Harry’s Place

Good news indeed, Orwell was very important in shaping my early political thoughts, particularly the bit about anti-totaliarianism.

Ditto for me Andy - will be most interesting. Not all of his stuff has aged well, but compared to others of his era, a remarkable percentage has…

Did him and Heath fight alongside the Church burning Stalinists at the same time? Upps, I mean cool student radical liberation army.

As much as I love Orwell’s novels, memoires and essays, I find him extremely disappointing and depressing his negative attitudes towards the Jews and their national aspirations. Just because he superficially condemned anti-semitism in one or two of his essays doesn’t mean he had developed any empathy for Jews, even after what had happened to them during WW2. Self-righteous prig is perhaps a good description of him, for all his brilliance and wonderful writing.

“Upps, I mean cool student radical liberation army.” Hmm…they pretty hip and cool those dockers, miners, peasants etc etc in the Anarchist Militia…definately you would be loving thier peasant chic outfits darling…

MacCohen

I don’t think Orwell was a “self righteous prig”, as you describe him. Have you read Down and Out in Paris and London? Self righteous prigs don’t write material like that.

Excellent news…but does anyone know why I can’t access

http://orwell.ru

It was surely the pre-eminent site for all things Orwellian

Somehow, this one just doesn’t quite cut the mustard:

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/

Any more?

TORY

1. You will remember that Churchill was on the side of those church burning Stalinists a few years later (Red Army 1941-5).

2. Orwell did not fight for the Spanish Communist Party but for POUM which was non-Stalinist Marxist.

I saw a very strange Orwell related thing last year: in a state owned bookshop in Beijing, was a display on the wall all about Orwell’s 1984, in Chinese.

Yes, and I was taking the piss out of your poster boy so there.

You showed them, TORY. You showed them good.

bloody hell, he’s not a saint chaps. I like a good yarn as much as the next chap..

Does George allow comments on his blog? Will Flanker call him a neocon? Will Benji tell him not to get so worked up about it, old boy?

I think what is striking about reading Orwell is that you really must keep doing it every decade.

I use him as a re-calibration techique of myself to see how much my so called political views are social fashion.

For example when I read Homage to Catalonia in the 70s I was blown away and it enabled me to have my first real conversations with my Stalinist Grandfather.

When I read it in the 80s I thought he was a socially conservative prig and in the 90s I laughed out loud at his total (Prince |Charles like architectural prejudices) misconception of the sagrada familia (as a justifiably bombed monstrosity) and his moral shock that the anarchists would have formed a militia for the defence of Barcelona from the prostitutes collective.

(showing he had no grasp of libertarian socialism).

Now I find Orwells social decency if a trifle ‘Bournemouth tea rooms frigid’ really very decent.

This upsets the metropolitan, bohemian, pseudo liberal anglo-american left , but they are bereft of either the solid socialism of a rather austere character like Orwell, or the genuine radical inclusivity of the syndicalists.

Burmese Days

I also recommend its re-reading. For me it has moved from a damning and thickly layered indictment of colonialism through a distorted Saidian lens of ‘orientalism’ and crypto imperialist racist hogwash (aka brown people cannot be bad) back to centre stage as a damning indictment of Imperialism.

Colonies themselves of course remain far more complex entities than ideology or rhetoric, but not the thick description of Orwell, allows for.

I would like to live another hundred years just to re-read Orwell each decade (I won’t betoo much trouble I could just have my brain kept in a tank with a flash drive using no more energy than one of those new flurescent bulbs)

Orwell seems to have become a lodestar for those who style themselves ‘decent left’ as opposed to totalitarianism but too many writers and journalists seek to emulate his stand in Why I Write as a kind of pose. For Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens it seems that the battlelines are the same as they were in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism and Soviet Communism proving there was a similarity between the far right and far left. But this analogy has been pushed too far by those who want to propagate the falsehood that Islamists and the liberal-left are the new totalitarians and part of some seamless and menacing and monolithic global evil.

