I want to see Samuel Jackson do a skit to mimic pulp fiction where you replace ‘what’ with ‘multiculturism’.
Administrator
Author
October 18, 2014 4:57 pm
16 Reasons You Should Listen to George Orwell
Consider the following important quotes by revolutionary author, George Orwell:
1 “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
2 “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
3 “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
4 “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
5 “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
6 “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
7 “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
8 “Big Brother is Watching You.”
9 “Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
10 “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
11 “Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
12 “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
13 “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
14 “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
15 “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
16 “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.”
Roger
October 18, 2014 5:14 pm
Orwell was a socialist. He fought with an anti Stalinist communist militia in the Spanish Civil War. He believed that the poor should not have the wealth of the wealthy distributed to them by the kindness of government but that the poor should rise up and take that wealth by force and create a government in their own interests. He described capitalism as a racket. “Animal Farm” was inspired by the Soviet Communist crushing of the Spanish Anarchist (libertarian communist) revolution that drove the bosses and capitalists out of much of Spain and collectivised the economy. Orwell loved them. He paid homage (read “Homage to Catalonia”) to the Spanish Anarchists. 1984 was a polemic against the kind of totalitarianism that this blog rightly critiques in America. Apart from that Orwell ain’t your kinda guy.
The quote No. 1 does not appear in any of Orwell’s writings. It is not a quote from Orwell, although often attributed to him. Read “Down and out in Paris and London” and “The Road to Wigan Pier” and realise the kind of Left radical Orwell was.
roger, i have read most of the books you’ve listed, albeit long ago. orwell radical? perhaps, but you have to put your claim in the context of the post WW1 period. if you read “down and out” and “road” how could you not have been an advocate for political change? the choices were fascism or socialism against a crude “liberal capitalism”. he chose socialism. can you blame him? if i remember correctly, the first book describes in part working in a filthy disgusting hot kitchen with overbearing abusive boss. the second describes working in the coal mines in northern england, an absolutely brutal job. i recall the passage when orwell has to stoop a long ways and walk (a mile?) through a submerged tunnel, gasping for breath, just to get to the job site. in short, he is showing what it was like to be a working stiff then–an unpleasant and undignified business for sure. the promises of socialism were surely seductive no? the work that orwell writes about hardly compares to the “work” of the pampered teachers union of today. whether he romanticized or exaggerated the accounts or not i can’t recall. but i doubt it. really, it’s the same with whittaker chambers, the former staunch communist who then much later testified against his former “friends”. he worked a series of physically brutal jobs when he was young. however, he benefited from hindsight, experience with actual communist players, and a sudden and ardent belief in God. orwell didn’t really have the chance, since he died too young. i very much doubt he’d be running with the socialist rabble today, who do in fact desire a form of totalitarianism.
in any case, your pithy parting statement “apart from that orwell ain’t your kinda guy” is juvenile and stupid. what orwell did get right admin latches onto and elaborates on. i guess you missed that.
Pedro
October 18, 2014 11:32 pm
It is remarkable how precisely Orwell connected his dots
a-german
October 19, 2014 5:13 am
very often in american movies you can find a dualism. The good guy is good, (so white, so bright – like GOD) and the bad guy is like hell.
mabye the good guy has some low-level problems, eventually the good guy gets the cake.
is Orwell a saint? or is he not?
when he makes mistakes, he is no saint …
his book was written in 1948, my teacher told us in 1984, that he just mixed the numbers, to tell us, the numbers are not important.
maybe my teacher was wrong and Orwell made an mistake.
made a mistake in spain, supporting “wrong” attitudes … maybe
I believe the world is colorful during daytime and during nighttime there are lots of grey shadows.
I believe: there is a GOD and there is evil. but this is not-human, thats spiritual.
Humans are easily to disturb. and desperate people do desperate things.
Ernest Hemingway was proud, that he was killing unarmed german soldiers (war prisoner) in WWII.
war damages your soul.
you make mistakes.
and there is no “white good war”, you cannot fight a war without sin.
GOD will ask you about the blood on your hand.
anyway
Roger, I want to thank you for your postings, for your thoughts
and I’m listenig to Orwell – even if he is no saint,
Roger
October 19, 2014 5:44 am
Cut out the abuse admin. It weakens your case. And you Archie. This animus of intolerance in your replies to me hints at a political authoritarianism which I’m sure you would deny. Orwell was a socialist, Archie, and not any kind of a fool. He had seen the outcome of the betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution by Lenin and Stalin and vehemently opposed Stalinism at a time when much of the world’s Left, to their discredit, followed the party line. He had time to think about it. There is no evidence that he thought that the Soviet experience invalidated socialism. He thought that this shift to totalitarianism was a denial of socialist values and close to fascism. 1984 is about that. There was nothing naive about Orwell. Read him on James Burnham. He simply did not think that socialism led to totalitarianism like you guys. I believe he would have found your politics ridiculous, as I do. He wrote these anti authoritarian books at a time when Britain opposed Hitler alone with what was effectively a centrally planning, socialist government. When the chips are down, as in a war, ALL governments become socialist. Capitalists would literally sell out to the enemy double quick. Also, in passing, your kind of anarcho-capitalism absolutely demands a State to protect your “property rights” with violence. I think you love The State so long as it is your State. Ayn Rand (whom I believe claimed welfare at the end of her life) proposed such a reduced State. If y’all want to live in a reduced state move to Liberia. Runaway Ebola is the result of your kind of individualist governance. The recent debacle in Dallas healthcare is precisely because you have an individualist healthcare system and not a national health service that coordinates services.
flash
October 19, 2014 7:34 am
Rodger…that was then , this is now…until you’ve walked a mile in Orwell’s shoes.
