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4.04 AVERAGE
4.04 AVERAGE
7/10
De man van Animal Farm doet hier zijn belevenissen uit de doeken toen hij ging vechten in Spanje tegen Franco. Soms wordt ik na het lezen van zo'n verhaal getriggerd om me in de materie te verdiepen, maar ik heb nu niet de drang gevoeld om mijn kennis over de Spaanse burgeroorlog te vergroten.
De man van Animal Farm doet hier zijn belevenissen uit de doeken toen hij ging vechten in Spanje tegen Franco. Soms wordt ik na het lezen van zo'n verhaal getriggerd om me in de materie te verdiepen, maar ik heb nu niet de drang gevoeld om mijn kennis over de Spaanse burgeroorlog te vergroten.
funny
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Excellent history written from a partisan socialist perspective on the Spanish Civil War. I loved the political chapters despite Orwell’s warnings. I also enjoyed it talking about how liberal newspapers distort the truth in pursuit of capitalist bourgeois goals and then googling the book and finding an article in The Guardian calling it bad history. So meta. The ending is incredible too. I’m going to have to read the rest of Orwell’s books since this is my first out of the two everyone has read.
adventurous
informative
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
informative
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I knew exactly nothing about the Spanish Civil War before reading this. It's an odd book - a memoir of a period of time in his life where he didn't exactly do much - stood in a trench for a few months, didn't shoot anyone in Barcelona, then got shot in the throat. Still, the explanations of the war and the politics of it all were surprisingly interesting, even if I don't think it was the clearest. Orwell does an exceptional job of describing the reality of the war and how it changed him, and I think that's the most interesting takeaway - war was (and is) tragic, unfair, disgusting, lousy, muddy, exhausting, and yet, both pointless and inevitable. And at the centre of it all, are humans.
In the closing remarks of the book, Orwell is travelling back to England.
"Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, ... and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London ... all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."
I think partially it just makes me homesick, but it's hard not be moved - how easy it is to sleep the deep, deep sleep of the comfortable places we (or at least, I) live. And the roar of bombs may not be here, but it doesn't take much to hear them.
In the closing remarks of the book, Orwell is travelling back to England.
"Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, ... and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London ... all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."
I think partially it just makes me homesick, but it's hard not be moved - how easy it is to sleep the deep, deep sleep of the comfortable places we (or at least, I) live. And the roar of bombs may not be here, but it doesn't take much to hear them.
Orwell is not a right-winger, he was a socialist! He fought for working class democracy against Stalinism and fascism. Anyone that disagrees should read this
hopeful
informative
sad
medium-paced
“I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return for my rations except suffer from cold and lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of most soldiers in most wars.“
George Orwell didn’t see a lot of fighting and may not even have killed a single fascist. He narrowly escaped being killed himself, when he was shot in the neck.
Doctors and nurses failed to assure him that a man hit through the neck, who survives is the luckiest man alive. “I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”
George Orwell went to Spain to report on the war in late 1936. Arriving in Barcelona he got caught up in the revolutionary feeling of the city and joined the militia. He joined POUM because he arrived with ILP papers. At the time he didn’t think there was a great difference between the government forces fighting fascism. He later learnt that the Communists backed by the USSR, were keen to suppress any revolutionary or “Trotskyist” forces, which their propaganda arm dubbed as closet fascists.
Orwell observes “anyone who criticises Communist policy from a Left-wing standpoint is liable to be denounced as a Trotskyist.”
After months on the front, where he fought more with the lice in his trousers than the fascists, he returned to Barcelona to be branded a traitor and an enemy of the state because he had been in a POUM (‘Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista’) regiment. Orwell escaped Spain but many of his friends were arrested, disappeared and ultimately died in the custody of the Communists.
There are elements in the narrative that emerge again in his later more famous works “Animal Farm” and “1984“. “Animal Farm” is a satire on the failure of Stalinism, we see in Napoleon’s propaganda against Snowball, much that came from the Communist PSUC’s attacks on POUM. Also we see in the trenches the big rats that scared Orwell so much and were used in 1984‘s Room 101.
Civil Wars are messy, like in the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s, there were more than two sides in this conflict, as Orwell ably demonstrates. This book is justly famous for its disillusioned account of how the Communist Party—in its eagerness to defeat Franco’s fascism and ally itself with Stalin’s USSR–betrayed the successful anarchist experiment in Catalonia for the sake of expedience, how it executed and imprisoned its anarchist and socialist comrades for the sake of a temporary alliance with the bourgeois.
George Orwell didn’t see a lot of fighting and may not even have killed a single fascist. He narrowly escaped being killed himself, when he was shot in the neck.
Doctors and nurses failed to assure him that a man hit through the neck, who survives is the luckiest man alive. “I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”
George Orwell went to Spain to report on the war in late 1936. Arriving in Barcelona he got caught up in the revolutionary feeling of the city and joined the militia. He joined POUM because he arrived with ILP papers. At the time he didn’t think there was a great difference between the government forces fighting fascism. He later learnt that the Communists backed by the USSR, were keen to suppress any revolutionary or “Trotskyist” forces, which their propaganda arm dubbed as closet fascists.
Orwell observes “anyone who criticises Communist policy from a Left-wing standpoint is liable to be denounced as a Trotskyist.”
After months on the front, where he fought more with the lice in his trousers than the fascists, he returned to Barcelona to be branded a traitor and an enemy of the state because he had been in a POUM (‘Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista’) regiment. Orwell escaped Spain but many of his friends were arrested, disappeared and ultimately died in the custody of the Communists.
There are elements in the narrative that emerge again in his later more famous works “Animal Farm” and “1984“. “Animal Farm” is a satire on the failure of Stalinism, we see in Napoleon’s propaganda against Snowball, much that came from the Communist PSUC’s attacks on POUM. Also we see in the trenches the big rats that scared Orwell so much and were used in 1984‘s Room 101.
Civil Wars are messy, like in the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s, there were more than two sides in this conflict, as Orwell ably demonstrates. This book is justly famous for its disillusioned account of how the Communist Party—in its eagerness to defeat Franco’s fascism and ally itself with Stalin’s USSR–betrayed the successful anarchist experiment in Catalonia for the sake of expedience, how it executed and imprisoned its anarchist and socialist comrades for the sake of a temporary alliance with the bourgeois.