Homage to Catalonia – the _

I am generally attracted to paragraphs describing places. These descriptors make me feels a little bit like taking a vacation mentally.

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is primarily about the Spanish Civil War, but its pages are filled with place descriptors that I now would like to visit. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is set in Paris during the inter bellum period and that gives me an idea how the city looked like long ago, which I could compare to my own experience of visiting the city when I was younger.

I love Kaouther Adimi’s A Bookshop in Algiers and Alice Zeniter’s The Art of Losing incredibly for their depiction of Algiers specifically, and Algeria more generally. It has been some time since I have finished reading The Art of Losing, but a scene from the book where Algiers is observed by the protagonist from the sea still lingers in my head. I have never been to Algiers but that is now my primary idea of the city: a city of whitewashed buildings with a casbah on top of a hill, unmissable from the Mediterranean.

I think that (the feeling of taking a vacation) is the reason I enjoyed reading Shih-Li Kow’s The Sum of Our Follies. When the place Lubok Sayong first came up in the novel, I immediately searched for it online and on the map. Nothing came up, which immediately told me it is a fictional place.

Yet, some aspects of the place feel familiar. It could have been just the village of Sayong, across the Perak River from Kuala Kangsar. The suspicion only grew stronger as I went deeper into the story, which pulls in events of the 2000s into its narrative: the character YB Datuk Seri Minister most definitely satirizes Rafidah Aziz, who was a long-time Member of Parliament for Kuala Kangsar. The Sum of Our Follies was first published in 2014.

Kuala Kangsar itself plays a central role in setting the story’s background. Having lived in the town for a few years as a teenager and having visited the place several times after although not recently, the story’s progression sometimes was accompanied by vivid images in my head. It was almost as if the characters were living in a set projected out of my memory of the place. The vividness is almost as if I was watching TV.

Or it was as if I was there observing the characters personally. Away, somewhere, in Kuala Kangsar.

I suppose if we are intent on finding similarities between two events however different they are, we would find it one way or another. Some of us are wired to find patterns or connections, even where none exists. A cat in the clouds that sort of things. Apophenia.

I kept telling myself that while reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia recently. However I tried adjusting down my pattern-finding bias, my mind kept on returning to contemporary Malaysian politics each time Orwell describes the republican politics of the late 1930s Spanish Civil War. As I opened Wikipedia to understand the war through a wider lens, I thought, indeed, there was a lesson, or two, from Spain for Malaysia. By Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved.

The differences between the 1920s/1930s Spain and the 2010/2020s Malaysia are aplenty. Spain experienced multiple military coups during those decades that makes Thailand a more appropriate comparison instead of Malaysia. And the Spanish conflict was bloodier than what Malaysia underwent in the 2010s and 2020s: our currently political conflicts are more boring when compared to the Spanish passion of the interwar period.

But if the Spanish Civil war was to be stripped of its details and the conflict made general, there are parallels to the today’s Malaysian reality. And the parallel is this: by the 1920s, support for the traditional powers—that is the monarchy along with the religious Christian class—was in rapid decline (within Malaysian context, throughout the 2000s and the 2010s, traditional power holders in the form of Umno suffered sustained severe erosion of support). So much so that by 1931, the king fled country over rising republican influence. Soon, the Second Spanish Republic was established (again here within Malaysian context, that runs parallel to the election of Pakatan Harapan as the federal government in 2018).

The Republic went through some difficulties right from the beginning. The traditionalists were feeling the heat of radical reforms. Land redistribution and restrictions imposed on the Church from owning properties were proceeding rapidly and pushing the traditionalists out of power further. Meanwhile, weak official responses to certain events that favored the traditionalists left republican supporters thinking the government was betraying them. All this took place with the Great Depression happening in the background. Times were just tough for almost everybody. This feels all too familiar for the 2020 Malaysia.

For the 1930s Spain, the political tensions eventually boxed everybody into an armed conflict. One on side was the republican government supported by the communists, the anarchists and the liberals, who are largely urban dwellers supported by the Soviet Union and Mexico. On the other side were the nationalist rebels comprising the monarchists, Christian conservatives and a group of fascists. By and large, the nationalists were rural folks backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Of interest is here the divisions within the republican ranks, which is one of two main subjects of Homage to Catalonia (the other being war conditions experienced by Orwell). By 1937, a year after the civil war officially began, republican politics was becoming immensely complex but it could be generalized as a competition between the anarchists and the communists. While there was a republican government at the national level, various institutions and cities were controlled by different factions of the republican supporters, with the anarchists and the communists being the more influential factions.

The anarchists wanted a revolution in the sense that workers would control the means of production. The communists wanted those means controlled by the state. The rivalry created a civil war within a civil war, which the communists won and purged the anarchists from government (while I am in no way stating that Rafizi Ramli is an anarchist, the leading-PH party PKR did push Rafizi aside). That communist victory was irrelevant however. So weak was the government from infighting that they eventually succumbed to the fascist rebellion led by Francisco Franco, who would hold on to power for the next 40 years.

Orwell, who was fighting for the Spanish republic with the anarchists, saw the purging as a betrayal, which is perhaps the same feeling many Pakatan Harapan supporters currently feel of the current government. In fact, Orwell writes several pages about being disillusioned, which again, a feeling that appears to be widespread about Pakatan Harapan supporters.

Yes, he felt betrayed but the realist him wrote something for the disillusioned:

As for the newspaper talk about this being a ‘war for democracy’, it was plain eyewash. No one in his senses supposed that there was any hope for democracy, even as we understand it in England or France, in a country so divided and exhausted as Spain would be when the war was over. It would have to be a dictatorship, and it was clear that the chance of a working-class dictatorship had passed. That meant that the general movement would be in the direction of some kind of Fascism. Fascism called, no doubt, by some politer name, and—because this was Spain—more human and less efficient than the German or Italian varieties. The only alternatives were an infinitely worse dictatorship by Franco…

Whichever way you took it it was a depressing outlook. But it did not follow that the Government was not worth fighting for as against the more naked and developed Fascism of Franco and Hitler. Whatever faults the post-war Government might have, Franco’s regime would certainly be worse. [George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia. 1938]

In other words, “Nak PN ke?”