Authored by Bruno Waterfield via Spiked-Online.com,
Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.
He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.
And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.
Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time
The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell. Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state. They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.
Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’
Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too. He was concerned about the Sovietisation of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties. He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.
Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviours and attitudes. This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it, ‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.
Edmond O’Brien as Winston Smith and Jan Sterling as Julia, in an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, 3 June 1955.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.
Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.
Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing. He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927. And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinised left.
The hostility was mutual. Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travellers continue to display towards Orwell today.
The importance of words
Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. Just think, for example, of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government – a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia (1938)).
Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview. Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation. As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:
‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’
As Orwell wrote elsewhere, ‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’
This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.
But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control. Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak. Newspeak is more than mere censorship. It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible. It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thoughtcrime’).
As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:
‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’
The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated. In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police. There is little of that in our societies today – people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.
However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thoughtcrime. And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realised in an openly dictatorial manner. No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.
The intellectual turn against freedom
But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.
Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organisation, English PEN. Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticise Soviet Russia or wartime censorship. Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.
‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.
Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.
An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is ‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.
These are insights which have stood the test of time. Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus. They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.
And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged. This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age. Free speech does not support privilege. We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC. But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.
Orwell’s legacy
Orwell is everywhere today. He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture. But his value and importance to us lies in his defence of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.
His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.
Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry. Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language’ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’. He said: ‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’
Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:
‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’
Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.
* * *
This is an edited version of a speech given at this year’s Living Freedom, an annual residential school organised by the Battle of Ideas.
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So, is this where we launch the campaign to save the N-word or do we buckle to the machinations of the Sapir-Whorf tyrants? You’ll have to look that one up.
Worldviews are clearly shaped by words, which is precisely why those who would rule invest so heavily in manipulation of narratives and .gov school and MSM dumbing down campaigns and non-stop hysteria.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” ― H.L. Mencken
“Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
MORE Gatto:
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/516764-dumbing-us-down-the-hidden-curriculum-of-compulsory-schooling#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI've%20noticed%20a%20fascinating,or%20poets%20in%20English%20classes.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
Great book, I have it around here somewhere.
Is it ebonics that makes the maff hard or understanding da’ maffs that makes the ebonics hard to comprehend ? Do tell.
Orwell’s strong opinions about sustenance mattered, too, especially given the non-food belly filler we casually wolf down:
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1034643-the-road-to-wigan-pier
“Words are such feeble things.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
exactly. sez what about symbol-slinging people?
“They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.” They absolutely did and still do today.
Unfinished Victory
ARTHUR BRYANT • 1940 • 79,000 WORDS
The banks, including the Reichsbank and the big private banks, were practically controlled by them. So were the publishing trade, the cinema, the theatres and a large part of the Press — all the normal means, in fact, by which public opinion in a civilised country is formed. In 1931, of 29 theatres in Berlin 23 had Jewish directors. The largest newspaper combine in the country with a daily circulation of four millions was a Jewish monopoly. So virtually were the Press Departments of the Prussian administration. At one period of the Republic’s history, as Mr. Mowrer pointed out, a telephone conversation between three Jews in Ministerial Offices could effect the suspension of any newspaper in the State.[80] It was a power that was frequently used.
In the artistic and learned professions the Jewish supremacy was as marked. Authorship in Germany almost seemed to have become a kind of Hebrew monopoly. It helps perhaps to explain the contempt for some of the greatest products of the human mind which has since so tragically prevailed in Nazi Germany. For many years the professional organisations of German writers were controlled almost entirely by Jews. In 1931, of 144 him scripts worked, 119 were written by Jews and 77 produced by them. Medicine and the Law followed the same trend: 42 per cent of the Berlin doctors in 1932 were Jews, and 48 per cent of the lawyers. So in Berlin University — by far the largest in the country were 15 out of 44 of the teachers of Law, and 118 out of 265 of the teachers of Medicine. Every year it became harder for a Gentile to gain or keep a foothold in any privileged occupation.
At this time it was not the Aryans who exercised racial discrimination. It was a discrimination which operated without violence. It was one exercised by a minority against a majority. There was no persecution, only elimination. “It seems”, Montz Goldstein, the Jewish essayist, had written before the war, “as if German cultural life was to be completely transformed into Jewish hands….Consequently we are now faced by the following problem. We Jews guide and administrate the intellectual property of a nation which denies our qualification and competency to do so.” By the third decade of the century the process had reached a new stage. It was the native Germans who were now confronted with a problem — that of rescuing their indigenous culture from an alien hand and restoring it to their own race.
https://www.unz.com/book/arthur_bryant__unfinished-victory/
The rotten toothed back stabbing, Bolshevik pwnd Brits were very good at creating a narrative of bullshit and lies if it helped their money lender owners keep their man Stalin in power, by any means necessary…and still today, Brits are shit -eating dogs.
