Amber Boyd

5-10-02

George Orwell:  Rebel to Patriot

        When the Spanish Civil war broke out, George Orwell was very much a political rebel.  Orwell was a Democratic Socialist in England during a time when Socialism was not accepted.  He joined the Spanish militia to help fight the fascist coup when the English government would do nothing to help the Spanish democratic government.  Events that occurred while Orwell was in Spain, as described in Homage to Catalonia, and after he returned home caused Orwell to question his political views and the views he held toward his own country.  These new, more patriotic, attitudes are expressed in the essay England, Your England.

        When Orwell arrived in Barcelona, a form of socialism had taken hold of the area.  Orwell described it as such, “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.  In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.”  Orwell’s immediate reaction to the situation was to find it odd, even dislike it, but at the same time, find it “worth fighting for.”  The Spanish militia was organized in a similar classless way.  Everyone from private to general received the same pay, lived in the same conditions, and shared what little they had.  Orwell gave part of the credit for success of socialism’s early stages in Spain to the Spanish people’s nature, which Orwell described in Homage to Catalonia as “their innate decency and their ever-present Anarchist tinge…”  

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        Soon after Orwell had reached the front, he was shot through the neck.  When Orwell returned to Barcelona three months later with the his branch of the militia known as the P.O.U.M., he described it as stepping into “an atmosphere that was scarcely less alien and hostile to us and our kind than if this had been Paris or London.”  While Orwell had been away, the atmosphere of the city had lost the egalitarianism and working-class control it once had.  Orwell blamed this change in attitude partially on Barcelona’s remoteness from the actual fighting, as well as the split of ...

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