Orwell and good

So yes, the Spanish Civil War. A source for Nineteen Eighty-Four? What with all the confusion on the Communist-Republican side during the street fighting in Barcelona in May 1937. The propaganda didn't help. Makes one wonder how much of our press today is impartial in its foreign news reporting. The disadvantage of CentCom during the Iraq war (from our point of view) was that the press core had it too easy, being spoon fed their "facts" by Allied press officers - hardly from the horses mouth; more from its manure. How were they supposed to double-source their stories? Comical Ali would hardly be a sensible counterweight, even though he sometimes made more sense than the Yankee poodle. (Back in Spain) a rather sly manoeuvre to accuse the POUM militia of being Fascist (the so-called Trotskyist pro-revolutionary group of gumboots with whom Eric Blair (George Orwell) was fighting. I wonder what his passport said, and how he introduced himself when he turned up ready to have a scrap for the Reds. Does a pseudonym ever really penetrate the bearer's mind as one's own real name does? I can't imagine being called anything other than my moniker, except maybies "Claire", which I was going to be hight if I'd been a girl (some might say I am. When was the last time I relished a game of rugger? Not enough cunt in my game, as Hilly, B.A. Hons., so eloquently put it. Others might say too much).

War is a bloody thing, but it provides the occasion for compelling literature and the odd cracking motion picture. Hemingway faffed around on the front too, although I image he was more cock than Robin, yet - in the words of any shite football pundit, player or manager, to be fair to the lad - he did have the courage to aim the gun at himself in a hotel room, I believe, toward the end of his life, in fact, at the end.