George Orwell, long before he dreamed up thoughtcriminals or newspeak, lived in Spain in the 30's. He went to write newspaper articles but joined the Republican Army instead. He got shot, and never fully recovered. Homage to Catalonia is the product of his time spent in trenches while mortar exploded around him and his poorly trained, poorly organized, and poorly equipped comrades. The other side was just as bad off: this was the Spanish Civil War. The war he experienced wasn't the war he'd heard about from the unceasing propaganda coming from all sides.

"The fighting had barely started when the newspapers of the Right and Left dived simultaneously into the same cesspool of abuse. We all remember the Daily Mail's poster: 'REDS CRUCIFY NUNS,' while to the Daily Worker Franco's Foreign Legion was 'composed of murderers, white-slavers, dope-fiends and the offal of every European country.' ...The New Statesmen was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), while [another paper] was declaring that 'the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman's legs' was 'a commonplace' in Loyalist Spain."

Even in 1938, Orwell had a pretty good take on the twisted patriotism in reporting a war:

"The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot never gets near a front-line trench, except for the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him."

As usual, Orwell makes me feel guilty for not standing up to The Man, or, in this case, our media for framing our own war as a fight to spread democracy and fight evil. In truth, the horrific, freedom-stifling acts of the Taliban we've heard so much about actually pale in comparison to the corruption and mass-rape of the government they overthrew--and who the West are trying to put back in power. So let's not pretend this is a war about Good and Evil. Recognize propaganda when you see it, and demand answers. Let this eerie Orwell prediction sink in a little, and ask yourself, when your time comes, will you shout or will you fight?