Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

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Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Page 24

by Adam Hochschild


  During his brief visits to Barcelona, Orwell wrote, “you seemed to spend all your time holding whispered conversations in corners of cafés and wondering whether that person at the next table was a police spy.”

  Sometimes he was a spy, and today we can read Homage to Catalonia side by side with these agents’ reports. For more than half a century, all such records were tightly locked up, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union some have become accessible.

  Certain documents, including the papers removed from Eileen Blair’s hotel room, are believed to remain in closed files in Moscow. But among what we can now see is a two-page inventory of what the police took that day. This includes such items as “correspondence exchanged between Eileen and Eric BLAIR,” “correspondence of G. ORWELL (alias Eric BLAIR) concerning his book ‘The Road to Wigan Pier,’” and “checkbook for the months of October and Nov 1936.” There were also letters to and from a long list of people and “various papers with drawings and doodles.”

  Some reports, as well as a translation of one letter to Eileen whose English original has disappeared, are in German. This was evidently the work of Germans involved in running Soviet espionage in Barcelona. One German communist agent in the city, Hubert von Ranke, subsequently had a change of heart: before the end of 1937 he would leave Spain, leave the Party, and declare that the people he had spied on and interrogated “were not ‘agents of Franco’ but honest revolutionaries.” Someone else may have been reporting to André Marty, the much-disliked French communist chief of the International Brigades, for the list of materials confiscated from Eileen is in French.

  A British communist, Walter Tapsell, meanwhile was reporting to London, writing to Party superiors there that Orwell was “the most respected man in the contingent” of Britons fighting with the POUM militia but that “he has little political understanding.” Another member of this farrago of agents was Hugh O’Donnell, the British Communist Party representative in Spain. Orwell and his wife knew him, but what they almost certainly did not know was his Party code name, O’Brien—which, by an uncanny coincidence, Orwell was to give to the sinister villain of his novel 1984.

  In Homage, Orwell wrote, “You had all the while a hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police.” This was even more true than he knew. David Crook, for example, another British communist, posed as a POUM sympathizer but meanwhile was reporting everything to his Soviet handlers, including his suspicions that Eileen Blair was having an extramarital affair—information potentially useful for blackmail. Crook claims in his memoirs that during the long Spanish lunch-and-siesta, he used to slip into the office used by Eileen and the handful of other Britons and Americans working in the POUM building, purloin documents, and quickly photograph them at a Soviet safe house. By design Crook was even briefly jailed during the crackdown on the POUM, so he could report on POUM prisoners and offer to help smuggle their letters out. He would die at ninety in the year 2000, having lived his last five decades in China, his faith largely unshaken despite five years’ imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution.

  • • •

  Almost all journalists who try to explain a complex conflict in a foreign country assume an air of authority. Even if just arrived in a new war zone the day before, an opinion columnist will rarely say he or she is unsure what the causes of violence are and what should be done about them. By contrast, one of the more subtle virtues of Homage to Catalonia is its humility. “It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes,” Orwell writes in one of several such cautionary notes. “. . . . Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.” He published his book in 1938, less than a year after he had left Spain and while the war was still raging. But he never forgot that he had seen “only one corner of events,” and as time passed, to his enormous credit, on some points he was not afraid to change his mind.

  In Homage, for example, he blames the Republic’s military defeats on its internal conflicts and the suppression of the social revolution he had so admired in Barcelona. He declares that if the government “had appealed to the workers of the world in the name not of ‘democratic Spain’ but of ‘revolutionary Spain,’ it is hard to believe that they would not have got a response”—in the form of strikes and boycotts by millions of workers in other countries. For Orwell, however, this was a rare moment of wildly wishful thinking. Most “workers of the world” had long since shown themselves not to be the revolutionary internationalists that radical intellectuals hoped for, something most notably demonstrated by their willingness to slaughter each other in huge numbers in the First World War.

  But by the time he published a long essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” in 1943, six years after he had left Spain and four after Franco’s troops had won the war, Orwell had come to feel that “disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat.” Instead he believed, as do most historians today, that “the outcome of the Spanish War was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin.” Rome and Berlin had supplied Franco with a flood of troops, aviators, advisers, and advanced weapons, like the latest Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter planes and Stuka dive bombers, each of which had its combat debut in Spain. And not just London and Paris, but Washington as well, had refused to sell arms to the democratically elected government of the Republic. The “Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false,” he wrote in his 1943 essay—somewhat misleadingly, for this belief was not limited to Trotskyists; it was exactly what Orwell himself had said in Homage. But he was completely right when he continued: “The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn’t.” And in the scope of the larger struggle against fascism, he told a friend, the suppression of the POUM, however unjust, was something that had “had far too much fuss made about it.”

