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> Orwell maintains that revolution is the only way to remove from power the oppressive business-based ruling class of the type that has dominated the West since World War II.

This line from the article seems to misrepresent Orwell. Perhaps it’s been too long since I’ve read Homage to Catalonia, but I’m pretty sure he arrived in Spain without any grand ideas of being part of a revolution, and quite simply wanted to fight against fascists. He makes it clear in his book that he initially had little understanding of the differences in ideology among the various left-wing groups, and chose to join the anarchists rather arbitrarily.

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"I’m pretty sure he arrived in Spain without any grand ideas of being part of a revolution, and quite simply wanted to fight against fascists."

He was a socialist before going to spain, but his idea was to go there as a journalist. But once there, he felt he had to activly take arms to fight fascism. (and like others mentioned, he joined not a anarchist, but a socialist militia, but not one under sowjet control, so he later experienced first hand, how the sowjets dealt with competition, which lead to "animal farm" and 1984)

But he did also met many anarchists and the differences between anarchists and socialist militias were rather blurry for the people in the trenches anyway.

What I really like about Orwell, as opposed to the usual glorifying propaganda - he just wrote down what he saw. The good and the bad. He did not close his eyes to the ugly side of the revolution (trash everywhere for example)

To me, the book was mostly an eyewitness account. Orwell himself remarks on the absurd amount of factions and how bizarre things were after returning from the front. I agree with your take that he went in quite blind, but you can feel that he has experience as a journalist. I was most impressed by his descriptions of small acts of humanity in a hopelessly complex conflict.

He however later explicitly called for revolution, and set out an explicit program for how he believed a revolution in England needed to happen, so whether or not it misrepresents his views at the time of Homage to Catalonia, he not only supported revolution but explicitly argued it was necessary towards the end of his life.

Which also leads to him making a fundamentally wrong analysis of the situation.

Now before you all yell at me, let me explain where I am coming from.

One of the great tragedies regarding the rise of fascism in Germany is that the left-wing forces did not manage to unite in time to stop it. Communists and social democrats preferred to fight each other instead. They did work together in the resistance later but then it was way too late.

This is fundamental for understanding the behavior of the communists in the Spanish Civil War. Simplified, they switched strategies from immediate revolution to focusing on fighting fascism first.

The Anarchist and other left-wing radicals like the POUM on the other hand wanted to do a revolution WHILE the republic was fighting for survival against fascism.

Do I need to explain why such a strategy was madness? They were destabilizing the country while not really contributing that much militarily. In a war you need a united leadership, you need clear hierarchies, that is how you win. You don't win with romanticism.

So what was to be done? Yes, the Republic had to get rid of these radicals.

I know people like Orwell's interpretation of history because it fits with their anti-communist biases. Sure you can say the communists had plans for after the war and you might not agree with those plans if you are not very fond of communism, that is fair. But saying the Anarchists and other left-wing radicals where the good ones, makes no sense. At least the communists did focus on fighting fascism.

There is reason other than the Soviets that prevented the communists to ally with the social-democrats in Germany: multiple deaths, smear campaigns, and genuine hatred.

But other than that you're 100% correct, the Soviet stayed with republican Spain until the end despite POUM secession in Catalonia.

> One of the great tragedies regarding the rise of fascism in Germany is that the left-wing forces did not manage to unite in time to stop it. Communists and social democrats preferred to fight each other instead.

That seems to point to some sensible people being in the ranks of the social democrats. Communism would have been a far bigger disaster for Germany than fascism - which is really saying something given that the outcome of fascism was the destruction of the nation and decades of foreign military occupation.

The real tragedy here is there were 3 political groups, none focused on and successful in increasing the prosperity of the people who they governed. They needed a competent liberal tradition.

> Communism would have been a far bigger disaster for Germany than fascism

This is a absolutely insane take. Especially in retrospect. Arguing that maybe some people did seriously think that fascism might the the less bad option would be a stretch and point to willful ignorance but arguing for this position now that the have the historical facts is insane.

