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Comment by revorad | Hacker News Reader

Priceless just for the last paragraph.

I've had an interest in philosophy lately and I thought the last comment was fantastic. I'm on Heidegger at the moment and Sartre may follow. I loved 1984, so maybe I'll heed Orwell's criticism and substitute Kirkegaard for Sartre.

Which of Sartre's book is he referring to?

"Reflections on the Jewish Question"

To save people who haven't read it the trouble, here's the wiki article on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew

Haven't read Sartre's book in question, but I do know that Orwell was quite antisemitic himself, so this looks like his prejudice showing through.

that's unfortunate. do you have any references to Orwell's antisemitism?

Having read "Down and Out in Paris and London" recently, I didn't notice anything too appalling. Just some stereotypical views of Jews, which I thought Orwell wrote with the purpose of describing a typical Brit from the early 20th century in order to criticize their antisemitism, but some googling suggests he expresses similar views in his diaries too, which is a bit more disconcerting.

> One could ignore this, just possibly, if it existed in a single book. And yet for 10 years the abstract figure of "the Jew" makes regular appearances in Orwell's diaries. Out tramping in the early 30s, he falls in with "a little Liverpool Jew, a thorough guttersnipe" with a face that recalls "some low-down carrion bird". Watching the crowds thronging the London underground in October 1940, he decides that what is "bad" about the Jews is that they are not only conspicuous but go out of their way to make themselves so.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/13/biography.higher...

How do you "know" that Orwell was antisemitic? Did you know the man? Whether you have first-hand knowledge or not, please do share your information.

I suggest reading his essay about anti-semitism if you wish to learn more about his opinion based on his writings. http://www.george-orwell.org/AntiSemitism_In_Britian/0.html

I take it that 'Did you know the man?' is a rhetorical question. I 'know' that Orwell was antisemitic, because of some of the stuff he has written. I have read 'Down and out in Paris and London', and 'Burmese Days' (apart from 'Homage to Catalonia' and '1984'), and in both books I got the clear impression that Orwell was an anti-semite.

The essay to which you have linked surprised me; I can only conclude that Orwell must have been an anti-semite most of his life, and changed (or at least appeared to change) his views towards the very end of his life.

I had never heard that Orwell was antisemitic. That's so troubling. And here I thought it was just a writers'/philosophers' feud. :(

Wikipedia, which knows everything and is never ever wrong, says the following of the matter, which seems to differ:

"Writing in the spring of 1945 a long essay titled "Antisemitism in Britain", for the Contemporary Jewish Record, Orwell stated that anti-Semitism was on the increase in Britain, and that it was "irrational and will not yield to arguments". He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could "swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others". He wrote: "For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. ... Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own anti-Semitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness." In Nineteen Eighty-Four, written shortly after the war, Orwell portrayed the Party as enlisting anti-Semitic passions against their enemy, Goldstein."

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

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