In an interview on Essential Reading for Reporters

Next you’ve got George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

So Orwell goes to Spain.

But does he go as a journalist? Doesn’t he go to fight?

He went to fight, but he also went with the intention of chronicling what he saw. But yes, he picked sides. He wasn’t one of these reporters who would interview the killer and the victim with equal weight. He believed there were times when one side was wrong. Like the Holocaust. You wouldn’t interview a member of the Einsatzgruppen and then one of the victims and get two sides of that story. There aren’t a whole lot of cases in history where it’s so clear-cut, but Orwell saw the Spanish Civil War as one of those cases. And then he gets there. He doesn’t lose faith in the righteousness of those fighting to preserve Republican Spain, but he becomes deeply disillusioned. Orwell was a person of the left, and then eventually, over the course of his life, became someone who was difficult to categorise because he wasn’t willing to hold back. He was willing to acknowledge and expose things. The left regarded it as a betrayal, and many of them just attacked this book. When it came out, it didn’t sell well.

But as Arthur Koestler said, quoting Thomas Mann: ‘A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.’ I love that because it’s so true. The book is just tragic. Orwell believes in this cause and simultaneously is just breaking it open and taking it apart. I’m sure it was very hard for a lot of his fellow leftists.

The other reason I picked this book is that Orwell, like Dan Schorr, was an outsider. When he went to Spain, he was an unknown. He wasn’t Hemingway. He wasn’t a well-connected intellectual. He just had this amazing eye for detail. He was an amazing observer, and he could write so powerfully. This book, to me, is just one of the classics of foreign reporting.

But as a journalist, aren’t you supposed to be objective? Isn’t it the worst thing to believe that one side is wrong and other right?

You are. But I don’t think Orwell would say that he was not objective. Quite the contrary. He would say the book shows just how objective he actually was as a reporter, because he wore his heart on his sleeve. He went to Spain with a letter from one of the Communist groups in London, and he wrote something that infuriated them and that they never forgave him for. That’s because he was a truth-teller. He wasn’t going to be part of a propaganda campaign.

I think in many ways this is the kind of book that should be handed out in journalism school. It says that all of us have viewpoints – and that to say that, as reporters, we’re robots, is a lie. And if you do say that, you shouldn’t be a reporter. If you have no opinions of your own, if you have no views, beliefs or passions, you shouldn’t enter the profession. But if you can’t also fight against your biases, then you shouldn’t enter the profession either. Orwell fought against his own beliefs and his own views – that’s the thing about the book that makes it so extraordinary. And he took a huge risk because he was unknown. He needed the work; he needed the money. That could have pretty much been the end of his career. And, for a while, it was. 

In an interview on The History of the Present

Let's move on to Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

The finest model of how to write about a foreign conflict, a war or a revolution. Anyone who wants to go off and write about Egypt, Tunisia or Libya today should pack a copy of Homage to Catalonia. It’s brilliant reportage. As you know, it opens with a vignette of an Italian militiaman in the barracks in Barcelona and he only saw this guy for a few moments but it captures the excitement. There’s great descriptive writing, hard political analysis and then, what is most fantastic, at the very end he says: ‘Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.’ So he explicitly warns the reader about the selectivity and partisanship, which, in a way, makes it all the more credible. It’s the model of political reportage. I went to Poland 30 years ago to write about Solidarity and that’s the book I read before I went.

Yes, I think the thing that is so fascinating about television news is the extent of censorship that goes on all the time, from the cameraman who is actually standing there choosing what to shoot, to the person who writes the script, to the editor back in London or New York. By the time it gets to the screen it doesn’t have much bearing on what actually happened but because it’s presented in living pictures it is presented very much as true. As the only version of the truth.

It’s very interesting. I’ll never forget going to Sarajevo during the Bosnian war and seeing on the news-stand the front page of a local news magazine which had pictures of hunks of charred flesh lying on the street, human remains from the bombing of the Sarajevo marketplace. I was nearly physically sick. Those pictures are being taken by photographers all the time and we never see them. It’s a good example of what we don’t get – and you can argue about whether we should or not. But there’s also the way in which things are shaped into at best a narrative and at worst a laundry line of clichés.

In an interview on the Leaderless Revolution

Let’s turn to George Orwell’s account of what he saw while volunteering for various factions against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Tell us the story of Homage to Catalonia.

This is just a wonderful book. Like all of Orwell's work it's incredibly well written. It's a very powerful piece of prose. Usually this book is seen as a picturesque account of an ultimately failed attempt to fight fascism, but what made a big impression on me was the fact that people like Orwell and 30,000 other foreign volunteers went to fight fascism in Spain at all. It's in such contrast to the way we think politics works now. In those days people realised that to fight fascism you had to go risk your own life. Thousands of foreign volunteers didn't return from Spain. These days, we're led to believe that signing our name on an internet petition is really going to end genocide in Darfur. That was the contrast that really hit home to me in that book.

The other thing that's interesting about it – and the reason why it's one of the books that led to The Leaderless Revolution – is that in Republican Spain, before Franco's victory, anarchist society came into being. There were organisations of peasants and workers, intercollectives and self-managing groups. And it worked. So it's actually one of the few examples of anarchism in practice. Orwell writes about it beautifully and clearly he found it very compelling. He later admitted that where in the book he joined a communist group in Spain called POUM, if he had his choice again he would have joined the anarchists – which is a very little noted fact about Orwell.

He gives great narrative detail about his journey through this war, from seeing those anarchist symbols and early organisation to his injury when he is shot through the neck.

It's wonderful to read, and a great book in its own right of a man going to fight in a foreign war.

In an interview on Dissent

Your first book is Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, which you describe as a prehistory of dissent.

Generally when people talk about Orwell in this context, they start with Animal Farm because it’s a retelling of Soviet history, or with 1984 because it’s an account of what a totalitarian society would look like, at a time when communism was spreading to Eastern Europe. The reason why I am so fond of Homage to Catalonia, and see it as an even more relevant precursor to dissent, is that in it you can see a man of the Left learning to make the distinction that breaks down the Left with a big L into lots of little lefts. He comes to understand what Soviet power actually is, and that it is qualitatively different to the other sorts of Spanish left, or to European left-wing intellectuals or Labour in England.

The difference is not just a matter of being on a different point of the spectrum. It is to do with the immediate violence of Soviet means which were visible to Orwell at that time and place. That’s the second thing which I find important about the book as a precursor to dissident literature. To the end of dissident literature, in the seventies and eighties, people defended themselves by making observations and elementary distinctions, preserving certain concepts, not allowing things to be vague. They defined themselves as individuals by their capacity to be specific about what was going on around them. And Orwell is wonderful at that. It is his creative gift.

He describes what is happening in Catalonia [during the Spanish Civil War] in such a way that we are able to see why he’s so upset about Soviet power. His argument is not one of category and concept but of irresistible observation, that builds itself up into facticity with a literary quality that is strong enough to contend with, if not defeat, ideological certainty. The dilemma that the dissidents had to face later on was that they had to build up a view of the world which was non-ideological, yet could somehow contend with and subvert ideological views of the world. Orwell did that on the basis of good observation and good prose.

Was it that fixed ideological dogma that repelled Orwell’s moral compass most?

My sense was that the ruthlessness of Soviet communist actions in Spain led him to an intuition about the wrongness of the total certainty of a worldview that could justify any action at any place and any time in service of the larger story. I think Orwell grasped that there was an almost arrogant coherence to Soviet activity when he saw the ruthlessness of Soviet behaviour, against a background where other people on the left were much less sure and confident, and were fighting for things that were much more immediate and palpable.