That appoach is dangerous for a number of reasons, not least because on an issue such as the invasion of Iraq the New Labour spin machine, the deceptions and manipulation were actually more Orwellian than anything that would have been supported by Orwell. It is somewhat disingenuous for those who supported the invasion of Iraq to claim that this is a position worthy of Orwell. It just isn’t.

The comparison between Saddam Hussein and Hitler and the use of the word totalitarian to mean some concerted and united threat to overthrown Western civilisation is a myth peddled by those who believe the control of the oil resources of the Middle East can somehow be reconciled with installed democracies. In practice that was never going to happen because no people would vote for those who supported the occupation of a foreign power which never took much interest in providing security and economic benefits for most Iraqis.

This is not to say that some humanitarian interventionists like Brian Brivati were not well intentioned but Iraq was a very different situation from Yugoslavia where there was already a conflict in motion whereas Iraq was stable under a repellent dictatorship to which there was never going to be an easy alternative.
As much as the ‘decent left’ have often wrote very perceptive things about the Orwellian nature of the ‘anti-war movement’ and RESPECT it does not follow that by opposing the motivation of those like Galloway and Andrew Murray in opposing the war that the case for a the invasion of Iraq is somehow proved.

If anything, the line of thinking pursued by Cohen and Hitchens and other would-be inheritors of Orwell’s mantle is more Orwellian in the sinister sense of that adjective. For example, Orwell’s 1984 cannot in any sense fail not to make it clear that torture is morally wrong and that the mass media can and will manipulate the citizens of an atomised society to believe anything if repeated often enough.

The mendacious use of language Hitchens has used to classify the torture of inmates at Guantanamo is entirely opposite to Orwell’s loathing for callous euphemisms that conceal brutal realities. Words like ‘extraordinary rendition’ and so on or the term ‘Islamofascist’ and other conflations of Second World War mythology with the current ‘war on terror’. Moreover in Cohen’s last Observer piece he was found by Guardian readers to have falsified reality by claiming that people did not laugh at the comedian Jon Stewart when he ridiculed Barack Obama when film footage proves they did.

Orwell would turn in his grave if he thought that those like Cohen and Hitchens were his authentic heirs. Cohen is merely an incoherent dolt and Hitchens is a media hungry poseur no less than his erstwhile opponent Galloway. Rather than trying to find out the truth about the way the nation was manipulated into supporting the US invasion they and others connected with the Euston Manifesto or ‘liberal interventionist’ left have simply decided to only see what they want to see and not to question the propaganda line that the invasion of Iraq was largely concerned with controlling the oil supply.

Those who supported the US invasion of Iraq were more like the fellow travellers of Stalin’s USSR in that respect. As John Gray has written in Black Mass , the policy of regime change was Utopian. All this ‘democratic geopolitics’ is really about controlling the diminishing supples of oil and contorting the facts to fit in with the proscriptions of the ideological creed. The writers who supported the invasion of Iraq doublethinked their way around the issue of oil. Even if it was an imperial intervention, then it was still going to be for the better if secular market state democracy could be exported and the people of Iraq would be so thankful.

Even more contemptable was the attempt by those like Denis McShane to compare the invasion of a sovereign country that was not threatening its neigbours at the tim of invasion to the revolution against Soviet totalitarianism in Hungary in 1956. This is the misuse of history to make crude propaganda points than are certainly Orwellian. If anything the liberal interventionists and neoconservatives seem to think that any number of deceptions in the higher interests of the cause of controlling oil or for geopolitical gain can be rationalised by such rhetoric.

If people wish to read Orwell to understand the self-styled ‘decent left’ they should start by realising that Orwell was critical of that kind of doublethink that it has shown over Iraq.

