been offered for the war. The first requirement, to convince the Moors of the good faith of the government, would have been to proclaim the independence of Morocco. What a pleasure that would have given the French! The best strategic opportunity of the conflict was lost in the vain hope of calming French and British capital” (7).

Orwell probably did not know when he wrote the latter that the ideal objective and subjective conditions existed to make the Moroccan insurrection a reality.
Miravitlles explains how the Moroccan nationalist leader Abdelkjalak Torres, accompanied by a delegation of leaders from his country, went to Barcelona shortly after the start of the civil war and proposed to the Catalan government to “establish an alliance” to liberate his country.
Torres went to Barcelona and not to Madrid because the Moroccan nationalists remembered that Catalonia was a territory seasoned with federalist ideals and had an autonomous government, as well as the historical fact that the 1909 movement – which culminated in the Tragic Week – originated as a protest against the war in Morocco. A commission from the Central Committee of the Militias of Catalonia, of which Miravitlles was a member, went to see Prieto, who sent them to Largo Caballero, telling them that he was “nothing more than a bellboy” there. The socialist president and minister of defence told Miravitlles that he had already received similar proposals and that he did not think it advisable, in such a delicate situation throughout North Africa, to support an insurrectionary movement that could spread to French Morocco. And that this could create a very difficult problem for the head of the French government, “my socialist comrade Blum”.

On the controversial question “first war, then revolution” Orwell insists:
“The whole communist policy was concentrated on reducing the war to a vulgar, non-revolutionary conflict, in which the government had the most to lose since such a war had to be won by mechanical means, that is, in the last instance, by the unlimited supply of arms, and the main supplier of arms to the government, me USSR, was in a much more disadvantageous geographical situation than Italy and Germany. Perhaps the slogan of the POUM and the anarchists, “War and revolution are inseparable”, was less visionary than it seemed” (8).

After the strong disappointment caused by the clashes in Barcelona in May, Orwell describes his state of mind upon returning to the front and his deep knowledge of what was being decided on the war fronts in Spain:
“Whatever perspective was adopted, the outlook was discouraging. But it did not follow from this that it was not worth fighting with the government against a more crude and developed fascism such as that of Franco and Hitler. For all the faults that could be imputed to the post-war government, there was no doubt that Franco's regime would be worse. Who won might ultimately be of little importance to the urban proletariat, but Spain is basically an agricultural country and the peasants would almost certainly gain from the victory of the government. They would retain at least some occupied land, in which case there would also be redistribution of land in the territory that had been Franco's, and there would be no restoration of the covert feudalism that had existed in certain parts of the country. The government that was in power at the end of the war would in any case be anti-clerical and anti-feudal; would keep the Church in line, at least for the moment, and modernize the country, building roads, for example, and promoting public education and health care, enterprises that had been undertaken to a certain extent even after the outbreak of war.”

And so there is a paragraph that does not appear in the [first] Catalan edition of the book, probably because it must have been considered unsuitable when it was published, in 1969. It says:
“Franco, on the other hand, insofar as he was not a simple puppet of Italy and Germany, was linked to the feudal landowners and represented the most ossified ecclesiastical-military reaction. The Popular Front might be a fool's errand, but Franco was an anachronism. Only millionaires and the deluded could wish for his victory” (9).

And Orwell goes up to the front again.
Now he had been promoted to lieutenant. He commanded a section: thirty men, English and Spanish. The positions at the foot of the Isuela River, in front of the Salas hermitage, were much closer to those of the Francoists, now that the rectification of the line had been carried out, which Orwell has already explained and which caused him so much admiration, the night they carried it to completion.

He had been up for two days when he was wounded. A lone sniper sent a bullet through his neck from one side to the other and narrowly missed his artery.
While they were taking him away in the ambulance - Orwell writes - :
"I began to feel more normal and to pity the four poor devils who were carrying the stretcher on their shoulders, sweating and slipping. It was almost two and a half kilometres to the ambulance and the journey was infamous, with those rough and slippery paths. I knew it was a beating, a couple of days before I had helped transport a wounded man" (10).

The bitter memory of the journey and his passing through the hospitals along the route until reaching the one in Lleida - as horrible and as badly organised (or better yet, disorganised) as those in Siétamo and Barbastro - is compensated by some anecdotes such as the following:
“Two militiamen on leave, some eighteen-year-old boys whom I had met during my first week at the front, came to see a wounded friend and recognised me. They stayed by the bed, feeling awkward as they tried to say something, and suddenly, to make me understand that they were sorry about my wound, they took out all the tobacco they had in their pockets, gave it to me and ran away without giving me time to refuse. How typically Spanish. Later I found out that tobacco could not be bought in the whole city and that what they had given me was equivalent to a week's ration” (11).
“One day we were all told in my ward that we were going to be sent to Barcelona that very day. I sent a telegram to my wife, telling her I was going there; we were put on buses and taken to the station. As the train was about to start, the hospital orderly who was travelling with us let slip in passing that we were not going to Barcelona, but to Tarragona. I suppose the driver had taken that approach. “Very Spanish,” I thought. But it was also very Spanish that they delayed the departure of the train to let me send another telegram, and even more Spanish that the telegram did not reach its destination” (12).

From Tarragona Orwell was taken to the Maurín Sanatorium, at the foot of Tibidabo, from where he left in the mornings for the General Hospital, where electric currents were applied to his arm. His wife was staying at the Continental Hotel.
It was still early June. In Barcelona there was “a bad feeling in the air, a climate of suspicion, fear, uncertainty and simulated hatred” (13). It was the aftermath of the events of May. The repression brought a large number of anarchists and POUM members to prison, the latter accused of being Trotskyists, a criminal figure who, if he could be a criminal in the homeland of the Russian proletariat, that is, in the homeland of the creator of the Red Army, no one could say he was one in Spain.
In Barcelona, Orwell also met up with some of his comrades, some of them mutilated, others invalids. There he learnt that in Valencia, one of the volunteers of his group, called Bob Smillie, a young man who was twenty-two years old and who had never been ill, had died in a very suspicious manner. While he was in prison he had not been allowed to see anyone, and was subjected to strict isolation, not even the parliamentary representative of the ILP [Independent Labour Party].
Later, he was told that Bob Smillie had died. He was buried immediately and not even the local representative of the ILP, David Murray, was allowed to see the body.
Orwell comments on the end of the young British fighter:
“(…) As I saw with my own eyes, he served at the front with unimpeachable will and courage, and all they could think of doing with him was to imprison him and let him die there like an abandoned animal. I know that in the midst of a bloody general war one should not make too much fuss about the death of a single individual; an aeroplane dropping a bomb on a busy street causes more suffering than many political persecutions. But what is so revolting about such a death is that it is utterly meaningless. To fall in battle? Well, that is a risk one takes; but to be put in prison, not even for a fabricated crime but for blind and obtuse contempt, and to be left to die alone… that is another story. I cannot understand how these episodes – because Smillie's case was not the only one – contributed to victory” (14).

He also meets his friend Kopp in Barcelona, the Belgian engineer who had been his commander at the Granja de Monflorite, and with whom he had also shared the critical hours of the first days of May in those streets of Barcelona. Kopp was arrested a few days after meeting Orwell and the latter's efforts to free him were useless, even risking his own safety. […].

Poor Orwell's ordeal and his Spanish odyssey do not end here.
At the General Hospital they are going to give him a certificate of incapacity, but he needed his army leave, which he could only obtain by passing a medical examination at one of the hospitals at the front. Arriving in Siétamo in mid-June, when the general attack on Huesca (this means that the author of Homage to Catalonia and that of La gran croada, the enraged communist Gustav Regler, (…) must have been very close to each other in time and space, if not in ideas and not even in… honesty) coincided with a mobilization of second-line forces out of fear - which later turned out to be a false alarm - of having to send reserves to the outposts. Despite his state of great weakness and the certificate he carried with him - and which he would not show until the next morning - he took the rifle they gave him, slept that night "with the cartridge belt for a pillow, but in a very depressed state of mind."

From Siétamo he had to return to Barbastro and Montsó, and from here back to Siétamo to have the license stamped. And after recounting the tribulations of a journey in trucks – which made him jump “higher than any horse had ever thrown me” – of hitchhiking and of sleeping one night in the ditch, he tells the following anecdote:
“I spent a night in the hospital in Monzón, where I went to see the medical inspector. In the next bed there was an assault guard wounded in the left eye, who was friendly and gave me tobacco.
"In Barcelona we would be shooting at each other," I said, and we laughed.

It was curious to see how the general mood changed when one was close to the front. All or almost all the morbid hatreds of the political parties vanished. I do not remember, during all the time I was at the front, that any PSUC sympathiser was hostile to me because I was from the POUM. These things happened in Barcelona and in places even further away from the fighting." (15)

When he returned to Barcelona he went to visit Kopp, together with his wife, and again risked being arrested to recover a letter of recommendation from the Ministry of Defence and General Pozas, addressed to the Colonel-in-Chief of Engineers of the Eastern Army. The letter had gone to the Chief of Police when Kopp was arrested, and Orwell headed resolutely to his office, thinking that he would most likely leave there in handcuffs. The letter was handed over to him, but it was of no use to his captive friend. Kopp’s superiors could do nothing to free him. The orders to repress the POUM came from higher up… or from further away.
One of the last pieces of news he received before leaving the country was that Josep Rovira, “the general who commanded the 29th Division”, had also been arrested. “His men,” Orwell writes, “sent a protest delegation to the Ministry of War. And it turns out that neither the Ministry of War nor Ortega, the chief of police, had been informed of Rovira’s arrest.”


Finally, thanks to the intervention of the British consul who provided them with the passport, Orwell left with his wife, McNair and Cottman on their way to Portbou. Already on French soil, they read in a newspaper that McNair had been arrested in Spain for espionage. “The Spanish authorities,” says Orwell, “had been a little hasty in giving the news. Fortunately, “Trotskyism” is not a reason for extradition” (16). […]

Josep Pané​

English : Notes
(1) For all the quotes from Homage to Catalonia we use the translation by Antonio Prometeo Moya, in Orwell in Spain (which includes other writings by George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War as well as that work), Barcelona, Tusquets, 2003, p. 98. The author cited the Catalan translation by Editorial Ariel.
(2) An error in the Catalan reference text has been corrected. Where it says “after the Spanish war” we have said “before the Spanish war”, since the years in which Orwell was in Paris were 1928-1929.
(3) Op. cit., p. 83.
(4) Op. cit., pp. 111-112.
(5) Op. cit., p. 72.
(6) The author refers to the introduction to the first Catalan edition of Homenaje a Cataluña, Editorial Ariel, 1970.
(7) Op. cit., pp. 221-224.
(8) Op. cit., p. 224.
(9) Op. cit., pp. 165-166.
(10) Op. cit., p. 170.
(11) Op. cit., pp. 171-172.
(12) Op. cit., p. 173.
(13) Op. cit., p.176.
(14) Op. cit., pp. 192-193.
(15) Op. cit., p. 181.
(16) Op. cit, p. 202.
Digital edition of the Andreu Nin Foundation, October 2003

About the author Pané, Josep​

See all posts by: Pané, Josep

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Written by: Pané, Josep

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Category: Orwell Space , POUM

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Orwell, soldado de Rovira (Josep Pané) - Fundación Andreu Nin

Josep Pané (1910 – 1979) fue sindicalista y militante del Bloque Obrero y Campesino y del POUM. Durante la guerra civil formó parte de las milicias poumistas. El actual texto reproduce una gran parte del capítullo 5 del libro que escribió junto a Josep Coll, titulado Josep Rovira, una vida al...

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JOURNAL ARTICLE

JOSEP COLL and JOSEP PANÉ : "Josep Rovira: Una vida al servei de Catalunya i del socialisme. (Hores de Catalunya.)"; Barcelona: Editorial Ariel. 1978. Pp. ix, 284.​

By Stanley G. Payne.

Stanley G. Payne - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Stanley G. Payne - Wikipedia

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The American Historical Review, Volume 84, Issue 5, December 1979, Page 1403, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/84.5.1403
Published: 01 December 1979

Article PDF first page preview​

josep coll and josep pané. Josep Rovira: Una vida al servei de Catalunya i del socialisme. (Hores de Catalunya.) Barcelona: Editorial Ariel. 1978. Pp. ix, 284

Stanley G. Payne; josep coll and josep pané. Josep Rovira: Una vida al servei de Catalunya i del socialisme. (Hores de Catalunya.) Barcelona: Editorial Ari

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GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA​

Cuando el Gran Hermano espió a Orwell :​

Stalin sometió al autor de '1984' a vigilancia en Barcelona en 1937 por su apoyo al POUM, de inspiración trotskista​

SPANISH CIVIL WAR
When Big Brother spied on Orwell :
Stalin subjected the author of '1984' to surveillance in Barcelona in 1937 for his support of the Trotskyist-inspired POUM.

George Orwell (tallest in the background on the left), when he was part of the POUM militia in 1937 in Barcelona, Spain.

Leonor Mayor Ortega
28/11/2020 ; Actualizado al 07/12/2020.

Winston Smith lives under the watchful eye of Big Brother, the only human being he is allowed to love, the one he has to adore. Napoleon is one of the pigs who bring about the revolution that makes it possible to overthrow Farmer Jones and establish a new order in which all animals are equal... until they are no longer equal.
Animal Farm and 1984 were largely the result of the passage of their author, George Orwell, through the Barcelona of 1937 in the middle of the Spanish Civil War when "politically aware people were much more aware of the internal clashes between anarchists and communists than of the fight against Franco".

Orwell himself, who at that time was not yet Orwell but Eric Arthur Blair, was spied on by Stalinism in those intense months of April and May of 1937, which journalist and historian Giles Tremlett now relives in The International Brigades (Debate).
"Orwell had the advantage of being a simple volunteer soldier and, therefore, was not one of the heavyweights among the foreign Trotskyists," Tremlett explains to La Vanguardia. Although "at risk", this anonymity could save the writer's life, but it did not prevent some reports on his wanderings in Spain prepared by the Russian espionage, the NKVD, from reaching Moscow.

Tremlett recalls that "the Spanish experience is the germ of both 1984 and Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia".
And he adds that Orwell was aware that Big Brother Stalin was watching him, which precipitated his flight from Spain, although "he did not know the details" of this espionage.
The writer had chosen dangerous friends. Most of them belonged to the POUM, an anti-Stalinist and philoanarchist formation, in which Orwell never became a member, but which was supported by the Independent Labor Party (ILP), which in the eyes of the British author was the only force "that aspired to something similar to what I consider socialism".
(...)


Continue here :

Cuando el Gran Hermano espió a Orwell

Winston Smith vive vigilado por el Gran Hermano, el único ser humano al que se le permite amar, al que tiene que adorar.

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(Another different view of George Orwel in the Spanish Civil War):

George Orwell (1903-1950)​ The writer Eric Arthur Blair, known as Orwell, is one of the greatest disasters that could have happened to the Spanish Second Republic during the war. ​ This writer and combatant of the POUM militias for a few months on the Huesca front, contributed immensely to the fact that in the Spanish Civil War, everything was upside down, as we often say. Let me explain. Blair was born in India into the English caste. After various vicissitudes and travels he joined the British imperial police in Burma. There he fell ill with tuberculosis while becoming increasingly aware of the hardship of the natives. On his return from the East, penniless, trying to make a living from his writing between London and Paris, he became even more radical. He wrote several novels and short stories, with little success but great interest, which already revealed his good writing. His political affiliation at that time could be that of the left-wing Labour Party, which represented a small but very active party, the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Blair's hobbyhorse up to the present day was standing on two legs, the fight against colonialism (imperialism) and the fight against the patriarchal and authoritarian society that always tells us what to think. Meanwhile his illness progressed and he remained penniless. By 1936, Blair had already adopted the pseudonym of Orwell and had a relatively important literary work. He decided to participate in the events that were taking place in Spain, and obtained a letter of recommendation from the ILP to be able to move with a certain freedom around the CNT Catalonia. It was December 1936. It seems that he had planned to join the International Column, but in Barcelona he decided to join the POUM militia, a small revolutionary party, close to Trotskyism, but which Trotsky himself abhorred, for its activism without real objectives. At the Lenin headquarters of the POUM he was assigned to the Third Century of these militias and sent to the Huesca Front where the POUM militias officiated with little or no military success. After months of inactivity and some sporadic action, the POUM militias were militarized, despite the bitter resistance of the POUM leaders, and converted into the 29th division commanded by Rovira. In the spring of 1937 he received a severe throat wound and was evacuated to Barcelona. There he experienced first-hand the events of May 1937, when the POUM, the FAI and sectors of the CNT (contradicting their leaders) rose up in Barcelona and after a week of fire, were defeated in their attempt to keep power in Catalonia, which the government and the governing party were taking away from them day by day with complete legitimacy. The main victim of this defeat was the POUM and its leaders who were imprisoned or captured. Andreu Nin was kidnapped by the Russian and Spanish police affiliated with the PCE, and after, probably, torturing him with impunity, they murdered him and disposed of his body. The other leaders of the POUM were later tried and sentenced with little severity. The government, which knew what had happened with Nin, had to swallow its guilt, as it could not do without the PCE and its older brothers, and although it commissioned an investigation, the USSR's policy of dependence hampered the investigation. Negrin, recently appointed President of the Council of Ministers, and quite angry, dismissed Antonio Ortega as Director General of Security. The POUM members of any relevance fled or went into hiding. Orwell did too. After a few months hiding in Barcelona he managed to return to England where he wrote his book Homage to Catalonia. In a country with little inclination to defend the Spanish Second Republic and generally fascinated with anarchists, the book was a hit and changed Orwell's life. Orwell's observations on the little war he lived through in the POUM column are excellently written, easy to read, but they contain many falsehoods and some inventions, as researchers have shown (most recently, Paul Preston). Paul Preston - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org Homage to Catalonia is primarily a book by a patriarchal imperialist who continually tells the reader what to think, precisely what the author criticised. Orwell's good pen and wit make the trance very smooth and I would even say entertaining, but it is a failed historical essay despite its popularity. When Orwell took pity on the poor in Burma and took the left, the extreme left of the ILP, as a good petty bourgeois, he still carried an imperial policeman in his vest. And so, friend Orwell, an icon of the bourgeoisie and of the Western secret services, entered the division of defenders of the extreme left, because of his furious anti-communism. What a strange journey these guys have! It seems that the government of the Second Republic, in order not to be Stalinist and all that, should have let itself be torn apart, on the one hand by the Francoists and on the other by the extremists of the POUM and the FAI (and part of the CNT). So, for all intents and purposes, the extreme right and the extreme left were as much enemies of the II Spanish Republic, and in my opinion, the government was very soft with these guys, except in the case of Nin, which was an extrajudicial execution decided by the Russians and which the Republic had to cover up so as not to alienate the only one who helped them, "the evil father Stalin." What things! There is evidence that Homage to Catalonia was written in haste and with a hot head, and that Orwell later rectified many of his statements. But as the honest journalist Mathews said, not at all suspected of being a communist, it was one of the books that did the most damage to the Second Republic, even if it was unintentional. Orwell, despite his poor health, became the censor in England of books about the Spanish Civil War that he did not like, ranting as he pleased, but unfairly, although with the approval of the British forces. And so he put Koestler down for his book "Spanish Testament" which was not exactly pro-communist, but he also harshly criticized Jellinek who defended some of the bad times that the Republic had to go through during the war. Orwell became completely unfair with the Spanish Republic on the path of fierce anti-communism. A bad path. Orwell had spent a few months on an inactive front, wounded in the throat and present at the events in Barcelona. That was all his baggage, and with that baggage he sentenced the struggle of the Spanish people.​ Orwell did not see beyond his nose although he told it very beautifully : The events of May 1937 were an armed rebellion against the legitimate government by the FAI, a part of the CNT and the adventurous POUM (which Trotsky himself never stopped cursing), when the Generalitat wanted to regain control of the Barcelona Telephone Company. When confronting the legal government, the May 1937 rebels objectively took the rebel side, no matter how many red and black flags and hammers and sickles they carried. And when you take up arms against a legal, democratic and constituted government, formed by a political pact called the Popular Front of practically the entire left-wing political spectrum, then you cannot go around saying how harshly they treat you, at war!! Memoria - República - Prensa - G. Orwell ​

 

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HISPANIA NOVA. First online magazine of contemporary history in Spanish. Second Period

1. HISPANIA NOVA. Nº 16 (2018)

Deceptions and errors in the Orwell' s Tribute to Catalonia.

