George Orwell Quote

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

I came by this quote today and was wondering if some of you eggheads could tell me if it's legit or not. The quote is as follows...


"If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists."

Also, what's this say about him in general and so on?

[Futility Personified]

I think he says that in Homage to Catalonia. Whatever became of him later in life, he was very much enthusiastic about immediate revolution and was opposed to statist models of socialism in that book.

[Geiseric]

He went to the country as a journalist, and the anarchists had the largest organisations as opposed to POUM and PSUC, and wasnt stalinist like the Communist party, meaning from a journalist POV he should of been at the action. He nearly missed the july days, he was only there because he was shot in the neck and was in a hospital.

[Redistribute the Rep]

In his Homage to Catalonia he says that the plan of action of the Anarchists and some Socialists was to carry on with the revolution while fighting the Fascist rebels, while the Communists (backed by the SU) and the conservative Socialists wanted to halt the revolution to focus all their energy on defeating the Facists. At the time, Orwell had the same sentiment as the Communists: he believed defeating the rebels was the most important thing and the proletarian revolution could wait. However, in this quote he reveals he later felt otherwise

[exeexe]

"Had I gone to Spain with no political affiliations at all I should probably have joined the International Column and should no doubt by this time have had a bullet in the back for being 'politically unreliable', or at least have been in jail. If I had understood the situation a bit better I should have joined the Anarchists."
George Orwell (letter to Jack Common, October 1937)
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/06/454647.html?c=on

He was against capitalism and he wanted to revolutionize society to the better as the anarchist represented, not to the worse as the communist party represented.

He joined the POUM militia which had its ideology from Trotsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM

This is also relevant:


On 26 April 1937 when Orwell and his ILP comrades had returned to Barcelona on their leave they had been shocked to see how things had changed. The revolutionary atmosphere of four months earlier had all but evaporated, and old class divisions been reasserted. Similarly, as he headed for the French border on the train to Port Bou (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Bou), Orwell noticed another symptom of the change since his arrival—the train on which classes had been abolished now had both first-class compartments and a dining car. "Orwell mused that coming into Spain the previous year, bourgeois-looking people would be turned back at the border by Anarchist guards; now looking bourgeois gave one easy passage."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Cataloni (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia)

[Prometeo liberado]

You first have to start of by understanding Orwell as an entire person. Who was the person that would say that? An ex-policeman of British Imperialism in India? A keen observer of the horrors of that which he was a part of? A journalist seeking to uncover the truth and only the truth? Reporting the facts? A theoretically totally unsound partisan for something vaguely revolutionary? Finally again a patriotic servant to the British war machine?
He probably did say that quote seeing that as a "revolutionary" and just a human in general he had neither any allegiances, other than to himself and the history he found himself in, nor much understanding of the "isms" he thought he was fighting for.