Franco had never claimed to be a politician but he was of the intuitive right, an instinctive defender of capitalism … his programme: no working-class trade unions, help for peasants but land for landowners, concord with the church, above all no democracy. ibid.
These aims of the Spanish right could only be secured by oppression. ibid.
Rome’s approval was a great reinforcement to the devout. ibid.
The people of Barcelona celebrated. Within days of the army rising, revolution had burst out spontaneously in most of Republican Spain. The Spanish Civil War V: Inside the Revolution
In these first weeks of the civil war the militias were the only real defence of the Republic. ibid.
Catalonia was the anarchists’ stronghold. ibid.
For them, the campaign was not just against the army rebels but against capitalism itself. ibid
Everyone now worked only for the community. ibid.
As the anarchists weakened, the communists became stronger. ibid.
Two years which had transformed Republican hopes into memories of failure. The Spanish Civil War VI: Victory and Defeat
The popular army had attempted to match the enemy in regular combat and failed. ibid.
There was a huge increase in German military aid to the Nationalists. ibid.
Catalonia had fallen: for these people the war was over. ibid.
In July 1936 General Francisco Franco led a revolt backed by the army, a revolt that soon blossomed into full-scale civil war. Foreign intervention in this confrontation seems to have begun right away. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia **** audiobook 8.05.29, foreword
The nationalists’ international brigade of left-wing partizans made up of volunteers from many countries including England, France and the United States came to Spain to join the loyalist. ibid.
The red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns further up the line, the muddy ice-cold trenches of the mountains: this was in late December 1936. ibid. ch1
It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. ibid.
Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. ibid.
Complete social equality between all ranks. ibid.
Every militia column had at least one dog attached to it as a mascot. ibid.
Above all it meant mud, lice, hunger and cold. ibid.
A ragged barricade of sandbags, a red flag fluttering, the smoke of dugout fires … a deep festering bed of bread crusts, excrement and rusty tins. ibid.
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last. ibid.
The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.S. but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society. Of course there was no perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war. ibid.
For days together clothes, boots, blankets and rifles were more of less coated with mud. ibid.
Firewood was the one thing that really mattered. ibid.
‘It is a comic opera with an occasional death.’ ibid. visiting big-wig
Of course they [guns] were far too precious to be fired. ibid.
It was pneumonia that we were fighting against. ibid.
If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered, ‘To fight against fascism,’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered, ‘Common decency.’ ibid.
It was only the beginning of the revolution and not the complete thing. ibid.
Every subsequent reshuffling of the government was a move towards the right ... The Russians were in a position to dictate terms … It was the communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain. ibid.
The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. ibid.
No-one was penalised for holding the wrong political opinions. ibid.
Meanwhile nothing happened, nothing ever happened. The English had got into the habit of saying that this wasn’t a war, it was a bloody pantomime. We were hardly under direct fire from the fascists. The only danger was from stray bullets, which, as the lines curved forward on either side, came from several directions. All the casualties at this time were from strays. Arthur Clinton got a mysterious bullet that smashed his left shoulder and disabled his arm, permanently, I am afraid. ibid.
The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war indeed! In war all solderies are lousy, at the least when it is warm enough. The men that fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles. ibid.
I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life – snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. – had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. ibid.