• Paul Preston ; London School of Economics
• 

  Paul Preston - Wikipedia

  en.wikipedia.org

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20318/hn.2018.4033

Summary​

Abstract:
Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is included in most lists of important books on the Spanish Civil War despite being simply a vivid eye-witness account of just two fragments of the war. It demonstrates little understanding of Spanish or Catalan politics and does not present a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war and particularly of its international determinants. Its underlying notion that the crushing of revolution in Barcelona would contribute to eventual Republican defeat makes it too easy to forget the contribution of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and the pusillanimous self-interest of the British, French and American governments. Based on the partisan views of anarchist and POUM comrades as well as ignorance of the wider context, Orwell’s analysis and prediction is misleading. This article aims to raise awareness that the views expressed in his book are often wrong because they are based on insufficient information and prior prejudice.

Engaños y errores en el Homenaje a Cataluña | HISPANIA NOVA. Primera Revista de Historia Contemporánea on-line en castellano. Segunda Época

 

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George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War: heroism, betrayal and paranoia :​

On the anniversary of his death, one of the lesser-known stories of the British writer, who fought fascism during the war.​

Mortally wounded, he had to flee, but the shadow of those days haunted him until the end and, in turn, was crucial to the creation of “1984”, his masterpiece.​

ByJohn Battle ; 21 Jan, 2018.

George Orwell fought as a volunteer against Franco's forces

For a couple of years now, a photograph has been circulating on the Internet, a snapshot with no date - except for the year, 1937 - or precise place, but which was taken during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
In the image, a soldier with a little dog in his arms looks at the camera, accompanied by many others, who are laughing and talking. That soldier, says the viral tweet, would be George Orwell, while behind him a figure can be seen who stands out in his 1.83 meter height, and there is no doubt about that person, it is Ernest Hemingway.

Orwell? holding a dog, with Hemingway in the background

Hemingway's experience is better known: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) finally established him as one of the great American writers, a reputation he had already gained after the publication of A Farewell to Arms in 1929.
However, Orwell's future is less known than the way in which the war forever affected his personal and literary life.

"The Spanish war and other events of 1936-37 changed things, and from then on I knew where I stood. Every serious line I have written since 1936 has been, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and in favour of democratic socialism as I understand it ," he wrote in 1946.

The 4 books that Orwell had already published before leaving for the war

It was Christmas 1936.
Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, had already published Burma Days (1934) and The Clergyman's Daughter (1935), among others, but had not yet created the classics that made him an eternal author.
He travelled to Paris, where he met his until then pen pal Henry Miller, whom he had defended after the release of Tropic of Cancer (1934), a novel that had granted him a certain status as a "cursed writer" thanks to the censorship of the American government. Sitting down, with wine, the Briton glared at the American's blurry eyes and declared: "I'm going to kill fascists because someone has to."

In the center, Henry Miller

At the beginning of chapter 3 of In and Out of the Whale (1940), the book of essays where he analyses Miller's classic, he recalls: "I first met Miller in late 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain. What intrigued me most about him was to discover that he felt no interest in the Spanish war. He simply told me very determinedly that to go to Spain at that time was an idiotic act. I could understand anyone going there for purely selfish motives - out of curiosity, for example - but to get mixed up in such things out of a sense of obligation was pure stupidity. In any case, my ideas about fighting fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were nonsense. Our civilisation was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we could hardly consider it human - a prospect which did not bother him, he said."

The Spanish War began after a military coup against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic and for some historians it was a "rehearsal for the Second World War".

During the confrontation, the governments of Great Britain, France and the USA did not take sides, due to a non-aggression pact after the Great War, however that did not stop Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, also elected by votes, from financing the armies of Generalissimo Francisco Franco with weapons.
The Republicans, for their part, only received help from the Soviet Union.


Orwell goes to war :

Orwell, above, second from the right

The day after Christmas he was already in Barcelona.
Thanks to a letter of introduction from the left-wing Independent Labour Party (ILP), that same afternoon he was already a uniformed brigadier of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), ready to fight the Francoist Fascist.
In his work Homage to Catalonia (1938), which summarises his time at the front, he says: "I joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed to be the only conceivable attitude."

In this book, Orwell presents himself almost as an eyewitness, with a very clear structure: in the first part he recounts the experiences of a militiaman in "a quiet sector of a quiet front" in Aragon, in which he goes through the emotions and circumstances, the fear and misery, the latrines and the rats, the cold and the desolation.
While in the second, he describes his days and nights on the roof of the Poliorama theatre, during the May Days of 1937.

Two works about his Spanish experience and one that compiles different essays on the subject

"An essential experience in war is the impossibility of ever being free from bad smells of human origin. Talking about latrines is a commonplace in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not for the fact that those in our barracks contributed to deflating the balloon of my fantasies about the Civil War."

He moved there with his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who worked as secretary at the Spanish headquarters of the ILP, the non-communist Marxist party, which supported the Spanish Republic through the POUM militias.

Orwell, his first wife and Harry Milton, an American volunteer who saved his life

His involvement in politics was not new, nor was it the stuff of youthful delusions.
At 33, he was a sort of rebellious anarchist who had studied at the elite Eton College. Orwell was not happy with his appointment to the POUM; his ideal was to join the International Brigades, which reveals a greater sympathy with the socialists, liberal republicans and communists. However, Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the British Communist Party, had rejected him.
Despite his relative literary fame, the British militiamen also showed revulsion at his "Eton-cut glass accent".


In My Spanish Civil War (1942) he says: "It is curious, but what I remember most vividly from the war is the week of supposed training we received before we were sent to the front."

Orwell, in the background, during his training with the POUM

Despite his ideals, Orwell lacked a deep knowledge of the conflict.
There is no record in his work that he had learned anything about the war beyond the newspapers before travelling to Spain.
Later, he would regret:
"My partisanship, my errors of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by having seen only one corner of the events."

Orwell's courage - or unconsciousness - in the fight, his obstinacy to "kill fascists" led him to make some risky decisions, if not downright idiotic, as Henry Miller told him. One of the best-known stories, which could have been a Monty Python sketch, tells how one night in a camp he saw a rat near his bunk and in a fit of fear and phobia he began to shoot without considering the consequences, which were none other than the end of the ceasefire that reigned under the Spanish sky.


Red Barcelona :

115 days passed before he received permission to travel to Barcelona, where his wife was waiting for him.
There, too, he had no qualms about bloodshed. His fate took him to the epicentre of the May Days of 1937, a civil war within the Civil War.
The fighting lasted five days and left more than a thousand dead, if those executed are counted.
Orwell, as he recounts in Homage to Catalonia , stood on the roof of the Poliorama theatre to defend his party's headquarters on the Rambla.

The Poliorama theatre in 1937 and its façade. Orwell held his position there

After Catalonia everything would change for Orwell.
The alliance between the CNT-FAI and the POUM disappeared.
While the former maintained their structure, thanks to the power they still possessed thanks to popular support, the PUOM was declared illegal on June 16 and its main leaders arrested, among them Julian Gorkin - who years later discovered the true identity of Leon Trotsky's assassin, Ramon Mercader - and Andres Nin - later executed by Stalin.

It was the end of the POUM in the war.

Regarding the internal conflict between anarchists and communists, in a letter from October 1938 to a relative, he explains:
"You don't know how much I despise the imbeciles who think they can first push the nation into a war for democracy and then, when people get fed up, change and say: 'Now let's make the revolution.'"

The Barcelona's headquarters of the POUM

In My Spanish Civil War , the author of 1984 , acknowledges that defeat was inevitable: "The (Anarchist and )Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false.
Nationalizing factories, demolishing churches and issuing revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more efficient.
The fascists won because they were the strongest; they had modern weapons and the others did not."

His farewell took place in Huesca, with a wound in the throat that could have been fatal.
The American volunteer Harry Milton described to the press, many years later, that Orwell's reckless attitude, added to his 1.88 meter height, led him to that end: "I heard the clear sound of a high-velocity shot and Orwell immediately fell on his back."
Milton stopped the bleeding and gave him first aid, until they could take the writer to a hospital.

The Rambla of Barcelona during the May Days of 1937

The traitor

The publication of The Road to Wigan Pier in March 1937 did not make him very popular among his comrades at the front, on the contrary.
The work is divided into two parts.
At first he analyses the life of the coal workers - from their economy to their thinking - then he expresses his socialist ideas, but with a criticism of the supporters of that time, whom he accuses of being the ones to blame for the fact that society does not want to get closer to that system.
This position made him more enemies within Stalinism - as if he needed them - and after the torture and murder of Andreu Nin, he was convinced that he was next.

Orwell would only prove himself right in the end.
Declassified Kremlin documents revealed that the "Trotskyist purge" had begun on Stalin's orders during the Spanish Civil War. He and his wife were on the payroll.
Decades later, he went into self-imposed exile on the Scottish island of Jura. In the tranquillity of the now famous Barnhill farm, where he wrote 1984, he feared he would suffer the same fate as another exile, Trotsky.

Here begins a new stage, that of paranoia that would accompany him throughout his life.
In May of that year, the NKVD, the Soviet organization that managed everything from transportation to state security, confiscated a large number of personal notebooks from his wife, who was staying at the Hotel Continental in Barcelona.
In June, he finally decided to escape from Spain.
However, for him the war was not over .


Paris, Hemingway and a gun :

The Second World War had ended and the ghosts of the Spanish conflict still haunted him.
In March 1945 he moved to Paris to work as a correspondent. His days were marked by the suspicion that the stalinist were spying on him in order to annihilate him, as happened to others, and he barely slept.

He needed protection, a gun, but as a civilian he had no way of getting it without alerting his pursuers. He turned to someone who understood - and had - weapons, like Ernest Hemingway . Carlos Baker, author of the first biography of the 1954 Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969), claims that the meeting took place in a room at the Ritz.

Hemingway, as a correspondent in the Spanish Civil War

In a letter Hemingway sent to critic Harvey Breit in April 1952 – more than two years after Orwell's death – he confirmed the meeting.
The story appears in Hemingway's memoirs, True at First Light (1999), published posthumously on the centenary of his birth, as well as in the autobiography, Dante Called You Beatrice (1960), by Orwell's poet and friend Paul Potts.
However, Orwell never mentioned the meeting in his letters or notebooks.

Orwell, Hemingway says, had a paranoid attitude, he distrusted everything and that seemed a little sad to him.
So, when he asked for a gun, he gave him one. From a drawer he took out a Colt .32. Orwell left "like a pale ghost."
What he never told him was that it was broken.

READ OTHER ARTICLES :
Three weeks of rum and violence: the treasure that only Hemingway could protect.

From illness to alien abduction: The 7 mysterious deaths of Ambrose Bierce.

Philip Roth and Milan Kundera: memories of a dialogue on literature and totalitarianism.

George Orwell en la Guerra Civil Española: heroísmo, traición y paranoia

En el aniversario de su muerte, una de las historias menos conocidas del escritor británico, que combatió al fascismo durante la contienda. Herido de muerte debió huir, pero la sombra de aquellos días lo atormentó hasta el final y, a su vez, fue crucial para la creación de “1984”, su obra maestra

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Critical Sociology​

Articles and texts for debate and analysis of social reality​

Lights and shadows in the “Homage to Catalonia” (I) / Paul Preston​

Paul Preston - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Orwell's Homage to Catalonia , despite a title that lends itself somewhat to misunderstanding, is the best-selling and most widely read book on the Spanish Civil War.[1] It is a vivid account of some fragments of the war, elegantly written by a very perceptive witness. Its subject is the valuable experience of a militiaman on the Aragonese front. In powerful sentences Orwell recreated in a very graphic way the fear, the cold and, above all, the misery of the trenches, the excrement and the lice. Two examples: “ We were now much closer to the front, close enough to notice the characteristic smell of war (in my experience, a smell of excrement and rotten food) ” and “ the landscape was impressive, provided one managed to overlook the fact that all the peaks were occupied by soldiers and, therefore, covered with tin cans and encrusted with excrement ”. He also complained about the lack of training and the poor armament. “ It was horrible that the defenders of the Republic were a bunch of ragged children armed with broken rifles that they did not even know how to use ”[2].

A biographer of Josep Rovira, commander of the 29th Division in which Orwell served, wrote that “ in his sleepy and distant traverse, he manifested himself entirely with an eagerness to observe, like a curious child .”[3] Orwell’s vivid observations of agricultural backwardness, of primitive pre-medieval farming implements, of ploughs that merely scratched the soil without making furrows, his evocations of the sights and sounds of the countryside are worthy of a great travel book and of great value to the historian.[4] As for his repeated comments about wasted food, “ terribly so, especially bread. In my barracks alone we threw away a whole basket of bread at every meal, which was shameful when you consider how scarce it was among the civilian population .”
If the POUM unit in which Orwell served could afford to waste food, it must have been a rarity among Republican forces.[5]

Photo: Andy Durgan, «With the POUM International volunteers on the Aragon Front (1936-1937)

Orwell's eyewitness account warrants inclusion on any list of important books on the Spanish Civil War. However, it would not rank there as an example of credible analysis of the wider political environment of the conflict and, in particular, its international conditions. In his book, Orwell combined a mass of high-quality personal observations with a devastating critique of the distortions and falsehoods of the press. It is, however, his political analysis and predictions that suffer most from his wholesale acceptance of the partisan views of his fellow anarchists and the POUM, coupled with his own ignorance of the wider context in which the conflict was set. At best, his book is a misleading contribution to the central debate over whether the priority of the Spanish Republic should have been revolution or perseverance in the conventional war effort against Franco and his Axis allies.

Herbert Matthews (right) with Ernest Hemingway
and Hugh Slater

Herbert Matthews, the great New York Times correspondent, summed up the problems following the publication of Homage to Catalonia as follows : “ The book did far more to blacken the loyalist cause than anything else written by the enemies of the Second Republic – a result which Orwell did not intend, as he showed in some of his later writings. In Homage Orwell wrote in the heat of the moment about a confused, unimportant and somewhat obscure incident in a war which he did not at all understand. All he saw between January and May 1937 was a minimal period of ‘quasi-war’ on the small Huesca front and a bloody clash between communists and anarchists in Barcelona. He had volunteered through the Independent Labour Party (PLI), a left-wing formation which had links with the POUM. This was a dissident group, very Marxist, not treacherous but somewhat revolutionary and subversive, which was proving dangerous to the Republican Government .” Matthews, who considered Orwell “a brave, even-tempered and honest man ,” also stated: “ I would say that very few people have read the scraps – essays, reviews, letters – that Orwell wrote about Spain in later years. Such scraps show a much better understanding of events than he had when he was in Spain .”[6]

Certainly Matthews was right, and yet Orwell’s book has had an enormous influence on perceptions aroused by the Spanish Civil War.[7] For example, Robert Stradling claims that “the two ‘analytical’ chapters of Homage are justly renowned as a condensed political treatise on the whole of the twentieth century.”[8] Orwell himself wrote: “ The most striking thing about books on the Civil War, at least those written in English, is their overwhelming poor quality and soporific boredom. But more significant still is that nearly all of them, whether right or left, are written from a political point of view by very self-assured people who tell the reader what to think .”[9] Homage to Catalonia is neither boring nor bad, but it is written from a political point of view by someone who is very self-assured and who tells the reader what to think.

P.O.U.M. building

Many distinguished readers were prepared to accept what Orwell told them. These included many who knew little about the Spanish Civil War, such as Lionel Trilling, Noam Chomsky, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson.[10] One who had been to Spain and later became a fierce anti-Communist was Arthur Koestler, who was drawn to Orwell's writings. However, Koestler's relations with the latter were based on their mutual hatred of the Soviet Union rather than on a considered consideration of events in Spain.[11]

The widespread admiration for Homage to Catalonia is all the more surprising given that the book is confined entirely to the time and place in which Orwell was in Spain. He evidently knew nothing of the origins of the war, of the long-running political conflicts between left-wing groups in Barcelona, and even less of the problems underlying the relations at that time between the Republican government in Valencia and the various political forces in Catalonia. As Robert Stradling writes, “ As a study of the Spanish civil war Homage to Catalonia is of dubious value. Not only did the author avoid any basic research, but he also lacked the necessary qualifications to carry it out .”[12] Orwell himself acknowledged the shortcomings of his summary of the political situation of the time towards the end of Homage to Catalonia , writing: “ If I have not said it before, I am saying it now: beware of my bias, my errors, and the inevitable distortion caused by having witnessed only part of the events. And I say the same about any other book about this period of the Spanish war ”[13].

