Far-right extremism is on the rise in the United States in recent years, and many Europeans have also seen a problematic rise in pro-fascist organizations. For example, Marine Le Pen (daughter of notorious far-right extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen) has led the National Rally party in France since 2017. The Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany — labeled an extremist organization by German intelligence since 2021 — received record votes in 2025. And the Human Rights Research Center notes in a 2025 article that American politics are beginning to mirror many aspects of Viktor Orbán’s policies in Hungary, which target ethnic minorities, use emergency powers to seize control of courts, and censor journalists and academics.

Like many other literary scholars living through troubling times, my instinct is to turn to the past to understand how we got here. Specifically, I’ve been revisiting works by various authors from the modernist period who were dealing with modern fascism at its inception, including books such as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) by Ernest Hemingway and Homage to Catalonia (1938) by George Orwell (among a few other books by Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Hermann Hesse).

Hemingway and Orwell aren’t without their own problems, but they provide a useful starting point for comparing different reactions to fascism — and they’re both nuanced in their approaches. Furthermore, for the purposes of this post, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Homage to Catalonia deal with strikingly similar situations involving foreigners (an American and a Brit) who travel to Spain during the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War and later volunteer to fight fascism.

Modern Fascism and 1930s Spain

Modern fascism took root in Europe at the start of the twentieth century, though it spread quickly across the globe. It’s not just a political movement; it’s closely tied to literature and culture. For example, Filippo Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto and leader of the Futurist movement, worked with other Italians to author the Fascist Manifesto in 1919. Mussolini and the National Fascist Party took hold of Italy in 1922. By the 1930s, political fascist groups in Germany and Spain had amassed power as well.

Fascism is defined by its reference to the fasces, a Roman symbol for the “right to rule.” This signals the authoritarian and nationalistic nature of modern fascists; i.e., they believe in centralized power (in a dictator or oligarchy) and sacrificing democracy for the sake of the “nation” or a single “race.” Most fascist organizations are conservative, or far-right, on the political spectrum. As Umberto Eco and others note, fascism isn’t really a stable, clearly defined political system (unlike Communism or social democracy), but it does have some consistent features, like a cult-like obsession with a dictator, praise for “masculinity” and violence, anti-socialism, anti-feminism, and an emphasis on a mythic past (e.g., the Aryan race or Roman culture).

In 1936 in Spain, a revolution started, pitting the Republicans (left-leaning) and Nationalists (far-right) against each other. Several countries viewed the Spanish Civil War as a representative struggle between Communism/democracy and Fascism/authoritarianism. That’s also why journalists such as Orwell traveled to Spain and later joined the fight. While Hemingway also reported on the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls is his novel based on what he documented during his time in Spain.

Hemingway: Anti-Fascism is a Personal Fight

Love him or hate him, Hemingway is a master of narrative tension. For Whom the Bell Tolls follows Robert Jordan, an American-turned-guerilla fighter, who works with a band of Spanish resistance fighters to blow a bridge. The novel is over 500 pages but is hard to put down, as readers learn what these guerilla fighters must do to secure the future of a free Spain. [[Spoilers ahead]]

Notably, Jordan is not a communist, and he’s really fighting for the Spanish people whom he had gotten to know over the previous decade while traveling the region. Yet, he works with Marxists and other groups; he recognizes he must be politically strategic to fight extremism. We later learn Jordan was actually a Spanish instructor at the University of Montana who, on his summers off, worked for the state forestry division. He learned to clear land using dynamite, which in turn led him to become a dynamiter and saboteur in the Spanish Civil War. (This might seem far-fetched to modern readers, but using dynamite for land clearing in rural areas was — and sometimes still is — fairly commonplace for farmers and homesteaders.)

