So far on the reading list, Homage to Catalonia appears to be the only one non-fictional, a memoir that recounts the real-life experiences of author George Orwell during the conflict. It is told in first person, narrated by Orwell himself. The story follows him as he first joins the ranks of the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) rather than the International Brigades purely by chance, because he was first issued with papers from the Independent Labour Party (ILP). There, he found a society most resembling and embodying socialism, where people were truly comrades in a fleeting egalitarian realm.

One recurrent theme within the story was the fact that both sides, but especially the Republicans were frequently inadequately armed, with hopelessly obsolete rifles, shells that didn’t explode, and limited ammunition. There were boys as young as fifteen fighting in their ranks in order to support their families.

In addition, there was a lot of intra-Republican squabbling where they would produce nasty, unconstructive rhetoric in the newspapers about their own comrades from different parties. When distributing rifles, this same type of petty politics was present as seen when weapons weren’t distributed to Republican soldiers that needed them most, but rather to those that aligned most with their party (as the Soviets did).

I found it quite interesting that on one hand he constantly berated the Spaniards for their lack of military prowess, terrible marksmanship, lack of organization etc., but on the other hand he praised them for their generosity, their largeness of spirit and their indomitable idealism. Nonetheless, in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, the Spanish civil war is almost portrayed as a farcical war, a joke war waged by people who don’t know how to handle weapons.

One notion of the book I don’t completely understand is the part about revolution in chapter 5. According to Orwell, “the whole world was determined, upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers’ control, but bourgeois democracy… Foreign capital was heavily invested in Spain… If the revolution went forward there would be no compensation, or very little; if the capitalist republic prevailed, foreign investments would be safe. And since the revolution had got to be crushed, it greatly simplified things to pretend that no revolution had happened.”

What difference would it make whether the press called it a revolution or not? The land reforms were still taking place as they spoke, and the foreign investments still in danger of being relinquished by the state. In fact, when the foreign press simplified the war to merely a struggle between “fascism and democracy”, were they still not lending their propagandist support to the Republicans who were instituting this land reform? Also, why were the communists against the land reform?