Shorter K. Naylor: I wish I had a column on a national newspaper and I’m intensely envious of those who do, but I can’t think of anything new to say about them, so here’s some tiresome old guff from such famously reliable, fair-minded and well-intentioned sources as The Guardian and John Gray. Of course, if I did have such a column, I’d do what Orwell did, and oppose the overthrow of dictatorships by democracies. Whoops, I mean …

What are these toys doing in my pram? I’m not having any of that!

Oh, and dictatorshizzle, ha ha ha!

K Naylor writes a lot like ‘flying rodent’ or ‘f.c.’ lite: i.e. nothing substantive whatsoever to back a boring litany of opinioneering that is only mildly less vituperative and less sanctimonious than the other aforementioned avatars.

Benjamin
30 July 2008, 2:54 pm

…..’I saw a very strange Orwell related thing last year: in a state owned bookshop in Beijing, was a display on the wall all about Orwell’s 1984, in Chinese.””

of all the things you have written about China this gives me the greatest hope (of course as long as the actual book is available in full chinese not CCP newspeak)

Oh Naylor is pretty good - hence the ad hominen responses.

no real surprise that stopper fionn disregards entirely that the purveyor of the most ad hominems and spurious claims in this thread so far is naylor who directs them at 3 individuals (cohen, hitchens, mcshane), and 2 entire groups (’decent left’ and euston signatories).

MacCohen: It is true that Orwell did not support the creation of Israel and had little sympathy for the idea of a Jewish State, but it is going way too far to say or imply that he was anti-Semitic. Like many people after the War, he still thought that the problems of anti-Semitism could be solved in Europe, and through immigration to the Americas and Australia. He thought that sending Jewish refugees to Palestine and creating a Jewish State there would inflame the Arabs and cause far more problems then it was worth.

To a certain extent Orwell was right, the problem with his point of view was that there was no where else for most of the million or so displaced Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to go. They could not go back to their old countries such as Poland. The anti-Semitic porgroms that happened there when Jewish survivors tried to return in 1946 proved that. Other countries, including the United States, would not take in more then a minority of the Jewish refugees due to their own anti-Semitism and nativist fears there would not enough jobs in the post-war economy if too many refugees were allowed in. There was no other politically acceptable place for the Jewish survivors to go except Palestine. This was something that Orwell and a good many of his contempories did not understand.

K Naylor is wrong when he says that the Islamists or Islamic Extremists and the far left are not the new totaltarians and they are not a threat to democracy. But he is right when he says that the invasion of Iraq was an unnecessary war that was motivated by the desire to control its oil and make millions in profits from such control and from reconstructing Iraq. Democracy was a nice cover, but was no more the real reason for the American-led invasion and occupation then it was for the British invasion and occupation during and after WWI.

There was also a second reason for the invasion which was to divert attention away from Al Queda and the country more then any other that was responsible for 9/11, Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are the ones responsible for financing the propaganda of Sunni Extremists around the world through their seemingly endless supply of oil profits that have made the doctrines of Islamic Extremism so wide spread and popular among Muslims.

Orwell was well behind the game on issues of gender equality and a few others. If you focus solely on those he is liable to disappoint.

I reckon his observations and opposition to totalitarians right and left make him well worthwhile.

Now I find Orwells social decency if a trifle ‘Bournemouth tea rooms frigid’ really very decent.

Well, funny you should say. I was driving through Bornemouth on a Sunday only 3 weeks ago, and not a tea room in sight, which I found quite odd. I ended up getting a jolly nice cuppa at Lyndhurst.

Orwell had plenty of contempt for the obsessions of self-proclaimed anti-fascists too.

