The Plot to Assassinate Orwell

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Rittenberg

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00CPJB7H4/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-small-woman...

Which is the story of Gladys Aylward, a missionary in China mostly in the first half of the century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Aylward

It was made into a film "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" featuring Ingrid Bergman. It of course took liberties with the story but I remember it being a good movie.

The problem with talking about this era is that half the country believes that the republicans were blameless and the nationalists were the devil. Both sides freely executed suspected political enemies, but the left is unwilling to recognize this. If the republicans had won there would have been as many or more executions than under Franco's regime. There would have even been a chance that Spain became communist, which would have resulted in even more deaths.

Now, I agree with you on the lack of freedom of speech in Spain. But it censors the left as much as the right is censored in England or Germany. That is to say, the censorship is shameful but on the same level as the rest of Europe.

Vox is a far-right party but it isn't a fascist one because they play under the Spanish Constitution rules.

Describing PP in that same political spectrum is a bad joke, the same kind you make when saying 'Spain has a disgraceful recent history of anti free-spech legislastion' (sic). Can you please give us any example? Any sentence? Any ource? Can you honestly say that you can't speak freely in Spain?

In the caricature you've drawn, it looks like the 'fascists' have all the power, keeping everyone with their mouths shut, but you need to take the whole picture, from far-right to far-left, and don't forget the disproportionate power of the regional nationalist parties.

The main point you forget is the interest of many parties to re-write History, being the Spanish Civil War one of their favorite subjects because, at the end, most of them were supporting a dictatorship, not a democracy. Or a Franco dictatorship, or a Stalin dictatorship, but none of them fighting for democracy or for the original spirit of the II Spanish Republic.

This is not true. The Soviet backed militias forced Anarchists to either fight for their militias or be part of their purge. The Soviets used force to squash the growing (and large) anti-authoritarian sentiment among the Spanish Civil War Republicans.

edit - I think I'm done here, bye Dang. You do a hard job, but this is utterly ridiculous. In the ongoing attempt to edit out anything contentious, this place has completely jumped the shark.

That's my hope anyway. In the short-term, I'd like to see free markets begin erasing more borders and reducing the number of nations. Hopefully, the recent nationalist fad is just that and we can get to more EU style setups, more globalism, and more cooperation. A disgusting amount of resources is spent on the military. Capitalism has the ability to solve our problems. Borders are in the way.

Edit: Is it the socialists, anarchists, or capitalists downvoting me? Hard to say. My ideas definitely don't have many friends.

Why do so many people seem to act like some form of socialism is required (or even useful) to avoid environmental issues? It really doesn't help fight the right's narrative of "all this global warming stuff is just the economic left seeking more control over the economy" - in fact it plays directly to it. Are people just trying to attach their particular goals to a crisis they think might propel them forward?

All communist governments (not all communist movements, and this is actually the source of many breaches between communist movements that aren't governments, particularly in the West, and communist governments and the movements aligned with them) are rooted in Leninist vanguardism, a specific and particularly authoritarian rewriting of Marxist theory to avoid the dependence on developed democratic capitalist society with broad proletarian class consciousness and grassroots leadership as prerequisite to communism.

But the French Revolution, which was ideologically far from authoritarian, had a lot of the same practical problems; trying to run a state with active counterrevolutionary forces tends to make people authoritarians for what they see as temporary and pragmatic necessity as a means to achieving a more free end-state (and defenders of Leninist vanguardism would probably see it as just that!)

Americans sometimes forget that what we call our “revolution” was not an anti-elite revolution but an elite-led regional separatist movement coordinated by the local governments acting in concert, and so avoided many of the challenges found in genuine revolutions.

Characteristic of the paranoia is that the worst purges after all were against party members and top party elites themselves.

Not because any of them resisted the "tax man" (heck, they had wealth and preferential treatment), but because they could threaten Stalin or limit his control.

Similar with Mao in China. The bloody cultural revolution wasn't some mass murder of people resisting the party rule or the "taxman", but party elites splitting the people into factions and using them as proxies to fight internal party power struggles.

When the rich and powerful unite against the tax man and the "proletariat", they always win.

So, when you say "people fight against taxes", we should clarify what people we are talking about. Plenty of people supported the collectivist movements of the era, and they are also people.

Maybe it's that cultural revolutions are like this, and there's very, very few non-cultural revolutions - maybe only independence revolutions? I literally do not know so like if you know one, put forth the Wikipedia link?

The modern revolution in Czechoslovakia turned out fairly free of violence, at it was not communist.

If you consider any wealth redistribution communism then you would have to consider most or all industrial states in part communist and the premise of the question itself becomes dubious.

If you consider any kind of far left redistributive movement communist then again the merit of the question is dubious because there have been many such movements that remained peaceful.

If you restrict the definition to only actors that call themselves communist even then the question is complicated by the fact that there have been many such actors that call themselves communist yet do not adhere to any communist doctrine. Just as there are many "Republics" which are not at all republics in reality.

Makes me think there’s something very lasting about his ideas, moral interpretations aside.

> But it was the Bolsheviks with their plan of communism immediately, not in 20 years, who won.

The Bolsheviks won in no small part because they were a particularly violent, insular faction. Revolutionary situations don't really reward being accommodating and adverse to violence, even though that might be very desirable post-revolutionary condition.

It's something of a problem with revolutions that the people you want running the show afterwards aren't the kind of people that revolutions inherently favor.