> Why, then, did he determine that it was a fight worth fighting? Bravely, and at some cost to his health, he fought an unwinnable war for a unrealizable cause. But he still believed it was right to have fought and to have gone on encouraging others to continue doing so. Despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, the issue, in his view, was simple: “Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not?”
> This explanation, entirely bereft of historical and cultural context, is bound to strike anyone half familiar with the history of the conflict as simplistic in the extreme, even simple-minded. Orwell wrote: “I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later . . . . That was the real issue of the Spanish war . . . and perhaps of other wars to come.”
I mean, it's fair to say that any one sentence summary of a war is going to be somewhat simplistic, but if one side has monarchists, fascists and military dictators on it, then it seems reasonable to me. Just the way the author writes it, I feel I should know of some alternative take that it seems like I don't.
What do the "mountains of evidence to the contrary" suggest (in this author's view)? Presumably something along the lines of fascism being better than risking communism, which seems to a strangely recurring historical motif.