303. Orwell: Fighting Fascism In The Spanish Civil War (Part 2)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rimpel. And this is the second episode in our mini-series on George Orwell. If you missed the first, let me tell you what you missed. You missed a lot. Where were you? First of all, wasn't born George Orwell, was born Eric Blair, wasn't born in Great Britain, was born in Bihar, moved to the UK as a toddler, went to Eton, hated Eton, went to a runaway to Burma to join the Imperial Police Force, became a police officer, hated being a police officer, came back to Great Britain. And this is the bit that we're going to be looking at.

1:05So he's sort of come back to Great Britain, but he's not going to tarry for that long because the next chapter of his life is going to revolve around the Spanish Civil War. And it will take you on a journey from Orwell's hatred of fascism and hatred of imperialism to a gradual disillusionment with what he thought might be the answer once upon a time, which was communism and then he ends up sort of hating stalinist totalitarianism so that's what we're going to be talking about today because what we did leave you with is he'd come back and he'd published burmese days and it's after publishing burmese days that his life changes forever and it changes because of a woman and a really extraordinary woman at that a woman called eileen o'shaughnessy just in a nutshell who is eileen eileen is very clever she's very beautiful Irish extraction.

1:58So she has that pale skin, these sort of sea blue eyes. She's got dark hair. She's one of the first female graduates from Oxford. She counts Tolkien himself as one of her professors. She is at various times a teacher, a secretary, a journalist. And Orwell himself remarks that she was the nicest person he had ever met and the type of woman he wished to marry. And they have this whirlwind marriage. We're going to go into this in a lot more detail with Anna funder who's written just fabulous book about oil and women but they are married june the 9th 1936 is the date the whirlwind marriage is so romantic but life doesn't start that way does it will you no and they're living in great poverty because he's making no money and she hasn't got much either so they move to a remote cottage in wallington hertfordshire where there is is there no is there no water, no heating.

2:53It's pretty great. It's very basic. I mean, rent is£2 a month, so you can imagine what you're going to get for£2 a month. So, you know, no running water, no indoor lav, no electricity, as you say. But Eileen really sort of, you know, is the strength behind this. She starts working. You know, he thinks he's going to live the good life kind of thing. And she says, well, we kind of need some money coming in. So, it is a pretty dire financial situation that they start their married life with. Despite this dire situation when it comes to money, Eileen is an unacknowledged force for good in his writing.

3:30Not only will she edit stuff, she will give him ideas for stuff. Some of the things that happened to her will be credited to George Orwell's own biography, and you'll find out about that in our Anna Funda episode. But Orwell does start bringing in a little bit of money because shortly before they get married, he He is thinking about the rest of his life and he gets this commission in January 1936 to document the deprived conditions of the unemployed and destitute in the north of England during the Great Depression. And particularly, he's looking at miners and particularly, he's going to immerse himself in their lives.

4:05So he's going to live in places like Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield. Yeah. And this is the trip that's famously published a year later as The Road to Wigan Pier. and this is another of Orwell's classic books, still very much in print, still very much taught at schools and university. And it's his horror at his discovery at what he had never really been aware of in the bubble that he grew up with as a King scholar at Eton with the most privileged of privileged folk at the heart of the empire. And it documents his horror at the miners' living and working conditions and produced what he describes as a passionate argument in favor of socialism.

4:49And it also contains, which is really interesting for what comes, a critique of the socialist movement itself. Already he's critiquing the left almost as soon as joining it. And he's frustrated by its fragmentation and what he sees as its sort of basic ideological confusion, which he believes alienated decent people. And rather like people on the right today dismissing the left as woke with all that that implies he says that socialism draws into itself by magnetic force every juice drinker nudist sandal wearer sex maniac quaker nature cure quack pacifist and feminist in england i wonder which of those today juice drinker.

5:37I think even the right, even the most far right. I'm sure Nigel Farage has juice for breakfast, doesn't he? He wouldn't be considered a lefty thing. The thing is, again, like Orwell does, I mean, what he does is he's just, again, so prescient because that's how you're right. I mean, often the left are dismissed as hemp wearing, tofu eating, surrender monkeys, you know, that kind of thing goes around. And so he was doing it so much earlier. He does this assignment, Road to Wigan Pier as the result of that. He completes the final version of his manuscript in December 1936. But very soon after that, he leaves for Spain.

