"In the clear yet cold winter of 1936-1937 a 33-year-old George Orwell
found himself fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
He was to vividly record his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, one of the first-rate nonfictional books on the brutality of war.
Now, with almost 50% of Catalans in favor
breaking away from Spain, Spaniards are facing a possible fracturing of
their country. Absurd? Impossible? Illegal? Unconstitutional? Well,
Orwell had never imagined that the Barcelona he admired, where “the
working class was in the saddle,” and where “there was a belief in the
revolution and the future,” was to have “lies and rumors circulating
everywhere, the posters screaming from the hoardings that I and everyone
like me was a Fascist spy” in less than six months’ time.
No one is predicting that in today’s Spain fellow countrymen will be killing each other, and the Minister of Defense has said that Spanish military involvement will be unnecessary as long as everybody “fulfills their duty.”
But there are several salient historical and political parallels
between what Orwell experienced in the Spanish Civil War and the current
independence movement in Catalonia."
Read more from source at El Pais in English here.
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