"When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist—after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct." -- from Homage to Catalonia, an autobiographical account of Orwell's time in Spain fighting the Fascists.
“It was five o’clock in the morning. This was always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky . . . Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt—it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness.”
"The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity." - Why I Write
In the summer of 1936, Spanish workers had taken up arms to oppose General Franco, who was leading the revolt against the nation’s left-leaning elected government. The fighting broke out on July 18th and as Orwell would write in his essay “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,” it is probable that every anti-Fascist in Europe felt a thrill of hope. Orwell determined to go to Spain to witness the fighting and to possibly take part in it. He left England on December 23, 1936, uncertain if he would fight or had the stamina to be a soldier. -- James L. Franklin, George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War: A brush with death
Now might be a good time to re-read George Orwell.
