Homage to Catalonia

I Just Read George Orwell's Book About Fighting Fascism. And I Think We're Doing It Wrong.

I just read¹ George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and I’m supposed to tell you how great it was, but, honestly, I’d skip it if I were you. Sure, the part where he gets shot through the neck is great because British people underplaying near-fatal throat wounds is hilarious. “The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think is worth describing in detail,” is a sentence thousands of Americans have now written about getting a Covid vaccination, only in all caps.

Also, the bits about lice are terrific.

“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 soldiers are lousy, at 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.”

But the long, boring parts are the ones that made me think the most. Specifically, about how our resistance to authoritarianism is all wrong.