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> You are confusing Communism in Western Europe with the communist state of the USSR and its Stalinist doctrine of socialism in one country They really aren't.
by FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
> You are confusing Communism in Western Europe with the communist state of the USSR and its Stalinist doctrine of socialism in one country
They really aren't. The Communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War -- the ones who put their boot down on Orwell's beloved POUM and other Trotskyists -- were honest-to-god Soviets.
But yes, more democratic "Communist" parties did exist in Western Europe later, and there is a large space of "third way" Socialisms and Communisms that are not Stalinist hell.
- jimnotgym 5y agoI don't have my copy of Homage to hand, but I seem to remember Orwell being in the POUM militia was more or less an accident of how he arrived in Spain and nothing to do with it being 'beloved'. As an aside, I once met a Spanish Civil War veteran from South Wales. I got the impression that he went to fight the fascists because it was the right thing to do ('If you tolerate this then your children will be next' was a famous slogan that made it into a song), not because of ideological indoctrination. He was a socialist in the British sense, but that should not suggest the slightest parallel with Stalinism