6:16And Spain is an absolute magnet for the ideological and for those who want to change the world for the better. So Camus said something really beautiful, and it was after the Spanish Civil War was over. He says, it's now nine years that men of my generation have had Spain within their hearts, nine years that they've carried it within them like an evil wound. And this is the most sort of haunting phrase from the Nobel laureate. It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit. And there are times when courage is not its own recompense. At the time, the magnet, not for, you know, juice drinkers or sex maniacs, the magnet for the politically aware and those who have sort of wide-eyed stars in there, you know, think they can change things, is Spain and the Spanish Civil War.

7:10And we should give a little bit of context to this, you know, what was the Spanish Civil War all about? So in the early 20th century, Spain is a country in turmoil. It's much poorer than most of Europe. It's considered enormously exotic. If you read the novels of the 1920s, think of Hemingway in Fiesta, The Sun Also Rises. It's almost like going to a third world country for Hemingway. Going south from Paris is to go into something far more exotic. Spain is somewhere which is barely developed and which is much more backward than France. And along with that comes stark inequalities between landowners and peasants, growing tensions between monarchy and the republican movement the whole business of the catholic church and atheist socialists who disapprove of the rights and the political position of the catholic church and the clashing of powerful left and right-wing ideologies in 1931 the monarchy is overthrown and the second spanish republic is established bringing sweeping forms such as secular education, land distribution, and the reduction.

8:22This is a crucial thing, the reduction of power for the Catholic Church. So in my family, in my wife's family, both of whom are very Catholic, these caused enormous divisions because the more conservative elements very much supported the Catholic Church and the monarchy. And with that, this General Franco, who we'll come to in a second. And it was considered for pious Catholics at the time to be a matter of faith that you would support the monarchy and Franco. And it's also against the backdrop of swirling tensions in the rest of Europe, sort of left and right going at each other. You mentioned Franco, and we should say who Franco is.

9:00Born in December 1892, Francisco Franco Bahamonde came from a family of upper-class naval officers, and he joins the infantry academy at the age of 14, which is much younger than most other boys would. and he's shorter than most other boys in his class. He's a kind of Napoleonic figure. I know I'm shallow. He's not a looker at all. Looks very much like, well, I don't know, a bookkeeper of some sort. Were it not for the uniform and the medals, utterly unnoticeable in a crowd, I would say. And in 1912, Franco serves in Morocco when it was established as a Spanish protectorate. Whatever he lacked in looks and height, he made up for in ambition because he wanted to be a man who was going somewhere.

9:48And the pathway to promotion was through action. So he joins this newly formed brigade, the Regulars, and they're Moroccan troops with Spanish officers. And they often find themselves on the front line. So he's not somebody who is going to be commanding from the back. And these years are formative for him. And his relationship with Moroccan troops is going to be really important. And it's going to be one of the things that elevates him to power. And this is this period in the interwar years where all these colonial armies are fighting with colonial troops. So the British army has vast numbers of Indian troops.

10:24The French have large numbers of Algerian troops and the Spanish have Moroccans. So he's only 24 when he becomes the youngest major in the Spanish army. So, you know, this tenacity and ambition does pay off for Franco. But as William was saying, you know, you You have not just a Spain but a whole Europe riven about the overthrow of the monarchy and the rise of the republic because the republic is not on God's side. So in July 1936, Franco leads this group of right-wing military officers. So he launches a coup against the republican government. But the coup fails. It doesn't work. But what it does do, it succeeds in splitting Spain into two camps.

11:06You have the Republicans made up of the leftists, the socialists, the communists, the anarchists, and the liberal Democrats. You've got the nationalists then on the other side, which is made up of the conservatives, monarchists, fascists, and much of the Catholic hierarchy. And they have got now this rallying point, and that rallying point is General Franco. And of course, there are outsiders interfering. interfering. So as Spain descends into full-scale civil war, with both sides receiving international support, it's of course Franco that is supported by Nazi Germany. And this is the period when Hitler is building up the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, and both are being given their first outing in the Spanish Civil War.

