The Enemy of My Enemy is Also My Enemy?

Reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia right now, and it's a fascinating book. It's George Orwell's account of his time fighting in the Spanish civil war for the POUM (Partido Ubrero de Unification Marxista), one of the many factions fighting against Francisco Franco. It's a memoir of the war, only Orwell didn't really do a lot of fighting. That left him with plenty of time for observing. What he observed were the conflicting politics and internecine fighting among Spain's various loyalist parties. On one side were the fascists, led by Franco and supported by the Catholic church and the upper classes. On the other side was a loose coalition of various communists, socialists and anarchists who were agreed on only one thing - keeping the fascists from taking over the government by force. They didn't, of course. The rest is history.

When the fascists tried to overthrow Spain's elected government, only two countries came to the Spain's aide - Mexico and the Soviet Union. The U.S. and the rest of Europe stood by and watched as the Franco wrested control of the country from the government, establishing a brutal dictatorship that would last for forty years. Many have said, and rightly so, that the Spanish Civil War was where Hitler tested out his theories and his equipment prior to the invasion of Poland. Had we intervened then, we might have averted the Second World War. But the Spanish loyalists were socialist and communists, so we declined. Many Americans who did go to Spain and fight for the loyalists were not allowed to return home after the war. Seems they'd been tainted. Seems fascism is preferable over socialism to most people.

As infighting by the various loyalist factions increased, Orwell observed the heavy use of propaganda by the communists (the largest party) to vilify the smaller parties and bully them into line. Orwell saw how the masses could be easily pushed to and fro by the use of a few carefully worded phrases and by disinformation. Here is where we see Orwell's later philosophies forming. They weren't born during the dark days of the German blitzkrieg, as I had always been taught, but during the political squabblings of the loyalist factions during the Spanish Civil War. Funny how that part was omitted from my schooling.

This book isn't taught in public school in this country. It reveals too much of Orwell's strong socialist philosophy, his love of the working class, his hope for an egalitarian society, his hatred of all authority figures. That's not the kind of stuff we want to be teaching our children in school. We prefer the Orwell of 1984 and Animal Farm. He's easier to classify, his philosophies are easier to teach, his ideas less repugnant to our highly stratified society. But I like the Orwell of 1936, the young reporter who went to cover a war, who decided to fight for a cause, and who almost died for an ideal. Orwell was critically wounded in 1937, and later he had to flee Spain to avoid being arrested and executed by the very forces he was fighting for. He was just in the wrong faction. Good thing for us that he was. We might never have had the later George Orwell otherwise.