Stalin’s War
Sean McMeekin
Equally damaging to Mihailović’s reputation with the British was
the activity of another Cambridge spy recruited by Stalin’s agents in
the 1930s, Guy Burgess, who promoted the cult of “Marshal Tito” in
BBC radio broadcasts to Yugoslavia. Burgess’s slanted, increasingly
pro-Tito broadcasts were devastating to Chetnik morale. As
Mihailović complained to Colonel Bill Bailey—the head of the Eighth
British Expeditionary Mission, sent to him in December 1942—“the
B.B.C. with revolting cynicism dropped its support of the sacred
Serbian cause, and functions now publicizing a band of terrorists
because [the] latter provide cheap sensational and apparently false
news.” When Bailey forwarded Mihailović’s complaints to BBC
headquarters, the justification offered was that English values
required “even-handedness.” Yet as one of the few BBC employees
clued in to totalitarian agitprop, a certain “Miss Baker,” wrote the
Foreign Office,
The Soviets have no such scruples. Not only do they ignore
Mihailović (the Yugoslav Government’s representative with
whom they are supposed to be in alliance and whom they
know we support), but in their endeavor to build up the
Partisans they openly attack him, call him a traitor and demand
his extermination. We, on the other hand, have not only
refrained from attacking Mihailović’s opponents, but in the last
few months we have actually boosted them. The impression it
has made on Mihailović has been disastrous.7
https://www.libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=58D31575B1F90D1F9525FA87C03A56DE
Britain went to war to defend Poland and Bolshevik shitstaisn Roosevelt halped…ha ha ha..
” On October 1, 1939, in the first of a series of
wartime radio addresses on the BBC, Churchill defended the
USSR’s invasion of eastern Poland “in the interests of its own safety”
and pointed out that the forward Soviet position there posed a
roadblock to German expansion. This address was welcomed by the
Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, who called on Churchill
at the Admiralty to thank him. Churchill assured Maisky that Britain
would also view Soviet expansion into the Baltic region favorably as
a counterweight to German influence.39″
Allied intervention or no intervention, the moment of maximum
danger had provided Stalin with an excuse to do away with an entire
hated class of aristocratic-bourgeois Polish officers and elites, and
he was not going to miss it. In the first week of April 1940, thousands
of Polish prisoners at the camps on Beria’s list were rounded up and
told that they were being returned to Poland. At Ostashkov, there
was even a band to serenade prisoners as they were sent off to their
deaths. Shipped in special trains “in batches of a few hundred at a
time,” the men had “not the slightest suspicion,” one witness
recalled, “that they were in the shadow of Lady Death.” One by one,
the unsuspecting victims were escorted to soundproof cellars and
then shot in the back of the head. Although most of the bodies were
dumped in the Katyn Forest—about twenty kilometers west of
Smolensk, the area gave its name to the crime after corpses were
discovered there by the Germans in 1943—the executions were
mostly carried out in cities. The bodies were then shipped for
disposal in rural pits unlikely to be found. In Kalinin (Tver), the city
northwest of Moscow nearest Ostashkov, Stalin’s trusted NKVD
butcher, Vasily Blokhin, oversaw a team of fifty who shot hundreds of
Poles each day. Thousands more Poles were murdered in Kharkov,
located between the Polish prisoner camps at Kozelsk and
Starobel’sk. In all, 21,892 Polish war prisoners were slaughtered by
Stalin’s executioners in April 1940, including more than 15,000 army
officers, 5,000 policemen, and nearly 2,000 government officials and
business leaders. All but one of the victims were men. Roughly 8
percent were Polish Jews. For good measure, Beria had his NKVD
squads track down the wives and children of executed Poles—of
whom 60,667 were counted—and deport them all to special labor
camps in Kazakhstan.32
In retaliation for Sikorski demanding an impartial Red Cross
investigation of the mass murder he and Beria had perpetrated,
Stalin declared that he was breaking off all relations with the Polish
exile government in London. Adding to its unpleasant effect, Stalin’s
poison-pill letter was hand delivered to Churchill at his country
house, Chartwell, where the overworked prime minister was enjoying
a rare day of rest on Good Friday.
