Posted on 10/14/2002 6:59:29 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
I will be sure to read and respond next month.
Thanks for starting this reading group. I love to read just about anything put in front of me.
For some reason, as I read this book, that old Chevy Chase phrase from Saturday Night Live kept running through my head!
Yeah, this book pretty much killed the notion of War being some great adventure. Maybe it's great for armchair warriors but just imagine being out in the field and being tortured by the constant biting of lice. No respite even in sleep. UGH!
An excellent book overall. I had only read Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm prior to this and figured those two works were pretty much all that was worth reading from Orwell.
I could definitely see where Orwell got his ideas for Animal Farm when reading this book.
I agree :)
Sorry PJ, but I wasn't able to get through this book either (I gave up on Electric Koolaide too). It was rather tedious and all the acronyms confused me.
The good news is that I've already read the Invisible Man and enjoyed it! I'll re-read it and be all ready next time.
What I carried away from this book is a deeper understanding of the childish mindset that one must have to be a communist foot solder.
From the beginning where he speak of the state of Barcelona churches burned, cars all commandeered, along with every thing else in the city, to the forcing down the throat of everyone of the Revolutionary mindset you know that this is not going to end well. And yet he sees it not, He observes the outward uniformity and all but claps his hands with childish glee that everyone wants to be just alike. That everyone is being forced in to this public mold under the threat of death seems to not bother him or even occur to him.
That many of the “bourgeois” had gone underground seems to have come as a great shock. Once again there is the almost simple-minded belief that everything is as it appears on the surface. It is not until he begins to shed this way of looking at the world and see the horror beneath that the book becomes interesting.
He redeems himself by his ruthless honesty. It is very hard to admit that you had it all wrong and is what made him stand out from the rest of the former communist who are not able to admit that they were wrong no matter how disillusioned they are.
Maybe I error in calling him childish, maybe romantic in the classical sense of the word describes him better. When faced with the grim reality of war he loses his romantic view of things bit by bit. War does tend to lose its glow about the time that you hear the first bullets fly and see your first causality.
I would love to have something, anything from his wife’s point of view. She is perhaps the most interesting because of her attempt to care for him even long distance. She obviously must have either loved him a great deal or had a strong sense of duty. I tend to lean toward love because even the strongest sense of duty would not have prevented me from smacking him upside the head at the start.
In the end when they return to England you can tell he suffers from culture shock. He has seen the larger picture, he has grown up and many of his contemporaries have not yet done so. War has a way of dragging you into adulthood kicking and screaming.
a.cricket
All great books that I've read before but wanted an excuse to re-read again---and now I do.
I enjoyed the book, but for reasons quite different than I had expected. I knew that it was considered an important book by conservatives for its realistic portrayal of the treachery of the Communists in the Spanish Civil War, by an avowed socialist, no less. But I was expecting something more along the lines of Witness, by Whittaker Chambers: the passionate Communist coming face to face with the evils of Communism, rejecting it completely, and dedicating his life to fighting it. I suppose if I had known much about Orwell, I would have known such was not the case.
Orwell's disillusionment with the Communists in Spain stemmed from the fact that they weren't leftist or revolutionary. As he points out, the Communist Party of Spain, and indeed of every nation, took its orders from the Soviet government. The Soviets had decided that it was in their interest to oppose not only the Fascists, but also their ostensible allies, the leftist revolutionaries fighting against the Fascists. It was the revolutionaries with whom Orwell sympathized, and it was their betrayal by the Communists that turned him against Communism. He left Spain wiser, but no less a socialist.
But that alone separates him from the other liberals of his day. In 1937, the prevailing "enlightened" view among Western intellectuals was that communism was superior to capitalism. Orwell may have been a socialist, but he was at least a sincere one, and he respected the truth enough to condemn the Communists. In hindsight, it may seem that he merely reached the obvious conclusion, but it was a conclusion that escaped most of his liberal contemporaries. In fact, right up until the day the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no shortage of college professors who claimed that the Soviet system was superior to, or at least no worse than, our own. Many still manage to elude reality and believe that it was.
Orwell's description of the internecine struggle among the various anti-Fascist groups was interesting, at least at first. You can see his revolutionary fervor starting to ebb as he describes the fall of Malaga:
By degrees the whole disgraceful story leaked out -- how the town had been evacuated without firing a shot, and how the fury of the Italians had fallen not upon the troops, but upon the wretched civilian population, some of whom were pursued and machine-gunned for a hundred miles. The news sent a sort of chill along the line, for, whatever the truth may have been, every man in the militia believed that the loss of Malaga was due to treachery. It was the first talk I heard of treachery or divided aims. It set up in my mind the first vague doubt about this war in which, hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.But eventually the political details of the alphabet soup of opposing factions just got too tedious (P.O.U.M., P.S.U.C., F.A.I., C.N.T., U.G.T., J.C.I., J.S.U., A.I.T., I.L.P, S.A.P., ...). I actually skipped the last 20 pages of Chapter 11, because I couldn't take any more.
The point of the political absurdities behind the war is actually better made by Orwell's simple, honest description of his time at the front. The boredom, the waste, the ineptitude and inefficiency on both sides, but particularly on the part of the "egalitarian" militias on his own side, comes through clearly. At times he tries to defend it; at times he is appalled by it; at other times he can't help but find it humorous. One image that will stay with me is that of the party militias and the Fascists shouting propaganda at each other with megaphones from their trenches:
The man who did the shouting at the P.S.U.C. post down on our right was an artist at the job. Sometimes, instead of shouting revolutionary slogans he simply told the Fascists how much better we were fed than they were. His account of the Government rations was apt to be a little imaginative. "Buttered toast!" -- you could hear his voice echoing across the lonely valley -- "We're just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!" I do not doubt that, like the rest of us, he had not seen butter for weeks or months past, but in the icy night the news of buttered toast probably set many a Fascist mouth watering. It even made mine water, though I knew he was lying.
Tuesday night bump!
It was certainly a chore trying to keep up with it all. I found the book a better read by skimming over that stuff and just absorbing the meat of the story. After I was done, I did go back and re-read those parts of it and it made a little more sense to me. But I don't even know how the participants kept all those factions straight (and they evidently didn't).
What's important about this story is that the left-wing "intelligentsia" totally ignored this book and refused to learn what really happened in the Spanish Civil War. They continued to promote Communism, giving aid and comfort to tyrants like Stalin.
Agreed. It has been said that the two "points of no return" for Communist-loving intellectuals were the Spanish Civil War and the Hitler/Stalin pact. After 1939, anyone who could still believe that Communism was not evil had to be totally blind and beyond hope. Unfortunately, many could and did.
These books are available as cheap, very cheap, paperbacks in almost all bookstores. Usually less than $5. I have read a lot of good literature in these "pocket" sized books. Not just Orwell but many other classics as well. They are great to carry around in your back pocket and read when you are in line at the bank or waiting for your wife to finish shopping at some mall store. In fact, I remember clearly reading 1984 at a hockey rink while my son was practicing. I think it took me maybe four practices to finish it.
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