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Essay

Understanding Orwell on the Lesser Evil

“Five years later, Orwell published an essay called ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War,’ in which he states, ‘War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.'”

George Orwell was a foreign fighter in the Spanish Civil War. From January to May 1937, he fought on the side of the democratically elected republican government, against the fascist insurrection led by General Francisco Franco. Five years later, Orwell published an essay called “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” in which he states, “War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.” Orwell understood that some things must be fought against, and there is no way to escape the fighting. That is why he saw right away the Spanish Civil War was not merely a small, localized conflict; the fascist countries were preparing for a global war on democracy, and the democratic countries, through their non-interventionist policies in Spain, were signaling they would not fight back. So, Orwell took it upon himself to go to Spain and fight back. From him I learned that if someone declares war on you, you are at war. It does not matter if you accept that you are at war. In fact, the surest way to lose a war is to refuse to acknowledge that you are in one. Cowardice guarantees the greater evil. I learned all this from reading George Orwell. But I did not learn it quickly. It took me 20 years to understand Orwell on the lesser evil.

The first time I read anything by George Orwell I was 14 or 15. My brother, a year younger than me, had read Animal Farm for school and recommended in the strongest possible terms that I read it as well. Our mother seconded his recommendation. I read it, and when I told my brother I had finished it he said something like, “Isn’t it great?” I said I guessed so, but I didn’t understand why the pigs were such d—s. My little brother then had to explain communism and satire to me. I had read Animal Farm without realizing it was anything more than a story about talking animals; I think I thought it was like a mean-spirited Dr. Dolittle. I remember standing in our mom’s kitchen later that day, listening as she and my brother discussed the nature of political revolution and other lofty concepts I had been ignorant of until that moment. While they talked, I stared at the tiny Penguin paperback on the kitchen table. How were they getting all that from a story about talking animals? I acted like I understood the book. But it was an act.

Orwell only started to make sense to me a couple years later when I read his essay “Politics and the English Language.” It was assigned to me in multiple classes during the second half of high school. I could see why. As soon as I read it, I felt like I had been handed the Rosetta Stone of the grown-up world. It was a step-by-step guide for making sense and being sensible. And it explained why adults so often seemed to be self-contradictory rationalizers: They let others do their thinking for them. But it also explained why I was so bad at school: I did not do my own thinking either. The bit that hit me the hardest came near the end: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” I knew as soon as I read this that I was an insincere student. I was constantly trying to convince teachers I understood what I was supposed to understand: why Gatsby was obsessed with the green light or why trenches were a deciding factor in World War I. But I did not know what I was talking about. So, I would smash together a bunch of parroted phrases and hope teachers did not see through me. They didn’t fall for it. 

I had never been a good student. I would avoid schoolwork if I could. But I re-read “Politics and the English Language” so many times that by senior year I could hear George standing over my shoulder shouting his checklist at me while I struggled through an assignment on King Lear or the French Revolution: “What are you trying to say?! Put it more simply! Cut that word out!” My grades improved. 

Orwell’s books multiplied in our house around this time. I remember vividly a massive hardcover tome of his collected essays. I think my brother bought it. I disliked the physical book itself because it was so large as to be inconvenient. You basically had to sit at a desk to read it. But I loved Orwell’s essays, even if that volume was a doorstop. 

I was initially attracted to Orwell’s essays because of the way they connected big ideas—liberty, democracy, objective truth—to everyday life. He made difficult concepts seem approachable, the highest ideals attainable. One passage that has always stuck with me since that time is the following from “The Lion and the Unicorn,” an essay about English national identity:

We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official—the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century…It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.

Although I could not articulate it when I was 18, I sensed that Orwell could make these connections, could see a commitment to political liberty embodied in a passion for gardening because he believed in the power of the individual to make effective judgments about reality. That is what appealed to me in Orwell’s essays. He saw the sanctity of facts and solid objects, and he believed that the point where one’s perceptions meet one’s judgment is the source of freedom. Just as importantly, he was forever on guard against anything that tempted or compelled one to disbelieve their perceptions or surrender their judgment. He was especially alert to corruptions of language that make judgment impossible. If anyone tells you that two and two make five, run.

The essay that was most important to me back then was a short article called “Why I Write.”  It was published nine years after Orwell returned from the Spanish Civil War. It is a personal manifesto wherein he explains that he always knew he was meant to be a writer, but until he went to Spain, he wrote lifeless prose because he lacked political purpose. “Why I write” hinges on the following passage:

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood…What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.

I remember reading this shortly before I graduated high school. I was deeply affected by the sentence “My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.” I knew that feeling. It had been a chronic condition my whole life. It still is. And it was especially acute at that time because a week into the school year Al-Qaeda operators attacked and destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York City. A “feeling of partisanship” and “a sense of injustice” were in the air. They were palpable to me. But until I read “Why I Write,” it never occurred to me that partisanship and injustice could be one’s motivations for writing. I felt an unarticulated desire to fight just wars and write political essays, as Orwell had done.

