In Simple Terms, a Clusterf*ck

By virtue of sheer chance, it so happens that the last work of fiction that I read before beginning this class was Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Naturally, then, I was interested and excited to see how Orwell would handle the same subject matter. I was also interested because Homage to Catalonia was a work of nonfiction, and I hoped that it would shed more light on exactly what was going on during the Spanish Civil War.

Needless to say, the description of what was actually going on was quite dense and confusing. Parties were betraying other factions of the same parties; the USSR was undermining efforts to build a communist state, and the press across the nation (and throughout Europe) was telling a very different story than what was actually happening on the ground. The lack of coordination and cooperation between likeminded militias was especially surprising, given that in many ways, they had a common enemy. Thus, I felt it necessary to describe the entire situation as a clusterfuck, where no one really knows what's going on, who's doing what, or what they should be doing (this is especially evident in the street fighting chapter [chapter 10?] in Barcelona).

One lesson from this mess that I think it's important to keep in mind is that it's impossible to use a blanket to cover everyone who subscribes to a certain political belief system. In Spain, many different factions of socialists, communists or anarchists all had different ideologies and agendas, so it would be a mistake to group them all together. I think that the way we have been raised and educated has lead to us believing that all members of a given ideology think the same way and agree on the same things. When we hear Communist, we assume that someone believes the same things as our preconceived notions of communism. Same goes for Anarchism, and Socialism, which has been turned into a dirty word over the last couple years even though we have socialist aspects already at work in our society. I think it's important for us to realize that it's impossible, and probably irresponsible, to think we can use one of these terms and automatically assume that we know exactly what a subscriber to that belief system thinks.