Word: catalonia
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...careful here too: his Armies of the Night, even though relying heavily on his personal experiences and impressions, had an entire section, "The Novel as History," in which he dispassionately described the 1967 Pentagon march and the events leading up to it. Similarly, George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, talked about the background of the Spanish Civil War in addition to recounting his own experiences at the front...
...equality and freedom," where people could sing together as comrades. "In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves," Orwell wrote. "In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes." Throughout Catalonia, he said, "human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine...
Pablo Casals--who discovered the Bach cello suites, unplayed for 150 years, at the age of 13--grew up in the Catalonia Orwell later wrote about, and he remained a loyal Catalan right up to his death last week at the age of 96. Catalan "was the language of troubadours," he once said, "and of free spirits." He liked to quote a Catalan poet, Joan Maragall, who wrote: "To take flight to Heaven, we must stand on the firm soil of our native land." And he sometimes told about Luis Companys, president of Catalonia under the Spanish Republic. Casals...
...price of prosperity is also being paid in terms of rampant inflation that is currently running at the rate of 1% a month at the same time that the expansion which fueled it is tapering somewhat. In Catalonia, Asturias and Bilbao, housewives recently defied a government ban and demonstrated against rising food prices. At a time when Spain is undergoing rapid change, and faces the pain of adjustment to a new political era, inflation of that magnitude is an ever-present worry to the nation's economic-and political -managers...
...question seems, perhaps, more important than it is. Orwell has become a sort of moral touch-stone for many intellectuals in political matters. A particularly fatuous example of this mentality can be found in Lionel Trilling's introduction to Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's account of the Spanish Civil War. "Orwell, by reason of the quality that permits us to say of him that he was a virtuous man, is a figure in our lives," Trilling writes. He says that Orwell "seems to be serving not some dashing daimon but the plain, solid Gods of the Copybook Maxims...