When I had almost completed A Life in Letters, I came across what struck me as the finest summation of George Orwell’s character and work and the finest tribute anyone could wish to have paid him or her. It was in a confidential report by his boss at the BBC, the Director of Indian Services, Rushbrook Williams, recommending Orwell receive an annual salary increase:
He has a great facility in writing and a literary flair which makes his work distinguished . . . He supports uncomplainingly a considerable burden of poor health. This never affects his work, but occasionally strains his nerves. I have the highest opinion of his moral, as well of his intellectual capacity. He is transparently honest, incapable of subterfuge, and in early days would have been canonised – or burnt at the stake! Either fate he would have sustained with stoical courage. An unusual colleague – but a mind and a spirit, of real and distinguished worth. [August 7th 1943]
And that is why, to this day, so many of us ask, when facing some new challenge or outrage, ‘What would George say?’
After some days I grew well enough to sit up and study the surrounding patients. The stuffy room, with its narrow beds so close together that you could easily touch your neighbour’s hand, had every sort of disease in it except, I suppose, acutely infectious cases. My right-hand neighbour was a little red-haired cobbler with one leg shorter than the other, who used to announce the death of any other patient (this happened a number of times, and my neighbour was always the first to hear of it) by whistling to me, exclaiming ‘Numéro 43!’ (or whatever it was) and flinging his arms above his head. This man had not much wrong with him, but in most of the other beds within my angle of vision some squalid tragedy or some plain horror was being enacted. In the bed that was foot to foot with mine there lay, until he died (I didn’t see him die — they moved him to another bed), a little weazened man who was suffering from I do not know what disease, but something that made his whole body so intensely sensitive that any movement from side to side, sometimes even the weight of the bedclothes, would make him shout out with pain. His worst suffering was when he urinated, which he did with the greatest difficulty. A nurse would bring him the bedbottle and then for a long time stand beside his bed, whistling, as grooms are said to do with horses, until at last with an agonized shriek of ‘Je fissel’ he would get started. In the bed next to him the sandy-haired man whom I had seen being cupped used to cough up blood-streaked mucus at all hours. My left-hand neighbour was a tall, flaccid-looking young man who used periodically to have a tube inserted into his back and astonishing quantities of frothy liquid drawn off from some part of his body. In the bed beyond that a veteran of the war of 1870 was dying, a handsome old man with a white imperial, round whose bed, at all hours when visiting was allowed, four elderly female relatives dressed all in black sat exactly like crows, obviously scheming for some pitiful legacy. In the bed opposite me in the farther row was an old bald-headed man with drooping moustaches and greatly swollen face and body, who was suffering from some disease that made him urinate almost incessantly. A huge glass receptacle stood always beside his bed. One day his wife and daughter came to visit him. At sight of them the old man’s bloated face lit up with a smile of surprising sweetness, and as his daughter, a pretty girl of about twenty, approached the bed I saw that his hand was slowly working its way from under the bedclothes. I seemed to see in advance the gesture that was coming — the girl kneeling beside the bed, the old man’s hand laid on her head in his dying blessing. But no, he merely handed her the bedbottle, which she promptly took from him and emptied into the receptacle.
About a dozen beds away from me was Numéro 57 — I think that was his number — a cirrhosis-of-the-liver case. Everyone in the ward knew him by sight because he was sometimes the subject of a medical lecture. On two afternoons a week the tall, grave doctor would lecture in the ward to a party of students, and on more than one occasion old Numéro 57 was wheeled in on a sort of trolley into the middle of the ward, where the doctor would roll back his nightshirt, dilate with his fingers a huge flabby protruber-ance on the man’s belly — the diseased liver, I suppose — and explain solemnly that this was a disease attributable to alcoholism, commoner in the wine-drinking countries. As usual he neither spoke to his patient nor gave him a smile, a nod or any kind of recognition. While he talked, very grave and upright, he would hold the wasted body beneath his two hands, sometimes giving it a gentle roll to and fro, in just the attitude of a woman handling a rolling-pin. Not that Numéro 57 minded this kind of thing. Obviously he was an old hospital inmate, a regular exhibit at lectures, his liver long since marked down for a bottle in some pathological museum. Utterly uninterested in what was said about him, he would lie with his colourless eyes gazing at nothing, while the doctor showed him off like a piece of antique china. He was a man of about sixty, astonishingly shrunken. His face, pale as vellum, had shrunken away till it seemed no bigger than a doll’s.