  Because these thoughts reflected a somewhat different view of the war than the one he had taken in Homage, Orwell wanted changes in the next printing, first outlining them in 1946, eight years after he had published the book. Before he died in 1950, he typed out corrections and marked up a copy. Most important, he asked that two long chapters, comprising roughly a quarter of the text and dealing with the factions on the Republican side and claims and counterclaims about the Barcelona street fighting, be relegated to appendices—a rearrangement that did not unsay anything he had written but that significantly altered the book’s political emphasis.

  Most of these changes were made when Homage appeared in French several years later—Orwell had also been corresponding with his French translator. But, surprisingly, his British publisher ignored his wishes and the marked-up copy, and it is not clear if his American publisher even knew about them. An English edition in the form Orwell intended did not appear in Britain until thirty-six years after his death in 1950 and until sixty-five years after it in the United States.

  • • •

  Barcelona today is a very different city from the revolutionary one full of armed militia members, defiant songs, militant posters, and workers in blue denim that Orwell first saw in 1936. The foreigners strolling the Ramblas—the city’s central, tree-lined pedestrian boulevard where so much of the action of Orwell’s memoir takes place—are not soldiers in uniform but tourists in baseball caps snapping cellphone photos and young people from elsewhere on the continent who have taken advantage of European Union migration rules to live here. The former Communist Party headquarters is now an Apple computer store, and the POUM building Orwell was assigned to protect in the 1937 street fighting is no more, although across the street remains the theater on whose roof he stood guard for three days and nights. Yet today’s Spain is a democracy and in that sense is far closer to the Spanish Republic that Orwell fought to defend than it is to the harsh military dictatorship, marked by repression and torture, that Francisco Franco imposed f
or three and a half decades after his victory.

  As with many books that matter, the reactions to Homage to Catalonia have changed over the years. When it was published in England in 1938, it was largely ignored. This memoir of fighting against Franco was of course anathema to right-wingers, who shunned it. Many readers on the Left, however, had no appetite for its indictment of the communist-dominated Republican police hounding and imprisoning members of the POUM. This complicated the image of the war as purely a battle between democracy and fascism. The book sold a mere eight hundred copies in the dozen years between its publication and Orwell’s death.

  When it first appeared in the United States two years later, however, the Cold War was under way, and Homage soon found an enormous audience. Most critics on both sides of the Atlantic seemed unaware of Orwell’s important 1943 essay, and none of them knew of his unheeded instructions for the revising of Homage. Ignoring the failure of the Western democracies to help stop Franco, they were eager to point to Orwell’s portrayal of Spain as an example of Soviet perfidy. The poet Stephen Spender, for instance, called the book “one of the most serious indictments of Communism which has been written.” And to the critic Lionel Trilling, Homage was in large part “about disillusionment with Communism.” But Orwell had very few such illusions to begin with, and despite his well-founded hostility to the Soviet Union, he would almost certainly not have agreed that this was his main message in Homage.

  Many of the young Americans who headed to the South as civil rights workers in the 1960s carried Homage in their backpacks or had read it. For us, Orwell was above all an example of someone willing to risk his life for what he believed in. He remained convinced until his death that it had been worth fighting to defend the Spanish Republic. “Whatever faults the post-war Government might have,” he says in Homage, Franco’s regime was “infinitely worse.” He repeated that conviction in his later essay. If the Spanish Civil War “had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on the surface.” And not only did he write this; he lived it. Where did he go, after his upsetting experience of the fratricidal street fighting in Barcelona? Back to the front.

  2015

  EIGHTEEN

  On Which Continent Was the Holocaust Born?

  LIKE MANY OF THE MOST ORIGINAL WRITERS, Sven Lindqvist is hard to pigeonhole. He is not exactly a historian, for his graduate degree is in literature. He is not exactly a travel writer, for he has little interest in the colorful details that make a place seem exotic; he always wants to direct our attention back to our own culture. He is not exactly a journalist, for when he travels to far points on the globe, he is less likely to tell us about his conversations with anyone than about his own dreams. His work does not come in neatly tied packages: he travels through Africa meditating on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but never reaches the Congo River; he goes all the way to Australia to write powerfully about what its native peoples endured but chooses not to interview a single Aborigine. And, for that matter, he’s not someone on whom I, or almost any American writer, can have the last word, for the great majority of his thirty-three books have not been translated from Swedish.

  If there is an English-language writer whom Lindqvist reminds me of, it might be James Agee: also hard to categorize, also working in many genres, also at times forcing painful detail on his admirers; his masterwork Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) can be highly difficult reading. Yet that book changed and expanded forever our sense of how to see the world, and, at its best, so does the work of Lindqvist.

  If you asked almost any American or European, for example, to date the great tragic turning points of the modern era, they might say 1914, when the First World War began and we saw the toll industrialized slaughter could take, or 1945, when the United States carried this to a new level by dropping two atom bombs on Japanese cities. If you asked Lindqvist, I think he would say 1898 and 1911. Why?