There are other reasons to question some of what Orwell wrote. There are many encounters with staff in his book which are described in detail but which he could only have accurately recorded if he had spoken Spanish well. The fact that there is very little reason to think that this was the case casts doubt on his intellectual honesty. He himself admitted that his Spanish was “atrocious” and this is highly probable given that he did not know the language when he arrived in Spain and spent virtually all his time there in the company of people who spoke English. The PLI liaison in Barcelona, John McNair, recalled in a scarcely credible way that Orwell “ spoke a good deal of Spanish and enough French to understand a lot of Catalan ”. It is rare for French ears, let alone English ears, to easily understand spoken Catalan. The captain of the unit in which Orwell served, Benjamin Lewinski, told biographer Michael Shelden that the French-speaking Orwell quickly picked up enough Catalan to be able to communicate with his comrades. However, Orwell himself wrote of his first days in Spain: “ All the while I continued to have my usual difficulties with Spanish. Apart from me, there was only one Englishman in the barracks, and no one, not even among the officers, spoke a word of French. And I found it even more difficult when my comrades spoke Catalan to each other .”

Orwell with leaders of the POUM (Nin, Gorkin, Bonet), PSOP (Marceau Pivert), ILP (John McNair) and Colette Audry, Barcelona, July 1936 (photo: «Julian Gorkin, testimony of a professional revolutionary»)

Even assuming that McNair and Lewinski's recollections of Orwell speaking Catalan were correct, they could only have done so at a level that would permit easy conversations but not sufficient to explain how Orwell, as he claimed in his book, was able to carry on complex discussions with Spanish officials in his efforts to secure the release of his friend Georges Kopp and even, when wounded and half-conscious, to have understood the comment of a Spanish comrade “ behind him that the bullet had gone clean through my neck .”[14] It is striking that the only Catalan word that Orwell might have been expected to know – la Generalitat – is always listed as the “Generalite.”* It is also noteworthy that in his collection of letters, reviews and essays there is no indication that before the civil war he had the slightest contact with Spanish or that he had ever read a book in Spanish, whether on the war or any other subject.

His precise and perfectly justified denunciations of the absurd claims of the communist and bourgeois press do not invalidate his failure to understand the general situation. Orwell claimed that the fact that the POUM was being persecuted meant that the Republican government was “ virtually in the hands of the communists .” And yet, a few pages later, he admitted that “ the majority of members of the Spanish government have denied believing the accusations made against the POUM. The Council of Ministers recently decided by five votes to two to release the anti-fascist political prisoners; the two ministers who voted against were communists .” He acknowledged that Indalecio Prieto, Minister of National Defense; Manuel Irujo, Minister of Justice; Julián Zugazagoitia, Minister of the Interior, among others, “ denied believing that the leaders of the POUM were guilty of espionage .”[15]

Despite this statement, in a text riddled with contradictions, Orwell did not hesitate to make a prediction, totally unfounded, about what would have happened if the Republic had won the war: “ As for the newspaper chatter that this was a “war for democracy,” it was pure nonsense. No one in his right mind thought there was the slightest hope that, when the war was over, there could be democracy, even as it is understood in England or France, in a country as divided and exhausted as Spain. There would have to be a dictatorship, and it was obvious that the opportunity for a dictatorship of the proletariat had already passed. That meant it would be some form of fascism .”

A few pages after this huge mistake, Orwell nevertheless wrote: “ I must add that I now have a much higher opinion of Negrin’s government than when he came to power. He has fought back with enormous courage and shown greater political tolerance than anyone expected. Even so, I remain convinced that, unless Spain ends up split in two with unpredictable consequences, the tendency of the post-war government will be fascist .”[16] After condemning the Spanish Republic as an incipient Stalinist dictatorship in late 1938 or early 1939, Orwell praised the fact that democratic norms had been maintained: “In governmental Spain the forms and spirit of democracy have survived to a degree that no one could have foreseen. It would even be correct to say that they were developing during the first year of the war .”[17]

Juan Negrín during a visit to the Ebro front in 1938 (photo: Archive of the Juan Negrín Foundation)

Juan Negrín - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Juan Negrín - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In August 1952 Herbert Matthews wrote to the former president of the Republican government in exile, Dr. Juan Negrín, to ask him about his relations with Orwell. While preparing an article about the publication in the United States of Homage to Catalonia , Matthews had learned that the socialist journalist and historian Antonio Ramos Oliveira had introduced Negrín to Orwell. After his time as press adviser at the Republican embassy in London under Pablo de Azcárate, Ramos Oliveira had remained in England and during this period had become friends with Orwell. Ramos Oliveira had told Matthews that Orwell had gotten on well with Negrín and that once Negrín had explained the big themes to him, Orwell began to “ remember his experiences in a different light and better understand the position of the Communists .” Matthews therefore wrote to Negrín to ask for more information.[18]

Negrín replied two weeks later: “ As far as I can remember I first met Orwell sometime after August or September 1940. He was introduced to me as an editorialist for the Observer and I was told that he had been in Spain during our war. I did not realise that he had been there not as a journalist or writer but as a volunteer in a combat unit and I think it was only when I read his book on Catalonia, months after his death, that I realised this. Since we met we saw each other several times and I dare say that a mutual current of esteem, sympathy and even friendship soon established itself between us .” Throughout their conversations Orwell bombarded Negrín with questions about the problems of the civil war that he had ignored in Homage to Catalonia .

Negrín explained to him that “ our foreign policy, especially our relations with Russia, took into account that the USSR was the only great power that supported us internationally and that was willing to supply us with the necessary weapons in cash (we never asked for gifts from anyone) . He also informed him of the problems and difficulties that arose from the “ heterogeneous conglomerate of parties, unions and dissident groups that were incompatible with each other, as well as the regional and local “governments” that were often self-appointed and unconstitutional ” with which he had to deal. Negrín concluded by stating that Orwell was “idealistic” and weltfremd (unrealistic). However, the fact that he did not say anything about his links with the POUM suggests that Orwell was not entirely honest with the former president.

Photo: Andy Durgan, With the POUM International volunteers on the Aragon Front (1936-1937)

Negrín wrote to Matthews that, had he read the book at the time of their conversations, “ I would have been more inquisitive, in order to clarify some of the events I narrated, trying to see through a frank and open discussion to what extent the interpretation of the facts he witnessed was correct. After reading your book, I have not changed my opinion of Orwell: a respectable and honest man but very biased by a point of view that was too rigid, puritanical, endowed with a candor that borders on naïveté, very critical but too credulous with respect to the religious community within which he moves and acts; “extremely individualistic (an Englishman!) but accepting too easily and without any discernment of his own the inspirations coming from the somewhat gregarious collective in which he voluntarily and instinctively wants to take root, and so extraordinarily honest and self-sacrificing that he would not hesitate for a moment to change his mind as soon as he realised that he was wrong (….) He arrived at the chaotic front (?) of Aragon under the tutelage of a group (…) controlled certainly by elements who were not only very allergic to Stalinism - this was often (sic) no more than a mere protest - but also to anything that implied a supreme and united direction of the struggle and under a common discipline. When all this is combined with the already mentioned factors of “astigmatism” one easily comes to justify the distorted image in Orwell’s mind of the events of 1937 in Barcelona ”[19] .

The honesty attributed to Orwell's book has been one of the pillars of its success, along with, naturally, its clear anti-communist stance. Even so, the veracity of some of the episodes described in the work has been questioned. In fact, shortly after publishing it, Orwell himself began to cast doubt on the things he had written. On December 20, 1938, in a letter to Frank Jellinek, he wrote about his book: “ I have no doubt that I have made a lot of mistakes and that I have made misleading statements, but I have also tried to indicate throughout the work that the subject is very complicated and that I am extremely fallible as well as biased .” He also confessed to Jellinek: “ I have actually written a much more sympathetic account for the POUM than I really felt because I always told them that they were deceiving themselves and I refused to join. However, I had to write with the greatest possible sympathy because the capitalist press has not paid the slightest attention to them and the left-wing press has piled up insults. In fact, considering how things have gone in Spain, I think there was some truth in what they said, although there is no doubt that their way of saying it was extremely boring and provocative ”[20].

POUM headquarters in Barcelona

There is something irresponsible in this spirit of “fair play” behind Orwell’s decision to play down as much as possible the degree to which the POUM’s attitude was detrimental to the Republic. It is all the more remarkable since Orwell admitted that, before the events in Barcelona, “ he generally shared the opinion of the communists, which was summed up by saying that ‘there is no point in talking about revolution until we win the war’” and “he tried to move from the POUM to the International Brigades. Of course, he wanted to go to Madrid. Everybody, whatever their political opinions, wanted to go to Madrid (…) For the moment, of course, I had to stay at the front, but I always said that, when I went on leave, I would try to go over to the International Brigades, which was equivalent to putting myself under communist control. Many tried to dissuade me, but nobody tried to stop me. It must be said in fairness that in the POUM there was little persecution of dissidents, perhaps too little given the circumstances; Unless one was pro-fascist, no one was punished for holding wrong political opinions. While I was in the militia I spent a lot of time bitterly criticizing the POUM “line,” but it never caused me the slightest trouble .”[21]

Orwell’s ILP commander, Bob Edwards, commented precisely in this vein: “ He made known on several occasions his intention to leave the International Militia and join the Communist-controlled International Column on the Madrid front. During this period most of the volunteers wanted to fight in Madrid because the big battles were taking place there .” Edwards, moreover, adopted a somewhat cynical stance because he believed that Orwell “ was putting his needs as a writer before his duty as a soldier (…) and I called him out on this quite clearly to the point that on one occasion after a very heated debate I told him that he was a “bloody second-rate writer” with no experience of working-class struggles other than that of a journalist who merely observed them .”[22]

Harry Pollitt (photo: Communist
Party of Great Britain Archives)

Orwell had initially written, “ If I joined their militia [the POUM] and not any other it was only because I arrived in Barcelona with PLI papers .”[23] That the POUM accepted him had much to do with his literary fame even though the book presents him as an anonymous volunteer. Believing that he would need left-wing party credentials to go to Spain, Orwell asked John Strachey to introduce him to Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the CPGB. Pollitt, “ after asking me several questions evidently decided that I was not to be trusted politically and refused to help me .”[24] Pollitt was probably resentful of what he perceived in Orwell as the snobbery of an Eton-educated boy.

This is how Orwell found his way to the PLI where he was given letters of introduction to John McNair, the representative in Barcelona. At first McNair, a Tyneside proletarian, was somewhat put off by Orwell's typical Eton accent, as had Pollitt. However, letters from Fenner Brockway and H.N. Brailsford alerted McNair that he was talking to the author of Burmese Days and Down and Out in Paris and London , which he had read and liked very much. He immediately realised Orwell's value in propaganda and agreed to take him quickly to the POUM militia base at the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona[25]. The enlistment of such a famous author was soon used as a means of stimulating recruitment in the English-language POUM newsletter, The Spanish Revolution [26].

Lenin Barracks in Barcelona (photo: Agustí Centelles). Orwell's head stands out above the recruits in the last rows, on the left.

In a later, unpublished memoir, McNair recalled that when he asked what he could do to help, Orwell supposedly replied: “ I have come to Spain to join the militia and fight against fascism .” He also claimed that Orwell said that “ he would like to write about the situation and try to stimulate the opinion of the workers in England and France .” McNair suggested that he take up residence in his office and visit Madrid, Valencia and the Aragonese front where the POUM was stationed “ and then write his book .” Orwell replied that writing a book “ was a very secondary thing and that his main reason for going to Spain was to fight against fascism .”[27]

Jennie Lee (photo:
Elliott & Fry, National Portrait
Gallery)

The British Labour MP Jennie Lee, wife of Aneurin Bevan, recalled in 1950: “ In the first year of the Spanish Civil War I was sitting with friends in a hotel in Barcelona when a tall, thin man with a dazzling complexion came to our table. He asked me if I was Jennie Lee and if so could I tell him where to enlist. He also said he was a writer. He had been given an advance for a book by [Victor] Gollancz and had come prepared to drive a car or do anything, preferably to fight on the front line. I thought this was suspicious and asked him if he had any papers from England. From what I saw he had none. He had not spoken to anyone and had paid his own way. He convinced me when he showed me the boots he was carrying over his shoulder. I knew he would have a hard time finding boots in his size as he was tall and over six feet tall. It was George Orwell in his boots, ready to fight in Spain .” The money advanced to him by Victor Gollancz was most likely for his work The Road to Wigan Pier and not for a book about Spain[28]

The same reasons that had been behind Pollitt's rejection and McNair's initial hostility contributed to Orwell's unpopularity with his British comrades in the militia who were well aware of the significance of " a crystal-clear Eton accent ". It might have been different with the Spanish, although Orwell recalled that some volunteers called him a fascist for resisting his efforts to impose discipline. His comrade Stafford Cottman put forward the thesis that Orwell adopted a contemptuous air about what he regarded as the political naivety of other volunteers. Frank Frankford, from the working-class suburbs of East London, said that the "supercilious bastard" disliked him as soon as he laid eyes on him. " He didn't really like workers... What I didn't like about him was his attitude in discussions, his attitude towards the working class. Two or three of us said that he was not with his own people, that he should be on the other side (…) I think that perhaps he saw himself as another Bernard Shaw (…) His socialism had no depth at all ”[29].

POUM volunteers (photo: Andy Durgan Andy Durgan, With the POUM International volunteers on the Aragon Front (1936-1937)

In fact, Orwell wrote that when he was preparing to leave Barcelona on 25 April, “ I tracked down a communist friend with ties to the Spanish Red Aid and explained my case to him. He seemed very keen to recruit me and asked me if possible to try to persuade some other Englishmen in the ILP to follow my example .”[30] The friend was Hugh O’Donnell, the CPGB man charged with keeping an eye on the POUM. After discussing the matter primarily with McNair two days later Orwell approached a more senior communist in Barcelona, Wally Tapsell, who had been instructed to keep a close eye on the ILP members. Tapsell sent Harry Pollitt a report on people connected with the POUM in which he also described his meeting with Orwell and Orwell’s motives for joining the International Brigades: “ The most distinguished and most respected person in the contingent at the moment is Eric Blair. She is a novelist and has written a number of books on the life of the English proletarians. She has little understanding of political issues and “is not interested in party politics. She came to Spain as an anti-fascist to fight fascism.” However, as a result of her experiences she has come to dislike the POUM and is trying to get herself discharged from the POUM militia ”[31].

It was not long before Orwell changed his mind about joining the International Brigades after what he saw in Barcelona during the events of May 1937. What he did not see was that the Spanish Republic was not only fighting Franco and his armed forces but also the military and economic power of Mussolini and Hitler in a context of Franco-British hostility. Surrounded from outside, the Republic also had to face enormous internal problems, unknown in the area that Franco had militarily brutalised. The collapse of the bourgeois state in the first days of the war occurred at the same time as the rapid eruption of revolutionary organs of a parallel power. There was a massive and popular collectivisation of agriculture and industry. Although it filled participants and observers like George Orwell with enthusiasm, the great experiments in collectivisation in the autumn of 1936 did little to create a war machine. Socialist leaders such as Indalecio Prieto and Juan Negrín were convinced that a conventional state, with centralized control of the economy and the institutional instruments necessary to mobilize the masses, was essential to generate and sustain an effective war effort. Communists and Soviet advisers agreed. Not only was this a common-sense approach, but the reduction of the revolutionary activities of the anarchists and the anti-Stalinist POUM was necessary to reassure the bourgeois democracies with which both the Soviet Union and the Spanish Republican government sought an understanding. The events of May that Orwell witnessed were provoked by the need to remove the obstacles that impeded the efficient conduct of the war. Despite the incorporation of proletarian militias into the regular army forces and the dismantling of collectivizations, Negrín's government could not achieve victory, not because the policy was wrong but because outside forces continued to encircle the Republic.

Thus, in Ken Loach's Homage to Catalonia and its film version Land and Freedom , a secondary episode pushes the major problems of the war to one side and, in doing so, presents a totally perverse explanation of the reasons for the Republican defeat. With a Republic abandoned by the Western powers and attacked by Franco, Hitler and Mussolini, only the Soviet Union decided to help it. Naturally, Stalin did not act in this way out of idealism or sentimentality. Rather, because, threatened by an expansionist Germany, he hoped, like his Tsarist predecessors, to be able to limit the risk by means of an alliance with France that would in turn encircle Hitler. He feared, with reason, that if Franco won the war with Hitler's help, France would collapse. He therefore set about providing just enough aid to the Republic to keep it alive while preventing revolutionary elements in Spain from justifying conservative decision-makers in London in continuing their appeasement of the Axis in the framework of an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Without Soviet arms and the International Brigades Madrid would probably have fallen in November 1936 and Franco would have won the war months before the anarchists and Trotskyists in Barcelona became a problem.

The reasoning behind both the book and the film is that it was Stalinist repression that brought Franco victory. However, Orwell himself completely demolished it in his 1942 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War : “ The hatred that the Spanish Republic aroused in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, playboys, reactionary sanctimonious people and the like should be enough to understand the situation. It was, in essence, a class war. Had it been won, the cause of the people throughout the world would have been decisively strengthened. It was lost, and those who live on its dividends throughout the world could rub their hands and celebrate. That was the bottom line, and everything else is foam on the surface (…) The outcome of the Spanish Civil War was decided in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin… In any case, it was not decided in Spain. After the summer of 1937, those with common sense realized that the government could not win the war unless there was a very profound change in the international panorama (…) The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been the victim of sabotage is probably a mistake and a lie. Nationalizing the factories, demolishing the churches, issuing revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more effective. The fascists won the war because they were stronger. They had modern weapons that the other side did not possess. There is no political strategy that can compensate for such a deficiency ”[32].

It is clear that even before his 1942 essay and indeed by the time his book was published, Orwell had substantially modified the views he had expressed in it. When he died in January 1950 the initial print run of 1,500 copies had still not been sold out. According to Peter Davison, the meticulous editor of his papers, Orwell had hoped that there might be a second, revised edition. The first step he took towards correcting his text came in the summer of 1938 in his correspondence with Yvonne Davet, the translator of the French edition which was not published, with corrections, until 1955.

