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IDK if I'd call that an "omission." There was a political system, and Hitler came to power within it. France still has a political norm of banding together to defeat populist far right parties, and an electoral system that lends to it.

The fact remains that Fascism, Hitler, and Nazism was popular and that was key to achieving power . This is essay is about that. Why, despite promising burdens and hardship, was Fascism popular. It just isn't about electoral tactics, negative politics or such. I'm sure he would have conceded the point that any given elections could have been determined by such tactics.

I agree with Orwell. The tactical-electoral subject isn't really that interesting, even if it is/was consequential. The point about promising voters burdens, hardship, & "military virtues" is interesting.

For example, I think this gives us clues about Russian communism's decline (also in the West, ideologically) after Stalin.

^Also I doubt Orwell was against "popular front politics." (a) I've read a lot of Orwell and can't recall any statement that suggests this and (b) Orwell himself volunteered in a communist militia against fascism. He himself was a socialist. If you're willing to join a communist militia to fight fascism, surely you'd be OK with joined ticket.

> For example, I think this gives us clues about Russian communism's decline (also in the West, ideologically) after Stalin.

The decline only started well after that, even after the 1968 Prague Spring debacle. Only a few of the faithful in the west were put off by it.

I'd put it at late 1970s, maybe really sinking in with Poland's Solidarnosc turmoil around 1980.

In Poland we say that popular support for communism ended together with food supply.

This is somehow relflecyed in Solidarity’s initial mission of fighting for „socialism with human face”.

> Also Hitler had the massive support of German industrialists, they bailed him out in 1932, and both Thyssen and Schlacht urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler.

From the essay: “It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. ”

I think I agree with you.

I don't think that the integrity of elections and democracy are the main point of this essay.

Orwell wrote a lot about authoritarianism, and as you say, "communism" was the prime example at the time.

What he hints at here is not only the fragility of democracy. It's about the fragility of civilization.

It's about the "will to power" as defined by Nietzsche, and the power of belief systems, as well as the primal underpinnings of our society.

This essay makes me think about the authoritarian side of capitalism, "freedom" (to take what you can), slavery and many more topics.

My takeaway is that our contemporary masquerade of "capitalism=freedom=human rights" is nothing but an illusion of a select few.

But that's what makes Orwell great, everybody reads him differently.

I'm well aware that Orwell is favored for "anti-socialist"/"pro-freedom" stances and I have read 1984 and Animal farm.

I must disagree.

Orwell is not the bible, or an if-by-whiskey politician. Everybody reads him differently because they're combining hearsay, random quotes and attributions.

If you read Orwell's essays or articles directly, he's extremely clear and unambiguous. The fact that people think Orwell agrees with them despite having polar opposite views is a testament to people's laziness, not Orwell's interpretability.

On capitalism as a belief system, Orwell was a critic. Not because of freedom, or lack thereof... but because he thought capitalist politics didn't offer enough hope. I can't find the quote but somewhere he goes into Socialist, Communist & even Fascist promises of a better future. Capitalism offered a very modest amount of hope on a very long timeline. Conservatism offered none, which is why (according to Orwell) Fascism succeeded it.

Thanks for the reply.

I have read Down&Out and the odd essay in addition to the ones I mentioned.

I have heard the shortened trope "Orwell was a socialist, even fought in the Spanish civil war, then became a vocal critique and disillusioned socialist" often enough so that my reply partly argued against this simplification.

There's some hard-to-explain background for my comments:

1) The above-mentioned simplification: I grew up with socialism and fascism equally being put under the "totalitarianism" umbrella in media and education. In German we call it "Hufeisentheorie". There's probably some truth to this. But I incrasingly feel that for capitalism to appear "human", an exponentially growing amount of available natural resources and slave labour is needed.

2) The post-war generation of which i.e. my parents were a part; they were in a way the undertakers of mainstream leftism.

3) You hint at it: Fascism and capitalism tend to go hand in hand. We have just been brainwashed to forget about it. See US foreign policy in Latin America.

>>I have heard the shortened trope "Orwell was a socialist, even fought in the Spanish civil war, then became a vocal critique and disillusioned socialist"

I don't think the last part is true. ASAIK, Orwell remained a socialist all his life. I don't think he was disillusioned, because he wasn't a kool aid kind of guy at any point.

