[Newsbot]

Title: 5 things George Orwell understood
Category: Showbiz
Posted By: andyt
Date: 2016-04-24 06:57:38
Canadian

[andyt]

I caught quite a bit of this program on the radio recently. Sounds like Orwell was a very principled, driven man. hard on himself, which is why he died so early.

He was for "liberal socialism" ie not the bureaucratic scocialism prevelant in Britain after the war. Bit of a dream, basically a return to the England he knew growing up, but with socialist government.

I've never read Homage to Catalonia, where he was fighting the fascists, but came to see what scum the communists could be - attacking their own side rather than allow non-Stalinists to get the upper hand.

[Thanos]

It would have been interesting to see what Orwell's opinions would have become if he'd lived through the 1970's and 80's. Both democratic socialism and communism had their high-water mark then and proceeded to rapidly die off immediately afterwards, killed as much by their own contradictions, the endemic society-wide ennui they generated, and self-loathing as much as they were by any outside enemy like Reagan or Thatcher.

I do like the part in the article at the end where the writer mentions Sanders and Corbyn, doing their best Herbert West imitations to resurrect something long (and deservedly) dead. The only way 1970's style socialism has been able to make some kind of a comeback is via a couple of silly old men who, cult-leaders of the L. Ron Hubbard or Charles Manson-style both of them, have been pushing a myth to a new generation of young people who weren't around 30-odd years ago to see what a crashing boor the socialism of back-then had become, and why by the beginning of the 1980's it needed to be strangled in it's sleep and then put in a sack to be thrown into the river.

I do also like the take Orwell had on Hitler. In this era where history and historical fact mean nothing anymore, national socialism has been written off by the barely informed as some kind of capitalist venture due to the Nazis allegedly being "right wing". The understanding of how national socialism became popular within Germany prior to the outbreak of the war usually gets obliterated by old clips of the Reichstag fire and SA troops blocking the entrance of Jewish stores. The reality was that the socialist aspect of Nazism was what led it to electoral victory and then to a willing dictatorship. "The state will take care of all Germans" as well as "Germans are not allowed to screw over and harm other Germans with the tools of capitalism" was exactly why the Nazis were able to legally gain power. This has been ignored for too long. Whatever good they did was of course destroyed in the invasions, occupations, and death camps, but they didn't come out of no where. And they were able to gain the willing support of millions of people that didn't want the nightmare of communism to win in Germany but who were also sick, tired, and angry at what the predatory capitalism of the banks within Germany and from outside in London and Wall Street were doing to them. Odd in a way that in a fascist state like 1930's Germany socialism ended up having one of it's greatest triumphs as the well-being of the people overall became much better thanks almost entirely due to the state vigourously implementing and enforcing socialist principles.

[andyt]

Well, Orwell didn't love Hitler so much that he didn't try to enlist in the army, where he was rejected for health reasons, and then pushed to get a job with the war effort. Wound up working in the propaganda department, which he stood for two years before quitting because he felt he had been thoroughly slimed. A lot of 1984 came out of that epxerience. Orwell saw that lying, even in the aim of a good cause, will inevitably corrupt the state and lead to further abuses during peace time.

If enforcing socialist principles was such a good thing for Germany, why the animus towards it? What, only fascists can be good socialists? Russia also became better for a while under communism. The question is where would Germany be now if Hitler had not been defeated. Animal Farm applies, no matter if the left or the right is in power.

[Thanos]

Nationalism beat the idea of international socialist brotherhood quite badly as far back as the opening days of World War One. The threat of a worldwide socialist mutiny, where the workers of all countries would allegedly refuse to take up arms against each other, never materialized. All citizens in all countries were quite eager to get at each other in the name of nationalism and got fed into the meat grinder because of it.

As for Hitler is should be self-evident. The man and his regime were too dangerous to be allowed to continue to exist. And the good they may have done was for Germans only. Everyone else, including the lower-grade Aryans in France or Britain, were fair game for conquest and exploitation simply because they weren't Germans. That's where the nationalism and tribal blood-loyalty kicks in again and puts a dead stop once more to any internationalist aspects. In the light of the failure of Versailles to de-fang Germany there was no way an armed German state was going to be tolerated any longer. The commitment of the Allies and Soviets to permanently eliminate German militarism was real. Germany was actually supposed to be entirely de-industrialized and returned to an agrarian state without the ability to build arsenals anymore under the post-war Morgenthau Plan by the Truman Administration. It was only the developing threat of Stalin and the opening of the Cold War that made the US realize an armed yet democratic Germany was going to be needed to fight the Russians and the Morgenthau Plan was terminated before 1950.

As for Russia, "better" is a relative term. High-up Communist Party members had a pretty easy life, if they managed to avoid the purges that is. Same with their celebrities and star athletes. But the middle class that was developing during the last years of the czarist monarchy had it hard, which is ironic because the revolution that destroyed the monarchy came out of the middle-class, courtesy of Russia's versions of educated dilettantes like Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein. The middle class economic wealth was destroyed or confiscated. All independent living came to an end and was replaced by mediocre state-provided jobs and goods. Education and health care became better but was also accompanied by a wide-ranging depression and ennui, caused by a lack of social mobility, that afflicted almost all of Russian society by the 1970's. The massive levels of alcoholism in Russia today began under the Communists a long time ago, and was a direct result of individual lives not being worth living, a despair that was an inadvertent creation of the state-directed everything Russians lived under. What's the point of becoming a doctor or engineer if you're issued the exact same lousy and tiny apartment to live in that they give out to cab drivers or street sweepers? Why put out or care at all if you're just another cog in the machine? What Orwell would later call the obliteration of the individual under communism was as active in the slightly gentler 1960's and 70's as it was in the Stalinist 1920's and 30's.

All societies lie. I doubt any society that didn't lie to itself constantly would be able to survive more than a few years. Lying is the basis of the entire electoral system in all the democracies as far as I can tell. The ones that tell the truth are simply unelectable, which is why the parties all seem to resemble each other far too much, at least in North America anyway. It's all just a bunch of lapdogs doing the job for the betterment of the 1% as far as I'm concerned. Any benefits that trickle down to the rest of us are merely fortunate happenstance and not a deliberate aim of any implemented policy.