# Homage to Catalonia [[George Orwell]]'s 1938 memoir of fighting in the [[Spanish Civil War]] with the POUM militia — revolutionary Barcelona, trench tedium, a sniper's bullet through the throat, and then the experience that reoriented his life's work: watching the Stalinist suppression of the POUM (the May Days of 1937, his comrades jailed or shot as "fascist agents") **reported in the European left press as the opposite of what he had personally witnessed**. "I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts... I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines.'" The book sold some 700 copies in his lifetime — rejected by his own publisher on political grounds, attacked by the left — and is now the standard text on propaganda's capture of the record by a participant-witness: the empirical seed of *[[Nineteen Eighty-Four]]*'s mutable past and [[The Memory Hole]]. For the KB it is the founding case study in **real-time history-laundering** and the cost of reporting against one's own side. ## See Also - [[George Orwell]] — the education this book records - [[Spanish Civil War]] — the war and its memory battles - [[Nineteen Eighty-Four]] — where the lesson went - [[The Memory Hole]] — the concept it seeded