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The next book assignment of the Freeper Reading Club is "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison due for November 18. This novel, although highly acclaimed, has large sections of it glossed over by liberals because of it's scathing (and funny) observations about the Communist Party U.S.A.. Definitely a very Un-PC novel. You will really enjoy reading Invisible Man not only because of it's great social commentary but because it is also incredibly well written (and funny in a bitter-sweet sort of way).
1 posted on 10/14/2002 6:59:29 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
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To: Bahbah; contessa machiaveli; BADJOE; Mr.Clark; Betty Jane; Orblivion; Non-Sequitur; dixie sass; ...
Post away your observations about Homage To Catalonia. If anybody out there wishes to be placed on the Freeper Reading Club Ping List, let me know and I will add you on.
2 posted on 10/14/2002 7:05:13 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
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To: PJ-Comix
HTC is an outstanding book. Anyone with an open mind who reads it will develop a healthy skepticism of the Fourth Estate.

BTW, didn't Orwell have problems getting HTC published?

3 posted on 10/14/2002 7:10:11 AM PDT by KoestlersRedFiat
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To: PJ-Comix
Leave me off!! If I want to read lies about the wisdom, loyalty and valor of the commies in Spain, I'll read the New York Times.
4 posted on 10/14/2002 7:14:24 AM PDT by Tacis
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To: PJ-Comix
The best thing about Homage to Catalonia is Orwell's vivid and explicit description of what it's like to be shot in the neck.
5 posted on 10/14/2002 7:18:33 AM PDT by Oschisms
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To: PJ-Comix
Do I remember correctly that the Anarchists were the junior league of the Libertarians?
8 posted on 10/14/2002 7:44:39 AM PDT by Uncle Miltie
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To: PJ-Comix
Eric Hugh Blair AKA George Orwell, had a wife, and a career, and he didn't really understand the complicated politics surrounding the Spanish Civil War. He believed in liberty, equality,' and 'common decency', so he joined the militia because, "It seemed the only conceivable thing to do."

He suffered the horrors of war, "...It was not bad fun in a way."

He found the experience of being hit by a near-fatal bullet, 'fairly interesting'.

He almost got thrown in jail where one, 'generally stays forever, with or without a trial'.

And yet--as a result, he is left with, "...not less but more belief in the decency of human beings."...Go figure.

My thoughts are that during his experience of war and bonding with his band of brothers, he developed a same sex attraction and went insane.

My hypothesis of his becoming a homosexual, explains his attraction to pain and his faith in the decency of his enemy.....Nevermind.

9 posted on 10/14/2002 8:07:19 AM PDT by shetlan
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To: PJ-Comix
I could not find this book at the library, but my mother was visiting a college friend in Barcelona when war broke out.
12 posted on 10/14/2002 9:40:29 AM PDT by Travis McGee
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To: PJ-Comix
Bumping the thread. I just got in so once I get settled, I'll give my input and start reading the other replies.
19 posted on 10/14/2002 4:46:45 PM PDT by SamAdams76
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To: PJ-Comix
Okay, without having read any of the other replies yet, here are my thoughts on "Homage To Catalonia."

From the opening paragraphs, I was immediately captivated by this account of the Spanish Civil War. It was the first time I ever read in depth about this civil war. Being that it occurred as the storm clouds of WW2 were building throughout the rest of Europe, the Spanish Civil War tends to get overlooked by history.

Orwell paints a fascinating picture of the perpetual misery that the average line soldier of this war had to deal with. In short, it was a hellish existence. Freezing your butt off night after night, dealing with body lice (louses), eating your often spoiled food out of greasy pannikans (Spanish term for dish that soldiers carried in the field), having to perform your bodily functions in a steaming trench full of raw sewage and a dozen other discomforts and hardships that no modern soldier would tolerate for very long.

