Homage to Catalonia

De: George Orwell

Narrado por: Frederick Davidson

In 1936, George Orwell went to Spain to report on the civil war and instead joined the P.O.U.M. militia to fight against the Fascists. In this now justly famous account of his experience, he describes both the bleak and the comic aspects of trench warfare on the Aragon front, the Barcelona uprising in May 1937, his nearly fatal wounding just two weeks later, and his escape from Barcelona into France after the P.O.U.M. was suppressed. As important as the story of the war itself is Orwell's analysis of why the Communist Party sabotaged the workers' revolution and branded the P.O.U.M. as Trotskyist, which provides an essential key to understanding the outcome of the war and an ironic sidelight on international Communism. It was during this period in Spain that Orwell learned for himself the nature of totalitarianism in practice, an education that laid the groundwork for his great books Animal Farm and 1984.©1980 The Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell (P)1992 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"[A] triumph.... The audio presentation adds a new dimension to a text which is required reading for any student of the Spanish Civil War." (AudioFile)

Homage to Utopia

George Orwell paid homage to Catalonia in this journalistic book on the Spanish Civil War, but he paid homage to much more.  Orwell, like many idealistic men and women of his generation, gave up comfort and security to fight for socialism, communism or republicanism against the proto-fascist Franco.  The war, which heralded many crucial dilemmas, ran from 1936 to 1939, resulting in Generalissimo Franco’s victory.


One of those idealistic individuals was my high school history teacher, Peter Carver.  He had fought with the Communists, been jailed for his trouble, and came away with a life-long abhorrence for communism in general, and “Uncle Joe” Stalin in particular.  I read “Homage to Catalonia” as an act of homage to my influential teacher.


Mr. Carver, like George Orwell and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, managed I think to come away from bitter experiences with communism without bitterness of soul.  Some part of the utopian dream that communism represented had touched his heart, and that openness remained.


“Homage to Catalonia” does not reveal Orwell as a mature political theorist, but as a man in process of understanding his experiences and attempting to put them in perspective.  Likewise, “Gulag Archipelago” shows us Solzhenitsyn as a true believer, an intuitive follower of the party of Lenin, even after he is arrested on the western front.  Surely there has been a mistake, he just needs to speak to the right person to have the whole horrible mess straightened out, so that he can continue to serve the Revolution, and in the process remove this disturbing cognitive dissonance.


Orwell presents the Spanish Civil War as a class conflict between the reactionary, would-be feudal, landowning families (and the Catholic Church) represented by Franco, and the Republicans who are a collection of modern bourgeois and working-class factions.  He arrives in a Barcelona which has been revolutionized, in the hands of labor organizations such as the anarcho-syndicalists (CNT).  This is as it should be for Orwell.  Why pursue the modern slavery which is capitalism when the possibility of socialist revolution is within our grasp?  


But this is the problem: the Russian Communists have entered the struggle against Franco but on the side of the bourgeoisie rather than the revolutionary socialists, and it is clear that the antifascistas will soon have to confront a contradiction.


Now this is not the kind of contradiction entertained by Marx’s historical materialism.  Stalin has allied himself with France out of his fear of Germany.  France has no interest in a revolutionary Spain, and one of Stalin's other great betrayals - Molotov-Ribbentrop - is still in the future.  Solzhenitsyn might point out that Stalin's fear of Germany was certainly legitimate, given that he was in the process of gutting his own military in a series of bloody purges.


The Communist International’s policy becomes “support the interests of the Spanish middle class even if it means turning on the socialist revolutionaries”. And guess what: the military successes of the anarchists and the independent marxists meant they would soon be a threat to the bourgeois dominance of the Republican party.


While Peter Carver might have fought with the Communist units (I never asked him this most important question), George Orwell fought with the POUM, a faction of independent marxists in Catalonia and Zaragoza.  At some point in mid 1937, the Republicans at Russian insistence began concocting stories about POUM betrayal, that they had been colluding with Franco. And the arrests began, leading Orwell and his wife to flee Spain in fear for their lives.


How naive was Orwell?  Having escaped Spain, he put together this book of reportage within months, “Homage to Catalonia” hitting the shelves in 1938.  He interspersed chapters of political analysis, apologizing to readers for all the acronyms, and suggesting they can skip these parts if it gets tiresome.  This great journalist had come face to face with the biggest story of the 20th century - the perfidy of the CPSU, and it's betrayal of the working class and it's would-be intellectual representatives - and he is afraid of boring his readers with acronyms!