Please go visit Auschwitz, visit Buchenwald and tell me again how fascism was the better alternative. That is where the "sensible people" in the ranks of the social democrats did end up. Dead. The Nazis did not stop at the communists, not at the social democrats, not at the trade unionists, not at the Jews, not at the queer people, not a the Gypsy and Roma, not at people with disabilities, not the "antisocial" people, not at anyone really.

Don't tell me how GULAGs were the same thing, they were not. Political repression in the Soviet Union was horrible but even the most intense years do not come close to the industrial scale murder the Nazis did. That es the equivalent of saying the US were not better than the Nazis because they put Japanese-Americans in camps and used the nuclear weapons. No, there were lots of messed up things but the crimes of the Nazis were of a quality that is unique.

Fascism is like a hot stove. People touched it, then there was a very visceral "nobody is doing that again!" reaction. The fascist states flamed out - often violently - and were absorbed into more successful ideologies. Ironically the outcomes have been, relatively speaking, pretty reasonable for the descendants of the fascists.

Whereas communism was just a big, ongoing failure. Countless deaths, brutal atrocities things like the Holodomor or the Chinese landlord butcherings. Nations plunged into poverty for generations. Instability and eventual collapse in the case of the USSR leading to a brutal decade and eventual quasi-dictatorship in Russia.

The priority, by far, is to suppress the communists. If communism takes hold a nation is doomed. Unwinding a communist takeover proved much more challenging than rooting out a Nazi infestation. In hindsight the Germans ended up with better outcomes. It is easy to imagine an impoverished communist Germany today because the communists ended up with half of the country after the war and we saw what happened.

> Please go visit Auschwitz, visit Buchenwald and tell me again how fascism was the better alternative

Those camps killed a few million people. While that is terrible; if that was all the Nazis did, they wouldn't be an especially memorable reigime - it is small biscuits to Mao or Stalin. The Holodomor doesn't get special mention like the Holocaust does, it is just another footnote to the long list of people that the communists starved to death.

> Political repression in the Soviet Union was horrible but even the most intense years do not come close to the industrial scale murder the Nazis did.

I dunno; I suspect that the communist famines came in waves of high- and low- intensity. It wouldn't have been annual famines, it would have been bursts of millions of people dying.

Picking on the Holodomor again because I have the wiki page open, that was ~4 million people in one year. That must be pretty close to the intensity of the Nazi's internal killing machine.

> Whereas communism was just a big, ongoing failure

If Fascism kept on going, it would not be just "failure". Catastrophe would be an understatement. If you are going to compare at least compare on the same basis.

But it didn't keep on going, and that was hardly an accident. It is similar to HIV vs SARS-CoV-2. If COVID lasted as long as AIDS, it'd be a much worse disease. But it doesn't, and HIV is actually the more serious of the two [0]. Similarly, communists taking hold are the bigger threat between fascists and communists - the communists will bring the host country a lot closer to death.

If we're talking counterfactuals, there is a decent chance that the Nazis and Communists would be similar to each other over the long term. Both ideologies do a lot of damage early on and then slowly collapse over a generation or two. The Nazis were more externally aggressive - but from an internal-to-Germany perspective (particularly at the time when nationalism was stronger) that would probably further reinforce the point that political alliances with the Communists are suicidal and defeating the Communists appropriately took priority over any other political issue.

[0] Although, thankfully, these days the treatment has apparently gotten so good that the analogy doesn't work so well. But think HIV in the 80s before they figured out how to deal with it.

> ...hardly an accident

It was accident that the dude also wanted to conquer the world, and doing so at the heart of the western civilization. So of course people had to get rid of him. There are regimes similar to the Nazi today that kept going on because it didn't bother the powerful guys that much.

The "conquer the world" part was the majority of the problem. If the Nazi's had stuck to conquering one or maybe even 2 countries they'd just be another unpleasant crowd in the unpleasant soup of history.

