#And homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

[crowley1990]

It’s December so everyone put in the tags what your favourite book(s) you read this year is (are)

[whatsnewalycat]

from Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[sharpened--edges]

There is a certain archaic grandeur about the setting of Orwell's experiences in Homage to Catalonia, and even about the actors. For, by the accident of history, he has entered a small, simplified society dominated by a few broad ethical concepts which gain value because of the material primitiveness of existence. These badly armed militiamen, guarding their mountaintops with very little but their ideals, seem a great deal nearer to the men who fought at Thermopylae and Marathon than to the great mechanized armies of modern times. It was doubtless this sense of living in a world snatched out of history that made Orwell recollect it immediately afterwards as something which had ‘the magic quality’ of ‘memories that are years old.’

George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (Little, Brown, 1966), pp. 174–5.

[victusinveritas]

Geroge Orwell, the tallest man in the background of the picture. Lenin garrison, Barcelona.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (Васи́лий Васи́льевич Вереща́гин; 1842-1904), The Apotheosis of War, 1871 :: Guillaume Gris

* * * *

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting… It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

—George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938)

[Robert Scott Horton]

[harrison-abbott]

this has to be among the best memoirs out there.

i don't agree with everything that Orwell / Blair said. but he sure had a colourful life. he certainly walked the walk.

[bluastro-yellow]

We also have a poodle puppy. We called him Marx to remind us that we had never read Marx and now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can't look the dog in the face when we speak to him...

Eileen O’Shaughnessy (George Orwell's wife) in a letter to her friend Norah Symes Myles

[jackleopard]

everyone wasn’t lying, 1984 IS good

[impervioustotheworldssoftdecay]

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell

[whatsnewalycat]

from Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

[skubic]

‘Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”’

- G. Orwell

[psychuan]

1984 is specifically anti-Stalinism. it was banned in the USSR for being anti-Stalinist, and banned in the US because Orwell was a die-hard socialist and 1984 is a critique of the USSR specifically based on his experiences with USSR-funded groups during the Catalonian revolutionary war, also known as the Spanish Civil War.

if you read Homage to Catalonia you get a better understanding of the perspective from which 1984 and Animal Farm were written. the events described in that book are what made him say "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."

[victusinveritas]

Richard Blair, son of George Orwell, Patron of the Orwell Society, stands in the Plaça de George Orwell, Barcelona, May 13th, 2024

[phantom-of-thee-library]

Jordan Peterson doesn't understand George Orwell