One morning my cobbler neighbour woke me up plucking at my pillow before the nurses arrived. ‘Numéro 57!’ — he flung his arms above his head. There was a light in the ward, enough to see by. I could see old Numéro 57 lying crumpled up on his side, his face sticking out over the side of the bed, and towards me. He had died some rime during the night, nobody knew when. When the nurses came they received the news of his death indifferendy and went about their work. After a long dme, an hour or more, two other nurses marched in abreast like soldiers, with a great clumping of sabots, and knotted the corpse up in the sheets, but it was not removed till some dme later. Meanwhile, in the better light, I had had dme for a good look at Numéro 57. Indeed I lay on my side to look at him. Curiously enough he was the first dead European I had seen. I had seen dead men before, but always Asiatics and usually people who had died violent deaths. Numéro 57’s eyes were still open, his mouth also open, his small face contorted into an expression of agony. What most impressed me, however, was the whiteness of his face. It had been pale before, but now it was little darker than die sheets. As I gazed at the tiny, screwed-up face it struck me that dlis disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of ‘natural’ death, one of the things you pray for in the Litany. There you are, then, I thought, that’s what is waiting for you, twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old. One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old. People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? ‘Natural’ death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful. Even at that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and not in a public institution. This poor old wretch who had just flickered out like a candle-end was not even important enough to have anyone watching by his deathbed. He was merely a number, then a ‘subject’ for the students’ scalpels. And the sordid publicity of dying in such a place! In the Hôpital X the beds were very close together and there were no screens. Fancy, for instance, dying like the little man whose bed was for a while foot to foot with mine, the one who cried out when the bedclothes touched him! I dare say ‘Je pisse!’ were his last recorded words. Perhaps the dying don’t bother about such things — that at least would be the standard answer: nevertheless dying people are often more or less normal in their minds till within a day or so of the end.
flash
October 19, 2014 7:58 am
FWIW to the Orwellian scholar, Rodger..
George Orwell, Socialist, Anarchist or What. . .?
On George Orwell’s Political Development
5. Conclusion
On the surface Orwell’s political development may seem filled with contradictions. After his time as a policeman in Burma he was an anarchist; a superficial one perhaps and not very consistent but that was how he felt. In the early 1930s he became more critical of society, and in The Road to Wigan Pier we see him as a socialist. But he is an undogmatic socialist who does not care much for the theories and who criticises the doctrinaire socialists, who precisely because of their theories have forgotten that socialism first and foremost is about liberty and justice. After Spain he was very sympathetic to anarchism and was even more undogmatic after having seen what dogmatism can lead to. The membership of the ILP therefore seems inconsistent since party membership will always to some extent result in dogmatism. But this must be seen in relation to the war which at that time was just around the corner. Orwell was against the war and he felt that the ILP was the only party that would adopt the right attitude to the war, most likely because of the party’s pacifism. With the war a drastic change in Orwell took place. Having been against the war he was now for it; he criticised the pacifists for views that he himself had held just a few years before; and he left the ILP. With Animal Farm he took up the themes from Spain and Homage to Catalonia and elaborated on them. Orwell’s anti-authoritarianism became more pronounced as he came closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four, where we see Orwell as a fairly consistent anarchist who saw the dangers of the State and leaders in general.
As said, this development may seem contradictory, but this is because Orwell lived in the present. His views were always to some extent shaped by the situation he at any given time was in. Perhaps he only had one view. In 1936 Orwell said that to him socialism first and foremost meant liberty and justice, and this view he never left. The contradictions were in many ways a consequence of this basic belief.
It is difficult to put a political label on Orwell, precisely because he was undogmatic. Unlike the doctrinaire socialists Orwell saw socialism as the social aspect of an all-encompassing moral attitude; a view that undoubtedly was caused by meeting the Spanish anarchists to whom anarchism was a moral attitude with political consequences.
It would, however, be an exaggeration to say that anarchism was Orwell’s all-encompassing moral attitude, although there are many anarchist traits in Orwell’s criticism of society, of the communists, the professional politicians and the elitist socialists, who believed they were the vanguard of the working class. But one of the most basic tenets of anarchism, the rejection of the State, Orwell could not accept. Orwell meant that some form of state was necessary to maintain freedom. In his view, the stateless society of anarchism contained totalitarian tendencies. In Politics vs Literature from 1946 he says:
This illustrates well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the Anarchist or pacifist vision of society. In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by ‘thou shalt not’, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by ‘love’ or ‘reason’, he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else. [CEJL vol. 4 p. 252]
Although rejecting the alternative society of anarchism Orwell did not have anything better to put instead. He was against the society of the day but had no ideas about how and to what it should change. The importance of Orwell as a political writer is not as a theoretician but as a critic, the guilty conscience and loyal opposition of the Left. To Orwell socialism was the only solution. It would not lead to a perfect world but at least to a better world. But in order for that to happen constant criticism was necessary.
We cannot really put a political label on Orwell. He had so many facets and aspects that he escapes any unequivocal definition. And since he himself tried to maintain his individuality and avoid the dogmas with their unresolved contradictions, this seems only fair. At one point, Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four writes in his diary:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted all else follows. [NEF p. 68]
Let these words in their seductive simplicity be the conclusion of Orwell’s political development.
flash
October 19, 2014 8:19 am
Truism..
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flash
October 19, 2014 8:39 am
Another prophetic text, on which the author offers up a solution to the problem of a mass population of low IQ citizens who know fault of their own will need the basic necessitates of life in a later book ..i.e. better to feed the herd than fight them…
‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
redicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about:
An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.
A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.
A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive distribution.
Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. (p. 509)
In the book you ask, “How should policy deal with the twin realities that people differ in intelligence for reasons that are not their fault and that intelligence has a powerful bearing on how well people do in life?” How would you answer this question now?
I gave my answer in a book called “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State,” that I published in 2006. I want to dismantle all the bureaucracies that dole out income transfers, whether they be public housing benefits or Social Security or corporate welfare, and use the money they spend to provide everyone over the age of 21 with a guaranteed income, deposited electronically every month into a bank account. It takes a book to explain why such a plan could not only work, but could revitalize civil society, but it takes only a few sentences to explain why a libertarian would advocate such a plan.