Take the louses for example, here is an excerpt of Orwell describing this vermin:

...I had a big experience of body vermin of various kinds, and for sheer beastliness the louse beats everything I have encountered. Other insects, mosquitoes for instance, make you suffer more, but at least they aren't resident vermin. The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of them. Down the seams of your trousers they lie laying their gleaming white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible pace...In war all soldiers are lousy...every one of them has lice crawling over his testicles...

I am somewhat in awe that George Orwell (by then he was pretty well known as a successful writer) would give up a comfortable life in England to tolerate these conditions. He really believed in the cause and was willing to put his life on the line for those Spanish revolutionaries.

It was a tragedy what happened to the P.O.U.M. Here were this group of guys who put themselves on the front lines day after day to fight against Franco's fascists, yet their reward back at the home front was to be persecuted. First the P.O.U.M. was declared to be in league with the Fascists, then they were hunted down, jailed and most of them eventually killed. Orwell was lucky to escape the purge.

The book was a little confusing to follow with it's alphabet soup of acronyms - signifying all the different groups that aligned themselves against Franco. But Chapter 5 does a pretty good job sorting everything out. Though I had to go back and re-read it as I got towards the end of the book so that everything would make sense to me.

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. Now I am going to check out Orwell's other works, perhaps starting with "Down And Out in Paris and London."

20 posted on 10/14/2002 6:02:48 PM PDT by SamAdams76
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To: PJ-Comix
Just a few first thoughts.

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

29 posted on 10/14/2002 7:25:26 PM PDT by another cricket
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To: PJ-Comix
Finished HTC almost a month ago. I actually thought it was closer to 1984 than Animal Farm. But what I found fascinating is that the tactics of the Left at all levels haven't changed much: double dealing at the top; compfortably settled apologists that shill for them in the press and acamadia; political witch-hunts; PC-behavior that ignores a person's genuine proclivities so long as the surface behavior conforms to the Party's image.

Probably a third of the way through Invisible Man and am enjoying that a lot less than the other books. Not so much what it's about as how it is written: the main character simply reacts or is merely an observer to whatever situation is occurring in the chapter at the time. It's a lot like Liar's Club or She's Come Undone in that regard (which were themselves a pair of "poor me" stories where the main characters do nothing but observe the dysfunctions around them). I suppose it's meant to be social criticism of the culture and politics of the times but... so what? I guess the point is that he's "invisible" and therefore the protagonists best option IS to simply observe what's going on around him. But IMO it makes for rather UNintersting reading. Bonfire of the Vanities was better for making those sorts of societal observations. (Because the main character takes action in the book.

A book which Invisible Man reminds me of is Dahlgren. It's a similar, "sci-fi" (that's how the book is classed) version of Invisible Man. I'll have to look that one up again...
32 posted on 10/15/2002 1:28:16 AM PDT by BradyLS
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To: PJ-Comix
Another good read by Orwell from this period is "The Road to Wigan Pier" wherein he leads a life alongside the proles of industrial northern England in the mid-30s -- very bleak indeed. The latter half of the book is a rant, funny in places, against his fellow socialists: why do they have to come off as such flaming fruitcakes? (An observation as valid today as it was 65 years ago!)
33 posted on 10/15/2002 6:46:30 AM PDT by Snickersnee
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To: PJ-Comix
This is the first time I have read Orwell. I somehow made it through high school without reading Animal Farm or 1984. I have always wanted to read something by the man known as "every conservative's favorite liberal", but I never got around to it until now. I'm glad I finally did.

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.

35 posted on 10/15/2002 9:48:15 AM PDT by Mute
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To: PJ-Comix
Hey Book Duuudes! Sorry I'm late. It was a great book and I loved the war scenes. I am very confused though as to the identity of Catalonia and why Orwell was paying homage to her. I kept waiting for her to be the woman who fixed him up after he was shot like in "A Farewell to Bells" by Ernest Hemingway.

I liked the book so durn much that I went out and bought the four volume set of his collected essays. THEY ARE GREAT and I heartily recommend them to the Freep Club.

