Homage to Catalonia : “Everyone Writes as a Partisan”

The handful of “battle” sequences almost harkened back to Graves’ account of trench warfare, though Orwell’s battlefield experiences seem to mainly consist of the duller parts of trench life. He often refers to his time spent on the front as boring, frustrating, and mostly pointless, even as he desires to perform some useful gesture for a greater good—both in that moment and in the retrospective writing of this memoir. Seeing as this could hardly be carried out on the battlefield, perhaps this memoir is an account of Orwell transitioning from a ‘valiant soldier’ to a kind of heroic journalist. 

Orwell’s account of journalism during the P. O. U. M. purges drafts up plenty of examples of bad reporting and manipulation of the facts. The stories cooked up by the Communist Press, for example, are described as “consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no other purpose than to work up prejudice” (167). Jingoism and propaganda drive the injustice of political suppression, just as Orwell believes that “the only hope” of maintaining political freedom in such an atmosphere “is to keep political controversy on a plane where exhaustive discussion is possible” (178).

I was moved by Orwell’s attitude towards the truth throughout this book, especially at the end. He consistently tries to set the record straight in the face of all this propaganda, but he maintains that he is only a part of a conversation that must be held. He is not the definitive source of the truth, and even suggests that his readers remain critical of his account, just as they should be critical of all such accounts. I think it is good of him to push readers to understand the complicated nature of the truth especially as lesser “journalists” try to package the truth for easy consumption in snippets of simplified propaganda.