Certain mental skillsets are now the “open sesame” to wealth and social position in ways that are qualitatively different from the role they played in earlier times. Nobody deserves the possession of those skillsets. None of us has earned our IQ. Those of us who are lucky should be acutely aware that it is pure luck (too few are), and be committed to behaving accordingly. Ideally, we would do that without government stage-managing it. That’s not an option. Massive government redistribution is an inevitable feature of advanced postindustrial societies.
Our only option is to do that redistribution in the least destructive way. Hence my solution. It is foreshadowed in the final chapter of “The Bell Curve” where Dick and I talk about “valued places.” The point is not just to pass out enough money so that everyone has the means to live a decent existence. Rather, we need to live in a civil society that naturally creates valued places for people with many different kinds and levels of ability. In my experience, communities that are left alone to solve their own problems tend to produce those valued places. Bureaucracies destroy them. So my public policy message is: Let government does what it does best, cut checks. Let individuals, families, and communities do what they do best, respond to human needs on a one-by-one basis.
Roger
October 19, 2014 11:26 am
FWIW the Orwell scholar Flash:
Excellent piece, difficult to find fault with. I know all the references you quote. I think Orwell would have supported the post-war Labour government and been a strong supporter of the National Health Service. Yes he was too honest to form strong ideological positions. The kinds of socialism I respect, moving Left, are Democratic Socialism of the kind we had in the UK after the war with a strong welfare system and strong trades unions, and the libertarian socialism tried out in Spain in ’36. Like Orwell I am uneasy about the coercive social pressure inherent in the latter. It seems to me that the Spanish experiment could be said to be analogous to the first flight of the Wright brothers. What I mean is that they proved, as it were, that a machine heavier than air (an anarchist society in the terms of my analogy) would fly. Strangely Orwell uses just this kind of analogy in his essay on James Burnham. Anyway, let’s suppose a decent libertarian socialist society would be something like a modern airliner. Getting there needs work, experimentation and the belief it’s possible. We need to stop being political Luddites and start to experiment. As things stand we have people in power who insist that flying is not human nature, that it will never happen, and that if you try to do it we are going to kill you. Good piece Flash. It encapsulates my impressions of Orwell.
Roger
October 19, 2014 11:37 am
Flash I agree with you on basic income. Here’s my poem on Orwell. You may have noticed the parallels between Animal Farm and the nativity story, and between Marxism and the millennial tradition in Judeo Christianity. It’s there in the symbolic level of Orwell’s fairy story.I’m playing with that. The poem is not copyright but copyleft of course……
Orwell in Catalonia
Quixote tilts at a typewriter
An Old Holborn rollup between his lips
The keys banging like a Gatling gun
Sees the stars over a farmer’s barn
The wise animals in the straw
Their innocent eyes…
Every night is Christmas when the workers win,
When the beasts speak,
He pays homage
To love, humanity, decency…
And smells the shit and the lies
The pigs plotting in the Generalitat.
This bristling man
His head above the parapet
Stands at the centre of an explosion
(A bullet shot through his scraggy neck)
Thinks… “The fascist who just killed me
I would have shot him too if I could.”
Orwell in Catalonia
Fighting on the streets of Barcelona in May 1937
“Revolutionary posters flaming from the walls
In clear reds and blues”
The beautiful season slipping away
His wounded voice just a whisper.
Homage is the word to warm a ghost…
No cold ghost in the damp slums of the North
Nor ghost haunting the polite fascism of the Shires;
But a ghost in the Catalan heat and light
Dodging bullets on the Ramblas
Where workers once had guns in their hands
And defeated an army.
Look for him there.
October 2014
Roger
October 19, 2014 11:47 am
PS Flash. Orwell experienced life at the bottom of the pile. It did not make him believe that the “masses” are unintelligent. My experience is that people tend to get brighter the “lower” down the social hierarchy you go. The 2008 financial crash would seem to support this view. Put away the typewriter and pick litter from a municipal dump somewhere in the Third World and you may get a different impression of the abilities of the very poor. See how long you last……there’s the material for your next book.
Roger
October 19, 2014 12:00 pm
PPS just looked you up Charles. Define intelligence.
archie
October 19, 2014 2:56 pm
roger, congratulations. in your response to me you’ve managed to come across as both intellectually dishonest and a pompous asshole. but you have one thing going for you: your leftwing boilerplate exceeds your ignorance. you know nothing of what i believe good sir. nor would i share my beliefs with a rapscallion such as yourself. kindly go fuck yourself.
you think admin has abused you? thanks for the laugh. now, ride your cheval de bataille to mother jones where you’ll be hailed as a genius.
Roger
October 19, 2014 6:31 pm
@ Flash. If you had any decency Charles you might comment publicly in the British press with your friend Frank Field on the welfare reform policies of the present government, inspired by your inability to think rationally, which are killing disabled people, which have brought back malnutrition and other diseases of extreme poverty, hungry children in school, and traumatised thousands of sick people at the very ends of their lives with having their benefits cut off and therefore having no income whatever. If you will not distance yourself from these Conservative policies you laid the groundwork for you are morally culpable for these deaths.
archie
October 19, 2014 7:29 pm
Roger, flash is not Charles Murray. He is however the c and p master. So, kindly take your moronic queries to the appropriate venues.