Anyway, just checking in and I am fixing to read the rest of the thread to figure out who she was. parsy the avid reader.

41 posted on 10/18/2002 10:56:31 AM PDT by parsifal
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To: PJ-Comix
Well Durn. I can't find the Well, Hitler, and the World State essay on line, but here is a good link to Orwell page:


http://www.k-1.com/orwell/
44 posted on 10/18/2002 11:31:50 AM PDT by parsifal
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To: PJ-Comix
Here is one review of HTC that I found at the link I posted. Putting here for those who did not read the book. What impressed me about HTC was the "honesty" and "simplicity" of Orwell's writing style. You can obviously tell Wells is smart, educated, and extremely good at putting situations into words. Yet he is not pedantic. The guy who wrote the intro to my edition put it real well when he noted how "detachedly" Orwell described his own wounding. I also appreciated Orwell's wry sense of humor.

parsy.

BTW, here is the review by somebody:

'Homage to Catalonia' differs from 'Nineteen Eighty-four' and 'Animal Farm' in that it is a non-fiction account of Orwell's actual experiences rather than an allegorical work of fiction or scientific romance novel. Orwell is describing events as he sees them, putting his own views across about real events. Orwell's experiences in Spain when fighting in the Civil War had a major effect on his political attitudes - before Spain he had read much about Socialism and had experienced varying degrees of Socialist rule, but this was the first time that he experienced an attempt to put a truly Socialist society into practice.
Orwell came to Spain as a journalist and claimed to be "uninterested in the political situation" (Appendix I). He joined up in the POUM militia because he wanted to fight against the forces of Fascism (for this was how he saw the situation at that time, his knowledge mainly based on English newspaper reports).

Orwell showed his bitterness at the Communists regularly after he left Spain, once commenting how "The Spanish Communists and their Russian allies were bent not on making a social revolution happen, as most Western intellectuals believed, but on preventing one from happening". Instead he saw the Communists as being the true Conservatives - they simply used their rhetoric of radicalism in order to bamboozle the Spanish people. The issue of power which was crucial in both 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-four' raised it's head in 'Homage to Catalonia' - the Communists were not Socialist, they were merely extremely adept at obtaining power and keeping it.

Orwell's motive when writing 'Homage to Catalonia' seemed to be to simply tell the truth about the events in Spain. However, this 'truth' that Orwell was so desperate to write about was focused around the treachery of the Communists in Spain. Many historians have taken issue with Orwell's harsh words about the Communist influence, saying that they had to tone down the radical elements of the Federalist side (the militias) in order to try and encourage other European countries to supply them with the much needed weapons with which to fight Franco. It was certainly true that most of the West preferred the prospect of a Franco-run Spain than a radically socialist one. Recent studies have also cast doubt on Orwell's accusation that the Communists deliberately held back weapons from the militias, fearing that they might get into the hands of Franco's troops.
In 'Homage to Catalonia' Orwell describes the terrible conditions that he had to endure whilst fighting on the front line for the POUM. He and other troops had to endure "boredom, heat, cold, dirt, lice, privation, and occasional danger". The rats that ran riot all over the trenches were one of the most horrible, and most common problems. The ever-present rats which Orwell had to endure provided inspiration for his description of the dreaded "Room 101" in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' where they attacked Winston and caused him to eventually cry out "Do it to Julia! Not me!" and consequently betrayed his love for her.

Although the chapters Orwell wrote about the political situation in Spain were relegated to appendices because he felt he needed to separate them from his account of his own personal experiences, Orwell still devotes a lot of space throughout the book to political and philosophical topics such as the nature of Socialism. In chapter VII he talks of the "mystique of Socialism" and how Socialism to most people "means a classless society". It was this attempt to create a classless society which Orwell found so intriguing. Orwell talks enthusiastically about the militias dotted around the front line and described them as "a sort of microcosm of a classless society" (Ch.VII) - it was the sense of comradeship and hope that permeated the militias that gave Orwell's "desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before".

