This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Feb 2007, by Philharmania.
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19 Feb 07
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In other words, he thought that this totalitarian society was an improvement on the messy compromises of liberal democracy. And in so thinking, it seems to me likely that he was guilty of precisely the dishonest self-hatred of which he later accuses British intellectuals: he has to suppress in himself the taste for the appurtenances of bourgeois life, such as cocktails and hot baths, for which he later admits that he so longs. That the disappearance of the bourgeoisie in Barcelona was only apparent and temporary was for him a matter of regret: obviously not enough of them had been killed.
I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.
Orwell’s opinion that it is worth fighting for the destruction of churches is not the result of a sudden rush of blood to the head. The whole of his book is sewn with such crude sentiments. The fact that a village “church had long been used as a latrine” by militiamen was unworthy of his condemnation and seemed to him no worse than that the fields surrounding the village had been used for the same purpose; likewise, looting candles from churches not only failed to draw from him a condemnation, but even an awareness that there was even a moral question involved: likewise when a “church had been knocked about but was used as a military store.” The “but” surely indicates approval: at least the building was still of some, no doubt temporary, use.In a cemetery, the crosses on tombstones “usually had been chipped off by some industrious atheist with a chisel.” Is “industrious” quite the word needed here? “To the Spanish people … the Church was a racket pure and simple.” To all the people, pure and simple? “Churches were wrecked and the priests driven out or killed”: the only regret that Orwell expresses is that it allowed Franco to represent himself to readers of the Daily Mail as “a patriot delivering his country from hordes of fiendish ‘Reds.’” But why the quotation marks? If it was not the Reds who drove out or killed the priests, who was it? The People, one and indivisible?
Orwell even exhibited a Taliban tendency:
For the first time since I had been in Barcelona I went to look at the Sagrada Familia… . Unlike most of the churches in Barcelona, it was not damaged during the Revolution—it was spared because of its “artistic value,” people said. I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance, though they did hang a red and black banner between its spires.
Incidentally, the fact that the Sagrada Familia was spared because of its artistic value proves that the other churches were not damaged collaterally, but by deliberate policy. And this was eight years after Stalin had had the cathedral of Christ the Redeemer in Moscow blown up, so Orwell ought to have understood the meaning of such destruction. In this matter he was definitely on the side of Stalin—in his own words, pure and simple.Just to make sure we get the point, Orwell states that “churches were pillaged everywhere as a matter of course, because it was perfectly well understood that the Spanish Church was part of the capitalist racket. In six months in Spain I saw only two undamaged churches, and until about July 1937 no churches were allowed to reopen and hold services.” Not much reflection here on freedom, tolerance, or the consequent accuracy of Franco’s propaganda, at least in this regard.
Another asp
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Do illiterate people reverence their supposed superiors, pathetically or otherwise? I have never noticed it, and I have had dealings with a lot of illiterates, but perhaps the nature of illiteracy has changed since Orwell’s day. In any case, one might have supposed that the type that Orwell describes, ready to commit murder and with a reverence for his superiors, was a rather dangerous type. But Orwell says, “I have seldom seen anyone—any man, I mean—to whom I have taken such an immediate liking… . Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger!”
Odd indeed, especially in such a case, as Orwell himself half-recognizes in the same paragraph. “I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again.” In other words, he knew, really, that his romanticized first impression was likely to be destroyed by further acquaintance with the truth, and he wanted to avoid the truth.
Having extolled ferocity and potential murderousness, presumably at the service of a pathetic reverence of superiors, Orwell goes on to describe Barcelona as it struck him when he first arrived there.
It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches were here and there being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and every café had an inscription saying it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black… . The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud.
Orwell also described the appearance of the people in the street:In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no “well-dressed” people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform.
What had happened, you might ask, to the “wealthy classes”?I believed that things were as they appeared, that this really was a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side.
What Orwell is describing is a totalitarian, completely politicized society, of which a Kim Il Sung might have approved. And so does Orwell:There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for
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Now, however, that Marxist Communism as a ruling doctrine has all but disappeared from the face of the earth (though its effects certainly live on), Orwell’s most celebrated books have lost some of their urgency. It is even possible that generations to come, historically uninformed and uninterested, will wonder what on earth they were all about. By then, of course, Newspeak will have become so deeply entrenched that no one will realize that he is talking it, for it is the fate of satire in the modern world to become prophecy.