Roger
October 20, 2014 4:02 am
@ Archie Are there just a couple of you in your Mom’s garage then?
Good cartoon…
He forgot “Diversity is our greatest strength…”
Guess that would fall under “The Big Lie”….
I want to see Samuel Jackson do a skit to mimic pulp fiction where you replace ‘what’ with ‘multiculturism’.
16 Reasons You Should Listen to George Orwell
Consider the following important quotes by revolutionary author, George Orwell:
1 “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
2 “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
3 “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
4 “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
5 “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
6 “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
7 “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
8 “Big Brother is Watching You.”
9 “Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
10 “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
11 “Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
12 “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
13 “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
14 “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
15 “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
16 “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.”
Orwell was a socialist. He fought with an anti Stalinist communist militia in the Spanish Civil War. He believed that the poor should not have the wealth of the wealthy distributed to them by the kindness of government but that the poor should rise up and take that wealth by force and create a government in their own interests. He described capitalism as a racket. “Animal Farm” was inspired by the Soviet Communist crushing of the Spanish Anarchist (libertarian communist) revolution that drove the bosses and capitalists out of much of Spain and collectivised the economy. Orwell loved them. He paid homage (read “Homage to Catalonia”) to the Spanish Anarchists. 1984 was a polemic against the kind of totalitarianism that this blog rightly critiques in America. Apart from that Orwell ain’t your kinda guy.
The quote No. 1 does not appear in any of Orwell’s writings. It is not a quote from Orwell, although often attributed to him. Read “Down and out in Paris and London” and “The Road to Wigan Pier” and realise the kind of Left radical Orwell was.
Roger
Is Orwell a looser?
You dumbass.
roger, i have read most of the books you’ve listed, albeit long ago. orwell radical? perhaps, but you have to put your claim in the context of the post WW1 period. if you read “down and out” and “road” how could you not have been an advocate for political change? the choices were fascism or socialism against a crude “liberal capitalism”. he chose socialism. can you blame him? if i remember correctly, the first book describes in part working in a filthy disgusting hot kitchen with overbearing abusive boss. the second describes working in the coal mines in northern england, an absolutely brutal job. i recall the passage when orwell has to stoop a long ways and walk (a mile?) through a submerged tunnel, gasping for breath, just to get to the job site. in short, he is showing what it was like to be a working stiff then–an unpleasant and undignified business for sure. the promises of socialism were surely seductive no? the work that orwell writes about hardly compares to the “work” of the pampered teachers union of today. whether he romanticized or exaggerated the accounts or not i can’t recall. but i doubt it. really, it’s the same with whittaker chambers, the former staunch communist who then much later testified against his former “friends”. he worked a series of physically brutal jobs when he was young. however, he benefited from hindsight, experience with actual communist players, and a sudden and ardent belief in God. orwell didn’t really have the chance, since he died too young. i very much doubt he’d be running with the socialist rabble today, who do in fact desire a form of totalitarianism.
in any case, your pithy parting statement “apart from that orwell ain’t your kinda guy” is juvenile and stupid. what orwell did get right admin latches onto and elaborates on. i guess you missed that.
It is remarkable how precisely Orwell connected his dots
very often in american movies you can find a dualism. The good guy is good, (so white, so bright – like GOD) and the bad guy is like hell.
mabye the good guy has some low-level problems, eventually the good guy gets the cake.
is Orwell a saint? or is he not?
when he makes mistakes, he is no saint …
his book was written in 1948, my teacher told us in 1984, that he just mixed the numbers, to tell us, the numbers are not important.
maybe my teacher was wrong and Orwell made an mistake.
made a mistake in spain, supporting “wrong” attitudes … maybe
I believe the world is colorful during daytime and during nighttime there are lots of grey shadows.
I believe: there is a GOD and there is evil. but this is not-human, thats spiritual.
Humans are easily to disturb. and desperate people do desperate things.
Ernest Hemingway was proud, that he was killing unarmed german soldiers (war prisoner) in WWII.
war damages your soul.
you make mistakes.
and there is no “white good war”, you cannot fight a war without sin.
GOD will ask you about the blood on your hand.
anyway
Roger, I want to thank you for your postings, for your thoughts
and I’m listenig to Orwell – even if he is no saint,
Cut out the abuse admin. It weakens your case. And you Archie. This animus of intolerance in your replies to me hints at a political authoritarianism which I’m sure you would deny. Orwell was a socialist, Archie, and not any kind of a fool. He had seen the outcome of the betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution by Lenin and Stalin and vehemently opposed Stalinism at a time when much of the world’s Left, to their discredit, followed the party line. He had time to think about it. There is no evidence that he thought that the Soviet experience invalidated socialism. He thought that this shift to totalitarianism was a denial of socialist values and close to fascism. 1984 is about that. There was nothing naive about Orwell. Read him on James Burnham. He simply did not think that socialism led to totalitarianism like you guys. I believe he would have found your politics ridiculous, as I do. He wrote these anti authoritarian books at a time when Britain opposed Hitler alone with what was effectively a centrally planning, socialist government. When the chips are down, as in a war, ALL governments become socialist. Capitalists would literally sell out to the enemy double quick. Also, in passing, your kind of anarcho-capitalism absolutely demands a State to protect your “property rights” with violence. I think you love The State so long as it is your State. Ayn Rand (whom I believe claimed welfare at the end of her life) proposed such a reduced State. If y’all want to live in a reduced state move to Liberia. Runaway Ebola is the result of your kind of individualist governance. The recent debacle in Dallas healthcare is precisely because you have an individualist healthcare system and not a national health service that coordinates services.