Orwell describes how in Aragon there were thousands of people "all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality...in theory it was perfect equality, and in practice it was not far from it". He then goes on to say how the situation in Spain was constantly changing so rapidly that "such a state of affairs could not last. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it". Orwell's short time in Spain during the early stages of the war modified his political outlook - now he could believe in Socialism, not just as a theory, but (at least in its early stages) as a reality. He had "breathed the air of equality" (Ch.VII).

The in-fighting between different factions of the Republican movement clearly distressed Orwell - it seemed to him that Spain was suffering from "a plague of initials" (Appendix I). When he arrived in Spain had the attitude "why can't we drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?", but eventually even he was forced to take sides "For even if one cared nothing for the political parties and their conflicting 'lines', it was all too obvious that one's own destiny was involved". Orwell described himself as "a pawn in the enormous struggle being fought out between two political theories". It was, most definitely, far more complex than simply a case of a struggle between the forces of Socialism and Fascism.

Homage to Catalonia certainly provided a lot of inspiration for Orwell when he wrote 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-four' and their are many aspects of the book which link closely to them.
The most obvious link that joins 'Animal Farm', 'Nineteen Eighty-four' and 'Homage to Catalonia' is the way that they all examine the forces of totalitarian and socialist government. 'Homage to Catalonia' tells the story of Orwell's experiences in Spain in such a way that reveals not only what happened but his opinions, his feelings, and his political hopes. His two novels 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-four' are also primarily self-revalations about his political ideas. The in-fighting within the Republican movement in Spain, according to Orwell, was caused by the different factions becoming engulfed in a struggle for power. The corrupting influence of mans desire for power over his fellow man is one of the most major themes in both 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-four'. In 'Animal Farm' the revolution was betrayed by Napoleon in his quest for personal power and material benefit, and in 'Nineteen Eighty-four' Big Brother becomes the figurehead of an organisation whose sole goal is the acquisition and maintainance of political power.
48 posted on 10/18/2002 2:32:05 PM PDT by parsifal
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To: Bahbah; contessa machiaveli; BADJOE; Mr.Clark; Betty Jane; Orblivion; Non-Sequitur; dixie sass; ...
I just checked the Freeper Reading Club Ping list and the Freeper Reading Club now has nearly a hundred members which makes it one of the largest (or maybe the largest) Reading Club on the Net.

Remember, the next book assignment, due November 18, is Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Although I have read this book before, I am now discovering a lot of nuances I missed the first time I read it. Also I found the introduction by Ralph Ellison (1972 Vintage paperback edition) to be quite interesting, especially where he explains how he began to hear the voice of the Invisible Man. Ellison was actually trying to write another book (about a black air corps officer in a WWII German POW camp) when that irreverent voice of the Invisible Man kept intruding into his head. He tried to ignore the voice but to no avail so he gave up on his original book and began writing the Invisible Man as narrated to him by that voice. It is this same voice that serves as the narrator the book and makes for its fascinating tone. The one big thing about this book that surprises me is that it has never been made into a movie. Perhaps that is because it ultimately proves to be so Un-PC.

Anyway, if anybody out there wishes to be placed on the Freeper Reading Club Ping list, please Freep Mail me. I assure that you will be FASCINATED by this next book assignment.

50 posted on 10/21/2002 6:51:05 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
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To: PJ-Comix

I just finished reading “Homage...” last week. I was struck by the fact that although Orwell is justly praised for his anti-communist novels, he was a complete nitwit concerning other forms of socialism. In his effusive praise for the revolutionary anarchists, he failed to see that brand of socialism was just as totalitarian as the Stalinist brand. His other statements like policemen are natural enemies of the workingman reveal a person who while anti-communist, certainly do not seem to have given up on the socialist dream. Orwell apparently was a socialist to his death. He never did see the great contradiction in opposing Stalinism while supporting other forms which would eventually be just as bad.


62 posted on 03/22/2012 5:27:37 AM PDT by driftless2
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