Editing Homage to Catalonia (section)

===Socialist reevaluation and communist backlash (1960s–1970s)===
Another reevaluation of ''Homage'' came during the 1960s, as the emerging [[counterculture of the 1960s|counterculture]] and the [[New Left]] brought a new generation of readers to pick up the book. The anti-communist tendencies of the 1950s, which had buried Orwell's positive depiction of [[revolutionary socialism]], were partly reversed and Orwell was again reconceived as a predecessor of [[Che Guevara]]. In 1971, the Welsh socialist scholar [[Raymond Williams]] commented that ''Homage'' had been reevaluated, in the context of the suppression of the [[Hungarian Revolution of 1956]] and the [[Protests of 1968]], as taking a position in favour of revolutionary socialism and opposed to both [[capitalism]] and [[Marxism-Leninism]].{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|pp=311-312}} This position was exemplified in [[Noam Chomsky]]'s book ''[[American Power and the New Mandarins]]'', in which the author used ''Homage'' to directly compare the Spanish revolution with [[Vietnam War|Vietnamese resistance to US intervention]], arguing that neither complied with the "liberal dogma" of the American intelligentsia. He speculated that the book's status as a symbol of 1950s anti-communism would have been "of little comfort to the author".{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|pp=311-312}} [[Raymond Carr]] praised Orwell in 1971 for being "determined to set down the truth as he saw it."<ref>Carr, Raymond, "Orwell and the Spanish war", essay in ''The World of George Orwell'', 1971, {{ISBN|0-297-00479-4}}.</ref> In his 1971 memoir, [[Herbert Matthews]] of ''The New York Times'' declared, "The book did more to blacken the Loyalist cause than any work written by enemies of the Second Republic."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Matthews|first=Herbert Lionel|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-xQrAAAAMAAJ|title=A World in Revolution: A Newspaperman's Memoir|date=1971|publisher=Scribner|isbn=978-0-684-12536-7|pages=43|language=en|access-date=17 October 2021|archive-date=16 March 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220316070044/https://books.google.com/books?id=-xQrAAAAMAAJ|url-status=live}}</ref> 

The revival in the book's popularity also triggered indignation from figures in the CPGB, which had never forgiven Orwell for it.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=307}} In 1967, the historian [[Frank Jellinek (historian)|Frank Jellinek]] expressed regret that the book had been exploited by [[anti-communism|anti-communists]] such as [[James Burnham]] and that it had brought the suppression of the POUM, which he called a "fairly minor piece of wartime expediency", to a prominent place within historiography of the civil war.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|pp=307-308}} In the late 1970s, British communist veterans of the war, such as Thomas Murray and Frank Graham, denounced the book respectively as a "weapon" of the [[anti-Stalinist left]] and as a [[slander]] against the International Brigades.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=307}} In 1984, CPGB politician and former commander of the International Brigades, [[Bill Alexander (British politician)|Bill Alexander]], accused Orwell of lacking anti-fascist sentiments and called the book an "[[The Establishment|establishment]]" denigration of the "real issues" of anti-fascism.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=307}} That same year, [[Lawrence and Wishart]] published ''Inside the Myth'', a collection of essays from authors hostile to Orwell, which [[John Newsinger]] described as "an obvious attempt to do as much damage to his reputation as possible".<ref name="newsinger" /> To Tom Buchanan, the sustained Communist campaign against ''Homage'' had been "so wrongheaded and ill-informed that it has probably, if anything, bolstered Orwell's reputation." He concluded that the legacy of the book, which cemented the repression of the POUM in popular historiography and damaged the reputation of the Communist Party, revealed the potential that single books can have to leave their mark on history.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|pp=307-308}}

Nevertheless, the revolutionary conception of ''Homage'' continued through the subsequent decades, with British film-maker [[Ken Loach]] notably adapting the book into his 1995 film ''[[Land and Freedom (film)|Land and Freedom]]''. Tom Buchanan comments that the film may not have been received as well if previous generations had not been primed to view the Spanish Civil War through the lens of "the Revolution betrayed".{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=312}} Buchanan was critical of the far-left's adoption of the book, pointing out that Orwell had never fully agreed with the POUM's politics and that his view of revolutionary Spain "ignit[ing] the passions of workers around the world" had been naïve, given the prevalence of dictatorship at the time.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=312}} He also commented that Orwell's revolutionary politics had been "unconvincing" and only a brief phase of his political development, which evolved and changed following his publication of ''Homage'', as evidenced by his more [[moderate politics|moderate]] reflection in his 1942 essay "[[Looking Back on the Spanish War]]".{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=312}}