Rodger…that was then , this is now…until you’ve walked a mile in Orwell’s shoes.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/53594-the-troubled-history-behind-george-orwell-s-complete-works.html
The Troubled History Behind George Orwell’s Complete Works
When I had almost completed A Life in Letters, I came across what struck me as the finest summation of George Orwell’s character and work and the finest tribute anyone could wish to have paid him or her. It was in a confidential report by his boss at the BBC, the Director of Indian Services, Rushbrook Williams, recommending Orwell receive an annual salary increase:
He has a great facility in writing and a literary flair which makes his work distinguished . . . He supports uncomplainingly a considerable burden of poor health. This never affects his work, but occasionally strains his nerves. I have the highest opinion of his moral, as well of his intellectual capacity. He is transparently honest, incapable of subterfuge, and in early days would have been canonised – or burnt at the stake! Either fate he would have sustained with stoical courage. An unusual colleague – but a mind and a spirit, of real and distinguished worth. [August 7th 1943]
And that is why, to this day, so many of us ask, when facing some new challenge or outrage, ‘What would George say?’
http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/Poor_Die/english/e_pdie
George Orwell
How the Poor Die
After some days I grew well enough to sit up and study the surrounding patients. The stuffy room, with its narrow beds so close together that you could easily touch your neighbour’s hand, had every sort of disease in it except, I suppose, acutely infectious cases. My right-hand neighbour was a little red-haired cobbler with one leg shorter than the other, who used to announce the death of any other patient (this happened a number of times, and my neighbour was always the first to hear of it) by whistling to me, exclaiming ‘Numéro 43!’ (or whatever it was) and flinging his arms above his head. This man had not much wrong with him, but in most of the other beds within my angle of vision some squalid tragedy or some plain horror was being enacted. In the bed that was foot to foot with mine there lay, until he died (I didn’t see him die — they moved him to another bed), a little weazened man who was suffering from I do not know what disease, but something that made his whole body so intensely sensitive that any movement from side to side, sometimes even the weight of the bedclothes, would make him shout out with pain. His worst suffering was when he urinated, which he did with the greatest difficulty. A nurse would bring him the bedbottle and then for a long time stand beside his bed, whistling, as grooms are said to do with horses, until at last with an agonized shriek of ‘Je fissel’ he would get started. In the bed next to him the sandy-haired man whom I had seen being cupped used to cough up blood-streaked mucus at all hours. My left-hand neighbour was a tall, flaccid-looking young man who used periodically to have a tube inserted into his back and astonishing quantities of frothy liquid drawn off from some part of his body. In the bed beyond that a veteran of the war of 1870 was dying, a handsome old man with a white imperial, round whose bed, at all hours when visiting was allowed, four elderly female relatives dressed all in black sat exactly like crows, obviously scheming for some pitiful legacy. In the bed opposite me in the farther row was an old bald-headed man with drooping moustaches and greatly swollen face and body, who was suffering from some disease that made him urinate almost incessantly. A huge glass receptacle stood always beside his bed. One day his wife and daughter came to visit him. At sight of them the old man’s bloated face lit up with a smile of surprising sweetness, and as his daughter, a pretty girl of about twenty, approached the bed I saw that his hand was slowly working its way from under the bedclothes. I seemed to see in advance the gesture that was coming — the girl kneeling beside the bed, the old man’s hand laid on her head in his dying blessing. But no, he merely handed her the bedbottle, which she promptly took from him and emptied into the receptacle.
About a dozen beds away from me was Numéro 57 — I think that was his number — a cirrhosis-of-the-liver case. Everyone in the ward knew him by sight because he was sometimes the subject of a medical lecture. On two afternoons a week the tall, grave doctor would lecture in the ward to a party of students, and on more than one occasion old Numéro 57 was wheeled in on a sort of trolley into the middle of the ward, where the doctor would roll back his nightshirt, dilate with his fingers a huge flabby protruber-ance on the man’s belly — the diseased liver, I suppose — and explain solemnly that this was a disease attributable to alcoholism, commoner in the wine-drinking countries. As usual he neither spoke to his patient nor gave him a smile, a nod or any kind of recognition. While he talked, very grave and upright, he would hold the wasted body beneath his two hands, sometimes giving it a gentle roll to and fro, in just the attitude of a woman handling a rolling-pin. Not that Numéro 57 minded this kind of thing. Obviously he was an old hospital inmate, a regular exhibit at lectures, his liver long since marked down for a bottle in some pathological museum. Utterly uninterested in what was said about him, he would lie with his colourless eyes gazing at nothing, while the doctor showed him off like a piece of antique china. He was a man of about sixty, astonishingly shrunken. His face, pale as vellum, had shrunken away till it seemed no bigger than a doll’s.
