Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish Civil War. One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin. The eldest would have been about twenty-five, the youngest sixteen. Except for two who were mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that all of them are dead. I name those particular men because I remember the faces of all of them.

It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front – the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of wine, the trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. Sixteen years later, however, Trump combined his brash bigotry with repeated attacks on the Iraq war and related appeals to America First isolationism.Home / Orwell / Essays and other works / Looking Back on the Spanish War Looking Back on the Spanish War Iįirst of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things. Evidently, his strong appeal to white nationalists didn’t always make him a serious contender for the presidency. Who could imagine such a man in the White House? He had toyed with the idea in 2000, and no one had cared. Instead, Trump kept telling the same lie, and the Tea Party adherents morphed into his Make America Great Again base. When Obama released his birth certificate to quell the nonsense, the spiritual leader of the birthers, Donald Trump, refused to apologize. By 2011, elements of the Tea Party had morphed into the risible birther movement, according to which Obama was a Kenyan-born radical intent on destroying America.

The election of a Black man with a Muslim name quickly spawned the Tea Party, which rejected traditional conservatism (and neoconservatism) in favour of semi-organized rage at the government Obama embodied. In this January 2009 photo, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama dance at an inaugural ball.

Talking heads the world after war