#478. Homage to Catalonia
Homage to Catalonia (9 hours):
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.
