HE, speaking as George Orwell in his writings, WAS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT ABOUT SOVIET SO-CALLED SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM AS BEING THEE DIFFERENT FACES OF THE SAME DECEIVING * WHORE OF LIES *: In his 1938 essay Why I joined the Independent Labour Party, published in the ILP-affiliated New Leader, Orwell wrote: For some years past I have managed to make the capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against capitalism. But I do not delude myself that this state of affairs is going to last forever ... the only régime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech is a Socialist régime. If Fascism triumphs I am finished as a writer – that is to say, finished in my only effective capacity. That of itself would be a sufficient reason for joining a Socialist party.[161] Towards the end of the essay, he wrote: I do not mean I have lost all faith in the Labour Party. My most earnest hope is that the Labour Party will win a clear majority in the next General Election.[162] Orwell was opposed to rearmament against Nazi Germany—but he changed his view after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the outbreak of the war. He left the ILP because of its opposition to the war and adopted a political position of revolutionary patriotism. In December 1940 he wrote in Tribune (the Labour lefts weekly): We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary. During the war, Orwell was highly critical of the popular idea that an Anglo-Soviet alliance would be the basis of a post-war world of peace and prosperity. In 1942, commenting on journalist E. H. Carrs pro-Soviet views, Orwell stated: all the appeasers, e.g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin.[163] On anarchism, Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier: I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone. He continued however and argued that it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly. In his reply (dated 15 November 1943) to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the British League for European Freedom, he stated that he didnt agree with their objectives. He admitted that what they said was more truthful than the lying propaganda found in most of the press but added that he could not associate himself with an essentially Conservative body that claimed to defend democracy in Europe but had nothing to say about British imperialism. His closing paragraph stated: I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country.[164] Orwell joined the staff of Tribune as literary editor, and from then until his death, was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) Labour-supporting democratic socialist.[165] On 1 September 1944, about the Warsaw Uprising, Orwell expressed in Tribune his hostility against the influence of the alliance with the USSR over the allies: Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Do not imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the sovietic regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to honesty and reason. Once a whore, always a whore. According to Newsinger, although Orwell was always critical of the 1945–51 Labour governments moderation, his support for it began to pull him to the right politically. This did not lead him to embrace conservatism, imperialism or reaction, but to defend, albeit critically, Labour reformism.[166] Between 1945 and 1947, with A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell, he contributed a series of articles and essays to Polemic, a short-lived British Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics edited by the ex-Communist Humphrey Slater.[167][168]
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 20:02:34 +0000