  These dates, too, have to do with industrialized warfare; the difference is where the targets were. The year 1898 saw the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, when a force of British and colonial troops, Winston Churchill among them, in a few hours killed more than ten thousand Sudanese and wounded another sixteen thousand, some fatally, many of them falling victim to half a million bullets fired by Hiram Maxim’s latest machine guns. It was the first large-scale demonstration in warfare of what this horrific new weapon could do. Thirteen years later, on November 1, 1911, during another long-forgotten war, an Italian lieutenant named Giulio Gavotti leaned out of his single-engine open-cockpit plane and dropped several hand grenades on two oases near Tripoli, Libya. It was the world’s first bombardment from an airplane.

  In both cases, the victims Lindqvist draws our attention to were outside of Europe. This perspective is the driving passion at the core of two of his books available in English, Terra Nullius and “Exterminate All the Brutes” and the same point of view is visible in several others, particularly the remarkable A History of Bombing—where he traces the genealogy of British terror-bombing of German cities in the Second World War back to similar targeting of civilians in a colonial war in Iraq more than twenty years earlier.

  We think of the 1937 bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War as another one of those historical turning points: for the first time, it seemed, bombers had tried to raze an entire town with no military targets. We remember Guernica, of course, because of Picasso’s great painting, which Lindqvist himself saw as a child when it traveled to Stockholm in 1938. But he points us toward other bombings, a decade earlier, which the rest of the world didn’t notice, because the victims were not European. During years of colonial rebellions in Morocco in the 1920s, for instance, Spanish and French aircraft (some of the latter flown by American mercenaries), dropped high explosives on many Moroccan towns and villages, severely damaging several of them, including Chechaouen, considered a holy city for its many mosques. But “Chechaouen,” writes Lindqvist, “had no Picasso.”

  • • •

  To read such books is to be reminded of how incredibly Eurocentric most historians are. We are accustomed to thinking, in the famous phrase of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, of “the lamps . . . going out all over Europe” in 1914 as a catastrophic war began, but we forget that they were extinguished decades earlier for people on other continents as they experienced European conquest. Almost all of us educated in North America or Europe grow up learning that there were two great totalitarian systems of modern times, each with fantasies of exterminating its enemies: Nazism and communism. Lindqvist reminds us that there was a third: colonialism. And, most provocatively, he makes connections between it and one of the others.

  “Exterminate All the Brutes”—the title is the phrase scrawled by Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz at the bottom of his report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs—takes us deep into the history of Western consciousness in a search for the sources of the very idea of extermination. An early “kindergarten for European imperialism,” for example, was the Canary Islands, where some five hundred years ago diseases and weapons brought by conquering Spaniards reduced an estimated eighty thousand indigenous inhabitants to zero in less than a century. How many people who have visited these lovely islands as tourists ever learned this? Not me. Lindqvist also introduces us to Lord Wolseley, commander in chief of the British army at the time of Omdurman, who, in this era when British wars were colonial ones, spoke of “the rapture-giving delight which the attack upon an enemy affords. All other sensations are but as the tinkling of a doorbell in comparison with the throbbing of Big Ben.” Then there is the nineteenth-century birth of scientific racism, which eagerly twisted Darwin’s discoveries to justify the idea that “inferior” races were fated to disappear from the Earth, just like species of plants and animals gone extinct—and implied that there was no sin involved in helping them vanish
.

  And finally, along came plenty of thinkers and politicians who saw this as inevitable. In 1898, the year of Omdurman, one of them declared, “One can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying.” This was no fringe racial theorist speaking but Lord Salisbury, prime minister of Great Britain. And then comes Lindqvist’s most unexpected discovery: a German thinker, Friedrich Ratzel, an ardent enthusiast of colonialism, believed that there was a “demonic necessity” for the “superior race” to see to it that “peoples of inferior culture” die out. And who were these inferior people? They included “the stunted hunting people in the African interior” (tens of thousands of Africans—neither stunted nor hunters, incidentally—would die in the notorious 1904 German genocide of the Herero people of today’s Namibia), Gypsies—and Jews. Hitler had a copy of Ratzel’s book with him in 1924, when he was in prison writing Mein Kampf.

  “Hitler himself,” writes Lindqvist, “was driven throughout his political career by a fanatical anti-Semitism with roots in a tradition of over a thousand years, which had often led to killing and even to mass murder of Jews. But the step from mass murder to genocide was not taken until the anti-Semitic tradition met the tradition of genocide arising during Europe’s expansion in America, Australia, Africa, and Asia.”

  Can we prove this beyond doubt? Not without knowing exactly what was in Hitler’s mind. But I defy anyone to read “Exterminate All the Brutes” and not see the Holocaust in a somewhat different light and the Jews, as Lindqvist suggests, as the Africans of Europe. His bold contention has riled some more traditional scholars, deeply wedded to the idea of the Holocaust’s uniqueness. Unique it certainly was in scale, technology, and speed, but Lindqvist makes us realize that it was but one of an appalling series of attempts—the others almost all outside of Europe—to exterminate entire peoples from the face of the Earth.

 

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