Orwell died young, before the cold war so he didn't really weigh in on that dialogue. The terms and cliches we tend to use came after he died.

In my opinion fascism courted, supported and leaned on capitalists, not really capitalism. The ideological view of capitalism (in the Rand/Hayek/Neoliberalism sense) was still new ATT.

Yes that all makes sense to me.

In hindsight I made some vague points partly because I misread your original comment.

I am myself annoyed by some popular misconceptions about Orwell and his work.

I had read some nuanced articles about him as well and they didn't all paint him in the way that I put in quotes.

Regarding capitalism and fascism, I misleadingly wrote "you hint at it", but maybe we disagree here at least partly.

> The fact that people think Orwell agrees with them despite having polar opposite views is a testament to people's laziness, not Orwell's interpretability.

This is common and always amuses me. My favorite is Adam Smith, beloved of the most demonstrably ardent self-described “capitalists” who would be shocked and repulsed by what he actually wrote.

Sometimes this property is considered a feature, not a bug, in particular by Marxists and religious leaders, and doubtless by many more.

As it happens I really love Eric Blair’s writing even when I disagree with him.

True, Orwell has a worldview (though it evolves over time) and it connects his thoughts if you pick up a collection of his essays and study them systematically. But one does not need to agree with everything to find agreement with some particular elements and thoughts.

Slavery pre-dates capitalism. Slavery is more a product of feudalism. In fact, it was the capitalist successes of the northern states in the US that drove the defeat of the southern slave states.

Yep, it's convenient today to connect the two or to pretend that America's (or Britain's) success in the early day was largely a product of slavery. But even when slavery ended there was hardly a sudden decline in prosperity, that engine kept accelerating.

> Slavery didn't make America rich. It made a few Southerners rich and a few Northerners rich, but it didnt make the country rich.

> Another way to look at it is, the Confederacy was a loose collection of agricultural states. The real money was made by the industrial northern states. In the north were mills, factories, ship building, and steel mills.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-slavery-contribute-to-Ame...

American capitalism (and the labour movements that reacted to it) was built in the factories and mills, not the farms in the south.

That is true, but also that tend to be true in multi-party voting system in general. Having over 50% is not routine at all. Generally, the leading party must make coalition of some sort.

I think that if you want to attack legitimacy of that election, going through the street violence and voter intimidation Nazi party produced is closer to mark.

Also communists were actual communists alien with Russian communist party. And news of purges going on Russia previously were available in Germany. Socialist party was the pro-democracy party on Germany. That is not compatible with party that takes their instructions from Stalin as communists were.

By the time of the KPD-SPD split, Stalin was not in power. In fact, the KPD split from the SPD in 1918, when the USSR was still being born. And far from taking orders from the Bolsheviks, they actually had a fair amount of influence on them. The idea that they split because the meek SPD was afraid of the Stalinists is revisionist history, and the SPD itself at various points in its history was far from above purges and political violence

The reason the KPD split from the SPD is that the SPD supported WW1 and the KPD were against the war. The reason they became mortal enemies was because in 1920 the SPD and the Freikorps killed many KPD members, from then on there was no hope at reconciliation.

Stalin took leadership of the country in 1924 and lost it when he died much much later.

By the time of elections of 1933, Russia was full totalitarian and that is what communist party wanted for Germany.

Yes, and the SPD banned anti-war socialists and communists in 1918, and then ordered to have leaders of the KPD shot in 1920. As you surely know, 1920 is before 1924. The point being, the KPD and the SPD were irrevocably alienated from each other past the point of no return before Stalin took power.

What is often forgotten, by the early 1930s, the split between SPD and KPD (which dates back to Marx and Engels and the condemnation of the "Bernsteinian revisionism" on the one hand and the SPD not being a revolutionary party after 1903) had become an abyss: to the KPD the SPD was a "social-fascist movement" and the SPD had adopted the three-arrows symbol, which symbolized an equidistance to fascism, communism and monarchism. There was probably not much room for a scenario of united forces.

The rift dates to WW1, not the 1930s, and considering the three arrows to be a better marking of the rift than the SPD literally giving the order to murder KPD is nonsensical.