As Davison explains before his death, Orwell “ left notes for his literary executor indicating what he wanted changed ” and also sent an annotated copy of the book to Roger Senhouse, a director at Secker & Warburg. “ Unfortunately Senhouse ignored Orwell’s request and the standard edition simply reproduced the 1938 text (with a few additional errors). The most obvious of these was the removal of Chapters V and XI from the body of the book and their relocation as appendices at the end, where Orwell felt it more appropriate to insert the historical and political discussion of what was otherwise nothing more than a personal account of his own experiences .”

These modifications did not appear until the edition prepared by Davison in 1986. The changes made in line with Orwell's notes - the relocation of the two chapters and the correction of some minor factual errors such as the confusion between the pro-Franco Civil Guard and the Assault Guards - did little to bring the text into line with the views expressed in many letters and articles he wrote after finishing the work. The impression that remains is that the fiercely anti-communist Orwell of the civil war was content to leave Homage to Catalonia more or less as it was despite knowing full well that his interpretation in the work erred considerably regarding the position of the Spanish Republic.[33]

It must be said to Orwell's credit that in his essay Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War he came to a conclusion which reflects his conversations in London with Dr. Negrín. In 1937 his interpretation was based on ignorance. An example which illustrates this is found in his numerous references in Homage to Catalonia to Lérida, “ the main stronghold of the POUM ”[34], where he was hospitalised after being wounded and the city in which, while waiting for his discharge papers to be issued, he spent some time practically as a tourist.

POUM leaders on the Aragon front:
Pere Bonet, Julian Gomez "Gorkin"
and Josep Rovira

What Orwell did not mention was that Lérida suffered terrible atrocities at the hands of both the local POUM and the anarchist columns from Barcelona. Uncontrolled terror was the norm for a brief period when dozens of civilians, army officers, civil guards, priests and novices were shot. When the anarchist columns passed through the province of Lérida on their way to Aragon in the first months of the war they executed everyone they considered to be a fascist, including all members of the clergy or practising Catholics, landowners and merchants. Individual terrorism in Lérida gave way to collective terrorism when the POUM cooperated with the CNT and UGT in setting up a Committee of Public Safety which did little to prevent either the burning of most of the city's churches or a wave of murders. The POUM commissioner for public order, Josep Rodés Bley, collaborated with the faistas in launching a wave of acts of pure vandalism in the city. By the end of October 1936 more than two hundred and fifty people had been killed.[35] Elsewhere in the province the POUM seizure of power led to many crops rotting and factories being abandoned. All those who called for the economy to be organised were denounced as reactionaries. The POUM committee seemed more concerned with sticking to the good life in the homes requisitioned from the rich.[36]

FOUNTAINS :
[1] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Barcelona: Debate, May 2017 printing, translation by Miguel Temprano García). References in this article are made to the previous edition.

[2] Tribute , pp. 42, 45.

[3] Josep Pané, “George Orwell, soldat de Rovira” in Josep Coll & Josep Pané, Josep Rovira. A life in the service of Catalonia and socialism (Barcelona: Ariel, 1978), p. 129.

[4] Tribute, pp. 81ff.

[5] Homage , p. 34. Bill Alexander, “George Orwell and Spain” in Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth. Orwell. Views from the Left (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), pp. 95-98.

[6] Herbert L. Matthews, A World in Revolution. A Newspaperman's Memoir (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), pp. 43s.

[7] Raymond Carr, “Orwell and the Spanish Civil War,” in Miriam Gross, The World of George Orwell (London: Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1971), p. 70.

[8] Robert Stradling, “The Spies Who Loved Them: the Blairs in Barcelona, 1937,” Intelligence and National Security , vol. 25, no. 5, October 2010, p. 639.

[9] George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell , volume I. An Age Like This 1920-1940 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 501. This paragraph, which corresponds to note 9 of the original essay, does not appear in his translation, “In the Belly of the Whale,” in George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Essays (Madrid: Turner and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006).

[10] Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), pp., 85s, 118s (there is a Spanish translation); Robert A. Stradling, History and Legend. Writing the International Brigades (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 49s.

[11] David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler. The Homeless Mind (New York: The Free Press, 1998), pp. 250-256.

[12] Robert A. Stradling, “Orwell and the Spanish Civil War. A Historical Critique,” in Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth. Orwell. Views from the Left (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), pp. 108s.

[13] Tribute , p. 206.

[14] Michael Shelden, Orwell. The Authorised Biography (London: Heinemann, 1991), p. 280; John McNair, Spanish Diary , edited with a commentary by Don Bateman (Manchester: Greater Manchester ILP, n.d.), p. 14. The issue of Orwell's linguistic competence is taken up by Stradling, “Orwell and the Spanish Civil War,” pp. 107f.; Homenaje, pp. 37 and 160.

*In the Spanish translations of Homenaje, the translators or editors have avoided the original term and replaced it with Generalitat or Generalidad.

[15] Tribute , pp. 259 and 262.

[16] Tribute , pp. 154-156.

[17] George Orwell, “Caesarian Section in Spain,” The Highway , March 1939. The journal claims that the article was written before the fall of Catalonia. Reprinted in Peter Davison, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume XI, Facing Unpleasant Facts 1937-1939 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), pp. 332-335.

[18] Matthews to Negrín, August 22, 1952, Documentary Collection of the Juan Negrín Foundation Archive (FJN), folder 93-41ª, no. 320. See also the prologue by Ángel Viñas to Antonio Ramos Oliveira, Controversy over Spain. Three Essays on the Civil War (Seville: Editorial Renacimiento, 2015), pp. 7-17.

[19] Negrín to Matthews, September 5, 1953. Documentary collection of the Juan Negrín Foundation Archive (FJN), folder 93-41ª, no. 270. Matthews commented on this letter both in A World in Revolution , pp. 43-45, and in Half of Spain Died. A Reappraisal of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Charles Scribner´s Sons, 1973), p. 231.

[20] Reproduced in Davison, Facing Unpleasant Facts , pp. 254-256.

[21] Tribute , pp. 231 and 235. See also a letter to his wife dated April 5, 1937, and another from her to her brother dated May 1, 1937. Facing Unpleasant Facts , pp. 15ff. and 23.

[22] Bob Edwards, Introduction, George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Folio Society, 1970), p. 8.

[23] p. 210.

[24] Orwell, “Notes on the Spanish Militias”, Facing , pp. 135-145.

[25] Bernard Crick, George Orwell. A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), pp. 208-210; Shelden, Orwell, pp. 274-279; McNair, Spanish Diary, pp. 13-15; Richard Baxell , Unlikely Warriors. The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism (London: Aurum Press, 2012), pp. 183-185.

[26] “British author with the Militia”, The Spanish Revolution , vol. II, no. 2, February 3, 1937, p. 2.



27 John McNair, Manuscript, 'George Orwell: The Man I Knew', dated March 1965, Newcastle upon Tyne University Library, cited by Crick, George Orwell , pp. 317-18.

28 Jennie Lee to Margaret M. Goalby, 23 June 1950 : 'Orwell's Arrival in Barcelona' , reprinted in Davison, Facing Unpleasant Facts , p. 5.

[29] Baxell, Unlikely Warriors , p. 187. Orwell replied to Frankford's criticisms of the POUM. See Davison, Facing Unpleasant Facts , pp. 82-85.

[30] Tribute , p. 121.

[31] Baxell, Unlikely Warriors , p. 188; Bill Alexander, “George Orwell and Spain”, Norris, Inside the Myth , pp. 92s.

[32] Written in 1941 and first published in abridged form in New Road , June 1943. Davison, Orwell in Spain , pp. 343-364. The publication history is on pp. 343ff. The translation, by Miguel Martínez-Laje, is taken from the Spanish version Memories of the Spanish Civil War , in George Orwell, Killing an Elephant and Other Essays (Madrid: Turner and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006). The quotations are on pp. 182ff.

[33] Facing Unpleasant Facts, pp. 133-135; Davison, Orwell in Spain , pp. 28-30; Davison's revised edition appears in Orwell in Spain , pp. 31-215.

[34] Tribute , p. 249.

[35] Frederic Escofet, Al servei de Catalunya i de la República , two volumes (Paris: Edicions Catalanes, 1973), II, p. 376; Jaume Barrull Pelegrí, Popular violence and revolutionary justice. The Popular Court of Lleída (1936-1937) (Lleída: Edicions de l'Universitat de Lleída, 1995), pp. 19-33; Jaume Barrull Pelegrí & Conxita Mir Cucó, Political violence and social rupture in Spain 1936-1939 (Lleída: Edicions de l'Universitat de Lleída, 1994), pp. 67-79; Solé & Villarroya, La repressió a la reraguarda , I, pp. 87s, pp. 467-484; Montero Moreno, History of religious persecution , pp. 369-373; Joan Pons Garlandí, Un republicà enmig de Faistes (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2008) pp. 80-83; Francesc Viadiu i Vendrell, Delegat d´Ordre Públic a ´Lleída la Roja´ (Barcelona: Rafel Dalmau, 1979), pp. 29-40 and 83-98.

[36] Tomàs Pàmies & Teresa Pàmies, Testament to Prague (Barcelona: Edicions Destino, 1971), pp. 128-131, 135-139; Sole & Villarroya, La repressió a la reraguarda , II, pp. 447-449.

Source: Historia Nova, no. 16 (2018)

Luces y sombras en el “Homenaje a Cataluña” (I) / Paul Preston

Paul Preston – Fuente: Historia Nova, nº 16 (2018) La obra de Orwell Homenaje a Cataluña, a pesar de un título que se presta algo al equívoco, es el libro más vendido y leído sobre la guerra …

sociologiacritica.es

 

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In animal farm Orwell mentioned one of the main reasons communism will never work.
All animals are equal
Some animals are more equal than other animals

 

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...And after these articles about Orwell and his Trilogy, a summary (and here they go...) for the dull with reading disabilities:
Orwell is criticizing Stalinism, and by extension all dehumanizing authoritarianisms.

 

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There will always be a pig dictator at the end of any form of Communism

 

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Critical Sociology​

Articles and texts for debate and analysis of social reality​

Lights and shadows in the “Homage to Catalonia” (I) / Paul Preston​

Paul Preston - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Orwell's Homage to Catalonia , despite a title that lends itself somewhat to misunderstanding, is the best-selling and most widely read book on the Spanish Civil War.[1] It is a vivid account of some fragments of the war, elegantly written by a very perceptive witness. Its subject is the valuable experience of a militiaman on the Aragonese front. In powerful sentences Orwell recreated in a very graphic way the fear, the cold and, above all, the misery of the trenches, the excrement and the lice. Two examples: “ We were now much closer to the front, close enough to notice the characteristic smell of war (in my experience, a smell of excrement and rotten food) ” and “ the landscape was impressive, provided one managed to overlook the fact that all the peaks were occupied by soldiers and, therefore, covered with tin cans and encrusted with excrement ”. He also complained about the lack of training and the poor armament. “ It was horrible that the defenders of the Republic were a bunch of ragged children armed with broken rifles that they did not even know how to use ”[2].

A biographer of Josep Rovira, commander of the 29th Division in which Orwell served, wrote that “ in his sleepy and distant traverse, he manifested himself entirely with an eagerness to observe, like a curious child .”[3] Orwell’s vivid observations of agricultural backwardness, of primitive pre-medieval farming implements, of ploughs that merely scratched the soil without making furrows, his evocations of the sights and sounds of the countryside are worthy of a great travel book and of great value to the historian.[4] As for his repeated comments about wasted food, “ terribly so, especially bread. In my barracks alone we threw away a whole basket of bread at every meal, which was shameful when you consider how scarce it was among the civilian population .”
If the POUM unit in which Orwell served could afford to waste food, it must have been a rarity among Republican forces.[5]

Photo: Andy Durgan, «With the POUM International volunteers on the Aragon Front (1936-1937)

Orwell's eyewitness account warrants inclusion on any list of important books on the Spanish Civil War. However, it would not rank there as an example of credible analysis of the wider political environment of the conflict and, in particular, its international conditions. In his book, Orwell combined a mass of high-quality personal observations with a devastating critique of the distortions and falsehoods of the press. It is, however, his political analysis and predictions that suffer most from his wholesale acceptance of the partisan views of his fellow anarchists and the POUM, coupled with his own ignorance of the wider context in which the conflict was set. At best, his book is a misleading contribution to the central debate over whether the priority of the Spanish Republic should have been revolution or perseverance in the conventional war effort against Franco and his Axis allies.

Herbert Matthews (right) with Ernest Hemingway
and Hugh Slater

Herbert Matthews, the great New York Times correspondent, summed up the problems following the publication of Homage to Catalonia as follows : “ The book did far more to blacken the loyalist cause than anything else written by the enemies of the Second Republic – a result which Orwell did not intend, as he showed in some of his later writings. In Homage Orwell wrote in the heat of the moment about a confused, unimportant and somewhat obscure incident in a war which he did not at all understand. All he saw between January and May 1937 was a minimal period of ‘quasi-war’ on the small Huesca front and a bloody clash between communists and anarchists in Barcelona. He had volunteered through the Independent Labour Party (PLI), a left-wing formation which had links with the POUM. This was a dissident group, very Marxist, not treacherous but somewhat revolutionary and subversive, which was proving dangerous to the Republican Government .” Matthews, who considered Orwell “a brave, even-tempered and honest man ,” also stated: “ I would say that very few people have read the scraps – essays, reviews, letters – that Orwell wrote about Spain in later years. Such scraps show a much better understanding of events than he had when he was in Spain .”[6]

Certainly Matthews was right, and yet Orwell’s book has had an enormous influence on perceptions aroused by the Spanish Civil War.[7] For example, Robert Stradling claims that “the two ‘analytical’ chapters of Homage are justly renowned as a condensed political treatise on the whole of the twentieth century.”[8] Orwell himself wrote: “ The most striking thing about books on the Civil War, at least those written in English, is their overwhelming poor quality and soporific boredom. But more significant still is that nearly all of them, whether right or left, are written from a political point of view by very self-assured people who tell the reader what to think .”[9] Homage to Catalonia is neither boring nor bad, but it is written from a political point of view by someone who is very self-assured and who tells the reader what to think.

P.O.U.M. building

Many distinguished readers were prepared to accept what Orwell told them. These included many who knew little about the Spanish Civil War, such as Lionel Trilling, Noam Chomsky, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson.[10] One who had been to Spain and later became a fierce anti-Communist was Arthur Koestler, who was drawn to Orwell's writings. However, Koestler's relations with the latter were based on their mutual hatred of the Soviet Union rather than on a considered consideration of events in Spain.[11]

The widespread admiration for Homage to Catalonia is all the more surprising given that the book is confined entirely to the time and place in which Orwell was in Spain. He evidently knew nothing of the origins of the war, of the long-running political conflicts between left-wing groups in Barcelona, and even less of the problems underlying the relations at that time between the Republican government in Valencia and the various political forces in Catalonia. As Robert Stradling writes, “ As a study of the Spanish civil war Homage to Catalonia is of dubious value. Not only did the author avoid any basic research, but he also lacked the necessary qualifications to carry it out .”[12] Orwell himself acknowledged the shortcomings of his summary of the political situation of the time towards the end of Homage to Catalonia , writing: “ If I have not said it before, I am saying it now: beware of my bias, my errors, and the inevitable distortion caused by having witnessed only part of the events. And I say the same about any other book about this period of the Spanish war ”[13].

There are other reasons to question some of what Orwell wrote. There are many encounters with staff in his book which are described in detail but which he could only have accurately recorded if he had spoken Spanish well. The fact that there is very little reason to think that this was the case casts doubt on his intellectual honesty. He himself admitted that his Spanish was “atrocious” and this is highly probable given that he did not know the language when he arrived in Spain and spent virtually all his time there in the company of people who spoke English. The PLI liaison in Barcelona, John McNair, recalled in a scarcely credible way that Orwell “ spoke a good deal of Spanish and enough French to understand a lot of Catalan ”. It is rare for French ears, let alone English ears, to easily understand spoken Catalan. The captain of the unit in which Orwell served, Benjamin Lewinski, told biographer Michael Shelden that the French-speaking Orwell quickly picked up enough Catalan to be able to communicate with his comrades. However, Orwell himself wrote of his first days in Spain: “ All the while I continued to have my usual difficulties with Spanish. Apart from me, there was only one Englishman in the barracks, and no one, not even among the officers, spoke a word of French. And I found it even more difficult when my comrades spoke Catalan to each other .”

Orwell with leaders of the POUM (Nin, Gorkin, Bonet), PSOP (Marceau Pivert), ILP (John McNair) and Colette Audry, Barcelona, July 1936 (photo: «Julian Gorkin, testimony of a professional revolutionary»)

Even assuming that McNair and Lewinski's recollections of Orwell speaking Catalan were correct, they could only have done so at a level that would permit easy conversations but not sufficient to explain how Orwell, as he claimed in his book, was able to carry on complex discussions with Spanish officials in his efforts to secure the release of his friend Georges Kopp and even, when wounded and half-conscious, to have understood the comment of a Spanish comrade “ behind him that the bullet had gone clean through my neck .”[14] It is striking that the only Catalan word that Orwell might have been expected to know – la Generalitat – is always listed as the “Generalite.”* It is also noteworthy that in his collection of letters, reviews and essays there is no indication that before the civil war he had the slightest contact with Spanish or that he had ever read a book in Spanish, whether on the war or any other subject.

His precise and perfectly justified denunciations of the absurd claims of the communist and bourgeois press do not invalidate his failure to understand the general situation. Orwell claimed that the fact that the POUM was being persecuted meant that the Republican government was “ virtually in the hands of the communists .” And yet, a few pages later, he admitted that “ the majority of members of the Spanish government have denied believing the accusations made against the POUM. The Council of Ministers recently decided by five votes to two to release the anti-fascist political prisoners; the two ministers who voted against were communists .” He acknowledged that Indalecio Prieto, Minister of National Defense; Manuel Irujo, Minister of Justice; Julián Zugazagoitia, Minister of the Interior, among others, “ denied believing that the leaders of the POUM were guilty of espionage .”[15]

Despite this statement, in a text riddled with contradictions, Orwell did not hesitate to make a prediction, totally unfounded, about what would have happened if the Republic had won the war: “ As for the newspaper chatter that this was a “war for democracy,” it was pure nonsense. No one in his right mind thought there was the slightest hope that, when the war was over, there could be democracy, even as it is understood in England or France, in a country as divided and exhausted as Spain. There would have to be a dictatorship, and it was obvious that the opportunity for a dictatorship of the proletariat had already passed. That meant it would be some form of fascism .”