Ethnic cleansing programs aren't that unusual. There are a couple of high profile ones going on today. I'm no history buff but it is a stretch to say Germany stands a head above the other mass killings in history. Even at the time the European colonisers were not gentle men. The Germans obviously made the especially egregious mistake targeting wealthy Europeans who are supposed to be above that sort of thing and also heavily involved in the media which means they get much worse publicity than say, the Ottomans.

They weren't a threat on the same scale as getting Communists in the government. The Communists had a habit of escalating from run-of-the-mill ethnic cleansing to a sort of combined mass-death/economic collapse/generational poverty/social implosion disaster. They were literally the last people anyone should want to be politically empowering. The right option really was a no-compromise dedication to freedom, capitalism and liberalism .

> the communists had a habit of escalating from run-of-the-mill ethnic cleansing to a sort of combined mass-death/economic collapse

I don't agree with this assessment.

Regardless of the fact that ethnic cleansing can happen under communism, at the end of the day, their ideology isn't about that. It's about "common ownership of the means of production". On the other hand, social hierarchy, master race and so on, are major parts of Fascism (and "conquering the world" is not necessarily in it)

And even if you want to argue that their ethnic cleansing isn't that bad, what really bad is the dictatorship with no real coherent ideology other than some guy saying so, and the persecution of dissidents/intellectuals. I have no doubt that had they not lost in WWII, they would run the economy into collapse/slow death similar to the USSR anyway.

... who cares about ideology when stalin decides to starve your nation to death in manufactured famine?

Yes we are going to be starved to death but its for the common good of a working man!

Nazi economy was going to collapse, it was based on expansion and looting.

Many historians make case that hitler started war too soon, but they forget that germany was running out of time and needed war to prevent collapse of their economy.

Arguing about which regime was worse is silly. Counting victims and who kill who and why is meaningless. Both were bloody and run by paranoid morons who left their nations in way worse state

Maoism/lysenkoism? Hello?

The idealogy is fundamentally about delusion and feel goodism over what works, which is why it is prone to authoritarianism and economic collapse (and famines, etc).

> The idealogy is fundamentally about delusion and feel goodism over what works

what's your point? Reminder that some people is arguing this is somehow worst than some ideology that has an explicit goal to kill people en-masse.

Lysenkoism killed approximately 30-40 million Chinese via completely avoidable starvation during the ‘Great Leap Forward’. Far more than Hitler killed (intentionally) through extermination.

And anyone with half a brain saw it was insanity - which is why those who spoke up got shot or sent to the Gulag. Because the ideology was fundamentally one that no one was able to question safely.

So they’re both mass murdering genocidal ideologies.

> the ideology was fundamentally one that no one was able to question safely.

so according to you there are only 2 ideologies in the world: dictatorship and non-dictatorship. I guess simplification is always a great start for an intellectual conversation. By saying that, you essentially dismissed the entire premise of this discussion, because fascism and communism are the same thing I guess, so what are we even talking about?

Also if you're going to compare body counts, then do it right

- First of all, all communist statistics are unreliable estimation, they didn't exactly brag about that to the outside world, do they.

- Second of all, communism was deployed to a much larger population, during a longer time frame, unlike fascism.

Seems like you're arguing communism is worse because it's not bad enough to die early, so it lasted and did more damage, which is a ridiculous argument.

I will not respond to everything because that would require a whole book but please let me highlight some historical facts that I feel you might have confused. You imply that famines were a regular occurrence under communism, this is wrong.

The was never a single famine in the Soviet Union after World War 2. In fact the CIA concluded that the Soviet citizens ate a similar amount of calories with slightly more nutritious food. [0]

Furthermore the idea of famines being typical for communism is contradicted by the basic historical fact that famines were a regular occurrence BEFORE the Soviets took power. The communist regime stopped famines from happening.

Comparing a famine that happened after the country was ravaged by the first world war AND a horrible civil war AND huge societal changes to planned industrial murder is insane.

> Nations plunged into poverty for generations.

Considering that Czarist Russia happened in one of the most backwards places on earth where people still used the wooden plow I would say the Soviet Union becoming a serious competitor to the US is very impressive. And current day Russia is doing rather well all things considered, surviving against at Western sanctions much longer than many predicted. I wouldn't want to live there but it is certainly doing better than many other countries in this world. China has seen a meteoric rise to power under a "communist" leadership. Cuba provide a vastly higher standard of living than comparable countries like Haiti.