See ‘Coming up for air’:
“You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the
hour. Just like a gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button,
and it starts. Democracy, Fascism, Democracy. But somehow it
interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a white
face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans.
What’s he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he’s
stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest to make you hate certain
foreigners called Fascists. It’s a queer thing, I thought, to be
known as ‘Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist’. A queer
trade, anti-Fascism. This fellow, I suppose, makes his living by
writing books against Hitler. But what did he do before Hitler
came along? And what’ll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same
question applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers, and so
forth, of course. But the grating voice went on and on, and
another thought struck me. He MEANS it. Not faking at all–feels
every word he’s saying. He’s trying to work up hatred in the
audience, but that’s nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every
slogan’s gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you’d find
inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a
chap like that in private life. But does he have a private life?
Or does he only go round from platform to platform, working up
hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.”
http://www.george-orwell.org/Coming_up_for_Air/14.html

I wonder what Orwell would’ve made of Cohen and Hitchens…

Orwell’s anti-Stalinism / anti-totalitarianism from a democratic left perspective was key, but his critiques of anti-pacifism (and the strange currents and overlaps within the “Peace” movement during WW2) are also interesting and still relevant.

Orwell had plenty of contempt for the obsessions of self-proclaimed anti-fascists too.

See ‘Coming up for air’

Orwell had an “antiwar” phase in the late 1930s, when he wrote CUFA, although his description of professional “anti-fascists” undoubtedly had some truth to it.

Here’s my favorite passage from that book:

What was more, I actually had a feeling that they were after me already. The whole lot of them! All the people who couldn’t understand why a middle-aged man with false teeth should sneak away for a quiet week in the place where he spent his boyhood. And all the mean-minded bastards who COULD understand only too well, and who’d raise heaven and earth to prevent it. They were all on my track. It was as if a huge army were streaming up the road behind me. I seemed to see them in my mind’s eye. Hilda was in front, of course, with the kids tagging after her, and Mrs Wheeler driving her forward with a grim, vindictive expression, and Miss Minns rushing along in the rear, with her pince-nez slipping down and a look of distress on her face, like the hen that gets left behind when the others have got hold of the bacon rind. And Sir Herbert Crum and the higher-ups of the Flying Salamander in their Rolls- Royces and Hispano-Suizas. And all the chaps at the office, and all the poor down-trodden pen-pushers from Ellesmere Road and from all such other roads, some of them wheeling prams and mowing- machines and concrete garden-rollers, some of them chugging along in little Austin Sevens. And all the soul-savers and Nosey Parkers, the people whom you’ve never seen but who rule your destiny all the same, the Home Secretary, Scotland Yard, the Temperance League, the Bank of England, Lord Beaverbrook, Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle, the bench of Bishops, Mussolini, the Pope–they were all of them after me. I could almost hear them shouting:

‘There’s a chap who thinks he’s going to escape! There’s a chap who says he won’t be streamlined! He’s going back to Lower Binfield! After him! Stop him!’

‘K Naylor is wrong when he says that the Islamists or Islamic Extremists and the far left are not the new totaltarians and they are not a threat to democracy.’

Well, the far-left is hardly new nor is it any stronger than it was during the Cold War. Those like the repellent Seumas Milne have little power but too much influence over opinion as do the Islamists he has patronised as comments editor of the Guardian.

Harry’s Place writers continue to try an appropriate lefting terminology with regards Islamism as ‘clerical fascism’. This is misleading. Islamism of the sort advocated by Soumaya Ghannoushi is Islamo-Leninism.

Islamism is a Western revolutionary ideology and the religious element, the use of the apocalyptic strands within Islam, to justify resistance against imperialism has much in common with Third World Revolutionary guerilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

Within Britain such ideology will remain popular amongst politically motivated young Muslims and those craving release from the sterile boredom of consumerism. Yet it hardly adds up to some direct threat to democracy other than in the fact the propaganda will encourage some young Islamists to commit terrorist acts.

The reason why there has been so much rationalisation of the terror threat as ‘retaliation’ to use Pilger’s word for it, is that the remnants of the far left are bitter history did not go there way. Now absolutely anything that can destabilise Britain is to be welcomed by unhinged writers like Pilger or Milne.