A few pages after this huge mistake, Orwell nevertheless wrote: “ I must add that I now have a much higher opinion of Negrin’s government than when he came to power. He has fought back with enormous courage and shown greater political tolerance than anyone expected. Even so, I remain convinced that, unless Spain ends up split in two with unpredictable consequences, the tendency of the post-war government will be fascist .”[16] After condemning the Spanish Republic as an incipient Stalinist dictatorship in late 1938 or early 1939, Orwell praised the fact that democratic norms had been maintained: “In governmental Spain the forms and spirit of democracy have survived to a degree that no one could have foreseen. It would even be correct to say that they were developing during the first year of the war .”[17]

Juan Negrín during a visit to the Ebro front in 1938 (photo: Archive of the Juan Negrín Foundation)

Juan Negrín - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Juan Negrín - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In August 1952 Herbert Matthews wrote to the former president of the Republican government in exile, Dr. Juan Negrín, to ask him about his relations with Orwell. While preparing an article about the publication in the United States of Homage to Catalonia , Matthews had learned that the socialist journalist and historian Antonio Ramos Oliveira had introduced Negrín to Orwell. After his time as press adviser at the Republican embassy in London under Pablo de Azcárate, Ramos Oliveira had remained in England and during this period had become friends with Orwell. Ramos Oliveira had told Matthews that Orwell had gotten on well with Negrín and that once Negrín had explained the big themes to him, Orwell began to “ remember his experiences in a different light and better understand the position of the Communists .” Matthews therefore wrote to Negrín to ask for more information.[18]

Negrín replied two weeks later: “ As far as I can remember I first met Orwell sometime after August or September 1940. He was introduced to me as an editorialist for the Observer and I was told that he had been in Spain during our war. I did not realise that he had been there not as a journalist or writer but as a volunteer in a combat unit and I think it was only when I read his book on Catalonia, months after his death, that I realised this. Since we met we saw each other several times and I dare say that a mutual current of esteem, sympathy and even friendship soon established itself between us .” Throughout their conversations Orwell bombarded Negrín with questions about the problems of the civil war that he had ignored in Homage to Catalonia .

Negrín explained to him that “ our foreign policy, especially our relations with Russia, took into account that the USSR was the only great power that supported us internationally and that was willing to supply us with the necessary weapons in cash (we never asked for gifts from anyone) . He also informed him of the problems and difficulties that arose from the “ heterogeneous conglomerate of parties, unions and dissident groups that were incompatible with each other, as well as the regional and local “governments” that were often self-appointed and unconstitutional ” with which he had to deal. Negrín concluded by stating that Orwell was “idealistic” and weltfremd (unrealistic). However, the fact that he did not say anything about his links with the POUM suggests that Orwell was not entirely honest with the former president.

Photo: Andy Durgan, With the POUM International volunteers on the Aragon Front (1936-1937)

Negrín wrote to Matthews that, had he read the book at the time of their conversations, “ I would have been more inquisitive, in order to clarify some of the events I narrated, trying to see through a frank and open discussion to what extent the interpretation of the facts he witnessed was correct. After reading your book, I have not changed my opinion of Orwell: a respectable and honest man but very biased by a point of view that was too rigid, puritanical, endowed with a candor that borders on naïveté, very critical but too credulous with respect to the religious community within which he moves and acts; “extremely individualistic (an Englishman!) but accepting too easily and without any discernment of his own the inspirations coming from the somewhat gregarious collective in which he voluntarily and instinctively wants to take root, and so extraordinarily honest and self-sacrificing that he would not hesitate for a moment to change his mind as soon as he realised that he was wrong (….) He arrived at the chaotic front (?) of Aragon under the tutelage of a group (…) controlled certainly by elements who were not only very allergic to Stalinism - this was often (sic) no more than a mere protest - but also to anything that implied a supreme and united direction of the struggle and under a common discipline. When all this is combined with the already mentioned factors of “astigmatism” one easily comes to justify the distorted image in Orwell’s mind of the events of 1937 in Barcelona ”[19] .

The honesty attributed to Orwell's book has been one of the pillars of its success, along with, naturally, its clear anti-communist stance. Even so, the veracity of some of the episodes described in the work has been questioned. In fact, shortly after publishing it, Orwell himself began to cast doubt on the things he had written. On December 20, 1938, in a letter to Frank Jellinek, he wrote about his book: “ I have no doubt that I have made a lot of mistakes and that I have made misleading statements, but I have also tried to indicate throughout the work that the subject is very complicated and that I am extremely fallible as well as biased .” He also confessed to Jellinek: “ I have actually written a much more sympathetic account for the POUM than I really felt because I always told them that they were deceiving themselves and I refused to join. However, I had to write with the greatest possible sympathy because the capitalist press has not paid the slightest attention to them and the left-wing press has piled up insults. In fact, considering how things have gone in Spain, I think there was some truth in what they said, although there is no doubt that their way of saying it was extremely boring and provocative ”[20].

POUM headquarters in Barcelona

There is something irresponsible in this spirit of “fair play” behind Orwell’s decision to play down as much as possible the degree to which the POUM’s attitude was detrimental to the Republic. It is all the more remarkable since Orwell admitted that, before the events in Barcelona, “ he generally shared the opinion of the communists, which was summed up by saying that ‘there is no point in talking about revolution until we win the war’” and “he tried to move from the POUM to the International Brigades. Of course, he wanted to go to Madrid. Everybody, whatever their political opinions, wanted to go to Madrid (…) For the moment, of course, I had to stay at the front, but I always said that, when I went on leave, I would try to go over to the International Brigades, which was equivalent to putting myself under communist control. Many tried to dissuade me, but nobody tried to stop me. It must be said in fairness that in the POUM there was little persecution of dissidents, perhaps too little given the circumstances; Unless one was pro-fascist, no one was punished for holding wrong political opinions. While I was in the militia I spent a lot of time bitterly criticizing the POUM “line,” but it never caused me the slightest trouble .”[21]

Orwell’s ILP commander, Bob Edwards, commented precisely in this vein: “ He made known on several occasions his intention to leave the International Militia and join the Communist-controlled International Column on the Madrid front. During this period most of the volunteers wanted to fight in Madrid because the big battles were taking place there .” Edwards, moreover, adopted a somewhat cynical stance because he believed that Orwell “ was putting his needs as a writer before his duty as a soldier (…) and I called him out on this quite clearly to the point that on one occasion after a very heated debate I told him that he was a “bloody second-rate writer” with no experience of working-class struggles other than that of a journalist who merely observed them .”[22]

Harry Pollitt (photo: Communist
Party of Great Britain Archives)

Orwell had initially written, “ If I joined their militia [the POUM] and not any other it was only because I arrived in Barcelona with PLI papers .”[23] That the POUM accepted him had much to do with his literary fame even though the book presents him as an anonymous volunteer. Believing that he would need left-wing party credentials to go to Spain, Orwell asked John Strachey to introduce him to Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the CPGB. Pollitt, “ after asking me several questions evidently decided that I was not to be trusted politically and refused to help me .”[24] Pollitt was probably resentful of what he perceived in Orwell as the snobbery of an Eton-educated boy.

This is how Orwell found his way to the PLI where he was given letters of introduction to John McNair, the representative in Barcelona. At first McNair, a Tyneside proletarian, was somewhat put off by Orwell's typical Eton accent, as had Pollitt. However, letters from Fenner Brockway and H.N. Brailsford alerted McNair that he was talking to the author of Burmese Days and Down and Out in Paris and London , which he had read and liked very much. He immediately realised Orwell's value in propaganda and agreed to take him quickly to the POUM militia base at the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona[25]. The enlistment of such a famous author was soon used as a means of stimulating recruitment in the English-language POUM newsletter, The Spanish Revolution [26].

Lenin Barracks in Barcelona (photo: Agustí Centelles). Orwell's head stands out above the recruits in the last rows, on the left.

In a later, unpublished memoir, McNair recalled that when he asked what he could do to help, Orwell supposedly replied: “ I have come to Spain to join the militia and fight against fascism .” He also claimed that Orwell said that “ he would like to write about the situation and try to stimulate the opinion of the workers in England and France .” McNair suggested that he take up residence in his office and visit Madrid, Valencia and the Aragonese front where the POUM was stationed “ and then write his book .” Orwell replied that writing a book “ was a very secondary thing and that his main reason for going to Spain was to fight against fascism .”[27]

Jennie Lee (photo:
Elliott & Fry, National Portrait
Gallery)

The British Labour MP Jennie Lee, wife of Aneurin Bevan, recalled in 1950: “ In the first year of the Spanish Civil War I was sitting with friends in a hotel in Barcelona when a tall, thin man with a dazzling complexion came to our table. He asked me if I was Jennie Lee and if so could I tell him where to enlist. He also said he was a writer. He had been given an advance for a book by [Victor] Gollancz and had come prepared to drive a car or do anything, preferably to fight on the front line. I thought this was suspicious and asked him if he had any papers from England. From what I saw he had none. He had not spoken to anyone and had paid his own way. He convinced me when he showed me the boots he was carrying over his shoulder. I knew he would have a hard time finding boots in his size as he was tall and over six feet tall. It was George Orwell in his boots, ready to fight in Spain .” The money advanced to him by Victor Gollancz was most likely for his work The Road to Wigan Pier and not for a book about Spain[28]

The same reasons that had been behind Pollitt's rejection and McNair's initial hostility contributed to Orwell's unpopularity with his British comrades in the militia who were well aware of the significance of " a crystal-clear Eton accent ". It might have been different with the Spanish, although Orwell recalled that some volunteers called him a fascist for resisting his efforts to impose discipline. His comrade Stafford Cottman put forward the thesis that Orwell adopted a contemptuous air about what he regarded as the political naivety of other volunteers. Frank Frankford, from the working-class suburbs of East London, said that the "supercilious bastard" disliked him as soon as he laid eyes on him. " He didn't really like workers... What I didn't like about him was his attitude in discussions, his attitude towards the working class. Two or three of us said that he was not with his own people, that he should be on the other side (…) I think that perhaps he saw himself as another Bernard Shaw (…) His socialism had no depth at all ”[29].

POUM volunteers (photo: Andy Durgan Andy Durgan, With the POUM International volunteers on the Aragon Front (1936-1937)

In fact, Orwell wrote that when he was preparing to leave Barcelona on 25 April, “ I tracked down a communist friend with ties to the Spanish Red Aid and explained my case to him. He seemed very keen to recruit me and asked me if possible to try to persuade some other Englishmen in the ILP to follow my example .”[30] The friend was Hugh O’Donnell, the CPGB man charged with keeping an eye on the POUM. After discussing the matter primarily with McNair two days later Orwell approached a more senior communist in Barcelona, Wally Tapsell, who had been instructed to keep a close eye on the ILP members. Tapsell sent Harry Pollitt a report on people connected with the POUM in which he also described his meeting with Orwell and Orwell’s motives for joining the International Brigades: “ The most distinguished and most respected person in the contingent at the moment is Eric Blair. She is a novelist and has written a number of books on the life of the English proletarians. She has little understanding of political issues and “is not interested in party politics. She came to Spain as an anti-fascist to fight fascism.” However, as a result of her experiences she has come to dislike the POUM and is trying to get herself discharged from the POUM militia ”[31].

It was not long before Orwell changed his mind about joining the International Brigades after what he saw in Barcelona during the events of May 1937. What he did not see was that the Spanish Republic was not only fighting Franco and his armed forces but also the military and economic power of Mussolini and Hitler in a context of Franco-British hostility. Surrounded from outside, the Republic also had to face enormous internal problems, unknown in the area that Franco had militarily brutalised. The collapse of the bourgeois state in the first days of the war occurred at the same time as the rapid eruption of revolutionary organs of a parallel power. There was a massive and popular collectivisation of agriculture and industry. Although it filled participants and observers like George Orwell with enthusiasm, the great experiments in collectivisation in the autumn of 1936 did little to create a war machine. Socialist leaders such as Indalecio Prieto and Juan Negrín were convinced that a conventional state, with centralized control of the economy and the institutional instruments necessary to mobilize the masses, was essential to generate and sustain an effective war effort. Communists and Soviet advisers agreed. Not only was this a common-sense approach, but the reduction of the revolutionary activities of the anarchists and the anti-Stalinist POUM was necessary to reassure the bourgeois democracies with which both the Soviet Union and the Spanish Republican government sought an understanding. The events of May that Orwell witnessed were provoked by the need to remove the obstacles that impeded the efficient conduct of the war. Despite the incorporation of proletarian militias into the regular army forces and the dismantling of collectivizations, Negrín's government could not achieve victory, not because the policy was wrong but because outside forces continued to encircle the Republic.

Thus, in Ken Loach's Homage to Catalonia and its film version Land and Freedom , a secondary episode pushes the major problems of the war to one side and, in doing so, presents a totally perverse explanation of the reasons for the Republican defeat. With a Republic abandoned by the Western powers and attacked by Franco, Hitler and Mussolini, only the Soviet Union decided to help it. Naturally, Stalin did not act in this way out of idealism or sentimentality. Rather, because, threatened by an expansionist Germany, he hoped, like his Tsarist predecessors, to be able to limit the risk by means of an alliance with France that would in turn encircle Hitler. He feared, with reason, that if Franco won the war with Hitler's help, France would collapse. He therefore set about providing just enough aid to the Republic to keep it alive while preventing revolutionary elements in Spain from justifying conservative decision-makers in London in continuing their appeasement of the Axis in the framework of an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Without Soviet arms and the International Brigades Madrid would probably have fallen in November 1936 and Franco would have won the war months before the anarchists and Trotskyists in Barcelona became a problem.

The reasoning behind both the book and the film is that it was Stalinist repression that brought Franco victory. However, Orwell himself completely demolished it in his 1942 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War : “ The hatred that the Spanish Republic aroused in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, playboys, reactionary sanctimonious people and the like should be enough to understand the situation. It was, in essence, a class war. Had it been won, the cause of the people throughout the world would have been decisively strengthened. It was lost, and those who live on its dividends throughout the world could rub their hands and celebrate. That was the bottom line, and everything else is foam on the surface (…) The outcome of the Spanish Civil War was decided in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin… In any case, it was not decided in Spain. After the summer of 1937, those with common sense realized that the government could not win the war unless there was a very profound change in the international panorama (…) The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been the victim of sabotage is probably a mistake and a lie. Nationalizing the factories, demolishing the churches, issuing revolutionary manifestos would not have made the armies more effective. The fascists won the war because they were stronger. They had modern weapons that the other side did not possess. There is no political strategy that can compensate for such a deficiency ”[32].

It is clear that even before his 1942 essay and indeed by the time his book was published, Orwell had substantially modified the views he had expressed in it. When he died in January 1950 the initial print run of 1,500 copies had still not been sold out. According to Peter Davison, the meticulous editor of his papers, Orwell had hoped that there might be a second, revised edition. The first step he took towards correcting his text came in the summer of 1938 in his correspondence with Yvonne Davet, the translator of the French edition which was not published, with corrections, until 1955.

As Davison explains before his death, Orwell “ left notes for his literary executor indicating what he wanted changed ” and also sent an annotated copy of the book to Roger Senhouse, a director at Secker & Warburg. “ Unfortunately Senhouse ignored Orwell’s request and the standard edition simply reproduced the 1938 text (with a few additional errors). The most obvious of these was the removal of Chapters V and XI from the body of the book and their relocation as appendices at the end, where Orwell felt it more appropriate to insert the historical and political discussion of what was otherwise nothing more than a personal account of his own experiences .”

These modifications did not appear until the edition prepared by Davison in 1986. The changes made in line with Orwell's notes - the relocation of the two chapters and the correction of some minor factual errors such as the confusion between the pro-Franco Civil Guard and the Assault Guards - did little to bring the text into line with the views expressed in many letters and articles he wrote after finishing the work. The impression that remains is that the fiercely anti-communist Orwell of the civil war was content to leave Homage to Catalonia more or less as it was despite knowing full well that his interpretation in the work erred considerably regarding the position of the Spanish Republic.[33]

It must be said to Orwell's credit that in his essay Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War he came to a conclusion which reflects his conversations in London with Dr. Negrín. In 1937 his interpretation was based on ignorance. An example which illustrates this is found in his numerous references in Homage to Catalonia to Lérida, “ the main stronghold of the POUM ”[34], where he was hospitalised after being wounded and the city in which, while waiting for his discharge papers to be issued, he spent some time practically as a tourist.

POUM leaders on the Aragon front:
Pere Bonet, Julian Gomez "Gorkin"
and Josep Rovira

What Orwell did not mention was that Lérida suffered terrible atrocities at the hands of both the local POUM and the anarchist columns from Barcelona. Uncontrolled terror was the norm for a brief period when dozens of civilians, army officers, civil guards, priests and novices were shot. When the anarchist columns passed through the province of Lérida on their way to Aragon in the first months of the war they executed everyone they considered to be a fascist, including all members of the clergy or practising Catholics, landowners and merchants. Individual terrorism in Lérida gave way to collective terrorism when the POUM cooperated with the CNT and UGT in setting up a Committee of Public Safety which did little to prevent either the burning of most of the city's churches or a wave of murders. The POUM commissioner for public order, Josep Rodés Bley, collaborated with the faistas in launching a wave of acts of pure vandalism in the city. By the end of October 1936 more than two hundred and fifty people had been killed.[35] Elsewhere in the province the POUM seizure of power led to many crops rotting and factories being abandoned. All those who called for the economy to be organised were denounced as reactionaries. The POUM committee seemed more concerned with sticking to the good life in the homes requisitioned from the rich.[36]

FOUNTAINS :
[1] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Barcelona: Debate, May 2017 printing, translation by Miguel Temprano García). References in this article are made to the previous edition.

[2] Tribute , pp. 42, 45.

[3] Josep Pané, “George Orwell, soldat de Rovira” in Josep Coll & Josep Pané, Josep Rovira. A life in the service of Catalonia and socialism (Barcelona: Ariel, 1978), p. 129.

[4] Tribute, pp. 81ff.

[5] Homage , p. 34. Bill Alexander, “George Orwell and Spain” in Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth. Orwell. Views from the Left (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984), pp. 95-98.

[6] Herbert L. Matthews, A World in Revolution. A Newspaperman's Memoir (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), pp. 43s.

[7] Raymond Carr, “Orwell and the Spanish Civil War,” in Miriam Gross, The World of George Orwell (London: Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1971), p. 70.