21
It was a moment of truth for Churchill and Roosevelt. Would these
signatories of the Atlantic Charter swallow Stalin’s slanders against
the International Red Cross and the Polish government, on whose
behalf the war had been fought in the first place?
The answer was yes. Churchill, who replied first, reassured Stalin
on April 24 that Britain would “oppose vigorously any ‘investigation’
by the International Red Cross or any other body in any territory
under German authority,” and promised to send his foreign minister
to meet with Sikorski and “press him as strongly as possible to
withdraw all countenance from any investigation under Nazi
auspices.” In a follow-up telegram sent on April 25, Churchill did
remind Stalin, delicately, that Sikorski had “several times raised this
question of the missing officers with the Soviet government, and
once with you personally,” suggesting that he suspected Stalin knew
more than he was letting on. But Churchill then forfeited any possible
leverage on the matter when he promised Stalin that he would lean
on Sikorski to “restrain Polish press from polemics.”22
Roosevelt, in his reply to Stalin, declared that Sikorski had “made
a mistake” in asking for a Red Cross investigation, and that he was
confident Churchill would find a way to set the London Poles straight,
so they would “act in the future with more common sense.”
Roosevelt did express hope that Stalin would order a mere
“suspension of conversations with the Polish Government-in-Exile
rather than a complete severance of relations,” but this was only a
suggestion. The president even promised Stalin that he would try to
“help [him] in any way” with his Polish problem—for example, by
“looking after any Poles which you may desire to send out of the
Soviet Union.” Stalin politely declined the president’s bizarre offer to
cleanse the USSR of unwanted Poles, assuring Roosevelt, with a
wink, that he viewed any and all Poles residing on Soviet soil as his
close personal “friends and comrades,” of whom there was no
“question of their being deported from the Soviet Union.”23
Told my son, a long time ago, that if you let the other side define the words then you have already lost the argument.
It started in a big way, and so many things followed from it, when the Corp MSM decided in the 70s and in entirely unison to remove the word “unfair” from “unfair discrimination”.
A linguistic assault on the definitions of words is causing chaos and a complete loss of moral and rational values. I encountered this manifestation today in a sudden moment of association awareness.
When I leave my neighborhood I come to a stop light onto a main road. Dam near every time I’m waiting for the light to turn green a car will hit the gas when they see a yellow light or just blatantly roll through a red light after I see my green light for go. I was furious thinking to myself this happens every time after I get the green I MUST look both ways with intentional deliberate hesitancy before I proceed lest I get smashed into. I was angry and started asking myself; ” why is this happening EVERY FUCKING TIME I’m at the light?” Then my moment of clarity about words and definitions being twisted and changed to fit a persons altered sense of reality explains why its so dam dangerous to proceed at the green light. In today’s world the color of a stop light and its meaning is subjective or open for interpretation based on one’s own perception of reality. Exactly the same as the gender confusion war tactic of changing the definition of the words woman and man and has infected deep into the psyche of the masses manifesting in all areas of thought and daily life. Its fits in with the satanic philosophy “Do what thou wilt” known as the Law of Thelema. or the new age religious concept; “Reality is what you believe, focus on, wish for, intend, think and feel.” This of course is delusion. Racing through a red light believing its all perfectly safe and acceptable for some will not prevent a tragic accident resulting in serious harm to yourself or others. It will not change reality as you sit in an electric chair paralyzed from the neck down drooling as your spoon fed oatmeal.
There is an assault on language and a war on for your mind. The hazards are everywhere everyday and relentless – the inversion of reality. The scripture warns of consequences for this inversion.
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own – for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.
[closing narration: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”, Twilight Zone episode aired March 4, 1960”
― Rod Serling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4nTm-2_E1c
Forest W on Maple St caused the memory of Forest W in the pool hall.
The scapegoat is words. Greatest trick the details devil ever played was convincing the literate (& the illiterate wannabe’s, or in awe of’s) that symbols ~ letters strung together into words ~ are real, while sensory evidence, in your face actions, aren’t ~ can’t be! That includes burned in synaptic tracks like whatever Fast Eddie Felsen was listening to while Fat Albert took his money.
Words are being misused. Wah. That’s their primary purpose. Misdirection. Feints. Even slow hands can, & do, rob you blind, kill you dead, if you are absorbed in “conversation” when you should be attending to the action.
I saw that Mac Davis broke thru with a song that wouldn’t pass muster today, according to ‘this day in history.’ (I also similarly heard some ass dj on radio say Fat Bottom Girls wouldn’t be made today & probably shouldn’t be played today. I love Fat Bottomed Girls, & the song, too.) And that he wrote the Elvis tune A Little Less Conversation. Too bad Elvis didn’t tell the Col. to stfu.