Great writer as Orwell was, he is not beyond criticism—as I am sure he would have been the first to agree. He never encouraged anyone to turn him into a plaster saint, though his very abjuration of claims to sanctity is, paradoxically, one of the grounds for his canonization; this modesty should not obscure from us the fact that he was full of contradictions, his powers of analysis were very deficient, he often lacked the imagination to see the consequences of what he said, he accepted political clichés uncritically, notwithstanding his brilliant essay on that very subject, and though he made much of what he saw as the quintessentially English quality of decency (I don’t think anyone would make that mistake nowadays after half an hour in any English town or city), which he contrasted with the cruelty promoted by ideology, he was not himself entirely immune from the latter, at least in the abstract.
In 1946, he wrote, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” Let us look a little more closely at this famous claim, that itself has been more or less uncritically accepted. (When I mentioned to a mildly leftist retired schoolteacher that I intended to write an essay critical of Orwell’s views, he said, in the tone of one genuinely and painfully shocked, “But you accept that he was in favor of democratic socialism?”) I therefore apologize in advance for any upset that my heretical views may cause.
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In any political argument of philosophical significance, everyone wants George Orwell as an ally. To be able to claim that he is so, however, you must first place him on an ideological map and then discover that, by happy coincidence, you occupy precisely the same position yourself. Hey presto, Orwell is on your side, and your opponents are thereby reduced to persons of ill-will or bad faith!
Why should Orwell be so desired and desirable, in short so unanswerable, an ally? He is a secular saint, over whose relics everyone squabbles. There are good reasons for this, no doubt. In his essay, Why I Write, published in 1946, Orwell disarmingly tells us that all writers are to some extent egotistical: they desire to seem clever, to be talked about and admired, and to be remembered after their death. Of all the important writers or intellectuals of the last century, however, Orwell was the most modest and least egotistical, in short had the best character. This communicates itself in the writing itself, which is almost always lucid, never pretentious or wilfully obscure, and gives the impression that what the author is trying to communicate is more important to him than the mere fact that it is he who is communicating it. This is by no means as usual or normal as it ought to be among writers. Such details as he reveals of himself are always to make a larger or general point, not to impress upon the reader how complex or interesting he is.
Connected with this was his honesty and his refusal to deny the obvious. In Politics and the English Language, Orwell wrote that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give solidity to pure wind.” Although he was not, in fact, entirely free of these vices himself, he has the reputation for being so. At any rate, he was far less inclined than others who wrote on the same subjects as he to disguise uncomfortable facts by means of euphemism or dialectical legerdemain. He never embraced lies as truth, or brutality as mercy.
Of course, his reputation beyond the purlieus of the Left now rests mainly on his two last books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. They made him an honorary conservative, though in fact he was a conscript rather than a volunteer. His moral courage in exposing the evils of communism when the prestige of the Soviet Union among the leftist intelligentsia—and there was virtually no other—was at its height was very great, if not quite to be compared with that of dissidents under a totalitarian regime. Insofar as it is possible for an intellectual in a liberal democracy to be brave, Orwell was brave.
Perhaps the most genuine and moving encomia to him I ever heard were in Romania in the dark days just before the downfall of Ceausescu. Nineteen Eighty-Four circulated clandestinely, and several Romanians told me that they found it astonishing how an Englishman, who had never so much as set foot in a communist country, seemed to understand their own experience from the inside, as it were, and sometimes better than they understood it themselves, so that the meaning of their own experience became clearer to them as a result of reading him. And this they found immensely consoling, the very opposite of Primo Levi’s terrible nightmare that after he was released from Auschwitz no one would listen to him or believe him because what he had to say was so utterly at variance with all previous human experience. Orwell’s book reassured the Romanians to whom I spoke that, the Iron Curtain notwithstanding, they were not alone, and also that the political conditions under which they were living were highly abnormal and therefore, however apparently durable, historically temporary. Dismal and pessimistic as the book may have seemed to a reader in the west, it was read with immense joy in the east. Few authors have ever been loved and venerated as Orwell was loved and venerated by the people to whom I spoke in Romania.
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11 Feb 07
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