Hacker News Reader

Well, Orwell was one of those "leftist" and did write "Animal Farm".

BTW the photos in your second link are fantastic!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...

Isaac Asimov wrote a great critique on 1984 which includes a few thoughts on Animal Farm: http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

I don't really like this critique, mostly because, in my opinion, it fails to understand that 1984 is a fictional book. There are some parallelisms with Stalinism and other tyrannical societies, yes, however they are only there as part of history in that world. I would say it failed to recognize that 1984 is more of an essay about human nature, more specifically into the desire for power above everything else. I really don't think Orwell had planned to make a "reflecting" story, something like "Woah! This was about Stalinist Russia all along!".

The critique failed to understand that, I think.

> There is no ability to make minor changes, even.

Good grief, how to totally miss the entire point. He’s trying to critique a political deconstruction as though it was entertainment fiction. Didn’t he realise the close parallels are kind of the point, because Orwell was writing a commentary on and illustration of those events and personalities? Introducing random variations would have completely obscured the things he was trying to say. Things Asimov didn’t even notice.

It seems evident, to me at least, that Asimov views "arms-length extremism" as a core part of the identity of upper case Leftism, at least in the West (and predominantly America). The way Asimov approaches 1984 appears to be the bog-standard "Well, if you're not a Nazi then you can't possibly be as evil as the Nazis". It betrays a view of looking at politics from a standpoint of a slope, rather than a hill that descends into immorality on both sides, and I'm sure Asimov derives that view (as does much of the modern world) from the reasons behind and outcomes of WWII. IMO, we still haven't gotten past this - even entertaining such a discussion can't be had without acknowledging the 'progressive Sword of Damocles' hanging overhead, and almost always descends into whatabout-whataboutism.

I really do hope that we eventually grow out of this phase and acknowledge that even the 'good guys' can be evil, we shouldn't need to wait and see a Communist Reich to know that the Leftist version of brownshirts are a bad thing, or wait until actual genocide is happening (or accept/ignore it as a possibility, even) or wait until it has a 1-to-1 mapping with Nazi atrocity to hold those kinds of behavior accountable just because they're not Nazis and they're not actually killing people.

> I really do hope that we eventually grow out of this phase and acknowledge that even the 'good guys' can be evil, we shouldn't need to wait and see a Communist Reich to know that the Leftist version of brownshirts are a bad thing, or wait until actual genocide is happening (or accept/ignore it as a possibility, even) or wait until it has a 1-to-1 mapping with Nazi atrocity to hold those kinds of behavior accountable just because they're not Nazis and they're not actually killing people.

Having looked at 2020, the threat of the United States going in this direction is not coming from some unholy trinity of the ghosts of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Trotsky. As a political idea in the public zeitgheist, it's dead as a parrot. It has no legs.

It's coming from the mainstream right. But since our friendly neighbourhood MAGA rallies aren't actually sieging and heiling, we're all in the 'wait and see how bad it can get the next time they take power' stage.

I agree, I vividly remember how bad some conversations used to get, to the point of ignoring or justifying certain atrocities, and I have seen that the acts of groups such as the-one-that-shall-not-be-named confined largely to certain counties in certain states. I don't know how much of the fervor dying down is attributable to 2020 having come and gone, but I'm at least a little glad that most discussions have remained firmly centrist and any leftover fires are the dying gasps of populist mainstream media wars.

It sounds like you might be ignorant of the anarchist vs. state socialist divide which has existed since 1872. [1] At every opportunity, state socialists have suppressed or outright killed anarchists, especially in the USSR. [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen%27s_A...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Russia#In_the_Sov...

I think you might be too strongly associating 'USSR' and 'communist'. They're intertwined but not identical.

The same thing happens with Fascism and the Nazis.

> Speaking of which (and continuing to troll)-- anyone know why the lower-case "other leftists" in Barcelona boxed up the photographic evidence of their existence and sent it to the UK instead of the USSR for safekeeping[2]? I mean if the forces against fascism were "Communists, Etcetera" why not send them there?

You are confusing Communism in Western Europe with the communist state of the USSR and its Stalinist doctrine of socialism in one country [3].

The Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel argues in "From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of 'Socialism in One Country'" that when Soviet Union in 1924 abandoned the goal of overthrowing capitalism around the world lead to development of what later was called Eurocommunism [4], with their democratic way to social reforms.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_one_country

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocommunism

Stalin's doctrine wasn't only to establish communism in Russia. He just realized it was impractical to export communism immediately. His intentional long-term play was to stoke war across the world between capitalist countries so that that war would create the desperate conditions for revolution within those countries similar to the role that WW1 played in creating the conditions for revolution within Russia. That's why he blocked reform to the Versailles Treaty, among other actions.

You failed to understand what I wrote - notwithstanding the reference I provided, and which you haven't.

I don't believe I misunderstood. You said the USSR abandoned the goal of overthrowing capitalism around the world in 1924. They (Stalin, in the 1930s, at least) didn't do that exactly. They just temporarily abandoned it as a direct goal based on their own direct intervention, knowing it wouldn't work. They wanted to achieve it firstly indirectly by creating the conditions for revolution in capitalist countries. They also knew that Russia needed to transform into an industrial power before it was possible to expand communism.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism/Stalinism#ref5391...

> "A third feature of Stalinism was the idea of “socialism in one country”—i.e., building up the industrial base and military might of the Soviet Union before exporting revolution abroad. To this end, Stalin rescinded the NEP, began the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, and embarked on a national program of rapid, forced industrialization.

> In foreign policy, socialism in one country meant putting the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of the interests of the international communist movement. After World War II, as Winston Churchill famously remarked, an Iron Curtain descended across Europe as Stalin installed communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, and Soviet-occupied East Germany as a buffer zone against an invasion from western Europe.

> Beyond Europe, the Soviet Union supported anticolonial “wars of national liberation” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and gave economic and military support to communist regimes in North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba."

> You are confusing Communism in Western Europe with the communist state of the USSR and its Stalinist doctrine of socialism in one country

They really aren't. The Communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War -- the ones who put their boot down on Orwell's beloved POUM and other Trotskyists -- were honest-to-god Soviets.

But yes, more democratic "Communist" parties did exist in Western Europe later, and there is a large space of "third way" Socialisms and Communisms that are not Stalinist hell.

I don't have my copy of Homage to hand, but I seem to remember Orwell being in the POUM militia was more or less an accident of how he arrived in Spain and nothing to do with it being 'beloved'.

As an aside, I once met a Spanish Civil War veteran from South Wales. I got the impression that he went to fight the fascists because it was the right thing to do ('If you tolerate this then your children will be next' was a famous slogan that made it into a song), not because of ideological indoctrination. He was a socialist in the British sense, but that should not suggest the slightest parallel with Stalinism