President Joe Biden’s administration will continue to recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the South American country’s president, Anthony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, stated on Tuesday.
Blinken told members of the U.S. Senate that Biden would seek to “more effectively target” sanctions on the country, aiming to oust President Nicolas Maduro, the country’s democratically elected leader.
On this day, 21 January 1950, George Orwell, celebrated British author and socialist who fought against the fascists in the Spanish civil war and revolution, died aged 46. Orwell fought with the socialist POUM militia, and was wounded by being shot in the neck, while many Western journalists and authors just hung out in Barcelona hotels.
While right-wingers are often fond of quoting Orwell to try to defend providing a platform for fascists, Orwell himself was not such a fan, as he described in his account of the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia: “When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist — after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct”.
He also vividly described the atmosphere in revolutionary Barcelona: “The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing… It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle… Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Senor’ or ‘Don’ or even 'Usted’; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade’ and 'Thou,’ and said 'Salud!’ instead of 'Buenos Dias.'… Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low… Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves.”
Learn more about the conflict in our podcast episodes 39-40: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/06/17/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/
Pic: Orwell, the tall man, with his unit and his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1634932053358605/?type=3
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