Homage to Catalonia

September 14, to September -- 2020  Orwell's book about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.  This conflict, which brought Franco to power in Spain, was a key moment in the run-up to the Second World War.  This conflict still echoes today.  Catalonia is seeking more autonomy, if not independence, from the federal government of Spain, and Franco's body was recently disinterred from its resting place at a national monument to the victims of this bloody conflict.  I will be reading this book in conjunction with Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain, a #1 bestseller in Spain about the Civil War.  I hope that Beevor's historical account will help me to put Orwell's narrative in perspective.

From Homage to Catalonia: When I first reached Barcelona I had thought it a town where class distinctions and great differences of wealth hardly existed.  Certainly that was what it looked like.  "Smart" clothes were an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you 'comrade.'  I had not grasped that this was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage.  The working class believed in a revolution that had been begun but never consolidated, and the bourgeoisie were scared and temporarily disguising themselves as workers.  In the first months of the revolution there must have been many thousands of people who deliberately put on overalls and shouted revolutionary slogans as a way of saving their skins.