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by justcreatedlol
1549 days ago
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If i remember correctly, Orwell joined POUM just because they were sending people to the front lines while the communist party was not at the time he arrived to Barcelona (don´t remember the details, maybe they were recruiting for defending Barcelona or their militia had already departed), not out of ideology. |
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* Once he'd decided to go to Spain to fight, he approached the British Communist Party, who suggested he join the International Brigades, but he was unwilling to do that without seeing the situation in Spain for himself first.
* He had friends in the Independent Labour Party, who gave him a letter of introduction for the ILP's man in Barcelona. Once there, he joined the POUM militia, because the POUM were affiliated with the ILP.
* While on leave in Barcelona, he decided to leave the POUM, which was stationed on the comparatively quiet Aragon front, for the chance of fighting on the Madrid front. He would have preferred to join the Anarchists, but was unlikely to be sent to Madrid with them, so applied to join the Communist International Column instead. However, the May Days intervened, sparking the breakdown in relations between the Republican government and Communists on one hand, and the Anarchists, POUM, and other left-wing groups not aligned with Moscow on the other: so he returned to the Aragon front with the POUM until being shot and invalided out, and then fleeing Spain altogether just ahead of a Stalinist purge.
So it would appear that the political differences between the various groups on the Republican side weren't, at least at first, that important to Orwell: making common cause against the Fascists was the priority.