Posted on 06/19/2024 2:52:00 AM PDT by Tench_Coxe
It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front – the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those particular men because I remember the faces of all of them.
(snip)
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
(Excerpt) Read more at orwellfoundation.com ...
Blair's experience in Spain had a profound impact that would influence two of his most well known works.
It might be a bit much to call 2024 an existential election, but neither is it hyperbole.
Viva Pinochet and Viva El Caudillo
Bkmk
Franco saved Spain.
Some say he kowtowed to Hitler, but I think he played Hitler to keep Hitler out of Spain.
ping
I read Homage to Catalonia. Great book. Didn’t know who the bad guy was. written a dozen years later. Orwell might have been rather dumb taking arms against the bad guys who I couldn’t figure out. Got shot in the neck. What if he died? They’d be no 1984.
Correction-1984 was written a dozen years later. I didn’t proof read.
Well consider this along with the whining of the Lincoln Brigade backed by the Soviets. Kim Philby Brit Soviet spy- was there in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell wrote about Ernest Hemingway in Spain (the “ambulance driver”) knowing all about Philby’s work for the NKVD! And then Hemingway from OSS to see eye eh— becomes the “monitor” of Fidel Castro??? An infiltrator.
Philby’s handler at NKVD was Alexander Orlov-in Spain, who was responsible for shipping the entire gold reserves of Spain-to Moscow for “protection” (supposedly for arms supplies to the “republican” Leftist Communists). Moscow sold off the gold! This is of great interest to those in the gold market- what happened to the Spanish national gold? Did Franco get any back?
If you are interested here is Orlov’s wiki “story”- he later “defected” so to say- never trusted, he was Stalin’s man, who as a result feared for his life from the lunatic. So this is how the Soviets finally got gold for themselves- having starved the Ukrainians for the wheat for sale on world markets. Incredible. Socialism is always- always, theft! Re-distribution just like obama and Xiden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Orlov_(Soviet_defector)
Great quote in bold—most of “history” is a pack of lies written by folks with agendas.
Once you figure that out you realize you can take nothing for granted.
What they don’t teach you in school is that knowledge is not what authorities tell you—it is what you learn on your own by digging and digging and digging and digging.
If you believe officials sources you are a drone, a NPC (non player character), a brainwashed pawn.
Being truly human means you are on your own.
That is funny.
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