So yes, they harbour totalitarian motivations but in themselves the far left cannot weaken democracy in the hope that ‘real socialism’ of the kind promised by secular revolutionary movements will prevail. All the propagandists can do is try to instigate militancy bu using their media profile to peddle absurd and inflammatory claims such as that the condition of Muslims under New Labour is comparable to the Jews under Hitler.

The prevention of terrorism and ‘the battle for hearts and minds’ as Jason Burke sees as the key to reducing it will depend upon pursuing a more sensible foreign policy, reducing overdependence upon oil and realising that Al Qaida cannot be defeated by conventional military means and by playing idiotic cat and mouse games with their operatives both at home and abroad.

Anyway, it’s sunny here so I’m off out now.

But he is right when he says that the invasion of Iraq was an unnecessary war that was motivated by the desire to control its oil and make millions in profits from such control and from reconstructing Iraq.

no he isn’t right, but both you and he are angry and deluded stoppers.

“although his description of professional “anti-fascists” undoubtedly had some truth to it.”
Do you think it still does have some truth to it, Gene? If so - and just out of interest - do you have anyone in mind?

“although his description of professional “anti-fascists” undoubtedly had some truth to it.”
Do you think it still does have some truth to it, Gene? If so - and just out of interest - do you have anyone in mind?

Not sure what you’re driving at, Andrew, but it’s worth noting that the professional “anti-fascists” that Orwell mocks were, in the end, essentially right.

And his comparison to a gramophone brings to mind the deadeningly repetitive rhetoric at a “Stop the War” Coalition demonstration.

@Ibnaz

The use of ’stopper’ is Orwellian since the very phrase ‘Stop the War’ is , of course , the delusion of those who support the StWC whose states aim is to manufacture slogans that stoke up the maximum of outrage and to channel it into support for the Islamo-Leninist totalitarian worldview.

So, yes, nasty little Stalinists such as Andrew Murray are rather like the characters mentioned in Orwell’s novels, namely the ones who turn to totalitarian creeds to save themselves from otherwise entirely merited personal insignificance.

However, the assumption that everybody who opposed the Iraq War are ’stoppers’ is to buy the propaganda of Murray that everyone was united beneath the vile or inchoate slogans that many marched under in 2003. The fact is they were not. Man very sensible people were against it too and I was revolted by what I saw that chilly march afternoon.

The sane response to the Iraq War is both revile the exploitation of it made by the StWC and RESPECT and the stupidity of the invasion itself which has done so much to discredit the idea that in certain circumstances humanitarian intervention could be justified.

All these issues from the wars in the Balkans to Afghanistan and the situation in Iraq are complicated and gumming labels on others to win polemical points acheives nothing.

“Not sure what you’re driving at, Andrew”
Just wondering which, if any, current anti-[Islamo-]fascist types you think are a little too keen like the over-enthusiastic anti-fascists that Orwell refers to.

Gene and Andrew’s lengthy quotes show Orwell developing the ideas that he was later to express at more length in “Animal Farm” and in “1984″.

All should remember that he didn’t live long enough to witness the first one-adult one-vote General Election in the UK. It was in 1950, a few months after his death.

“Islamism is a Western revolutionary ideology and the religious element, the use of the apocalyptic strands within Islam, to justify resistance against imperialism has much in common with Third World Revolutionary guerilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s”

What a load of bollocks! Anyone who has studied Islam and its history knows only too well that (minority) extremist and fundamentalist elements have always been there and that there have always been extremist Islamic groups actively engaging in or advocating large-scale butchery to make a “political” or “religious” point. Look at the early Kharijis (they broke up into various groups, some over whether non-Khariji Muslim children must be killed), the Ismailis (from whom we get the term “assassin”) and the more recent, lovely Wahhabis. The medieval Ibn Taymiyyah was a fundamentalist on the fringes, but still broadly respected by the mainstream, even though he vomited out considerable bile against non-Muslims, especially the Jews.