[8] Robert Stradling, “The Spies Who Loved Them: the Blairs in Barcelona, 1937,” Intelligence and National Security , vol. 25, no. 5, October 2010, p. 639.

[9] George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell , volume I. An Age Like This 1920-1940 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), p. 501. This paragraph, which corresponds to note 9 of the original essay, does not appear in his translation, “In the Belly of the Whale,” in George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Essays (Madrid: Turner and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006).

[10] Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), pp., 85s, 118s (there is a Spanish translation); Robert A. Stradling, History and Legend. Writing the International Brigades (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 49s.

[11] David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler. The Homeless Mind (New York: The Free Press, 1998), pp. 250-256.

[12] Robert A. Stradling, “Orwell and the Spanish Civil War. A Historical Critique,” in Christopher Norris (ed.), Inside the Myth. Orwell. Views from the Left (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), pp. 108s.

[13] Tribute , p. 206.

[14] Michael Shelden, Orwell. The Authorised Biography (London: Heinemann, 1991), p. 280; John McNair, Spanish Diary , edited with a commentary by Don Bateman (Manchester: Greater Manchester ILP, n.d.), p. 14. The issue of Orwell's linguistic competence is taken up by Stradling, “Orwell and the Spanish Civil War,” pp. 107f.; Homenaje, pp. 37 and 160.

*In the Spanish translations of Homenaje, the translators or editors have avoided the original term and replaced it with Generalitat or Generalidad.

[15] Tribute , pp. 259 and 262.

[16] Tribute , pp. 154-156.

[17] George Orwell, “Caesarian Section in Spain,” The Highway , March 1939. The journal claims that the article was written before the fall of Catalonia. Reprinted in Peter Davison, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume XI, Facing Unpleasant Facts 1937-1939 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), pp. 332-335.

[18] Matthews to Negrín, August 22, 1952, Documentary Collection of the Juan Negrín Foundation Archive (FJN), folder 93-41ª, no. 320. See also the prologue by Ángel Viñas to Antonio Ramos Oliveira, Controversy over Spain. Three Essays on the Civil War (Seville: Editorial Renacimiento, 2015), pp. 7-17.

[19] Negrín to Matthews, September 5, 1953. Documentary collection of the Juan Negrín Foundation Archive (FJN), folder 93-41ª, no. 270. Matthews commented on this letter both in A World in Revolution , pp. 43-45, and in Half of Spain Died. A Reappraisal of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Charles Scribner´s Sons, 1973), p. 231.

[20] Reproduced in Davison, Facing Unpleasant Facts , pp. 254-256.

[21] Tribute , pp. 231 and 235. See also a letter to his wife dated April 5, 1937, and another from her to her brother dated May 1, 1937. Facing Unpleasant Facts , pp. 15ff. and 23.

[22] Bob Edwards, Introduction, George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Folio Society, 1970), p. 8.

[23] p. 210.

[24] Orwell, “Notes on the Spanish Militias”, Facing , pp. 135-145.

[25] Bernard Crick, George Orwell. A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), pp. 208-210; Shelden, Orwell, pp. 274-279; McNair, Spanish Diary, pp. 13-15; Richard Baxell , Unlikely Warriors. The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism (London: Aurum Press, 2012), pp. 183-185.

[26] “British author with the Militia”, The Spanish Revolution , vol. II, no. 2, February 3, 1937, p. 2.



27 John McNair, Manuscript, 'George Orwell: The Man I Knew', dated March 1965, Newcastle upon Tyne University Library, cited by Crick, George Orwell , pp. 317-18.

28 Jennie Lee to Margaret M. Goalby, 23 June 1950 : 'Orwell's Arrival in Barcelona' , reprinted in Davison, Facing Unpleasant Facts , p. 5.

[29] Baxell, Unlikely Warriors , p. 187. Orwell replied to Frankford's criticisms of the POUM. See Davison, Facing Unpleasant Facts , pp. 82-85.

[30] Tribute , p. 121.

[31] Baxell, Unlikely Warriors , p. 188; Bill Alexander, “George Orwell and Spain”, Norris, Inside the Myth , pp. 92s.

[32] Written in 1941 and first published in abridged form in New Road , June 1943. Davison, Orwell in Spain , pp. 343-364. The publication history is on pp. 343ff. The translation, by Miguel Martínez-Laje, is taken from the Spanish version Memories of the Spanish Civil War , in George Orwell, Killing an Elephant and Other Essays (Madrid: Turner and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006). The quotations are on pp. 182ff.

[33] Facing Unpleasant Facts, pp. 133-135; Davison, Orwell in Spain , pp. 28-30; Davison's revised edition appears in Orwell in Spain , pp. 31-215.

[34] Tribute , p. 249.

[35] Frederic Escofet, Al servei de Catalunya i de la República , two volumes (Paris: Edicions Catalanes, 1973), II, p. 376; Jaume Barrull Pelegrí, Popular violence and revolutionary justice. The Popular Court of Lleída (1936-1937) (Lleída: Edicions de l'Universitat de Lleída, 1995), pp. 19-33; Jaume Barrull Pelegrí & Conxita Mir Cucó, Political violence and social rupture in Spain 1936-1939 (Lleída: Edicions de l'Universitat de Lleída, 1994), pp. 67-79; Solé & Villarroya, La repressió a la reraguarda , I, pp. 87s, pp. 467-484; Montero Moreno, History of religious persecution , pp. 369-373; Joan Pons Garlandí, Un republicà enmig de Faistes (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2008) pp. 80-83; Francesc Viadiu i Vendrell, Delegat d´Ordre Públic a ´Lleída la Roja´ (Barcelona: Rafel Dalmau, 1979), pp. 29-40 and 83-98.

[36] Tomàs Pàmies & Teresa Pàmies, Testament to Prague (Barcelona: Edicions Destino, 1971), pp. 128-131, 135-139; Sole & Villarroya, La repressió a la reraguarda , II, pp. 447-449.

Source: Historia Nova, no. 16 (2018)

Luces y sombras en el “Homenaje a Cataluña” (I) / Paul Preston

Paul Preston – Fuente: Historia Nova, nº 16 (2018) La obra de Orwell Homenaje a Cataluña, a pesar de un título que se presta algo al equívoco, es el libro más vendido y leído sobre la guerra …

sociologiacritica.es

You can paste what ever you want
You have never read George Orwell. It will be our little secret.
I have completely given up on reading your writing. You are all over the place. What you write is long and monotonous.

 

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HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SPAIN, BY JUAN FRANCISCO ARENAS DE SORIA

Partido Comunista de España - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Communist Party of Spain - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Chapter XXVIII: 'The Prague Spring of 1968. The PCE, from orthodoxy to dissidence'​

POLICY- Juan Francisco Arenas de Soria - Friday, December 24, 2021

Juan Francisco Arenas de Soria is a professor of Geography and History and a member of the Granada Association for Truth, Justice and Reparation .

History of the PCE
A new and extraordinary chapter in the magnificent history of the PCE, which Juan Francisco Arenas de Soria brings us every Friday in the year of its Centenary.

Soviet tanks in the centre of Prague.

“There is no language without metaphor,

death is a metaphor for nothing,

it is not life, it is the rose,

it is not history, it is the tank

, not even Prague is Prague”

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
​

The article presented below aims to bring us closer to the so-called “Prague Spring” due to its profound significance in the development of the PCE and its political proposal.
It is a clear example of the defence of a “socialism in freedom”, of a defence of the necessary conquest of democratic freedoms to make the socialist ideal possible.
We have made excessive use of multiple quotes, in order to reconstruct, in the most reliable way possible, the puzzle that underpinned the analysis that led the PCE to dissidence .

The year 1968 will be key to understanding the international communist movement, since the events that took place during it, such as the “French May”, the Vietnam War , and in a very special way the so-called “Prague Spring”, would considerably change the evolution of the same and its different expressions of a “national” type.

Prague Spring - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Because the “Prague Spring” is nothing but an attempt to deepen the socialist model, not an attempt to destroy it, as the historian Luis Zaragoza [1] states. It is precisely for this reason that the entry of the Warsaw Pact tanks into Czechoslovakia represents a real upheaval within the socialist block itself, a clear example of this being the testimony of Irene Falcón:
“…Suddenly, a nightmare shattered the new dream. Pravda, TASS and other media reported alarming news about the relations between the CPSU and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Years earlier we had experienced the Sino-Soviet split. Fears became reality. The Red Army left its barracks, invading a sovereign country, not to push back and defeat the Nazi armies, but to subdue a socialist country!...” [2]

Without a doubt, we would not understand the full context of the changes that are taking place in this key year without the “French May”.

May 68 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The student mobilisations in France will have a strong impact on the entire European left, as shown by the study on the PSUC carried out by Giaime Pala:
“…the outbreak of youth protests in the streets of Paris caused an earthquake in the communist cells of students and teachers: the PSUC university students saw questioned, for the first time and from the left, not only their strategy and vision of socialism, but also their political and cultural references…” [3]

This is the cause of the questioning that will be made in France of the role played by the PCF, but which ultimately affects all the communist parties anchored in the Stalinist past, from which, despite the XX Congress of the CPSU , they had not emerged in most cases, to which should be added the changes that were taking place in Czechoslovakia at the hands of the KFS of Alexander Dubček .

Police forces at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Complutense University, Madrid, Spain, May 1968.

Changes in Czechoslovakia had been taking place progressively since 1961 after the XXII Congress of the CPSU , following the conclusions of which the Komunistická strana Československa (KSC /Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) began a process of review and study of the socialist evolution in its own country, with various milestones in the process such as the student movement, the program of economic reforms promoted by Ota Sik inspired by the Yugoslav system, the IV Congress of Czechoslovak Writers (1967) or the beginning of a major economic crisis that put the government headed by Antonín Novotný in check .

Alexander Dubček.

Alexander Dubček - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The change in the leadership of the KSC, in which Alexander Dubček, leading the reformist sector, became general secretary, would have important repercussions.
From that moment, until April 1968, the internal debate in the KSC on the reforms that were necessary to implement was very intense. An Action Program that, while maintaining the socialist essence, opened the door to reforms of important depth, starting with an internal democratization of the KSC itself, a proposal for Czecho-Slovak federalization that would resolve internal dissensions, moving towards economic reforms that intended to boost the ailing Czechoslovak economy.
Measures accompanied by loyalty to the USSR, maintaining its membership in COMECON and the Warsaw Pact, while reaffirming its defense of socialism.
But the mistrust that Dubček 's reforms aroused in the socialist bloc and in the most conservative sector of the KSC itself were too much in the context of the Cold War .


For Manuel Sacristán , one of the most prominent Spanish Marxist thinkers:

Manuel Sacristán - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Manuel Sacristán - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

“…The new direction that Alexander Dubcek was promoting in the CCP was welcomed by the leadership of the PCE with great interest and even enthusiasm. I
n their opinion, this new type of socialism was more in tune with their proposal for a “political and social democracy” approved at the VII Congress and disseminated through various books under the signature of Santiago Carrillo…” [5]

Santiago Carrillo - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Santiago Carrillo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

“…As for the characteristic features of the Czechoslovak political revolution of 1968, the two main ones are in my opinion the return of political freedom to the people and the restoration of truthfulness by the CP, which allowed it to genuinely self-criticize the bureaucratic regime, as well as to sincerely pose the situation of socialist political theory in light of the lights and shadows of the experience that began in 1917 in Russia…” [6]

Contacts between the socialist countries continued, and in July 1968 the USSR, the GDR, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria asked Czechoslovakia to abandon the path it had taken.

At the beginning of August, the aforementioned countries met with Czechoslovakia at the so-called Bratislava Conference , reaching an agreement of understanding, with some limitations for the reforms undertaken, but not cutting them off at the root [7] . A conference that ended with a declaration along the lines of a political agreement, which the PCE saw as a very positive sign, since its position had been from the beginning to seek an understanding between the parties.
Thus Mundo Obrero reproduced some fragments of the “Bratislava agreement”:
“…the firm decision to develop and defend the socialist achievements in their respective countries; to maintain the leading role of the working class and its vanguard, the Communist Party; to recognize the need for each Party to creatively resolve the problems of future socialist development, taking into account national particularities and conditions…” [8]

The KSC was heading towards its IV Congress in September, which would give a legal basis to the policies undertaken, but despite what was agreed at the Bratislava Conference, the so-called Operation Danube was launched, by which under the command of the Warsaw Pact the USSR together with several other countries, began the invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21 to end the reformist "adventure".

Soviet tanks in the centre of Prague

The invasion caused a major rupture in the international communist movement [9] , as shown by the condemnation issued by the PCE in a brief note in La Pirenaica .
Days later, in a meeting of the Executive Committee of the PCE, an in-depth reflection was made on what had happened, resulting in a statement that would be published in the September issue of Mundo Obrero .
The PCE would analyze the aspects that it considered key within its own perspective, on the submission of the different communist parties to the CPSU, and on the Spanish model of “Socialism in Freedom” :
“…the Spanish Communist Party has expressed its opinion against armed intervention in Czechoslovakia, considering that the solution to the problems of this country corresponds to the Communist Party and the Czechoslovak people, helped by the socialist States and by the Parties of the world communist and workers' movement” [10]

Santiago Carrillo's Book cover

The PCE questions the Soviet Union's way of proceeding, issuing a statement in which:
“…affirms its understanding and support for the position of the leadership of the Party and the Czechoslovak State, which, on the basis of the decisions taken (…) intends to proceed to the improvement of the methods of management of society, to the development of socialist democracy and to the strengthening of the socialist system on the basis of Marxism-Leninism…” [11]

In this context, the PCE raises the fact that there are different paths to achieving socialism, and that a single type of vision cannot be imposed, which clashes with the position of the leadership of the Soviet leader Brezhnev on "limited sovereignty" .

The leader of the CC.OO. Marcelino Camacho , who is experiencing these events from Carabanchel prison, will express himself in this vein :

Comisiones Obreras - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Workers' Commissions - Wikipedia

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Marcelino Camacho - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Marcelino Camacho - Wikipedia

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“…The members of the Central Committee were fully informed of the discussions held in Moscow with the CPSU, of the correct position of Dolores Ibarruri and the leadership of the PCE condemning the intervention of the Warsaw Pact, as well as of the opinion of the comrades who resided at that time in Prague. I expressed my total agreement, adding my vote to the condemnation. That internal debate of the party was one of the most significant turns in its history, reaffirming its rejection of Stalinism and further shaping the idea of a democratic and plural socialism…” [14]
"Thanks to his firm stance and that of Dolores Ibarruri, who was ready to tell Brezhnev off, the PCE reached its highest point in defense of democracy and against Soviet imperialism" [15]

Dolores Ibárruri - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

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Dolores Ibárruri - Wikipedia

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Brezhnev would try to bring the PCE back to orthodoxy, calling Santiago Carrillo and Dolores Ibarruri to a meeting in the Kremlin, taking advantage of the occasion of the International Conference of Communist and Workers' Parties (1969) .

Santiago Carrillo 's intervention in the Conference will show the firmness of the Spanish position despite the pressures:
“…Spain is fighting, in which the future of freedom, democracy and socialism is beginning to take shape. And in this struggle against the Franco regime, which extends throughout the whole of Spain, the working class, the young generations of students and workers who did not fight in the war and who want to live in a democratic, clean homeland freed from the dross of a tragic past, are participating with great enthusiasm.
(…) The communist parties are growing in number and influence; new revolutionary forces are appearing at their side, arising from the worsening crisis of imperialism and the extraordinary penetration of Marxist-Leninist ideas. These forces are our natural allies, above the differences in tactics and even in conception. Lenin said, quite rightly, that 'whoever waits for the pure social revolution will never see it'. (…)
It is impossible to try to achieve uniformity in a revolutionary movement as vast and diverse as that of the modern era. Only in the process of struggle through personal experience, and sometimes not only through successes, but also through setbacks, will it be possible to overcome differences and achieve greater homogeneity. But even then, what will be achieved will not be uniformity, because the differences in situation, development, and the specific characteristics of each detachment will persist and will be maintained for a long time” [16]

Assembly of the Working World, June 22, 1969.

Thus, the PCE will lead in Western Europe the process of the so-called "Eurocommunism" together with the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the French Communist Party (PCF), an attempt to make the communist worldview compatible with the framework of bourgeois-democratic societies, without ever renouncing socialism as a goal, but in any case moving away from authoritarian distortions.

Eurocomunismo - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Eurocommunism - Wikipedia

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The internal debate surfaced with great force within the Party and despite the easing of relations with the CPSU after the bilateral meeting in April 1970, it will maintain critical positions, although diverting them towards other countries of the socialist bloc such as Poland and its repression of workers' mobilizations [17]
“…The events in Poland are serious and worrying (…) In the defence of socialism and in the fight against imperialism we are in full solidarity with all socialist countries. But when orders are given to shoot at workers’ demonstrations, when our blood, workers’ blood, is shed in the streets, then, in defence of socialism, we feel the urgent duty to say: NO…” [18]

The PCE would break relations with Moscow if there is an invasion :​

"The Spanish Communist Party (PCE) would break relations with the Soviet Communist Party (PCUS) if there were an armed intervention in Poland," said Manuel Azcárate, head of international relations for the PCE, yesterday.
The Spanish communist leader declared that a Soviet armed intervention "is absurd for peace, European security and the very development of Socialism in Freedom"...