11:52It's the first time that you see cities reduced to complete rubble by aerial bombing campaigns. In the First World War, there'd be little sort of Sopworth camels dropping tiny bombs that were more like grenades. But now we're seeing these massive bombers for the first time unleashing their payloads. And the military support of Nazi Germany gives a massive boost to the fascists and the Republicans are on the back foot. And this is the point when Orwell arrives. It isn't just the Nazis. It's also fascist Italy. Let's not forget, you know, sort of the land of Mussolini was also backing the nationalists because they are singing from the same hymn sheet.

12:29But as far as international interference is concerned, the other side has it too, because you have the Soviet Union then getting involved. So, you know, this is before World War II, remember. The Soviet Union starts sending international brigades of leftist volunteers. This becomes almost a proxy World War. There are people who described it in that way. I mean, I think Orwell himself describes it as, you know, World War II started well before the date of World War II, and Spain was its arena. And you have these new military technologies that William was talking about that are going to be the hallmark of the Second World War.

13:07And the fighting is so bitter and acrimonious that there are horrific atrocities on both sides, including mass executions, the strafing of civilian populations, and that infamous attack on a place called Guernica. And you will know that name, Guernica, because of that Pablo Picasso painting, that very famous 1937 painting. I mean, describe it for us. You're very good at describing paintings, William, for anyone who doesn't know what Guernica is. You couldn't have asked a more difficult painting to describe. It's a scene of sort of cubist chaos, if you like, with a sun beaming down, a sun that could also be a sort of an aerial explosion of a bomb because it's jagged outwards.

13:52There are parts of bulls coming out of walls. There are horses screaming, people with their hands in the air as if shot from behind, bodies on the ground. And it's probably the single most famous, it is the single most famous painting by Picasso and of the modernist movement, 1937. But it's also very much a testament of the time. It's when people are becoming aware of the horrors of the new warfare that is being pioneered by the new technology of Nazi Germany. Yeah, I mean, of its time, but also resonant for years later, because in 2003, there was a reproduction of Gernicke in the United Nations building.

14:36And it was covered up when the US Secretary of State announced the war in Iraq because so powerful was its message, you know, that this kind of warfare is unacceptable, that they covered it up. And I think you talked, didn't you talk to an artist, Willie, who, you know, there is a Ghaznika, which is a painting about the war in Gaza. Yes, it's called Ghaznika and it sort of quotes Picasso. It's got the same sons, the same arrangement of splayed figures in the process of being massacred and shot up. But they are, in this case, Palestinians wearing very clearly a Palestinian caffier. It's moving the Picasso image into Gaza.

15:16There was an extraordinary exhibition some years ago at the Imperial War Museum of the Spanish Civil War, just called Dreams and Nightmares. And if you look at some of the photographs that they displayed, what is really striking is that you have squares full of people in civilian dress, just lying dead on the ground, obviously strafed from above. And they just look as though they've been frozen in a moment going to work or going to the market. They don't look like they're fighters, but they are certainly the casualties of this hideous civil war. And what happens is the more this war progresses, the more it becomes a lightning rod for people who have ideology.

15:59You get African-Americans who joined the Republican International Brigade. And this is kind of really bonkers to think about, but around 90 African-Americans volunteered in the International Brigade on the Republican side. That's the side on the left. The nationalists are on the right. And they are motivated against this fight against fascism and a belief in international solidarity against colonialism and racial discrimination. And so they fight. This is a George Orwell quote. The Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II. After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the US entered World War II?

16:45So, you know, you have this whole small arena of what is going to be a much larger scale of conflict. And it becomes as famous and as well written as it is because so many writers head off there. Most famous, Ernest Hemingway, who's already written a novel in Spain, which I mentioned before, Fiesta, Sun Also Rises. and now this is For Whom the Bell Tolls, which some think to be his great masterpiece. I personally prefer Farewell to Arms, but it's a spectacular image of these Republican fighters trying to blow up a bridge in Spain at this time. It's also the novel which Did the Earth Move For You comes from, for those that know the Hemingway.