There was no split in 1903 - the SPD simply had both a revolutionary and electoral faction.

And Bernsteinian revisionism wasn't about taking power through elections or through revolution (which is what the SPD took position on in 1903), it was about the idea that capitalism wasn't going to implode on its own and that accelerationism was a bad policy (on which he was objectively right), but he still allied with revolutionary Marxists such as Liebknecht in the USPD.

Why the USPD? Because he was essentially excluded from the SPD for not supporting WW1.

Hence the doctrine of social fascism - the SPD supported war (and to some degree imperialism), so the KPD and the USPD exaggerated this and called them fascists. That was a result of the core reason of the split, which is differing views on war.

The split itself was already an abyss in 1920, it did not in any way get worse - indeed there is little that is worse than armed confrontation.

There was absolutely room for united forces is the SPD didn't kick out the KPD and USPD (including Bernstein) over WW1, and then progressively gotten more and more centrist as predictably the pro-war position was beneficial to centrists. Without that central event there would have been so split. The USPD is an example that shows that both revolutionary communists and social democrats (by the definition of the time, you would call them communists nowadays) were able to work together as they all agreed that electoralism and harm reduction were inherently necessary, that capitalism had to be abolished, and that this abolition had to be done fairly gradually.

Nazis in their past Freikorps incarnation also killed plenty of communists. It did not prevent KPD from doing joint strikes with them.

So I find it very dubious that KPD and SPD couldn't have made a single united front, if instructions from Moscow weren't towards the opposite.

> So I find it very dubious that KPD and SPD couldn't have made a single united front, if instructions from Moscow weren't towards the opposite.

And if social democrat's were willing to cooperate with them. Because communists were only slightly smaller threat then nazi. Hitlers tactic was to talk about communists and Jew and social democrats interchangeably, but they were not. That does not mean the three were the same in practice.

Social democrats were the one pro-democracy party in Germany. That is not compatible with communism. Then there were those pro-monarchy or military dictatorship, then nazi.

> The rift dates to WW1, not the 1930s (…)

What I wrote is that the rift dates back to the late 19th century and had become rather an abyss by the early 1930s (considering things like the Iron Front).

> he benefited from the enmity between the Social democrats and the Communist

To support Hitler Stalin ordered German Communists to not join forces with Social Democrats.

When? In 1918 when the KPD split from the SPD? Or in 1920 when the SPD and the Freikorps shot all of their leaders dead? Perhaps when the death of those leaders and the ensuing infighting allowed the Comintern to take influence? No, because Stalin wasn't in power when the SPD and KPD became literally mortal enemies. You don't join forces with people that gave the order to kill your friends. Pretending Stalin was the reason they were alienated is ridiculous - the alienation predated him taking power.

More like the center-left SPD failed to respond to the depression well (i.e. govern properly) and made alliances of convenience with the right and the Nazis to marginalize and ban Communists along with anyone else on the left.

That's how it's going to happen in the US, too: The governing center/center-left party expends all of its effort attacking the left, and becomes completely ineffective at governance through incompetence, corruption and self-dealing, losing the support of the voters. The far-right (rising in popularity) eats into the center-right through direct targeting of individuals and the rewards of conversion to a movement currently rising in popularity. Eventually a charismatic far-right speaker starts giving popular speeches indicting the corruption and incompetence of the governing center, probably during a deep economic crisis, and insisting that this corruption and incompetence is disarming the country in the face of the real existential threat that everyone from the far-right to the center-left agrees upon, which is the left. And the left is actually covertly foreign-based, funded by powerful Jews and enemy governments, so their opinions are actually a form of invasion. So we need to cleanse this country of the traitors, then take the fight to the countries that supported them.

that's true. On the other hand: when the nazis came to power the communists were advocating for a generals strike, whereas the SPD leaders were staunchly against it.

in German: https://www.gewerkschaftsgeschichte.de/1933-konflikt-ueber-d...

now both parties took part in a general strike in 1920 against the Kapp putsch, and that was the end of the coup attempt.

It all could have been averted, I think people exaggerate the strength of the NSDAP in march 1933. They were already on a downturn, when they took power - in terms of the popular vote. It is possible that they would not have mattered, half a year later.