I’m currently reading the fantastic book Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War by Adam Hochschild, and I can’t help but draw parallels to the Spanish Civil War and post-2016 election America.

The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, was a battle between fascism (Nationalists) and progress (Republicans). On the left, communists, socialists, anarchists, revolutionaries and artists banned together to fight oppression and conservatism. Their fight was hard, and ultimately ended in defeat (and the beginning of WWII), but their efforts inspired some of the greatest works in literature and art: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, the latter two writers both spending time in Spain during the war — Hemingway as a journalist and Orwell as a Republican fighter.

With the results of the 2016 election, I felt the urge to do something I haven’t thought about doing in a long time: to write a private diary. This diary (more…)