17:32The other person who goes there, of course, is Laurie Lee, who I met and chatted with before he died when I won my first literary prize. Laurie Lee gave it to me for City of Jits. And we chatted about his time in Spain. And so I actually got this from the horse's mouth. And for him, it was this great, great liberation, not only fighting for the Republic, but also he'd come from a very small town, Cotswolds, sided with rosy territory, and suddenly catapulted into this world with Hemingway and with Orwell and all these other extraordinary characters. Can I just tell you the other person who went over to fight in this war was Decker Mitford.

18:10Did she fight too? She has two sisters who are Nazi sympathizers. The oldest sister in the Mitford family is the famous writer Nancy Mitford. Decker falls in love with a communist, fall madly deeply in love, and they both head off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. This is an absolute melting pot of intellectuals, if you like, interesting people. That is where Orwell finds himself in the middle of. Join us after the break and we'll tell you what happens as soon as he arrives in December 1936.

18:49So Orwell doesn't go to Spain as a fighter. He thinks he's going there to report the civil war as a journalist, which is what Hemingway, for example, was doing. But unlike Hemingway, on arrival in Barcelona, he's so profoundly moved by the revolutionary atmosphere that he immediately abandons his journalistic plans and decides to enlist as a soldier. And what happens to him then is how he and Eileen, who is also with him after a break, she comes and joins him, what they find the hypocrisy and the growing totalitarianism of the left dictated by the growing Stalinist influence from Russia completely changes his attitudes.

19:36And so this is the crucial moment in which Orwell verges rightwards. It is certainly what's happening with Soviet Russia, but it's also the British left, which starts getting on his nerves and big time because initially he wants to join this larger communist-led international brigade. And he goes to the headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain and says, I'd really like to join the big communist-led international brigade. it's international, I meet lots of people, it's the biggest one, can I join it? But Harry Pollock says actually, oh, well, you know what, you're politically unreliable and he won't help him because he's not the right type of lefty.

20:16He feels rejected. He feels this is really strange. And why is somebody who's so willing to fight being given a purity test that he's failing? And a purity test that's basically set by the Soviets, not by London or people who know him. And so, you know, he starts then going into the ranks. Not set by Spain either. Yeah. Just set by Stalin. So by accident, because he's still sort of wanting to be part of this, he's funneled into the ranks of the Communist Party's greatest political enemy in Spain. He starts getting involved with the Independent Labour Party of Spain. It's a small maverick socialist group, and it's allied with anti-Stalinist lefties, the anti-Stalinist Workers' Party of Marxist unification.

21:02They have a snappy title or the P-O-U-M for short. Boom. So he becomes a member of Boom and they're the ones who give him accreditation because he can't even get accreditation from the British Labour Party because he's not the right kind of lefty. And he doesn't think the Stalinists would like him or he doesn't particularly want to join them immediately. So finally, he finds this home. But the problem is, in Spain, it's the wrong kind of left and it's not the right kind of left. So he shows, I think, a degree of naivety that he's coming in to fight for a cause. He's this sort of soldier poet who's going to be on the right side.

21:38And he ends up in, boom, they're the only ones who will have him. So he arrives in Barcelona at the close of 1936. And what he witnesses is a society transformed by revolutionary fervor, a radical contrast to all the kind of rigid class structures that he's been railing about in Britain. And initially, he's completely won over by it. He describes the atmosphere as the sudden emergence into an era of equality and freedom. And after the racial hierarchies of Burma and the class structure of England, he thinks he's arrived in a sort of classless Eden. and he observes a city where the working class is in control apparently with every wall scrawled with hammer and sickle and every shop klectomized.

22:28He sees it as the living embodiment of the ideals he'd been seeking to understand since his return to Burma. So his initial attitude is of enormous excitement and he's thrilled. But there are also these amazing characters who you know make the whole thing seemed so romantic. So people like a woman called La Pasionada, her real name was Isadora Dolores, Ibaruri Gomez. And she is this amazing, strong woman who gives these fiery speeches about the Spanish Civil War. Her favorite phrase becomes this Republican battle cry. No pasarán, no pasarán is her cry, which means they shall not pass. You know, it's very Gandalf the grey.

