Etikett: spanska inbördeskriget

Under sommaren 1937 skickade Left Review ut en uppmaning till en mängd författare och intellektuella att redovisa och kort motivera sina ställningstagande angående det spanska inbördeskriget, under rubriken Authors Takes Sides on the Spanish War. Orwell avböjde vänligt men bestämt att medverka. Eller ja, bestämt minsann, men inte direkt vänligt…

Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet-hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody. Moreover, I know what is  happening and has been happening on the Government side for months past, i.e. that Fascism is being rivetted on the Spanish workers under the pretext of resisting Fascism; also that since May a reign of terror has been proceeding and all the jails and any place that will serve as a jail are crammed with prisoners who are not only imprisoned without trial but are half-starved, beaten and insulted. I dare say you know it too, though God knows anyone who could write the stuff overleaf would be fool enough to believe anything, even the war-news in the Daily Worker. But the chances are that you – whoever you are who keep sending me this thing – have money and are well-informed; so no doubt you know something about the inner history of the war and have deliberately joined in the defence of ”democracy” (i.e. capitalism) racket in order to aid in crushing the Spanish working class and thus indirectly defend your dirty little dividends.

This is more than 6 lines, but if I did compress what I know and think about the Spanish war into 6 lines you wouldn’t print it. You wouldn’t have the guts.

By the way, tell your pansy friend Spender that I am preserving specimens of his war-heroics and that when the time comes when he squirms for shame at having written it, as the people who wrote the war-propaganda in the Great War are squirming now, I shall rub it in good and hard.

George Orwell (1998), Facing Unpleasant Facts, ed. Peter Davison (The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. XI (1937-1939); London: Secker & Warburg), s. 67.

Dags att återuppta historien om Orwells äventyr i Spanien. Nedan citeras ett brev till Cyril Connolly daterat 8 juni 1937. Orwell har vid detta laget redan hunnit bli skjuten och ligger nedbäddad på ett sanatorium utanför Barcelona. Till Connolly skriver Orwell att han planerar att skriva en bok när han väl kommit hem till England, inte minst eftersom det i engelsk press nästan uteslutande är den kommunistiska synvinkeln på motståndet mot Franco som kommer till uttryck. Orwell skriver om sin tid i det revolutionära Barcelona och bland trupperna vid fronten:

I have seen wonderful things & at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before. On the whole, though I am sorry not to have seen Madrid, I am glad to have been on a comparatively little-known front among Anarchists & Poum people instead of in the International Brigade, as I should have been if I had come here with C.P. [Communist Party] credentials instead of I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party] ones. A pity you didn’t come up to our position & see me when you were in Aragon. I would have enjoyed giving you tea in a dugout.

Orwells upplevelser av Barcelona är särskilt intressanta. I boken som han kom att skriva, Homage to Catalonia, berättade Orwell om stämningarna i det revolutionära och strikt egalitära Barcelona. Han sammanfattade sina intryck med följande rader (för övrigt nyligen citerade av Tony Judt som avslutning på ”What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy”):

There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

Värt att kämpa för alltså. Vilket för oss till nästa punkt angående brevet ovan, nämligen att Orwell hamnade i det anarkistiska P.O.U.M. och inte det kommunistiska lägret. Denna omständighet kom att få avgörande konsekvenser. För P.O.U.M. blev snart utsatt för en smutskastningskampanj från kommunistisk sida, åtföljt av arresteringar och arkebuseringar. Således: i Barcelona kom Orwell att se inte bara ”wonderful things”, utan även tämligen hemska saker. Peter Davison skriver:

Of one thing there can be no doubt: genuine Terror haunted Albacete and Barcelona in and after May 1937. Orwell may have been no political theoretician, especially in 1937; and he certainly did not have the facts available to him that have now surfaced; but, intuitively, he assessed the position accurately. The vision of a socialist society that he experienced on first arriving in Barcelona was not destroyed by Franco; it was betrayed by his Communist allies. As described by him in Homage to Catalonia, this has all the inevitability of tragedy. That ‘peculiar evil feeling in the air—an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred’ that he found on his final visit to Barcelona was precisely that of the miasma of evil and terror dramatised in his favourite Shakespeare play, Macbeth. The effect of that experience marked all else he wrote and did until the day he died.

Orwell, George (1998), Facing Unpleasant Facts, ed. Peter Davison (The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. XI (1937-1939); London: Secker & Warburg), s. 28, 35.

Den andra volymen av Orwells Complete Works sträcker sig över åren 1937–1939. Det spanska inbördeskriget upptar naturligtvis en avsevärd del av denna volym, som inleds med en beskrivning av Orwell, hämtad ur ett brev som Labour MP:n Jennie Lee skrev till en väninna strax efter Orwells död 1950.

In the first year of the Spanish Civil War I was sitting with friends in a hotel in Barcelona when a tall thin man with a ravished complexion came over to the table. He asked me if I was Jennie Lee, and if so, could tell him where to join up. He said he was an author: had got an advance on a book from Gollancz, and had arrived ready to drive a car or do anything else, preferably to fight in the front line. I was suspicious and asked what credentials he had brought from England. Apparantly he had none. He had seen no-one, simply paid his own way out. He won me over by pointing to the boots over his shoulder. He knew he could not get boots big enough for he was over six feet. This was George Orwell and his boots arriving to fight in Spain.

I came to know him as a deeply kind man and a creative writer. […] He was a satirist who did not conform to any orthodox political or social pattern. […] The only thing I can be quite certain of is, that up to his last day George was a man of utter integrity; deeply kind, and ready to sacrifice his last wordly possessions — he never had much — in the cause of democratic socialism.

Part of his malaise was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts, The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. XI (1937–1939), artikel 355A, s. 5.