Sources:​

• Historical Archive of the Communist Party of Spain (AHPCE)
• Virtual Library of Historical Press. Ministry of Culture

Articles:​

• ABAD, Eduardo, “Declaration of the PC of Spain on the events in Czechoslovakia” , in the digital edition of Mundo Obrero , 11/22/2021
• ABAD, Eduardo, “ Flowers and Tanks. A Return to the Prague Spring, by Luis Zaragoza” in Nuestra Historia magazine , number 9, first semester 2020, Madrid, Marxist Research Foundation, 2020, pp.179-182
• AZNAR AZURMENDI, Jaime, Prague 1968, in search of freedom, in Nuestro tiempo magazine , University of Navarra, 2018, num.699, July-September, pp.39-43
• ELORZA, Antonio, “The lesson of Prague”, in the digital edition of El País, 08/15/2018. Link: https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/08/13/opinion/1534168819_667486.html
• HUGUET PANÉ, Guiomar, “Prague Spring”, in the digital edition of National Geographic magazine , 11/12/2021. Link: https://historia.nationalgeographic.com.es/foto-del-dia/primavera-praga_17388
• SACRITÁN, Manuel, “Interview on Czechoslovakia in 1968”, in the digital edition of El Viejo Topo , 08/27/2016. Link: https://www.elviejotopo.com/topoexpress/entrevista-sobre-la-checoslovaquia-de-1968/
• TREGLIA, Luiss, “The PCE and the international communist movement (1969-1977)”, in Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea , Madrid, Complutense University, 2015, vol37, pp.225-255

Literature:​

• AA.VV. I Congress on the History of the PCE (1920-1977) , Barcelona, Marxist Research Foundation, 2007
• AMORÓS, Mario, They shall not pass! Biography of Dolores Ibarruri, Pasionaria , Madrid, Akal, 2021
• CAMACHO, Marcelino, I confess that I have fought , Editorial Atrapasueño, 2018
• CARRILLO, Santiago, Eurocommunism and State , Barcelona, Edit.Crítica, 1977
• CARRILLO, Santiago, Memory of the transition , Barcelona, Grijalbo Editions, 1983
• CARRILLO, Santiago, The difficult reconciliation of the Spanish people , Barcelona, Planeta, 2011
• FALCÓN, Irene , Assault on the Heavens. My life with Pasionaria , Madrid, Temas de Hoy Editions, 1996
• SÁNCHEZ RODRÍGUEZ, Jesús, Democratic theory and practice in the PCE (1956-1982) , Barcelona, Marxist Research Foundation, 2004
• ZARAGOZA, Luis, Flowers and Tanks . A Return to the Prague Spring , Madrid, Edit.Cátedra, 2018

Bibliographic citations:​

______________________________________________________________

• [1] ZARAGOZA, Luis, Flowers and Tanks.A Return to the Prague Spring, Madrid, Edit. Cátedra, 2018

• [2] FALCÓN, Irene,Assault on the Heavens. My life with Pasionaria, Madrid, Temas de Hoy Editions, 1996, p.348

• [3] PALA, Giaime,“The PSUC and the Czechoslovak crisis”,in AA.VV.I Congress on the History of the PCE (1920-1977), Barcelona, Marxist Research Foundation, 2007, p.302

• [4] AZNAR AZURMENDI, Jaime,“Prague 1968, in search of freedom”,in Nuestro tiempo magazine , University of Navarra, 2018, num.699, July-September, p.45

• [5] ABAD, Eduardo,“Declaration of the PC of Spain on the events in Czechoslovakia”, in the digital edition of Mundo Obrero , 11/22/2021

• [6] SACRITÁN, Manuel, “Interview on Czechoslovakia in 1968”, in the digital edition of El Viejo Topo , 08/27/2016

• [7] AZNAR AZURMENDI, Jaime,“Prague 1968, in search of freedom”,in Nuestro tiempo magazine , University of Navarra, 2018, no. 699, July-September, pp. 39-45

• [8] “Declaration of the Executive Committee of the PCE after the Bratislava Conferences”,in Mundo Obrero , September 1968, No. 16.

• [9] ABAD, Eduardo,“Declaration of the PC of Spain on the events in Czechoslovakia”, in the digital edition of Mundo Obrero , 11/22/2021

• [10] “Declaration of the PCE on the events in Czechoslovakia”,in Mundo Obrero , September 1968, no. 16.

• TREGLIA, Luiss,“The PCE and the international communist movement (1969-1977)”,in Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea , Madrid, Complutense University, 2015, vol37, pp.230

• [18] “The events in Poland”,in Mundo Obrero , Year XL, No. 20, 12/22/1970, p.13

• [19] PALA, Giaime,“The PSUC and the crisis in Czechoslovakia” (2007),p.301-310

• [20] SÁNCHEZ RODRÍGUEZ, Jesús,Democratic Theory and Practice in the PCE (1956-1982), Barcelona, Marxist Research Foundation, 2004, pp.144-145

• [21] TREGLIA, Luiss,“The PCE and the international communist movement (1969-1977)”,in Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea , Madrid, Complutense University, 2015, vol37, pp.226

 

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View attachment 19079059

HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SPAIN, BY JUAN FRANCISCO ARENAS DE SORIA

Partido Comunista de España - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Communist Party of Spain - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Chapter XXVIII: 'The Prague Spring of 1968. The PCE, from orthodoxy to dissidence'​

POLICY- Juan Francisco Arenas de Soria - Friday, December 24, 2021

Juan Francisco Arenas de Soria is a professor of Geography and History and a member of the Granada Association for Truth, Justice and Reparation .

History of the PCE
A new and extraordinary chapter in the magnificent history of the PCE, which Juan Francisco Arenas de Soria brings us every Friday in the year of its Centenary.

Soviet tanks in the centre of Prague.

“There is no language without metaphor,

death is a metaphor for nothing,

it is not life, it is the rose,

it is not history, it is the tank

, not even Prague is Prague”

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
​

The article presented below aims to bring us closer to the so-called “Prague Spring” due to its profound significance in the development of the PCE and its political proposal.
It is a clear example of the defence of a “socialism in freedom”, of a defence of the necessary conquest of democratic freedoms to make the socialist ideal possible.
We have made excessive use of multiple quotes, in order to reconstruct, in the most reliable way possible, the puzzle that underpinned the analysis that led the PCE to dissidence .

The year 1968 will be key to understanding the international communist movement, since the events that took place during it, such as the “French May”, the Vietnam War , and in a very special way the so-called “Prague Spring”, would considerably change the evolution of the same and its different expressions of a “national” type.

Prague Spring - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Because the “Prague Spring” is nothing but an attempt to deepen the socialist model, not an attempt to destroy it, as the historian Luis Zaragoza [1] states. It is precisely for this reason that the entry of the Warsaw Pact tanks into Czechoslovakia represents a real upheaval within the socialist block itself, a clear example of this being the testimony of Irene Falcón:
“…Suddenly, a nightmare shattered the new dream. Pravda, TASS and other media reported alarming news about the relations between the CPSU and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Years earlier we had experienced the Sino-Soviet split. Fears became reality. The Red Army left its barracks, invading a sovereign country, not to push back and defeat the Nazi armies, but to subdue a socialist country!...” [2]

Without a doubt, we would not understand the full context of the changes that are taking place in this key year without the “French May”.

May 68 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The student mobilisations in France will have a strong impact on the entire European left, as shown by the study on the PSUC carried out by Giaime Pala:
“…the outbreak of youth protests in the streets of Paris caused an earthquake in the communist cells of students and teachers: the PSUC university students saw questioned, for the first time and from the left, not only their strategy and vision of socialism, but also their political and cultural references…” [3]

This is the cause of the questioning that will be made in France of the role played by the PCF, but which ultimately affects all the communist parties anchored in the Stalinist past, from which, despite the XX Congress of the CPSU , they had not emerged in most cases, to which should be added the changes that were taking place in Czechoslovakia at the hands of the KFS of Alexander Dubček .

Police forces at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Complutense University, Madrid, Spain, May 1968.

Changes in Czechoslovakia had been taking place progressively since 1961 after the XXII Congress of the CPSU , following the conclusions of which the Komunistická strana Československa (KSC /Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) began a process of review and study of the socialist evolution in its own country, with various milestones in the process such as the student movement, the program of economic reforms promoted by Ota Sik inspired by the Yugoslav system, the IV Congress of Czechoslovak Writers (1967) or the beginning of a major economic crisis that put the government headed by Antonín Novotný in check .

Alexander Dubček.

Alexander Dubček - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The change in the leadership of the KSC, in which Alexander Dubček, leading the reformist sector, became general secretary, would have important repercussions.
From that moment, until April 1968, the internal debate in the KSC on the reforms that were necessary to implement was very intense. An Action Program that, while maintaining the socialist essence, opened the door to reforms of important depth, starting with an internal democratization of the KSC itself, a proposal for Czecho-Slovak federalization that would resolve internal dissensions, moving towards economic reforms that intended to boost the ailing Czechoslovak economy.
Measures accompanied by loyalty to the USSR, maintaining its membership in COMECON and the Warsaw Pact, while reaffirming its defense of socialism.
But the mistrust that Dubček 's reforms aroused in the socialist bloc and in the most conservative sector of the KSC itself were too much in the context of the Cold War .


For Manuel Sacristán , one of the most prominent Spanish Marxist thinkers:

Manuel Sacristán - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Manuel Sacristán - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

“…The new direction that Alexander Dubcek was promoting in the CCP was welcomed by the leadership of the PCE with great interest and even enthusiasm. I
n their opinion, this new type of socialism was more in tune with their proposal for a “political and social democracy” approved at the VII Congress and disseminated through various books under the signature of Santiago Carrillo…” [5]

Santiago Carrillo - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Santiago Carrillo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

“…As for the characteristic features of the Czechoslovak political revolution of 1968, the two main ones are in my opinion the return of political freedom to the people and the restoration of truthfulness by the CP, which allowed it to genuinely self-criticize the bureaucratic regime, as well as to sincerely pose the situation of socialist political theory in light of the lights and shadows of the experience that began in 1917 in Russia…” [6]

Contacts between the socialist countries continued, and in July 1968 the USSR, the GDR, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria asked Czechoslovakia to abandon the path it had taken.

At the beginning of August, the aforementioned countries met with Czechoslovakia at the so-called Bratislava Conference , reaching an agreement of understanding, with some limitations for the reforms undertaken, but not cutting them off at the root [7] . A conference that ended with a declaration along the lines of a political agreement, which the PCE saw as a very positive sign, since its position had been from the beginning to seek an understanding between the parties.
Thus Mundo Obrero reproduced some fragments of the “Bratislava agreement”:
“…the firm decision to develop and defend the socialist achievements in their respective countries; to maintain the leading role of the working class and its vanguard, the Communist Party; to recognize the need for each Party to creatively resolve the problems of future socialist development, taking into account national particularities and conditions…” [8]

The KSC was heading towards its IV Congress in September, which would give a legal basis to the policies undertaken, but despite what was agreed at the Bratislava Conference, the so-called Operation Danube was launched, by which under the command of the Warsaw Pact the USSR together with several other countries, began the invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21 to end the reformist "adventure".

Soviet tanks in the centre of Prague

The invasion caused a major rupture in the international communist movement [9] , as shown by the condemnation issued by the PCE in a brief note in La Pirenaica .
Days later, in a meeting of the Executive Committee of the PCE, an in-depth reflection was made on what had happened, resulting in a statement that would be published in the September issue of Mundo Obrero .
The PCE would analyze the aspects that it considered key within its own perspective, on the submission of the different communist parties to the CPSU, and on the Spanish model of “Socialism in Freedom” :
“…the Spanish Communist Party has expressed its opinion against armed intervention in Czechoslovakia, considering that the solution to the problems of this country corresponds to the Communist Party and the Czechoslovak people, helped by the socialist States and by the Parties of the world communist and workers' movement” [10]

Santiago Carrillo's Book cover

The PCE questions the Soviet Union's way of proceeding, issuing a statement in which:
“…affirms its understanding and support for the position of the leadership of the Party and the Czechoslovak State, which, on the basis of the decisions taken (…) intends to proceed to the improvement of the methods of management of society, to the development of socialist democracy and to the strengthening of the socialist system on the basis of Marxism-Leninism…” [11]

In this context, the PCE raises the fact that there are different paths to achieving socialism, and that a single type of vision cannot be imposed, which clashes with the position of the leadership of the Soviet leader Brezhnev on "limited sovereignty" .

The leader of the CC.OO. Marcelino Camacho , who is experiencing these events from Carabanchel prison, will express himself in this vein :

Comisiones Obreras - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Workers' Commissions - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Marcelino Camacho - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Marcelino Camacho - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

“…The members of the Central Committee were fully informed of the discussions held in Moscow with the CPSU, of the correct position of Dolores Ibarruri and the leadership of the PCE condemning the intervention of the Warsaw Pact, as well as of the opinion of the comrades who resided at that time in Prague. I expressed my total agreement, adding my vote to the condemnation. That internal debate of the party was one of the most significant turns in its history, reaffirming its rejection of Stalinism and further shaping the idea of a democratic and plural socialism…” [14]
"Thanks to his firm stance and that of Dolores Ibarruri, who was ready to tell Brezhnev off, the PCE reached its highest point in defense of democracy and against Soviet imperialism" [15]

Dolores Ibárruri - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Dolores Ibárruri - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Brezhnev would try to bring the PCE back to orthodoxy, calling Santiago Carrillo and Dolores Ibarruri to a meeting in the Kremlin, taking advantage of the occasion of the International Conference of Communist and Workers' Parties (1969) .

Santiago Carrillo 's intervention in the Conference will show the firmness of the Spanish position despite the pressures:
“…Spain is fighting, in which the future of freedom, democracy and socialism is beginning to take shape. And in this struggle against the Franco regime, which extends throughout the whole of Spain, the working class, the young generations of students and workers who did not fight in the war and who want to live in a democratic, clean homeland freed from the dross of a tragic past, are participating with great enthusiasm.
(…) The communist parties are growing in number and influence; new revolutionary forces are appearing at their side, arising from the worsening crisis of imperialism and the extraordinary penetration of Marxist-Leninist ideas. These forces are our natural allies, above the differences in tactics and even in conception. Lenin said, quite rightly, that 'whoever waits for the pure social revolution will never see it'. (…)
It is impossible to try to achieve uniformity in a revolutionary movement as vast and diverse as that of the modern era. Only in the process of struggle through personal experience, and sometimes not only through successes, but also through setbacks, will it be possible to overcome differences and achieve greater homogeneity. But even then, what will be achieved will not be uniformity, because the differences in situation, development, and the specific characteristics of each detachment will persist and will be maintained for a long time” [16]

Assembly of the Working World, June 22, 1969.

Thus, the PCE will lead in Western Europe the process of the so-called "Eurocommunism" together with the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the French Communist Party (PCF), an attempt to make the communist worldview compatible with the framework of bourgeois-democratic societies, without ever renouncing socialism as a goal, but in any case moving away from authoritarian distortions.

Eurocomunismo - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

es.wikipedia.org

Eurocommunism - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The internal debate surfaced with great force within the Party and despite the easing of relations with the CPSU after the bilateral meeting in April 1970, it will maintain critical positions, although diverting them towards other countries of the socialist bloc such as Poland and its repression of workers' mobilizations [17]
“…The events in Poland are serious and worrying (…) In the defence of socialism and in the fight against imperialism we are in full solidarity with all socialist countries. But when orders are given to shoot at workers’ demonstrations, when our blood, workers’ blood, is shed in the streets, then, in defence of socialism, we feel the urgent duty to say: NO…” [18]

The PCE would break relations with Moscow if there is an invasion :​

"The Spanish Communist Party (PCE) would break relations with the Soviet Communist Party (PCUS) if there were an armed intervention in Poland," said Manuel Azcárate, head of international relations for the PCE, yesterday.
The Spanish communist leader declared that a Soviet armed intervention "is absurd for peace, European security and the very development of Socialism in Freedom"...

Sources:​

• Historical Archive of the Communist Party of Spain (AHPCE)
• Virtual Library of Historical Press. Ministry of Culture

Articles:​

• ABAD, Eduardo, “Declaration of the PC of Spain on the events in Czechoslovakia” , in the digital edition of Mundo Obrero , 11/22/2021
• ABAD, Eduardo, “ Flowers and Tanks. A Return to the Prague Spring, by Luis Zaragoza” in Nuestra Historia magazine , number 9, first semester 2020, Madrid, Marxist Research Foundation, 2020, pp.179-182
• AZNAR AZURMENDI, Jaime, Prague 1968, in search of freedom, in Nuestro tiempo magazine , University of Navarra, 2018, num.699, July-September, pp.39-43
• ELORZA, Antonio, “The lesson of Prague”, in the digital edition of El País, 08/15/2018. Link: https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/08/13/opinion/1534168819_667486.html
• HUGUET PANÉ, Guiomar, “Prague Spring”, in the digital edition of National Geographic magazine , 11/12/2021. Link: https://historia.nationalgeographic.com.es/foto-del-dia/primavera-praga_17388
• SACRITÁN, Manuel, “Interview on Czechoslovakia in 1968”, in the digital edition of El Viejo Topo , 08/27/2016. Link: https://www.elviejotopo.com/topoexpress/entrevista-sobre-la-checoslovaquia-de-1968/
• TREGLIA, Luiss, “The PCE and the international communist movement (1969-1977)”, in Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea , Madrid, Complutense University, 2015, vol37, pp.225-255

Literature:​

• AA.VV. I Congress on the History of the PCE (1920-1977) , Barcelona, Marxist Research Foundation, 2007
• AMORÓS, Mario, They shall not pass! Biography of Dolores Ibarruri, Pasionaria , Madrid, Akal, 2021
• CAMACHO, Marcelino, I confess that I have fought , Editorial Atrapasueño, 2018
• CARRILLO, Santiago, Eurocommunism and State , Barcelona, Edit.Crítica, 1977
• CARRILLO, Santiago, Memory of the transition , Barcelona, Grijalbo Editions, 1983
• CARRILLO, Santiago, The difficult reconciliation of the Spanish people , Barcelona, Planeta, 2011
• FALCÓN, Irene , Assault on the Heavens. My life with Pasionaria , Madrid, Temas de Hoy Editions, 1996
• SÁNCHEZ RODRÍGUEZ, Jesús, Democratic theory and practice in the PCE (1956-1982) , Barcelona, Marxist Research Foundation, 2004
• ZARAGOZA, Luis, Flowers and Tanks . A Return to the Prague Spring , Madrid, Edit.Cátedra, 2018

Bibliographic citations:​

______________________________________________________________

• [1] ZARAGOZA, Luis, Flowers and Tanks.A Return to the Prague Spring, Madrid, Edit. Cátedra, 2018
• [2] FALCÓN, Irene,Assault on the Heavens. My life with Pasionaria, Madrid, Temas de Hoy Editions, 1996, p.348
• [3] PALA, Giaime,“The PSUC and the Czechoslovak crisis”,in AA.VV.I Congress on the History of the PCE (1920-1977), Barcelona, Marxist Research Foundation, 2007, p.302
• [4] AZNAR AZURMENDI, Jaime,“Prague 1968, in search of freedom”,in Nuestro tiempo magazine , University of Navarra, 2018, num.699, July-September, p.45
• [5] ABAD, Eduardo,“Declaration of the PC of Spain on the events in Czechoslovakia”, in the digital edition of Mundo Obrero , 11/22/2021
• [6] SACRITÁN, Manuel, “Interview on Czechoslovakia in 1968”, in the digital edition of El Viejo Topo , 08/27/2016
• [7] AZNAR AZURMENDI, Jaime,“Prague 1968, in search of freedom”,in Nuestro tiempo magazine , University of Navarra, 2018, no. 699, July-September, pp. 39-45
• [8] “Declaration of the Executive Committee of the PCE after the Bratislava Conferences”,in Mundo Obrero , September 1968, No. 16.
• [9] ABAD, Eduardo,“Declaration of the PC of Spain on the events in Czechoslovakia”, in the digital edition of Mundo Obrero , 11/22/2021
• [10] “Declaration of the PCE on the events in Czechoslovakia”,in Mundo Obrero , September 1968, no. 16.
• TREGLIA, Luiss,“The PCE and the international communist movement (1969-1977)”,in Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea , Madrid, Complutense University, 2015, vol37, pp.230
• [18] “The events in Poland”,in Mundo Obrero , Year XL, No. 20, 12/22/1970, p.13
• [19] PALA, Giaime,“The PSUC and the crisis in Czechoslovakia” (2007),p.301-310
• [20] SÁNCHEZ RODRÍGUEZ, Jesús,Democratic Theory and Practice in the PCE (1956-1982), Barcelona, Marxist Research Foundation, 2004, pp.144-145
• [21] TREGLIA, Luiss,“The PCE and the international communist movement (1969-1977)”,in Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea , Madrid, Complutense University, 2015, vol37, pp.226

 

[right]

I posted this here on icmag years ago.
Im posting it again in this format so that it will reach a broader audience.