I knew that to do these things I would need to understand the great ideas so thoroughly that I could communicate them in words anyone could comprehend, like Orwell. That became my life’s work by the time I graduated. I began writing (very bad) essays on topics such as liberty and objective truth. As I did so, I became increasingly focused on the phrase “aesthetic experience” from the end of the quote above. At that time, admittedly, I did not know what an “aesthetic experience” was, but I could tell Orwell meant by it something to the effect of “When I write, I want people to want to read it, to enjoy it, to see the art in it.” This was the opposite of everything I was taught in school. In school, almost everything I had to read seemed written to be as unpleasant as possible. And it only got worse once I was in university. I resolved to do all I could to make everything I wrote an “aesthetic experience,” even if I was only vaguely aware of what that meant.

I will not bore you with the details of my next couple decades. I got a philosophy degree. I joined the army. I kept writing (slightly less bad) essays. Eventually, I acquired all 20 volumes of Orwell’s Complete Works. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I was reading Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s memoir about fighting in Spain. Actually, I guess I was doing something between reading and re-reading it. I had sort-of-read it a long time ago, but I had not understood it. It is a difficult book to make sense of. It is plagued by a messy publication history that resulted in multiple very different editions as well as two confusing chapters detailing the Stalinist duplicity that backgrounded the war. A reader who has only read Orwell’s later, lucid works—Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Politics and the English Language”—will be shocked at how hard it is to read Homage to Catalonia. I was re-attempting it because I had recently returned from a deployment where I worked with a woman from Spain, a United Nations employee whose family descended from the Basque Country. Her descriptions of Spanish politics and history were bewildering to me. She told me a story about being beaten up by fascists in high school in Madrid in the late 2000s. I realized then that the difficulty of reading Homage to Catalonia might not have been Orwell’s fault; maybe he had made a messy situation as comprehensible as it could be made. I decided that when I returned home, I would give the book another, deeper read. 

Shortly after I arrived back in Canada, we were in lockdown because of the pandemic. I spent several weeks studying Homage to Catalonia the way I had studied Orwell’s essays as a teenager. I was immediately struck by how bad a soldier Orwell was. I had not noticed this when I read the book as a younger man, but, by 2020, I was a career infantry officer. Because of that, Orwell’s famous tone of authority—something I usually admire—seemed quite pompous and silly when he said things such as:

Now that I had seen the front, I was profoundly disgusted. They called this war! And we were hardly even in touch with the enemy! I made no attempt to keep my head below the level of the trench. A little while later, however, a bullet shot past my ear with a vicious crack and banged into the parados behind. Alas! I ducked. All my life I had sworn that I would not duck the first time a bullet passed over me; but the movement appears to be instinctive, and almost everybody does it at least once.

What kind of idiot doesn’t keep his head below the level of the trench? And how much of a macho poser do you have to be to lament ducking when you’re shot at? Orwell could only make these rookie mistakes, could only confuse recklessness for bravery, because he was serving in a revolutionary army that lacked an established corps of professional Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) to enforce discipline. In a regular army, immature soldiers like Orwell are the reason NCOs always seem angry.

Once I got over Orwell’s rookie qualities, I gradually became aware of an important fact about the book: Orwell’s underdeveloped explanation of why he went to Spain to fight. He barely mentions his reasons, and, when he does, it is with a tone of great ignorance. In this, he displays an attitude I have found common among soldiers, namely, a disregard for the politics of war:

When I came to Spain, and for some time afterwards, I was not only uninterested in the political situation but unaware of it. I knew there was a war on, but I had no notion of what kind of a war. If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism,’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency’…I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their lives should have separate [political] parties; my attitude always was, ‘Why can’t we drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?’

You hear this all the time from military people, especially young soldiers, this strange belief that war can somehow be separated from politics, that those doing the fighting should not have to concern themselves too much with why they are fighting. Let’s just get on with it. It occurred to me that establishing himself as politically uninterested in this way was a rhetorical move by Orwell. It not only makes him into a sympathetic character, the naïve but noble soldier familiar from countless books and movies, but it also positions the reader to share his journey from credulity to conviction as he discovers the political realities of the Spanish war. The reader is set up to have all the same realizations that Orwell had as he uncovered the Soviet plot to undermine the republican cause in Spain. Orwell’s political message is delivered through an aesthetic experience.