Jordan actively chooses to join the fight, but he also stumbles into his position in many ways. If the war had broken out in another country, he probably wouldn’t be involved. If he hadn’t learned how to use TNT while working in the summers, he wouldn’t have been asked to get involved with the bridge. Fate plays an important role in the novel, and, in some ways, it seems like Jordan is destined to sacrifice his life for the Spanish Republicans.

Hemingway portrays the fight against fascism as a personal struggle as well as a socio-political one, as a cycle that we must all face at some point in our lives (even if we don’t literally join a band of resistance fighters). For example, the novel opens and closes with the same image:

“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees . . .” (3).

“Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady. He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could hear his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest” (507).

The narrative is circular in this sense, and several times throughout, the character Pilar suggests that Jordan is fated to die. She reads his palm and knows what will happen. As scholar Michael Allen notes, this feeling of repetition pervades the novel, as Jordan has a sense of deja vu throughout: “Robert Jordan had the feeling of it all having happened before” (409). In the end, Pilar is right in predicting Jordan’s death, though Hemingway never tells us whether she really is clairvoyant.

The point, I think, is that Jordan views his sacrifice as one that we all must make at some point. For him, humans are defined by their capacity to decide how they will live their lives with purpose: “You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow” (169). As Hemingway writes, the novel shows the struggle that all humans must experience when faced with injustice. Jordan’s life could have ended differently, but he chooses to do what he thinks is right — to fight fascism and protect the Spanish people he loves. He’s not driven by nationalistic pride (he’s not even from Spain) nor is he an anarchist deliberately trying to disrupt the social system as much as possible.

Additionally, Hemingway avoids the temptation to make the fascists clearly villainous or the rebels perfect (there’s no ‘light side’ and ‘dark side’ like in Star Wars). Republicans and Nationalists are human beings who make mistakes — and some of them are just caught up in the fight. When one resistance fighter asks Jordan whether there are fascists in America, Jordan responds, “There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes” (226). This is perhaps one of the most prescient moments in the novel. Hemingway knows that many Americans would do horrible things as a result of self-interest, tribalism, and apathy. And sadly, I’m not sure much has changed since Hemingway’s time.

Orwellian Resistance: Fighting Fascists

Homage to Catalonia is the start of Orwell’s political consciousness, and it arguably led to the authorship of 1984 and Animal Farm. Homage is a memoir documenting his involvement in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1937. He joins up to fight with the Republicans, trains how to fight in Barcelona, is shot and injured, and later escapes to France.

It’s unclear how much actually happened to Orwell — whose real name is Eric Arthur Blair — and he takes certain liberties in much of his nonfiction. As I write elsewhere, Orwell was a staunch critic of capitalism and his three major nonfiction books, Down and Out in Paris and London, Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia, are perhaps best understood as political polemics more so than documentary essays.

I think one of Orwell’s main points is summarized at the very end of Homage:

“Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered by wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London [. . .] all the sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs” (231-232).

Here he’s talking about the return to England after his endeavors, but he knows that the world is about to be set ablaze with political fanaticism. England and France seem almost boring compared to what’s happening in Spain, but at least in Spain, per Orwell, the people are “awake.”

In many ways, Orwell notes that there doesn’t seem like a peaceful solution, or at least one that leaves a unified nation intact. Fascism is inconsistent with liberal democracy, which is why it often relies on scapegoating and force to drive out minorities or dissenters. In a liberal democracy, disagreements are part of the process. But with fascism, your views simply don’t matter if you’re not the dictator or oligarchic party in charge.

Homage describes in minute detail the political situation in Spain, so it can be less interesting for some readers than For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s not a narrative with a clear conclusion or “goal”; it describes the reality of the world, which lacks clear resolutions. What Orwell leaves us with in the quote above is the notion that it isn’t over yet — that the struggle will continue indefinitely.

And, in many ways, Orwell was right. The fight for freedom continues.

Works Cited

Allen, Michael. “The Unspanish War in For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 13, no. 2, 1972, pp. 204-212.

Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940.

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Harcourt, 1952.