 

[Cannavore]

orwell was a socialist lol

 

[Eltitoguay]

'Furtivo', the short documentary about life after fighting Daesh in Syria​

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"Sniper Arges Artiaga actively participated as a volunteer in the defeat of Daesh at the hands of Kurdish militias in Raqqa, the bastion in Syria of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
Three years later, the short film Furtivo explores some of the marks that this experience has left him with."

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Goya Awards - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"Every year, the Academy celebrates the quality of Spanish cinema by awarding the Goya Awards to the best professionals in each of the technical and creative specialties"

"FURTIVE" : Award Nominated Best Documentary Short Film ; 35th edition of the Goya Awards.​

https://www.premiosgoya.com/pelicula/furtivo/

International Fragments | Furtive

DocsMX​

"FURTIVE" .
By Pedro García Campos, Pol González Novell | Spain | 2020 | 25 minutes :
"After three years of fighting in Syria against the Islamic State, Arges Artiaga travels to the United Kingdom to meet his comrades in arms at the funeral of his best friend, Jac Holmes.
At 43, his life is reaching a turning point."

CINEMA​

'Furtivo', the short documentary about life after fighting Daesh in Syria :​

Sniper Arges Artiaga actively participated as a volunteer in the defeat of Daesh at the hands of Kurdish militias in Raqqa, the bastion in Syria of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

Three years later, the short film Furtivo explores some of the marks that this experience has left him with.

Arges Artiaga, at home in the short documentary 'Furtivo'.

Trailer

Jose Duran Rodriguez
@j_duran_r
SEP 15, 2020 06:00


The 24-minute short film Furtivo tells the farewell of two friends, among other things.

The phrase could be used as a synopsis, it is the fundamental part of the film, but it would leave out a lot of substance.
Because it is not a typical friendship, nor a relationship forged since childhood, but the two met on the battlefield, fighting against Daesh in Rojava, Syrian Kurdistan.
The Galician Arges Artiaga travels to Poole (Dorset, England) to attend the funeral of Jack Holmes, killed in Raqqa by the explosion of a suicide vest abandoned in the street after the capitulation of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

It is the starting point for a suggestive cinematographic work, Goya candidate for Best Documentary, that premiered in August at the Malaga Festival, in addition to several other international festivals.

Furtivo poses some questions but does not provide the answers and leaves the discourse very open. Nor does it judge. Although it is set in a very specific action, the intention of its creators, Pedro García Campos and Pol González Novell, debuting with this work, has not been so much to explain the defeat of Daesh or to narrate a war episode in a spectacular way but to deal with what happens to the life of someone who decides to go to a conflict in a personal way, outside the logic of conventional armies, “who has experienced atrocious things on a human and physical level, and returns home,” according to the filmmakers.

Furtivo poses some questions but does not provide the answers and leaves the discourse very open. Nor does it judge. Although it is set in a very specific action, the intention of its creators, Pedro García Campos and Pol González Novell, debuting with this work, has not been so much to explain the defeat of Daesh or to narrate a war episode in a spectacular way but to deal with what happens to the life of someone who decides to go to a conflict in a personal way, outside the logic of conventional armies, “who has experienced atrocious things on a human and physical level, and returns home,” according to the filmmakers.

And they add another circumstance that makes this documentary film unique:
“We always had the feeling that in the Spanish media this issue was approached from the perspective of accusation or propaganda, and that in between there was a huge amount of emotion and memory, without judging, which is where the story was, the true story, the powerful and transcendent thing.”

In any case, due to its subject matter and archive images, Furtivo is part of the discourse that is gradually being built in Europe about the Kurdish resistance to the atrocities perpetrated by Daesh, with the decisive and complicit participation of Turkey, and about what has happened in Rojava during the last decade, that revolutionary experience of self-government that, in the worst possible conditions - under bombs, an embargo and the continuous harassment of jihadist militias and Turkish troops - has developed among the various communities that live there.

Cultural products such as this short documentary or the comic Kobane calling , by the Italian author Zerocalcare, provide perspectives that help us understand what has happened in one of the most conflictive areas in the world. From Rojava itself, the activity of the Film Commune is essential in this broadening of the focus.

A still from the feature film "The End Will Be Spectacular", which recounts the 100-day resistance that took place in the Kurdish city of Sur (Republic of Türkiye)

The comic to understand the Rojava revolution​

JOSE DURAN RODRIGUEZ

The initial idea of the directors of Furtivo was to make an experimental piece, based on a “more psychological” profile of the experiences of a person like Arges Artiaga and the burdens he carries on his shoulders. “We were inspired by things like the theory of the landscape to confront his state of mind with his environment, that Galicia that is both exuberant and decadent, but the story progressed and took on a more documentary tone. And then we spent more than a year turning the editing around, looking for a tension that would seduce us between those enigmas and the character’s driving force, the action and the scenes and their strength,” recalls García Campos, who defines the film as something similar to a puzzle without instructions.

Arges Artiaga, in a truck during the conquest of Raqqa. Still from 'Furtivo'.

His interest was in the aftermath, beyond what kind of war had taken place, who had been involved in it or what ideological reasons had led to participation in it. And at the origin of Furtivo —which has a musical setting by Marcel Bagés— there is a previous journalistic work and the discovery of Artiaga's story, as García Campos explains:
“I had been investigating and interviewing young people who had been in Ukraine and Syria for several years, and Arges, in some way, has always been someone different, a person with a weight in everything he says and does that makes him a very interesting personality, very different from the rest. We travelled to the north of Spain and I had the opportunity to be on camera for almost two hours, talking to him about what he had experienced in Syria. Then we had to stop the piece in ten minutes and, as I say, it was the report that opened the programme... but I kept watching and rewatching the interview, the two hours."
“Ever since that day, I have always thought that there was something more to tell here, and that Arges, who did the interview wearing a scarf to hide his identity, would perhaps take it off and tell us more, and we could follow him in his life, once the battle for Raqqa, which was his last experience there, was over.”


VICE interviews Arges Artiaga after his first interval fighting DAESH with the YPG. Crude images of the war taken by DAESH, the YPG and the SDF, and Argés Artiaga.
A. Artiaga: "It is very difficult for me to treat with humanity the prisoners we take from DAESH, after seeing the videos they have on their mobile phones..."

Learning to live with your demons :​

“A thousand times,” Arges Artiaga replies when asked if he would do something like that again in the future.

A.Artiaga in the front line.

What he did was fight with the YPG (People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish self-defense militia integrated into the Syrian Democratic Forces) during three different periods between 2015 and 2017, between the Kurdish defense of Kobane and the fall of Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State, the two great defeats of the terrorist group.

People's Defense Units - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Syrian Democratic Forces - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Still from 'Furtivo', with Arges Artiaga in England to attend the funeral of his partner Jack Holmes.

Artiaga had been in the military for six years before he first went to Rojava and had served in the army. His motivation for getting involved in the Kurdish struggle “was not political, but rather justice”, he observes now, while recalling that one of the reasons that led him to get involved was the massacre of Yazidis in Sinjar (Iraq) by Daesh in August 2014.

Artiaga, left, with a colleague from his unit.

Asked if the self-proclaimed Islamic State is a representation of fascism in the 21st century, he replies that “Daesh is just the tip of the iceberg,” and believes that, in a certain sense, the struggle of the international volunteers who fought in Rojava can be compared to that of the brigadiers during the civil war in Spain.

ARGES ARTIAGA (STANDING) WATCHES COALITION (between USA, France, and the SDF and the YPG) BOMBINGS OF ISLAMIC STATE POSITIONS THROUGH BINOCULARS, WAITING FOR THE END TO ASSAULT DAESH'S POSITIONS BY LAND.

“I wouldn’t call Daesh members fighters,” he says when asked how not to be carried away by hatred when arresting enemy fighters. “They are guys who would execute a two-year-old baby without a second’s hesitation. They are not fighters at all, they are terrorists. It is a good question, though.”

PHOTO FOUND BY ARGES ARTIAGA ON A MOBILE PHONE ABANDONED BY THE JIHADISTS

Alongside Daesh, Artiaga points to the role played by Turkey, which :
“was, is and continues to be one of cooperation. 99% of foreign terrorists arrived at Turkish airports, stayed in Turkish hotels and crossed the border into Syria without any problems. Wounded terrorists were transferred to Turkey and treated in Turkish hospitals, not to mention the transfer of weapons and equipment. Curiously, journalists who reported on the subject have died in unclear circumstances or are in prison accused of terrorism.”

Although he spent most of his time in Syria on the front lines and admits that he cannot say much about the day-to-day life of civilians, Artiaga believes that Rojava's self-government “worked wonderfully, considering the brutal blockade to which they are subjected from all four corners of the globe.” He also adds that “the autonomous government is deeply democratic, inclusive, represents all the ethnic groups in the region and is tolerant, so we agree on the most important things. I would never support any totalitarianism of any political or religious ideology.”

For him, watching the film has not meant reopening wounds or closing them definitively, as he sums up concisely: “Wounds do not heal like that, it is just that one learns to live with one's demons or your demons can get the better of you.”

‘Furtivo’, el corto documental sobre la vida después de combatir al Daesh en Siria

El francotirador Arges Artiaga participó activamente como voluntario en la derrota del Daesh a manos de las milicias kurdas en Raqqa, el bastión en Siria del autoproclamado Estado Islámico. Tres años después, el corto Furtivo explora algunas de las facturas que esa experiencia le ha dejado.

www.elsaltodiario.com

 

[Eltitoguay]

@Cannavore:
I insist again; Considering that the USSR was not Marxsist Socialist is a modern concept, I think it is also a mistake, when History is there:
Not only because, as I repeated, Lenin opposed his replacement at the last moment: Trosky's opposition was earlier and much harsher; and "as recently and contemporaneously" as in 1929, he had to flee the USSR, and he was managed to being assassinate by Stalin in 1940 . And before, Stalin managed to assassinate another of his harshest critics and opponents, Andreu Nin, in 1937.

But already before Stalin, both Marxism that would be called "libertarian Marxism", and the Marxist socialists and social democrats of the Mesheviks (not Bolsheviks), even opposed the authoritarian drifts of Lenin and Trosky themselves.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Mensheviks - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Mensheviks) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Even Libertarian Marxism and some of its first currents that you mention, already existed in 1920: Rosa Luxeburg died in 1919, and in 1920 the German-Dutch "Counselor Communism" already existed.

And if we look at the origins of Eurocommunism-Neocommunism, Antonio Gramsci died in 1937.

And anyone who has half a brain will know that Marxism is previos to Lenin, Trosky and Stalin variations .
Soviet Bolshevik Marxism-Leninism is new interpretation and variant of "original" Marxism, for a dictatorial and underdeveloped state, mainly agrarian, since original Marxism is designed for the working class of developed industrialized states that can abate in the democratic republic.

FIRST WERE MARX AND ENGELS, AND THEIR COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. All other variants are later years.

...And within the currents of Libertarian Marxism, I forgot to mention Anarcho-communism ; long before Lenin and his Marxism-Leninism (since they already stayed in the First International along with the anarchists, while Stalinism is from the Third International ; Social Democracy and part of Marxist Socialism are from the Second International, and Trotskyism and another part of Marxist Socialism are from the Fourth International ) and very dominated by the historical Spanish organizations.

International Workingmen's Association - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

One of the members of these A.I.T. - I.W.A. organizations, also fighting against DAESH:

Spain

'Demhat': the Spanish anti-fascist fighting against the Islamic State in Syria :​

He had never fired or held a gun before, until he arrived in Syria to fight alongside the Kurds “against the fascism of the Islamic State and Türkiye.”

• 
  Rodrigo Isasi Arce
  @isasi89[email protected]

Published: 12/29/2019


He calls himself 'Demhat', but that is not his real name. He bears it in honour of a fellow militiaman who fell in combat. He is Spanish, an anarchist and anti-fascist, he is over thirty and had never fired or held a weapon before, until he arrived in Syria to fight alongside the Kurds "against the fascism of the Islamic State and Turkey."




Siwan – the Kurdish nom de guerre under which he fought in Syria – covers his face with a scarf, leaving only his blue eyes exposed. “I fight with the YPG,” he tells me, not with the PKK, although if he did, he wouldn’t tell me that either. Whenever you ask foreign militants who are fighting with the Kurds, they always tell you the same thing: “I fight with the YPG, not the PKK.”

The difference, although it seems subtle, is not so. In the United States and part of Europe, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), founded under communist and anarchist ideas and currently based on the system of democratic confederalism, is considered a terrorist organization.
Fighting alongside it would mean that militants would face a possible 30-year prison sentence for terrorist crimes upon their return.

People's Defense Units - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Kurdistan Workers' Party - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A militant from the International Popular Revolutionary Guerrilla Forces (IRPGF) fighting in the Syrian town of Tabqa. | Photo: IRPGF

We met him in a small theatre in Lavapiés, at an event organised by the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) and with the aim of promoting the documentary "Si te dicen que caí en Rojava " , directed by Ferran Barber , the journalist who was imprisoned in Iraq for a month, and produced by the collective of independent journalists specialising in international conflicts Freedom and Worms for Rojo y Negro TV.

He went to Kurdistan to join the International Liberation Battalion , a unit made up of foreign militiamen and inspired by the International Brigades that participated in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 in defense of the Second Spanish Republic against the rebels.

There he fought hand to hand with the Peshmerga, the armed Kurdish fighters whose name literally means “those who face death.” He too faced death, and some of his comrades, like Demhat, fell on the battlefield.

Militiamen of the International Freedom Battalion (Rojava) | Photo: International Popular Revolutionary Guerrilla Forces (IRPGF)

Others, even if they are alive, cannot return to their countries of origin, where justice is after them.
This Spanish militiaman has managed to avoid it, for the moment. "I have always kept a very low profile," he tells me. "This is the first time I have agreed to come to an event of this kind."

Barber's documentary contains first-hand accounts from some foreign militants who have stood up to the terrorist group and who, following Turkey's invasion of Rojava, have now been forced to return to their countries of origin, where they have had to face judicial persecution and, at times, social discredit. Harsh conditions that have led more than one to take their own lives.


Rodrigo Isasi Arce
@isasi89[email protected]
Journalist specializing in defense, armed conflicts, the Arab-Islamic world and international cooperation. Avid traveler and amateur photographer

'Demhat': el antifascista español que lucha contra el Estado Islámico en Siria

Se hace llamar 'Demhat', pero no es su verdadero nombre. Lo lleva en honor a un compañero miliciano caído en combate. Es español, anarquista y antifascista, supera la treintena y nunca antes había disparado ni empuñado un arma, hasta que llegó al Kurdistán para "luchar contra el fascismo del...

theobjective.com

 

[Eltitoguay]

Spain

Journalist Ferran Barber released after a month in prison in Iraqi Kurdistan​

Ferran Barber says he was “kidnapped” in a “torture center” along with 160 other people

• 
  THE OBJECTIVE
  @TheObjective_es

Published: 09/08/2019


Spanish journalist Ferran Barber was released after nearly a month of illegal detention in Iraqi Kurdistan, as reported on Sunday by Reporters Without Borders, which published the journalist's statements in which he describes how he was mistreated and how his human rights are violated in the Erbil prison.

"I am still in danger, physically weakened and psychologically stunned, but I want to share my testimony because I promised it to all those who have been left suffering in that hole," Barber told Reporters Without Borders, adding that the journalist lost 12 kilos in the four weeks of captivity.

Ferran Barber claims that he was "kidnapped" in a "torture center" , where he spent almost a month with up to 160 people detained, like him, arbitrarily and without any legal guarantee, in a cell measuring 50 square meters, explains the NGO.

The reporter travelled to Iraqi Kurdistan in mid-July on a contract from a German production company to interview German militants fighting the Islamic State.

When he finished his job, he decided to spend a few days in the Nahla Valley, which is occupied by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and outside the control of the regional government, because he has friends. When he was returning on foot on 8 August, he was intercepted by an (Irak - Turkey's linked) armed group of security forces who took him to a centre where they interrogated him without him understanding what they were saying and forced him to sign a document. He was then transferred to Erbil.

The journalist's colleagues raised the alarm about his disappearance and the collaboration of the Spanish Embassy in Iraq made his release possible on September 4.

Barber, who regularly collaborates with Spanish media, has been working in this area for 25 years , a place of dispute between the Kurds of the region and the government of Baghdad.

El periodista Ferran Barber, liberado tras un mes encarcelado en el Kurdistán iraquí

El periodista español Ferran Barber fue liberado tras casi un mes de retención ilegal en el Kurdistán iraquí, informó este domingo Reporteros Sin Fronteras, que difundió declaraciones del profesional en las que relata cómo fue maltratado y cómo se violan los derechos humanos en la cárcel de Erbil.

theobjective.com

 

[right]

orwell was a socialist lol

The discussion has to do with Animal farm a book about stalin