(7 of 10)
He had scarcely written these words when he met their reality headon. A few months after marrying Eileen O'Shaughnessy, 30, an Oxford graduate who was working for an advanced degree in psychology in London, Orwell went to Spain. The attempt by Generalissimo Francisco Franco to topple an elected left-wing government had led to civil war. Orwell could not pass up the chance to see "democracy standing up to Fascism at last." He arrived in Barcelona at the end of 1936 and found a city being run by the underdogs: "It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle."
Orwell was enchanted, "breathing the air of equality." A hotel manager scolded him for offering a tip to an elevator operator; barbers posted anarchist placards by their chairs announcing that they were no longer slaves. The signs of class he so detested in his own country had disappeared: "Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. 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."
He recounted his odyssey in Homage to Catalonia (1938). He joined a local militia unit and marched into trouble. Franco's troops fired at him, as expected; they were the enemy. But while recuperating from a bullet wound in the throat, Orwell learned that Communists in the Spanish government had outlawed the loose alliance of radicals he had joined in the struggle against Franco. The independent workers' stronghold in Barcelona was not, apparently, what Madrid or Moscow had in mind. Suddenly Orwell and his colleagues-at-arms were being called fascists, Franco's hired killers, by the Communist papers in Spain and Europe. Purges and reprisals began in Barcelona. Released from the hospital, Orwell was forced into hiding and then out of the country. His journey from exhilaration to exile took six months.
Spain left definitive marks on Orwell's character; all the political writing he did after escaping the civil war was sharpened by his keen sense of betrayal. He had seen the future, and it worked far too well; the world was being staked out by mirror-image tyrannies equally ruthless in stamping out the individual. The workers in Barcelona had been punished by the Communists for the crime of being unorthodox; they became, until suppressed, a more important enemy than Franco.
Back home in England, Orwell read accounts of the events in Spain and realized that he was being fed hogwash: "I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories." This phenomenon frightened him, he wrote, "because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world."