Does this sound strange or foreign or particularly Russian? Or does it sound pretty damn familiar, & local (even if perhaps doppelganger’ish)? ::
“…This is a dominant idea in all the Russian Intelligentsia, an idea going back though Plato to ancient Asia: All of objective reality is of no importance except as symbols for some subjective truth. This was, of course, the point of view of the Neoplatonic thinkers of the early Christian period. It was generally the point of view of the early Christian heretics & of those Western heretics like the Cathari (Albigenses) who were derived from this Eastern philosophic position. In modern Russian thought it was well represented by Dostoevski, who while chronologically earlier than Tolstoi is spiritually later. To Dostoevski every object & every act is merely a symbol for some elusive spiritual truth. From this point of view comes an outlook which makes his characters almost incomprehensible to the average person in the Western tradition: if such a character obtains a fortune, he cries, “I am ruined!” If he is acquitted on a murder charge, or seems likely to be, he exclaims, “I am condemned,” & seeks to incriminate himself in order to ensure the punishment which is so necessary for his own spiritual self-acquittal. If he deliberately misses his opponent in a duel, he has a guilty conscience, & says, “I should not have injured him thus; I should have killed him!” In each case the speaker cares nothing about proiperty, punishment, or life. He cares only about spiritual values: asceticism, guilt remorse, injury to one’s self-respect. In the same way, the early religious thinkers, both Christian & non-Christian, regarded all objects as symbols for spiritual values, all temporal success as an inhibition on spiritual life, & felt that wealth could be obtained only by getting rid of property, life could be found only by dying (a direct quotation from Plato), eternity could be found only if time ended, & the soul could be freed only if the body were enslaved. Thus as late as 1910, when Tolstoi died, Russia remained true to its Greek-Byzantine intellectual tradition.
We have noted that Dostoevski, who lived slightly before Tolstoi, nevertheless had ideas which were chronologically in advance of Tolstoi’s ideas. In fact, in many ways Dostoevski was a precursor of the Bolsheviks. Concentrating his attention on poverty, crime & human misery, always seeking the real meaning behind every overt act, or word, he eventually reached a position where the distinction between appearance & significance became so wide that these two were in contradiction with each other. This contradiction was really the struggle between God & the Devil in the soul of man. Since this struggle is without end, there is no solution to men’s problems except to face suffering resolutely. Such suffering purges men of all artificiality & joins them together in one mass. In this mass the Russian people, because of their greater suffering & tjeir greater spirituality, are the hope of the world & must save the world from the materialism, violence, & selfishness of Western civilization. The Russian people, on the other hand, filled with self-sacrifice & with no allegiance to luxury or material gain, & purified by suffering which makes them the brothers of all other suffering people, will save the world by taking up the sword of righteousness against the forces of evil stemming from Europe. Constantinople will be seized, all the Slavs will be liberated, & Europe & the world will be forced into freedom by conquest, so that Moscow may become the third Rome. Before Russia is fit to serve the world in this way, however, the Russian intellectuals must merge themselves in the great mass of the suffering Russian people, & the Russian people must adopt Europe’s science & technology uncontaminated by any European ideology. The blood spilled in this effort to extend Slav brotherhood to the whole world by force will aid the cause, for suffering shared will make men one.
This mystical Slav imperialism with its apocalyptical overtones was by no means uniquely Dostoevski’s. It was held in a vague & implicit fashion by many Russian thinkers, & had a wide appeal to the unthinking masses. It was implied in much of the propaganda of Pan-Slavism, & became semiofficial with the growth of this propaganda after 1908. It was widespread among the Orthodox clergy, who emphasized the reign of righteousness which would follow the millenialist establishment of Moscow as the “Third Rome.” It was explicitly stated in a book, “Russia & Europe,” published in 1869 by Nicholas Danilevsky (1822-1885). Such ideas, as we shall see, did not die out with the passing of the Romanov autocracy in 1917, but became even more influential, merging with the Lenisnist revision of Marxism to provide the ideology of Soviet Russia after 1917.” ~ Tragedy & Hope, Carroll Quigley
Symbolic animals & real carnage.
Congrats to the author for getting the first two paragraphs correct. (Not many do!)
But the rest is so slanted/tainted, I can only call it bullshit.
It may be time for the remnant to find shelter until the storm blows over.
Orwell was a lower ranking intelligence officer in the military. Many times those people are exposed to some high level intel. and much of what he wrote about could have very well come from things he learned at that time.