It was mostly impoverished countries that have seen communist revolutions. You are confusing cause and effect.

Yes, Western Germany has done very well but is mostly due to the huge investment of the US in it as it was needed as a bulwark against communism.

We have an example on what the communists would do with Germany in Eastern Germany and well it is not very spectacular. No famines. No mass murder. The main issue where of course the wall between Eastern and Western Germany which separated families.

I will not deny the atrocities done during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, they are stomach turning. To say they are typical for communism is a bit dishonest considering the Soviets denounced Mao to the point that diplomatic ties broke. If we played the game like that, we would have to say that the Irish famine or rather genocide is to be considered typical for capitalism.

I don't really like comparing atrocities. Every single one is bad enough on their own.

The main point is that anyone with a shed of humanity has a duty to be anti-fascist first, after that we can battle out whatever system is better or worse.

[0] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000498133.pdf

> The was never a single famine in the Soviet Union after World War 2.

That is technically wrong [0]. But more importantly is the fact that you're arguing that most of the deaths were before WWII - ie, the USSR (single handily!) was comparable to the Nazis even before the Nazis went full Nazi. And then throw China in to the mix. This history is why it is a higher priority to root out powerful domestic Communists than to neutralise the Fascists. Even though both were terrible, the Communists managed to be the scarier of the two, even at the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%93...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...

From polish perspective, a nazis told you you are subhuman and treat you like it.

Soviets told you they are your best friend while torturing your brother and using you cousin to snitch on you.

You pick which oppression is worse - overt or covert.

Objectively soviets did way more damage and set Eastern Europe decades back. Under nazis you knew who was the enemy, under soviet everyone was paranoid who the enemy is.

Its still debating which one of your limbs to cut off.

Eh, I’d argue the only reason Eastern Europe might consider the impact of communism worse than Nazi’ism is because Nazi’ism flamed out quickly. So ‘stabbed with a knife once’ instead of ‘punched in the face daily for decades’.

Can you imagine how shitty it would have been if Germany had won WW2?

My guess is 1/4 of the existing population would have survived.

The only reason it wasn’t (quite) that bad is because they didn’t have the time to settle in and only murdered people they could easily find while on their way to the front.

I am not trying to make a case who was worse.

But that under nazis it would be nazis punching, under soviets it would be your neighbor under command of soviets.

Soviets insidiousness had additional layer that was actively destroying national trust/cohesion and instilling culture of fear and snitching.

Stazi vs Gestapo approaches.

A lot of the death toll for Jews in Eastern Europe was from local ‘auxiliaries’ to the Nazi Einsatzgruppens [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Einsatzgruppen].

If they had more time (and weren’t fighting a war at the time) the same would have happened but more directly murderous.

Frankly, it’s pretty crazy that they distracted themselves from a massive war (which had quickly turned to a war of survival/attrition) to round up and murder people in areas they had already conquered just because of religious affiliation. But psychos are gonna psycho.

Stalinism and Nazism were roughly within the same order of magnitude, if one doesn’t count the direct war death toll. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Sovi....]

And Maoism is likely on the order of 30-40 million.

The nazi’s were definitely unique, as were the nature of their crimes.

But nomitive communism has a lot of blood on its hands.

> Communism would have been a far bigger disaster for Germany than fascism - which is really saying something given that the outcome of fascism was the destruction of the nation and decades of foreign military occupation.

Huh? Chemnitz, Leipzig, Potsdam etc were communist.

Germany is still under foreign military occupation. Only one of the armies left. The communists formed a Sinatra doctrine that the other foreign military occupation never did.

> Germany is still under foreign military occupation.

I think the US actually started withdrawing recently. But the point is the people in Germany are in a great position compared to anywhere that got serious about Communism.