But as I was re-reading Homage to Catalonia, I came to realize I could not have that aesthetic experience without understanding the geopolitical backdrop to the Spanish Civil War, something Orwell does not explain in his book. So, I did some research. In August of 1936, about a month after the fighting started, 27 countries signed a non-intervention pact meant to prevent the Spanish war from escalating into a broader European conflict. The signatories included Italy and Germany, who immediately violated the pact by supplying tanks, planes, personnel, and weapons to Franco’s insurrectionists. Because none of the democratic countries would do the same for the republicans, the Spanish government had no choice but to turn to the Soviet Union for military aid. Although Joseph Stalin had also signed the pact, he was willing to arm the Spanish republic—not because he supported their cause but because he saw fascism as a threat. Stalin understood the strategic advantage of having a communist ally in Europe, just as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini wanted another fascist regime on the continent. Stalin’s aim in Spain was not republican victory but, rather, a puppet regime dominated by communists who took their orders directly from Moscow. This meant Soviet aid came with a brutal price tag: the elimination of anti-Stalin elements within Spain’s coalition government. 

Enter Orwell, who arrived in Barcelona on December 26, 1936. He joined a republican militia called El Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. (This translates to “The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification,” but the unit is typically called by its Spanish acronym: P.O.U.M.) The unit was affiliated with the Soviet dissident Leon Trotsky, meaning it was anti-Stalin. Orwell, in his rush to get to the front and fight fascism, paid no attention to such details. Unfortunately, those details had become a matter of life-or-death by the end of 1936. While Orwell was fighting on the Catalonian front in early 1937, Soviet agents were dispatched to Barcelona to conduct secret police operations meant to ensure the Spanish government was controlled by the Spanish Communist Party (who was loyal to Stalin). Soviet hit squads assassinated leaders of anti-Stalin factions within the republican coalition, including Andres Nin, the leader and founder of the P.O.U.M. In the first week of May, 1937, the in-fighting between the Stalinist and anti-Stalinist factions within the government culminated in open street warfare in Barcelona, which Orwell took part in. The outcome of this civil war within the Civil War was a Stalinist stranglehold on the government. Purges and a political terror followed as the puppet regime became preoccupied with liquidating non-Stalinists in their own ranks rather than defeating Franco’s invasion. 

The P.O.U.M. was declared illegal, and Orwell had to flee the country, narrowly escaping the Soviet secret police. This was his first real brush with totalitarianism. He saw the Spanish republic lose their war against the fascists; he knew they were betrayed by the communists; and he watched the democratic world abandon them. When he returned to England, he worked tirelessly to tell the English people that the same war was coming to their country. He tried to convince them it was a fatal mistake to pretend English parliamentary democracy could ever coexist with totalitarianism, whether fascist, communist, or otherwise. Any political system that bases its identity on destroying all rival political systems cannot be reasoned with. If someone is out to destroy you, do not negotiate with him. Orwell saw that war with such hostile regimes was inevitable, and the longer the democratic countries delayed the inevitable, the more likely it was that they would lose when the war finally came.

After re-re-reading Homage to Catalonia, I spent the next year studying Orwell’s books and essays published from 1937 until his death in 1950. At that time, I was employed as a staff officer in the Canadian military’s operational command headquarters, supporting my country’s training missions in Ukraine and Latvia. While in this role, I watched the same totalitarian forces Orwell had identified signal that they were again preparing for a war on the free world. I watched the revolution in Belarus get crushed in the summer of 2020, as well as the build-up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border in the spring of 2021. I witnessed foreign interference in my own country’s government. I stared at the news in disbelief as we retreated from Afghanistan and the Taliban took it back. 

When I went on Christmas leave in December of 2021, I, like most people, was unsure if President Vladimir Putin was going to invade Ukraine once the frost set in and the ground was hard enough for Russian tanks to roll across the border. But I knew that if Russia did invade, the free world would be forced to choose between the greater and lesser evils. And I strongly suspected the democratic countries would choose poorly. We would avoid war at all costs; we would delay the inevitable. We would choose the greater evil.

On Sunday, February 27, 2022, three days after Russia launched the full-scale invasion, I woke up early to work on an essay about a book called Totality and Infinity by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. It is a difficult read. I had been struggling with it on and off for 15 years. Levinas was principally concerned with how philosophical errors led to totalitarianism. I was hoping I could translate his argument into simpler language and apply it to Russia’s war in Ukraine. I worked on it all day. 

In the evening, my phone buzzed. A friend had sent me a link to a video on social media. It was President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announcing the creation of the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine. I listened as he pleaded for foreign fighters to help his country defeat the Russian invasion. I had known for 20 years this moment would come.

I walked over to my bookshelf and took down my weathered Penguin Classic of Homage to Catalonia. I sat down and began re-re-re-reading it. On the second page, I was confronted with the following sentence: “I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” I put the book down and went back to my computer. I closed the Microsoft Word document on the screen, abandoning my article on Levinas. Then I emailed the Ukrainian Embassy to ask how to join the Legion.

Dave Smith is a retired Major in the Canadian Armed Forces. He fought in Ukraine in the war there for the past year and a half. He previously authored an op-ed in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail earlier this year outlining why he decided to serve in Ukraine. 

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