Islam doesn’t distinguish between personal, social and political views and actions, so when a form of it goes extremist, so too do the political actions of its followers. That’s not to say that many unpleasant “Western” elements haven’t become incorporated into modern-day extremist Islamist groups. But Islam has always absorbed “Western” elements, from Aristotle to the Church’s anti-semtic Blood-Libel accusations. (You’ll find Islamic equivalents to the Blood Libel in many popularist Islamic works, especially Shiite ones.)

To conflate a medieval, extremist form of a long-developed and sophisticated religion with an extremist modern-day, unsophisticated secularist ideology shows you simply don’t know what you’re talking about. Please don’t pontificate on Islam if you don’t know anything about it. Really, for your own good.

Stopper! This word is funny and is particularly so when mentioned on a post about Orwell. Anti-Americanism is another word that pops up from time to time. It’s rhetoric designed to shut down argument and for those pro-war types and Euston signatories to tar and feather their opponents. The war has been such an awful disaster that to debate it reasonably would make fools of the supporters so instead it is better to scream louder than the other person and call them “vile, disgusting dictator lovers!” Utter crap, of course.

@Albert

Islamism and Islam are not synonymous. Islamism as developed by Qutb and others is a revolutionary ideology which like Communism can be regarded as a ‘political religion’. If not convinced please educate yourself by reading Malise Ruthven A Fury for God.

The Islamism in Britain espoused by those like Soumaya Ghannoushi is far more close to violent collectivist Marxism-Leninism than voluntaristic and pietistic forms of Sufi Islam for example of the kind that Ed Hussain embraced after rejecting Islamism.

Islamism as it is developing within Britain is a modernistic reaction against the disenchantment felt by Muslims with capitalism and secularism which has political origins and is also part of an attempt to regenerate an ‘authentic’ civilisation crushed beneath the phoney non-culture of banal consumerism.

It is just Fanon adopted to the predicament of the Muslim world and makes it appealing to alienated adolescents who feel that the oppression of the ummah by Satanic forces of Western Imperialism is their oppression too because it means that the culture they identify with will be sanitised by consumption.

But the viscerality of such resentments is compounded by the fact that control over the supply of oil, and the appropriation by the West of the resources that might have allowed a more equitable development between the West and the Middle East, ensures that the Muslim world remains wracked by war, poverty and repression whilst the West becomes ever richer and decadent.

The interesting thing about this is that many in the West feel uneasy guilt over the fact that their banal consumer existences are literally fuelled by easy credit and the relatively cheap oil that allows the total satisfaction such imperative human rights as the necesity of flying on Easy Jet to get drunk in Prague.

The outpouring of protest in March 2003 was not so much about Iraq but the need to assuage feelings both of guilt but a certain joy at feeling ‘we’ can really change the world, a revival of activism that meets the need to escape consumerism and the dulling of the emotions that comes from a life dedicated to

That the niche market Galloway fills and HP bloggers suffer this boredom and ned to feel some emotion too which is what the pro-war liberation left is about. The sheer boredom of Middle England and the condition of the Middle East and the guilt drives the need to believe that instead of reducing consumption and the disproportionate using up of diminishing resources like oil that everyone in the world can be liberated by free market democracy and participate in consumerism too. It’s what the people of Iraq ‘really want’. Part of the movement towards the End of History and so on.

That’s what all these polemics represent. The search for meaning amidst the meaningless drift of history between placid consumerism and the spectre of nasty acts of anarchy and terror interrupting the lives of nice people like us. Authentic leftist politics could be resurrected either by supporting Blair’s War of Liberation or through opposing it by portraying Blair as sinister and satanic.

There’s nothing wrong with the word “stopper” so long as you don’t use it simply to mean “opponent of the Iraq war”. It’s shorthand for a supporter of the Stop the War Coalition, ie someone whose politics are broadly in line with Lindsay German and that lot. Obviously there were millions upon millions of people who opposed the war who weren’t “stoppers”. Malcolm Rifkind, for example, isn’t a stopper.