The Chinese might be the first group to go from Communist to prosperous; we'll see how they go on a per capita bases. But when the dust settles it won't be because they have people running the show subscribe to communist principles of the 1930s Europe variety.

It's been too long since I've read Homage to Catalonia as well, and I agree with your understanding.

However, he did have quite complex views after learning more.

The one thing that is constant from the beginning of the book until the end is Orwell's antifascism. He believed it was essential to kill fascists, and that he had a duty to personally kill as many as he could.

At the beginning, he didn't really care whether he killed fascists under an anarchist flag or a socialist flag.

By the end, he was disillusioned with the unwillingness of the free world to support the underequipped antifascist forces. And he discovered to his dismay how Soviet authoritarians undermined the antifascist cause in their own drive to seize power.

It doesn't seem that he ever figured out the best way to fight fascism and authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but it's pretty clear that he still thought it was important to destroy them, and he saw up close how Spanish anarchism by itself wasn't very effective at doing that.

This makes him sound like a serial killer rather than a soldier or a writer. I don't think he gave a damn about killing any individual private or corporal on the fascist side except in pursuit of fighting their ideology, and so far as I know he never tried to assassinate Mosley. Opposing fascism itself was his goal.

The controversial second half of The Road to Wigan Pier contains a section where it seems Orwell regards individual fascists almost as mislead socialists and is strikingly sympathetic to them. See the paragraph that begins "In order to combat Fascism it is necessary to understand it, which involves admitting that it contains some good as well as much evil." It is obvious to me that he'd much rather stop them from becoming fascists before the declaration of war than kill them afterwards.

He also states pretty clearly, that he did not feel any hate towards the fascist sniper who shot him. Very british sportsmanlike, he said he would have rather congratulate him for the great shot.

> where it seems Orwell regards individual fascists almost as mislead socialists

Mussolini, the guy who, like, invented Fascism, was the editor of a socialist newspaper for a while. His views definitely grew out of Socialism, but with the stuff he didn't like taken out, and a whole heap of nationalism added in.

Sure, but he labeled himself a Libertarian Socialist afterwards, which was what I was referring to.

And I would argue he did figure out the best way, he wrote books about it.

An article that clarifies that somewhat: https://www.biographyonline.net/socialism-george-orwell/

Eric Blair uses the word socialism in a way that is somewhat different from modern usage and especially he is not communist "Unfortunately, many in America equate Socialism with Soviet Communism.".

That isn't different in modern usage, Libertarian Socialism has nothing to do with Soviet Communism.

Libertarian Socialism, means Anarchism, the topic of this thread.

And the reason why America equates Socialism with Soviet Communism is the same reason America associates Libertarianism with Right Wing Corporatism.

Propaganda.

Libertarian Socialism also includes groups that do not consider themselves anarchist, such as Libertarian Marxist. All of which are closer to and more sympathetic to anarchism than "Soviet Communism", though.

i read Homage to Catalonia on the TGV to... Catalonia drinking a bottle from De Wijnerij in Amsterdam. it was fantastic

2018. Rebellion broke out on the Spanish side of Catalonia a week later.

> This line from the article seems to misrepresent Orwell...He makes it clear in his book that he initially had little understanding of the differences in ideology among the various left-wing groups, and chose to join the anarchists rather arbitrarily.

The one misrepresenting Orwell is yourself, he joined the communist POUM, not the anarchists.

He got a detail wrong, but I think this takes little away from his point. Orwell considered the possibility of joining several of the factions and his choice to join POUM was ultimately arbitrary. His choice to join was not due to a perfect personal alignment of his with the goals of POUM.

Thanks for the correction. One thing I definitely don’t remember from the book is the alignment of all the groups. I checked again and what happened was that the POUM (independent communists) ended up fighting alongside the anarchists against the Soviet-aligned communists.

In fact, his wider body of work ends up prefiguring a politics that's primarily anti-communist, not leftist.

No, anti-authoritarian, and pretty much leftist, as in against hierarchical order and for an egalitarian society.

The word primarily is important in my comment; snitching on CPGB members and fellow travellers to the government does very much make you an anti-communist.

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