One morning my cobbler neighbour woke me up plucking at my pillow before the nurses arrived. ‘Numéro 57!’ — he flung his arms above his head. There was a light in the ward, enough to see by. I could see old Numéro 57 lying crumpled up on his side, his face sticking out over the side of the bed, and towards me. He had died some rime during the night, nobody knew when. When the nurses came they received the news of his death indifferendy and went about their work. After a long dme, an hour or more, two other nurses marched in abreast like soldiers, with a great clumping of sabots, and knotted the corpse up in the sheets, but it was not removed till some dme later. Meanwhile, in the better light, I had had dme for a good look at Numéro 57. Indeed I lay on my side to look at him. Curiously enough he was the first dead European I had seen. I had seen dead men before, but always Asiatics and usually people who had died violent deaths. Numéro 57’s eyes were still open, his mouth also open, his small face contorted into an expression of agony. What most impressed me, however, was the whiteness of his face. It had been pale before, but now it was little darker than die sheets. As I gazed at the tiny, screwed-up face it struck me that dlis disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of ‘natural’ death, one of the things you pray for in the Litany. There you are, then, I thought, that’s what is waiting for you, twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old. One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old. People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? ‘Natural’ death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful. Even at that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and not in a public institution. This poor old wretch who had just flickered out like a candle-end was not even important enough to have anyone watching by his deathbed. He was merely a number, then a ‘subject’ for the students’ scalpels. And the sordid publicity of dying in such a place! In the Hôpital X the beds were very close together and there were no screens. Fancy, for instance, dying like the little man whose bed was for a while foot to foot with mine, the one who cried out when the bedclothes touched him! I dare say ‘Je pisse!’ were his last recorded words. Perhaps the dying don’t bother about such things — that at least would be the standard answer: nevertheless dying people are often more or less normal in their minds till within a day or so of the end.
FWIW to the Orwellian scholar, Rodger..
George Orwell, Socialist, Anarchist or What. . .?
On George Orwell’s Political Development
5. Conclusion
On the surface Orwell’s political development may seem filled with contradictions. After his time as a policeman in Burma he was an anarchist; a superficial one perhaps and not very consistent but that was how he felt. In the early 1930s he became more critical of society, and in The Road to Wigan Pier we see him as a socialist. But he is an undogmatic socialist who does not care much for the theories and who criticises the doctrinaire socialists, who precisely because of their theories have forgotten that socialism first and foremost is about liberty and justice. After Spain he was very sympathetic to anarchism and was even more undogmatic after having seen what dogmatism can lead to. The membership of the ILP therefore seems inconsistent since party membership will always to some extent result in dogmatism. But this must be seen in relation to the war which at that time was just around the corner. Orwell was against the war and he felt that the ILP was the only party that would adopt the right attitude to the war, most likely because of the party’s pacifism. With the war a drastic change in Orwell took place. Having been against the war he was now for it; he criticised the pacifists for views that he himself had held just a few years before; and he left the ILP. With Animal Farm he took up the themes from Spain and Homage to Catalonia and elaborated on them. Orwell’s anti-authoritarianism became more pronounced as he came closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four, where we see Orwell as a fairly consistent anarchist who saw the dangers of the State and leaders in general.
As said, this development may seem contradictory, but this is because Orwell lived in the present. His views were always to some extent shaped by the situation he at any given time was in. Perhaps he only had one view. In 1936 Orwell said that to him socialism first and foremost meant liberty and justice, and this view he never left. The contradictions were in many ways a consequence of this basic belief.
It is difficult to put a political label on Orwell, precisely because he was undogmatic. Unlike the doctrinaire socialists Orwell saw socialism as the social aspect of an all-encompassing moral attitude; a view that undoubtedly was caused by meeting the Spanish anarchists to whom anarchism was a moral attitude with political consequences.
It would, however, be an exaggeration to say that anarchism was Orwell’s all-encompassing moral attitude, although there are many anarchist traits in Orwell’s criticism of society, of the communists, the professional politicians and the elitist socialists, who believed they were the vanguard of the working class. But one of the most basic tenets of anarchism, the rejection of the State, Orwell could not accept. Orwell meant that some form of state was necessary to maintain freedom. In his view, the stateless society of anarchism contained totalitarian tendencies. In Politics vs Literature from 1946 he says:
This illustrates well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the Anarchist or pacifist vision of society. In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by ‘thou shalt not’, the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by ‘love’ or ‘reason’, he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else. [CEJL vol. 4 p. 252]
Although rejecting the alternative society of anarchism Orwell did not have anything better to put instead. He was against the society of the day but had no ideas about how and to what it should change. The importance of Orwell as a political writer is not as a theoretician but as a critic, the guilty conscience and loyal opposition of the Left. To Orwell socialism was the only solution. It would not lead to a perfect world but at least to a better world. But in order for that to happen constant criticism was necessary.
We cannot really put a political label on Orwell. He had so many facets and aspects that he escapes any unequivocal definition. And since he himself tried to maintain his individuality and avoid the dogmas with their unresolved contradictions, this seems only fair. At one point, Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four writes in his diary:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted all else follows. [NEF p. 68]
Let these words in their seductive simplicity be the conclusion of Orwell’s political development.
Truism..
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Another prophetic text, on which the author offers up a solution to the problem of a mass population of low IQ citizens who know fault of their own will need the basic necessitates of life in a later book ..i.e. better to feed the herd than fight them…
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/10/the-bell-curve-20-years-later-a-qa-with-charles-murray/
‘The Bell Curve’ 20 years later: A Q&A with Charles Murray
redicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about:
An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.
A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.
A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive distribution.
Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. (p. 509)
In the book you ask, “How should policy deal with the twin realities that people differ in intelligence for reasons that are not their fault and that intelligence has a powerful bearing on how well people do in life?” How would you answer this question now?
