Tribute to OrwellOrwell, a non Catalonian, this man has earned my deep admiration for the revolutionary and the artist. The pages of his books spark the imagination and emotions of a reader like myself. There is the stupid Hollywood portrayal of war, the pretence of Hemingway in ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, however, Orwell is like a painting in the style of Goya, completed with the sincerity of an Andalusian, London or Melville. There were volunteers who could neither read nor understood the capes nor the black haired girls with flowers in their hair who sent them to the front with kisses. Barcelona endured three months of military action and has ceased to be an anarchist/trade unionist
city and has recovered its bourgeois status, its coffee houses were full of fat, well dressed men who ate pies with their women whilst city dwellers queued up to two hours to buy a little bread. During' The Acts of May', the repression by the Liberal Government of Trotskyites and anarchists is described in Orwell’s sober prose, a series of street battles worse than the fighting in Madrid between republicans and
fascists. Orwell, the Englishman, narrates everything as though a stranger to humour, however he tells us of the death of a dream, that of
equality between men. As the Catalan bourgeoisie recovered its privileges the hated Civil Guard and its assassins was paid a salary. He related how the USSR commanded its GPU Generals like Orlov, yes the same Orlov who fled for 2 years to the U.S. to write ‘The Crimes of Stalin’. This Orlov and other Russians captured the Trotsky leader Andres Nyn and killed him, but they skinned him alive first as this was a
lesson the Communists wanted to teach not only the fascists but the true revolutionaries a lesson. Orwell writes about a period of history where editors and the democratic press were silenced.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell is an impressive
book which can be downloaded from the internet by looking up the title of the book. It is difficult to find this book in libraries. Sirvan wrote a modest homage to George Orwell whom I admire because he has tried to restore equality between men.
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