The American Spectator

Hal Colebatch’s comments on George Orwell are a sideshow to his overall excellent and informative review. But in a curious coincidence, that particular sideshow was not only of special interest to me, having read Homage to Catalonia, and The Road to Wigan Pier, and the better-known Orwell works, but apparently also to Mr. Colebatch.

Where I differ from Mr. Colebatch is when he writes, “I did not realize the full moral dimension of how wrong Orwell, Hemingway and the rest were.” Perhaps I have flunked reading comprehension, but my overall sense of Homage to Catalonia was that it was a first person absolute unequivocal confession of how wrong Orwell concluded he was, not so much about the Republican cause, but about the specific Republican incarnation, which of course was the mass murdering Stalinist creature of the Kremlin. I also sensed that Orwell’s later cooperation with British authorities in the matter of naming leftist security risks, for which Orwell was later demonized in the dominant media, had its incarnation in Orwell’s Spanish Civil War experience.

p>In any case, The Last Crusade: Spain 1936 , sounds like a good read and I thank Mr. Colebatch for the review. br> — Frank Natoli br> Newton, New Jersey /p> p> NEOPROHIBITIONISTS br> Re: Eric Peters’s Alcohol Nanny Breathalizers : /p>