Homage to Orwell

I had never read Homage to Catalonia before, and I just finished it. What’s astonishing about it is its raw power in the writing: a first-hand account of someone who volunteered to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War but who was so determined to be honest in his writing that accounts of his time in the misery of the freezing and terrifying fray got interspersed with analysis of what was going on at the time, especially in Barcelona, despite the utter impossibility of anyone ever knowing this. His account of the infighting among the factions on the left — the wholesale annihilation of the anarchists by the communists, for example, because when uncle Josef is paying the bills for the guns, you are 100% loyal — gives a sad picture of wasted energy. What if all this aggression had been directed at Franco’s forces?

The book came out in 1938, a full year before Franco’s victory, a full year before the decades of the dictatorship. Orwell was badly wounded in the fighting and was able, after a long and tortuous bureaucratic journey, to leave Spain with his wife. There are many passages that struck me, but one in particular, the final sentence of the book, a warning to all of us in 2025, is clanging a bell in my head. May we rise out of the deep, deep sleep of bread and circuses.

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.