Of course, the division amongst the Republicans led to their failure against Franco.  His Nationalists won the civil war, and Franco remained in power until his death in 1975.  The Nationalist victory was still in the future when Orwell was writing in 1937, so we are not told what he thought about this catastrophe for the Spanish working class.


But naivete can be charming, and this is why Orwell is still relevant.  After all, how do we respond to this great fact of history: the most powerful idealistic ideology has spawned the most murderous regimes the world has known?


Orwell felt no need to apologise for his revolutionary enthusiasm over Barcelona in December 1936, because he still saw socialism as the path to authentic human relations.


But Solzhenitsyn had reached a different point by the time he composed “The Gulag Archipelago”.  He observed that evil is not “out there”, but that the dividing line between good and evil runs through every human heart.  The spiritual path is that of attending to the “beam in our own eye” before any form of violence in the service of the ideal could ever be justified.


Trying to protect me from the leftists I would encounter on the Sydney University campus, Peter Carver had me read Karl Popper.  I bought and devoured Popper’s two volume “The Open Society and It's Enemies” in 1979.  The vaccination didn't work.  I was still swept into Marx's orbit, first by the man himself, and then by the postmodernists and the critical theorists.


I was soon thoroughly sickened by not-really-post-marxists such as Adorno and Foucault.  I might not have wanted to throw myself at the barricades, but barricades we're pretty hard to find in Sydney in the 1980s.  The next best thing, as far as Satan was concerned, was for me to be caught up into a bubble of criticism of the status quo, which bubble severed me from real human relationships and real happiness.


I did attend a Socialist Workers Party meeting in which a visiting British professor assured us passionately that international finance capital (or whatever) was about to collapse of its own weight.  But in the age of disco, Adorno’s critique of the culture industry seemed more to the point.


Mark Levin’s impressive “Ameritopia” makes a major mistake, in my opinion.  You can't kill the utopian impulse, because it is written on the human heart.  In my Bible, the Book of Revelation still plants seeds of hope for the future:


22 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.


Levin and my conservative brothers and sisters  want us to surrender that hope, but it is not for us to surrender.  Orwell's book is an homage to the human spirit he experienced in Barcelona and the battles he fought with the volunteer militias - who were woefully trained and armed yet defeated not by the fascists but by the Comintern.  Utopia was negated by communists not by fascists because this was Satan's false version of utopia.

Interesting firsthand account of the Spanish Civil

I wanted to know more about the Spanish Civil War, and I received more insight into it thanks to Orwell's "you are there" narration. I felt like I was in the trenches with him.
The only thing that irritated me was the narrator's mispronunciation of Spanish words and names. I didn't expect him to be fluent in the language, but he should have learned how to pronounce it.

Complicated Political &Tragic Political Alliamces

Orwell gives a clear and moving account of a people's movement tragically corrupted by political powers.

A fascinating narrative!

I knew next to nothing of the Spanish Civil War, yet was fascinated by Orwelll's tale of his 1936/37 experience on the front lines and in Barcelona.

Exceptional

The story was exceptional and I love Orwell's humor. The narrator was pretty good, but some of the pronunciation of Spanish words was kind of strange. The accent was a little too posh for Orwell but still fit the story. I wonder what it would sound like with an American narrator. All in all, it's perfect for anyone trying to get an honest perspective of the Spanish Civil War from the POUM side. It's also quite comical at certain points. Before the political sections that one might find boring, Orwell warns the reader and says that he may skip.

Great Book

An interesting look at how fake news can shape your world. I'm sure Orwell spoke a bit better Spanish than the reader of his book.

A classic well read

Many previous reviewers complained about the distant and posh narration, but I found it perfect for Orwell’s style of carefully selected words, phrases, and paragraphs.

Least Favorite Orwell

I've read most of what Orwell has written, and this is my least favorite. I think it is because there are so many political parties, groups, and cities/areas of which I was unfamiliar that it just seemed so jumbled. This was Orwell's experiences during the Spanish Civil War, where he fought for the Republican (Socialist/Communist) side against Franco's Fascists. Interesting that he used the word Fascists and the history textbooks (at least in the US) use the word Nationalists to describe Franco's forces. Orwell spent a lot of time describing the in-fighting of the Republicans and what he finally saw as a betrayal by the same. He also addresses loyalty and the propaganda of the leftist press. The book ends with Orwell's escape from Barcelona into France when the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) was suppressed.

Good book, boring performance

Somehow the reader made a story about war exhausting to listen to. I’ve read the actual book, I’d recommend it over this audiobook

Terrific Account of the Spanish Civil War

One of the best written things I have ever read/listened to. Irony, facts, humor and tragedy.