Before he was George Orwell, he was Eric Blair, police officer
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We must be in trouble, given Orwell became so popular. Extra so if powers that be deemed worthwhile to character assassinate someone who writes "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". It should have never gotten as popular as it did.
Just saying that most of us cannot see the implications of our thoughts in our own epoch. Most dystopian authors playfully hope they're wrong. So I think when Orwell penned his best anti-fascist works the world was already on an optimistic post-war trajectory, seeing an "arc of history that bends toward justice". Nobody had anticipated technofascism is its emerging forms.
Fascism has no false pretense of equality across races and peoples, which is clearly what Animal Farm was referring to, but Communism does. Orwell deliberately doesn’t name the ideology but clearly Fascism isn’t the only authoritarian ideology that Orwell was criticizing in his body of work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_automated_luxury_communi...
Orwell had lived through a hell of a lot of non-mundanity (British colonialism, Spain's civil war, Nazism and World War II, Stalinism) whose injustices he wrote about.
It's not like he just wrote about 1940's common places against ordinary injustices.
When an author is promoted by the CIA, it is probably not that subversive. Or perhaps it is subversive in a differet way than the reader think.
[1] https://annas-archive.org/md5/6486c7cb2f83f4a97cc02728ff77c2... (Public domain)
The latter's novel inspired Orwell on how to highlight dystopian ideas, and convinced Orwell that fiction is the medium best suited for this. It's a good read (and so is his research-oriented book "The Sleepwalkers" giving a history of physics/cosmology up to modern science - modern in Koestler's time).
The opposing view is that Britain's ex-colonial possessions should count themselves lucky to have been colonized by the British, who built trains, schools and hospitals, as compared to the French, Spanish or Belgian versions, so it was all okay. The British, they say, would have loved to have been colonized by a superior culture, only one wasn't available.
In Burmese Days, the only character who seems to really understand the system and thrive within it is one of the story's villains, U Po Kyin. He might have served as a template for Napoleon in Animal Farm:
> “No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”
RIP
O well ...
He did put on a good show, which TV and the press loved.
“[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.” George Orwell (31 December 1943)
“Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
“The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.”
“Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.”
I guess welcome to the age of schizophrenia. For those who are interested, his membership of the Fabian Society is key to understanding how he was so spot on about today's world (eg: planned). Wolf in sheeps clothing indeed.
https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=FabianSociety&C...
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
"It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours."
"It is sometimes a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is changing the conditions of warfare. In the next great war, we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him."
"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting."
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
I strongly recommend the four-volume Penguin edition of his collected journalism and essays.
This holds NO candle the the candor of Robert McNamara talking about fire bombing Japan in WWII. If you have never seen "fog of war" the documentary interview of him go and see it. The context of "McNamara's Morons" and forest Gump is lost on so many...
That's a neat quote. I wonder what Orwell thought of the manufactured famines in Ireland and India, or the British East India Company going to war with China so they make them purchase opium.
If picking up a rifle and traveling to a foreign country to participate in their socialist revolution isn't enough to bury any accusations of not being a true believer, I can't imagine what is.
Loosely bases on the book
I had the impression that he went more for fighting fascism than fighting for a socialist revolution.
More to the point, Blair thought he needed socialist credentials to get invited into the war, but couldn't actually get them because the socialists didn't trust him, looks like for very good reason. He got in instead using his Labour contacts, which was far more conventionally liberal. He really didn't care at all about socialism, he just hated fascism.
1984 wasn't anti-socialism, he actually had very little to say about it, all his criticisms were aimed at fascist totalitarianism, IngSoc was only socialist in name. Nothing owned and controlled by the people, everything controlled by the government.
All of the things this article says are bad about 1984 are the things that make it a good novel:
- It has a complex main character who is deeply flawed and far from an ideal revolutionary. - It isn't especially concerned with accurately modelling a plausible political system, and instead describes an emotive representation of the author's fears for the future. - Many of it's themes are aesthetic or subjective. - It doesn't try to offer a concrete alternative, giving the whole thing a sense of hopelessness.