I gave my answer in a book called “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State,” that I published in 2006. I want to dismantle all the bureaucracies that dole out income transfers, whether they be public housing benefits or Social Security or corporate welfare, and use the money they spend to provide everyone over the age of 21 with a guaranteed income, deposited electronically every month into a bank account. It takes a book to explain why such a plan could not only work, but could revitalize civil society, but it takes only a few sentences to explain why a libertarian would advocate such a plan.
Certain mental skillsets are now the “open sesame” to wealth and social position in ways that are qualitatively different from the role they played in earlier times. Nobody deserves the possession of those skillsets. None of us has earned our IQ. Those of us who are lucky should be acutely aware that it is pure luck (too few are), and be committed to behaving accordingly. Ideally, we would do that without government stage-managing it. That’s not an option. Massive government redistribution is an inevitable feature of advanced postindustrial societies.
Our only option is to do that redistribution in the least destructive way. Hence my solution. It is foreshadowed in the final chapter of “The Bell Curve” where Dick and I talk about “valued places.” The point is not just to pass out enough money so that everyone has the means to live a decent existence. Rather, we need to live in a civil society that naturally creates valued places for people with many different kinds and levels of ability. In my experience, communities that are left alone to solve their own problems tend to produce those valued places. Bureaucracies destroy them. So my public policy message is: Let government does what it does best, cut checks. Let individuals, families, and communities do what they do best, respond to human needs on a one-by-one basis.
FWIW the Orwell scholar Flash:
Excellent piece, difficult to find fault with. I know all the references you quote. I think Orwell would have supported the post-war Labour government and been a strong supporter of the National Health Service. Yes he was too honest to form strong ideological positions. The kinds of socialism I respect, moving Left, are Democratic Socialism of the kind we had in the UK after the war with a strong welfare system and strong trades unions, and the libertarian socialism tried out in Spain in ’36. Like Orwell I am uneasy about the coercive social pressure inherent in the latter. It seems to me that the Spanish experiment could be said to be analogous to the first flight of the Wright brothers. What I mean is that they proved, as it were, that a machine heavier than air (an anarchist society in the terms of my analogy) would fly. Strangely Orwell uses just this kind of analogy in his essay on James Burnham. Anyway, let’s suppose a decent libertarian socialist society would be something like a modern airliner. Getting there needs work, experimentation and the belief it’s possible. We need to stop being political Luddites and start to experiment. As things stand we have people in power who insist that flying is not human nature, that it will never happen, and that if you try to do it we are going to kill you. Good piece Flash. It encapsulates my impressions of Orwell.
Flash I agree with you on basic income. Here’s my poem on Orwell. You may have noticed the parallels between Animal Farm and the nativity story, and between Marxism and the millennial tradition in Judeo Christianity. It’s there in the symbolic level of Orwell’s fairy story.I’m playing with that. The poem is not copyright but copyleft of course……
Orwell in Catalonia
Quixote tilts at a typewriter
An Old Holborn rollup between his lips
The keys banging like a Gatling gun
Sees the stars over a farmer’s barn
The wise animals in the straw
Their innocent eyes…
Every night is Christmas when the workers win,
When the beasts speak,
He pays homage
To love, humanity, decency…
And smells the shit and the lies
The pigs plotting in the Generalitat.
This bristling man
His head above the parapet
Stands at the centre of an explosion
(A bullet shot through his scraggy neck)
Thinks… “The fascist who just killed me
I would have shot him too if I could.”
Orwell in Catalonia
Fighting on the streets of Barcelona in May 1937
“Revolutionary posters flaming from the walls
In clear reds and blues”
The beautiful season slipping away
His wounded voice just a whisper.
Homage is the word to warm a ghost…
No cold ghost in the damp slums of the North
Nor ghost haunting the polite fascism of the Shires;
But a ghost in the Catalan heat and light
Dodging bullets on the Ramblas
Where workers once had guns in their hands
And defeated an army.
Look for him there.
October 2014
PS Flash. Orwell experienced life at the bottom of the pile. It did not make him believe that the “masses” are unintelligent. My experience is that people tend to get brighter the “lower” down the social hierarchy you go. The 2008 financial crash would seem to support this view. Put away the typewriter and pick litter from a municipal dump somewhere in the Third World and you may get a different impression of the abilities of the very poor. See how long you last……there’s the material for your next book.
PPS just looked you up Charles. Define intelligence.
roger, congratulations. in your response to me you’ve managed to come across as both intellectually dishonest and a pompous asshole. but you have one thing going for you: your leftwing boilerplate exceeds your ignorance. you know nothing of what i believe good sir. nor would i share my beliefs with a rapscallion such as yourself. kindly go fuck yourself.
you think admin has abused you? thanks for the laugh. now, ride your cheval de bataille to mother jones where you’ll be hailed as a genius.
@ Flash. If you had any decency Charles you might comment publicly in the British press with your friend Frank Field on the welfare reform policies of the present government, inspired by your inability to think rationally, which are killing disabled people, which have brought back malnutrition and other diseases of extreme poverty, hungry children in school, and traumatised thousands of sick people at the very ends of their lives with having their benefits cut off and therefore having no income whatever. If you will not distance yourself from these Conservative policies you laid the groundwork for you are morally culpable for these deaths.
Roger, flash is not Charles Murray. He is however the c and p master. So, kindly take your moronic queries to the appropriate venues.
@ Archie Are there just a couple of you in your Mom’s garage then?