History Lesson

George Orwell fought for "democracy" during the mindless Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, prelude as were the Sino-Japanese War and Abyssinia, to World War II. He takes a dim view of the propaganda onslaught between the left wing Republicans and Franco's Fascists. The Anarchists, Communists and Socialists on the left engaged in internecine infighting which then undermined their common front against Franco, for whom the war was won by Nazi Germany and Italy. The international press often intentionally mislead in their reporting. Are there lessons from his writings about the state of the press to-day? He wrote, "no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed...... and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to the various 'party lines'. "
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell, 1938.