Of course everyone has their own response to any piece of art but I find this criticism very surprising. Even the "takedown" article you posted pretty clearly shows Winston to be a complex character (especially in relation to the role he is cast in):
"From the very beginning of his supposed revolt against the Party, Winston simply assumes that he will not be victorious"
"Winston’s revolt against the situation is based in large part on his sense of physical disgust with icky surroundings, far more (I would argue) than it’s based on any coherent ideological or humanitarian critique... Winston is repelled more by the crappy cigarettes, and the fact that people use ugly English, and the malodorous sweatiness of Parsons, and the nastiness of the food, and the forgetting of nursery rhymes, than he is by the way the system he lives in is forcing people to live as slaves in terror of death and torture."
"Winston’s sexuality is really weird, mixed up as it is with his general uninterest in other people, his contempt for the Party and a general dislike of women"
"The closest Winston comes to thinking that there is any hope of positive social change is when he thinks about the proles; but he doesn’t know any proles, he doesn’t like being around them, he thinks they smell (of course), he doesn’t believe that they are capable of independent thought or action, and what ‘faith’ he has in them is shown to be completely groundless and abstract"
"As would-be rebels go, Winston is strikingly inactive and incurious. When Winston and Julia form their little two-person cell, do they talk to each other about the world they live in, and try to figure out its true nature, and what, if anything, they can do to shake the system? No. They have sex and drink black market coffee."
Seems like a pretty complex guy to me, and much more interesting as a character than the ideologically motivated revolutionary that Johnston seems to want him to be.
"That’s the thing about Orwell’s Imperialism: it’s perfectly ordinary stuff, distinguished only by the socialist persona he invented to speak it. As an example of literary dissembling, Orwell belongs with the great forgers. But as a man of ideas, he is truly beneath contempt. His ideas are simply the hatreds of his nursery, hidden by an elaborate self-glorifying backstory."
Your article's main thesis is "how dare he do that!" (before rejecting imperialism).
Actually, it’s simple. Orwell went to Spain to fight for his most deeply held belief, yes. Unfortunately, that belief wasn’t socialism but the nastiest, most puerile of the tribal hatreds English babies learn in the cradle: anti-Catholicism."
I just couldn't keep reading after that. I like John Dolan's analyses in the War Nerd podcast but this essay seems unhinged. Did he write this at the time the Exiled staff were smashing each other in the face with horse semen pies? Seems like a lot of edginess and projection.
Chronologically I think this comes after the horse semen pies.
It's not a stretch to think a middle class Englishmen from the early 20th century hates catholics, and that this bigotry (along with his other pet hates) pop up in his writing.
As far as Orwell being a socialist....don't forget he ratted out British socialist to British intelligence.
His writing is partly journalistic, partly literary.He's never really trying to assemble a coherent ideological or philosophical argument.
He's reporting what he sees and reflecting on the world he lives in and his place in it. He can see profound problems and injustices, but is deeply skeptical that any of the ideologies of his time provide solutions. But he is also acutely aware, I think, that he doesn't really have any better ideas. There's a profound anxiety and uncertainty than runs throughout Orwell's writing.
For me, this is what makes him a good writer. Judging him on not being "properly" socialist or anti-imperialist or whatever is completely missing the point.
But there are people who put him on the pedestal. His claimed by the left, and western leftists love to argue over who is "more socialist" than the other. His time in Spain, books like Animal Farm and 1984...they're held up as examples of Orwell being a better leftist than others.
In Road to Wigan Pier - to the decry of mainstream Marxists - he noted that blind opposition to landlords is nuanced in working class coal mining communities. Generally the property would have been the only source of income for an old widow. I believe that's the project in which he remarked that, "The working classes smell."
"Ideally, the worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested her life's savings in three slum houses, inhabits one of them, and tries to live on the rent of the other two — never, in consequence, having any money for repairs."
Make enough people associate Orwell's works with the dark pages of his past, and the focus will shift from the ideas of the works to the identity of the writer. Then use it to attack those who still dare to bring up those ideas, and you have driven them off the public's attention span for good.