23:10But she is the one who says, you know what? We know that people are coming to us. They gave up everything, their homes, their country, their fortune, fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, sisters, and children. They came and they told us, we are here. Your cause, Spain's cause, is our cause. And that's the kind of rhetoric. But then he goes to the front, William, and this is the Aragon front. Tell us about the Aragon front. Yeah. And this is where things begin to go pear-shaped because, as everyone finds in warfare, most of warfare is about the cold, boredom, and surviving. And Orwell notes his hierarchy of needs as he's sitting in his trench.

23:49He says, firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. Listing the enemy is a bad last in the winter on the Zaragoza front. The Pum, whose name you enjoyed so much, is basically a sort of Trotskyist party. it's one of several left dispositions but of course the trotskists are now persona non grata in the Soviet Union the Soviet Union is supplying the most of the weapons for the Republicans so he has not chosen an easy position and while he's driven by a desire to fight fascism Orwell quickly observes the kind of massive inefficiency of his unit concluding that Spaniards were competent at many things but not at making war yeah I mean it's a harsh judgment I I mean, part of the problem for them is that they're not getting help from anybody else.

24:39Not really. The British government has a policy of non-intervention, officially neutral. But, you know, they actually effectively end up working against the Spanish Republic because Western democracies won't sell arms to the Republican government. And when it's the legitimate Republican government that's overthrown by Franco, they don't come to its aid, even though it isn't the actual government. And because of the Second World War, I think we all forget how far right the British were at this period and how many Nazi and fascist sympathizers there were in the British upper classes at this period.

25:15That all gets kind of rewritten out of history when we end up at war with Nazi Germany. But there are many among the ruling class in Britain that think Franco is wonderful. Hello, Mitfids. I mean, you know, sort of families are split in half by this. Eileen arrives in Barcelona in February 1937, and she comes in an official capacity because she's the secretary to John McNair, the independent Labour Party representative in Spain. So she immediately gets to work. She starts producing a newsletter. And while she's sort of working away, Orwell is bored out of his gourd because nothing much is happening apart from he's getting very, very cold and very, very bored and observing all these weird fractions and factions in the left.

25:58And it's all really ticking him off. So he gets leave in April 1937. Eileen comes and visits him and notes that he's tanned and well, but afflicted by lice. But I think it's Eileen, actually, in Barcelona headquarters that notices before Orwell does the divisions on the left and the fact that the left is about to eat itself. and there's a Stalinist orchestrated purge of his party, the party he's fighting for, boom, and it's denounced by its own allies as a fascist organization. It's not left enough. And this is something that Eileen gets onto very early on, and its members are ended up and imprisoned.

26:37And this is Orwell's first direct encounter with the insidious nature of totalitarian communism. He's come from the world of British imperialism, which he knows is a bad thing, and is oppressing freedom. But this is the point that he realized it's just not the right and imperialism, which is oppressive, that the left has its own version of totalitarianism, which is just as bad, if not worse. Well, I mean, and that purge, taking people off, that fear of that is going to remain with him even when he goes back to England, because, you know, there will be times when there's a knock on the door and he won't answer because he thinks it is the communists who have come to get him because he was on the wrong bit of the left, even when he's back in England.

27:19Anyway, May the 3rd, 1937, police units attempt to seize the Central Anarchist-controlled telephone exchange. And this is immediately met with resistance. There are five days of intense street fighting and there are people falling everywhere. And just to clarify, this is left-on-left fighting. This has nothing to do with the fascists or with Franco. This is two different factions of the left killing each other. Yeah. And so, I mean, you've got casualties ranging between 500 and 1 ,000 dead. And Orwell, who's on leave in the city, he spends three nights defending the Pum headquarters on the rooftop of a cinema with a rifle.

27:59And it is a nightmare unfolding right before his eyes. I mean, he always sort of finds himself in these places where he bears witness to some of the worst that humanity can do to other human beings. So what happens then after, I mean, because Pum is defeated in the end. So what happens then, William, when you've got Pum defeated? The faction for which all has been fighting is now persona non grata. But luckily, just at the right moment, and this actually potentially saves his life, ironically, he's shot by a sniper, but not killed. Yeah, who'd have thought that? He's on the Aragon front, and he's shot in the throat by a fascist sniper, because at this point he's fighting fascists.