Who was George Orwell?
In 1936, Eric Blair (the novelist, critic, and political satirist who used the pseudonym George Orwell) went to Spain to write about the Spanish Civil War, and to enlist in a Socialist Republican militia. He said he went to Spain “to fight Fascism” and that he was fighting for “common decency”. Throughout Homage to Catalonia, one gets a sense of Orwell’s commitment to honesty. During 1936 and 1937, he fought with the “Trotskyist” P.O.U.M. in support of the Republican government. In the trenches in the Catalan section of Spain, he battled against the attempted take-over by Franco’s Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Despite the sacrifices by the Spanish and volunteers from Britain and the United States, Franco and his fellow-Fascists defeated the legally elected socialist Republican government of Spain. Orwell has said: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand
