Life on Dubya's Animal Farm

Fascinating. For decades leftists have used their tactic of shouting down ideas they would rather not hear, using the sheep-bleating they now decry. Now, when they are routed by people who will not be cowed by these antics, they invoke Orwell. Need I remind my esteemed associate that Orwell was a leftist himself, but after seeing the moral bankruptcy and brutality that is communism he penned both 1984 and Animal Farm. I would suggest you read them again. And for that matter, how about Down and Out in Paris and London, and Homage to Catalonia. Perhaps then you will follow the evolution of a mind from deluded leftist to one of leftism's most gifted critics.

Fascinating. For decades we have had to endure Leftists using the tactic of shouting down ideas that they would rather not hear rather than engaging in debate. Now, when an audience will not tolerate such thuggish behavior, the Left sees Orwellian sheep. I suggest you look in the mirror. And remember, Orwell was initially a Leftist himself, but when he witnessed firsthand the moral bankruptcy and dehumanizing brutality that is Communism, he penned both 1984 and Animal Farm. It pays to know what you are talking about.

... i see, so in his later life, Orwell became a puritanical free market capitalist. and he would freely and without question support hidden trials, indefinite detentions and denial of legal counseling based on "secret evidence" and an unseen looming "threat". and he would also support the labelling of citizens as "enemy combatents" based on "secret evidence" and thereby, and simply because of the label, denying this citizen rights...

animal farm and 1984 are so increadibly sharply prescient, that they can be applied to any egregious and unlawful exercise of power. it's not a matter of left and right. these novels are timeless because they so accurately illustrate the bullshit manipulating that power in the modern world is based on, whether communist or capitalist, left or right. in fact, i cannot think of any political or economic ideology that these novels could not be applied to.

Fascinating. For decades we have had to endure the partisans of the Left shouting down speaker after speaker rather than allowing discourse and debate. Now that a group of citizens will not tolerate this thuggishness, the Left calls foul and sees Orwellian sheep. Take a look in the mirror. Oh, and need I remind you that in his youth Orwell was a Leftist as well, but he turned his back on the movement and penned 1984 and Animal Farm in response to the moral bankruptcy and brutality of Communism.

I apologize for the multiple posts. I didn't receive notification that my post had been accepted the first two times. Damn frustrating, really. Again, sorry for the repitition.

... but you see, they really aren't multiple posts of the same item, because you changed phrasing in each one of them. damn sorry old chap for pointing this out to you.

now if i could just get president bush to write his book report on 1984... he's got alot to learn from it...

Yes, the posts are all subtly different; this is due to the fact that my computer would freeze and fail to execute the 'add my comment' command (or so I thought). I had to back up and try again. And, given the opportunity to try again I would try to improve on the original. Once again I apologize for the repitition.

As far as your argument concerning the applicabilty of 1984 to both capitalist as well as socialist societies, I would have to disagree. 1984 is a nightmare based on a totalitarian socialist society. It's likeness is in the soulless architecture, desolation and intellectual despair of East Germany, North Korea, and the USSR. There are, of course, aspects of 1984 that can be found in the west but these are invariably socialist aspects that have been instituted by Leftists.

... you won't find any leftists arguing in double speak that "war is peace" like ariel sharon and unfortunately president george bush.

there's alot of droning, soulless architecture, music, politics and leaders in america, i can tell you that much. it's all about the money in america, everything else is just dust compared to that money.

you must understand, the last obstacle in the path of capitalism is democracy. there are going to be many big, fierce battles between these two forces in the future. i am willing to bet that as people have less and less power to hold capitalism accountable, through the diminishing power of democracy, capitalism will acheive massive, entrenched power. in a sense, governmental and corporate power will merge as one. it will become totalitarian in the sense that it will acheive it's own inertia and momentum as a gigantic world wide system. everything will be done for capitalism. anything so that it can keep expanding. and held over humanity's head will be the fear of it's imminent collapse as a massive, global, integrated economic system.

"remember, keep the system alive! all for the system! work until you drop! so the system may live! buy things simply for the sake of buying things! long live the system!" (sounds reminiscent of a communist call to arms, does it not... only it's for capitalism)

and with this power it will begin asking the earth and all life on it to sacrifice more and more to it, all in the name of it's own glory as an economic ideology and its eternal and everlasting expansion...

i also want to point out that capitalism is changing before our very eyes. it's not about the small anymore. it's about the big. it's not about friction, chaos and small local markets. it's about a smooth functioning system, predictable results, and massive global exchanges. it's about the top down. capitalism can only find efficiency by getting larger and larger. it can only find efficiency as a system, not a patchwork of chaotic individuals. and the larger it gets, the more obstacles it will clear from its path.

democractic forms of government (which pass laws regulating the practice of capitalism), and the human life cycle and the human body itself (in a sense, the entire human body is an obstacle to capitalism. while asleep, we cannot produce or consume. and if only we came out of the womb old enough to produce and consume, and if only we never grew too old to produce, and if only we never died...), being the last obstacles with any importance.

but not if the left can help it. i would admit that the "left" doesn't have the slightest idea about what to propose in place of capitalism and communism and socialism, but at least the "left" is scratching its head and trying to figure something out, trying to see with open eyes the problems and not relying on the ultimate drug that is denial.

lastly, capitalism doesn't need democracy to flourish. it certainly helps, but it isn't an absolute. look at china. no free speech. no free press. no freedom of religion. intrusive, violent, big brother style security forces. yet, you could make billions for yourself as a real estate tycoon in the insanely fast growing cities on china's east and south coasts, or as a software manufacturer. all you need is a blessing from party headquarters...

What incidents are you thinking of when you say the Left has shouted down people in America?

Also, I think 1984, in particular, was targetting fascist and communist (ie., rightwing and leftwing) dictatorships. Orwell even has O'Brien say as much to Winston when he lumps the Nazis and Communists together as precursors for Oceania.

First, an answer for Lt. Slothrop:

Examples: Let's start with virtually every conservative to attempt to address the student bodies at Cal Berkeley and the University of Michigan. Notable among these are Al Haig and Admiral Hyman Rickover, Ronald Reagan, Casper Weinberger, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. How about David Horowitz? Organized attempts to disrupt and shout down opposition have been the M.O. of the left for quite some time. The Left believes in diversity of skin and sexual preference - not opinion. They are, in effect, Stalinists.

Totalitarian regimes as they have existed in modern times are all socialist in nature. I would argue that Socialism and Totalitarianism are, in practice, the same. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Mugabe, Ceaucescu, all of them are identical. They rely on the power of the State to enforce the diktats of the Leader. They countenance no opposition in thought word or deed (sound familiar?). The notion that National Socialism is a movement of the right is erroneous; it would be more accurate to say that National Socialism was a movement of the near left in response to the hard left Communist party. The only aspect of National Socialism that could be construed as from the right is the fact that Hitler adroitly manipulated the army and the old aristocratic classes and used them in his moves to power. Simultaneously he was encouraging the legions of German Socialists with promises of redistribution of land and wealth. It is only through the machinery of Socialism that man can be as dehumanized and isolated as to be helpless in the face of the omnipotent government.

Second a reply to ‘by this thing here’:

Your analysis of Capitalism, while colorful, is I believe a bit overwrought. Historically companies and corporations have grown and shrunk depending on the economic, political and historical imperatives of the day. Fear of world-straddling megacorporations is unfounded. In this country we have witnessed corporate growth before. Standard Oil anyone? And garage-based businesses can grow to immense proportions while huge companies can vanish. Flown on Eastern Airlines recently? There is a wider ‘diversity’ of people operating in a wider range of professions (the vast majority of them outside of the public sector) here in the western democracies than anywhere in the Socialist world. Socialism is anathema to human existence. It doesn’t raise everyone to the same standard, it lowers them to it. Universal healthcare is a euphemism for universal neglect. If you are injured and taken to the emergency room in the middle of the night as I once was, the plastic surgeon that attends you will behave professionally and with skill. Why? Because in addition to the Hippocratic Oath he or she knows that to perform poorly is to risk damage to career and reputation. In a socialist society you will damn well wait for the morning; and if you are permanently disfigured? Well, that’s really just too bad. Perhaps the government will reprimand the hospital staff someday, just as soon as the proper forms are filled out.

Environmental damage in Democracies is a moon cast shadow to the wreckage found in Socialist countries. Without free press and a government of laws beholden to the public weal, governments will (and do) despoil at will. Many sites in the former East Germany and the former Soviet Union are toxic wastelands. And of course there’s Chernobyl.

The Left isn’t scratching its collective head and thinking of new paradigms. It’s trotting out the same old bile and discredited concepts that have been tried and failed before. Funny you don’t see too many Poles or Czechs or Hungarians that yearn for a Socialist paradise. They had it.

Finally let us look at the generation of wealth and its uses. I can’t remember ever seeing bags of flour or grain or containers of milk or boxes full of blankets donated to those in need by a Socialist country. It is invariably the West that provides for the citizens of countries with failed governmental systems and laughably inept economic systems.

That’s enough for now.

I was at the most recent Horowitz talk at UC Berkeley. After it, he went home and completely falsely reported that he had been shouted down. In reality, this is 100% not true, and in fact the opposite is true - they intimidated and silenced everyone else. First, the young republican club put everyone through a metal detector and made a list of everyone's name that was entering, which was totally ludicrous. The young republicans put a grad student, Jose Palafox, under citizen's arrest because he had called them dumb for the metal detector garbage and they falsely said that it was a threat to set off a bomb in the lecture hall or something.
http://www.dailycal.org/article.asp?id=5024&ref=search
There were about 30 young republicans and 24 police lining the aisles, and the head of the club made an intimidating speech beforehand that anyone who made a peep during the speech would be hauled out. So no one made the slightest sound during his speech. Then during the Q&A session, Horowitz went ballistic when a lawyer was asking a question and the two were interrupting each other for about 8 seconds, and he went home and said that they had tried to lynch him. He sucks. He lies.

Horowitz is going to be taking another tour with his anti-reparations deal which is his big fund raiser and has brought more publicity to the reparations concep tthan anything else. Just go watch if he comes around here again, which he probably will.

Is this a right-winger that does'nt rant or use put downs to prove his point?This sounds intelligent.

The left would never shout down Horowitz. Why, they are the epitome of tolerance.

Concerning Mr. Horowitz' appearance at Berkeley I must defer to your impression of the event as I was not there. I still stand by my assertion that a common tactic of the Left has been to attempt to muzzle critics through interference - either at events where they will chant and scream, or before by putting pressure on like-minded administrators to disinvite conservatives from speaking in the first place. Let them speak, and then take their points of view apart. If this can be done it will prove your position. If it cannot, then perhaps you should reconsider your views. Horowitz has been savaged for his views, and there have been criminal acts perpetrated to ensure that his views will not be heard. And what the hell was this whole conversation about in the first place? Oh yeah. Orwell. Love the guy. Read Down & Out in Paris and London if you haven't. It's just the neatest book.

you see, corporations are becoming states. their interests have as much power as states. this is something that those who espouse free markets and capitalism fail to realize. CAPITALISM MUST KEEP GROWING. GROWTH MUST BE PREDICTABLE, AND ETERNAL. the pinnacle of capitalist development is a massive, smooth functioning, global system. the face of it, the acting character, is the global corporation. this is what capitalist evolution has lead to. these are its finest sons.

isn't this what capitalists wanted? isn't this what capitalists dreamed of? isn't this the legacy of capitalist design?

i agree that competition is a good thing. i agree that it makes plastic surgeons perform better. but should we praise capitalism for the skill of the plastic surgeon? what? or should we praise the high personal standards, the ideals, of the surgeon HIMSELF, for his work...

capitalism is a beautiful thing on a small, personal, friendly, local level. when it gets too big, it forgets what made it possible. the problem (one, anyway...) for the future of the world is that it wants to forget, and it refuses to acknowledge any consequences. after all, this is the mature, healthy, fully-evolved capitalist system operating at peak efficiency. isn't it...

here's a question that'll keep people tossing and turning all night: what should capitalism get the credit for, and what should our friends, our neighbors, people we don't know, people we never met, our mothers and fathers, their great grand mothers and fathers, on and on, get the credit for...

the day capitalism takes a back seat to humanity/life on earth/the undescribable beauty and complexity... will be a good day. the day humanity takes a back seat to capitalism is a bad day.

orwell's writing has alot to say about this. it is absolutely relevant...

Well, I am constantly seeing right wing writers using a totally fallacious story that 'the left is hypocritical because they say they support tolerance but they don't tolerate right wingers!', that resembles what you are saying. Ann Coulter's latest book 'Slander' is a perfect example of this.
The concept of freedom of speech does not involve everyone else holding their tongue in response; if someone responds and tells you to shut up, you have not been censored.
Anyone who sees Coulter invited on Fox News etc. can observe that the reason that she is such a ratings hit is that some people love the antagonistic outlandish style she has in wildly insulting liberals and the left, saying muslims should be forcibly converted to christianity, and that they should start executing liberals in order to set an example for the others, and saying that John Walker Lindh is a representative example of 'liberals'. So she makes all sorts of slanderous statements that no one could take seriously, and is probably one of the most egregious examples of this on the right, then she comes out with a book about how 'the left' doesn't tolerate the right very much.
This doesn't follow any of the rules of logic because the left never made an argument like this about the concept of tolerance in the first place. The left never said that actions and opinions and behaviors mean nothing, so one should tolerate a drunken naked guy at your children's playground, and you should tolerate extremist political views without raising a counterargument etc. The argument about diversity and tolerance always pertained to behaviors and features which are inherently personal - no one has the right to judge someone on their religion or choice of spouse because that's their personal realm.
This guy at the Daily Cal newspaper is raising the same fallacious argument and it bugs me because I used to contribute articles to the paper and no journalist should be so thin skinned... op-ed writers always get tons of crank letters and he's taking it personally, even though I didn't even notice that he was a conservative during the past few months because he never really writes about personal politics... and I even thought he might be liberal because he wrote about being stopped by the police on the way to a chess match based on his demographic criteria: http://www.dailycal.org/article.asp?id=9164&ref=search

Although I still would like to hear some specific details of leftists shouting down conservative dissent, not vague allusions (I'm not doubting you here, I just don't know what you're talking about). I think the fact that conservative opinion is being expressed here on this thread (unlike what would happen if leftist opinion were expressed on a rightist forum) says a lot in itself.

Personally, as a leftist, I want open debate and discussion from all perspectives and bristle whenever I hear anyone try to quash responsible debate. I sometimes feel that many conservatives equate any disagreement with them as an attempt to "shout them down" or stifle dissent.

And, here, from the horse's mouth, is a definition of fascism:

"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger
of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

ann coulter is a lonely, angry women who's in need of lots of attention and some sexual healing... but that ain't gonna be my job.

anyways, the inferiority complex of the "right" always astonishes me. it's as if they cannot understand, or fail to realize, that their "side" has always held power in the world. they own the money and the guns. they make the rules. they are the establishment.

so when horowitz criticizes the "left", and gets heckled merely for appearing, i hope he understands why. it's not becuase he is weak and has nothing to say, but because he represents the "right", the powerful, and the establishment. that is why. the "left" has always, always been the underdog. especially in america. the "left's" lagacy is civil rights and perhaps social security, but otherwise, it's been the "right's" ball game all along. especially regarding economic policies.

the "right" needs to wake up and look upon itself honestly. because it, and the legacy of it's political, military and economic philosophies, rule the world at this moment in time. they have what they want in their grasp, a world where all speak the same engli$h, capitalism. their dream has almost been realized, and yet they act afraid, paranoid, in need of wars and fights and enemies in order to prove their worth (classic symptoms of an inferiority complex), and as if maybe they can't handle the resposibilities their dream entails.

Oh, to see yourselves as others see you.

I shoulda known better...

"Although I still would like to hear some specific details of leftists shouting down conservative dissent, not vague allusions (I'm not doubting you here, I just don't know what you're talking about). I think the fact that conservative opinion is being expressed here on this thread (unlike what would happen if leftist opinion were expressed on a rightist forum) says a lot in itself.

Witness how conservative dissent is shouted down on SF IMC:

http://www.indybay.org/news/hidden.php?id=133077#134848

Review that thread thoroughly and see exactly how these boardops tolerate free speech from conservative voices. The censor and hide the fucking shit out of it. Get your head out of your ass soldier.

I said nothing impolite. It was an observation.

There is, I believe, a world of difference between arguing one's point and hearing counter arguments on the one hand and attempting to silence criticism through shouting down speakers or otherwise disrupting public forums on the other. This forum is an example of the former. Imagine how frustrating it would be if every time you attempted to post your opinion it was rejected.

To equate people who view issues differently than you with naked drunken people at playgrounds exposes the intolerance of your position. We are correct, all who oppose us are incorrect and not worthy of being allowed a hearing. The Leftists who attended the rally in Stockton were there not to hear a point of view and then present their reply, but were instead intent on disruption or cancellation of the event. To say that those who resisted this are Orwell’s sheep is positively well, Orwellian. And spare me the whole ‘we don’t have a voice or forum’ violin-playing routine. You have the same ability as I do to participate in politics in this country. If you feel that your representatives aren’t sufficiently radical then run for election. But I suspect you won’t. There is little to gain by trying and failing. How much easier to not participate and bellyache about ‘the man’ or ‘the system’ and attend drive-in rallies against global warming after gassing up your oh so roots VW Van at the quickie mart and stopping for a full belly of food at McDonalds. I’m off on a tangent here.

"If you feel that your representatives aren’t sufficiently radical then run for election. But I suspect you won’t. There is little to gain by trying and failing. "

Elections in the US cost alot of money so I would hardly call this country a democracy. Yes, it would be possible to elect people to local offices with new viewpoints, but larger elections require corporate backing to pay for all the ads and PR events. So there IS something to lose in running for election; in most cases these days one can lose tens of millions of dollars. Anway, while protests often dont present reasoned arguments since the coverage of them is often bad, their message is usually clearer than the million dollar smear campaigns mainstream politicans use to get elected (or weird underhanded propoganda like Davis' work to get Simon nominated!).

And of course, Bush didn't get elected in any real sense of the word. The attempts to ban people from voting based of fake claims of felonies in Florida was enough to make most third world elections look clean.

:-) .....

If you don't want to run for election one excuse is as good as another.

I believe I said that there would be nothing to GAIN. I didn’t say that there was nothing to LOSE. Of course elections cost money. Don’t tell me that Lefties don’t have cash – how much money do you think Barbara Streisand has? Or Ted Turner? Or Jane Fonda? Or a million others? The Left has money, but it also has a failed message. The Left exalts the working class and in the same breath bemoans its lack of political sophistication. It can organize a million protest ‘marches’ (more like a 5k protest walk, everybody gets bussed in and out), yet it doesn’t have the money or popular exposure to get elected? Money isn’t the problem. Having unpopular views is. And if you are unhappy with the outcome of the last presidential election, work to have election laws changed.

"how much money do you think Barbara Streisand has? Or Ted Turner? Or Jane Fonda?"

You consider Ted Turner a Leftist!

I think you must have come to the wrong web site or are deeply confused since I think most people here have about as many problems with people like Ted Turner as we do with George Bush.

"And if you are unhappy with the outcome of the last presidential election, work to have election laws changed."

The last elections were not legal! But it didnt matter since the corruption goes to the top.

The USSR would never have fallen if people had your attitide ("if you dont like the single candidate we are giving you complain to your local Party official"). Sometimes the only way to change things is to act outside of the corrupted legal system.

I think most people here have about as many problems

Seconded.

Do you really want to bring up the USSR? You, who through word and deed supported and sustained that criminal enterprise? You who insisted that the United States appease and learn to live with them? You who opposed all efforts to resist encroaching totalitarianism? You who continue to defend its stooges like that animal Castro? Let me guess: The USSR fell because of some really groovy anarchists that listened to Rage Against the Machine, right? Wrong. Massive expenditures by the United States and a determined hand at the wheel brought that abomination to its end.

Oh, and I agree. In the preamble to the Declaration of Independence it speaks of the moral imperative to revolt if a government becomes tyrannical. Tricky thing is to know when to jump, isn’t it? Keep in mind, governments take a dim view of armed insurrection.

Weren’t we talking about Orwell? This is getting silly.

... first this:

>Keep in mind, governments take a dim view of armed insurrection.<

this is the conservative view of government. law and order. strong law enforcement. and a strong internal security apparatus.

then this:

>Weren’t we talking about Orwell? This is getting silly.<

you still have failed to persuade me that orwell is totally unrelevant to current situations in the world today, or when discussing capitalism as it marches triumphantly towards its own ends.

also this:

>Tricky thing is to know when to jump, isn’t it?<

the tricky thing for those who hold power in america today is to realize that the protestors are not jumping off of what they believe. and unfortunately, the more those who hold power in america continue to dismiss out of hand what people are protesting about, the more the protests are going to increase in size and occurance.

i have already made the point that the "right" has the world at its fingertips, and is coming closer than ever before to seeing the fruit of its labor. that being said, the "right", and the interests it represents, and the power it holds in todays world, will continue to dismiss the protestors in its peril.

it will continue to throw the "left", the "anarchists", the "environmentalists" and countless others in one giant convenient heap of "communist agents in general, every last one of 'em", and, "lovers of the USSR", and, "traitorous terrorist collaborators", and thereby falsely thinking it doesn't have to listen, and falsely believing its philosophies are beyond question, at its peril.

"the "right" has the world at its fingertips" "and thereby falsely thinking it doesn't have to listen, and falsely believing its philosophies are beyond question"

Who said we're not listening or are above being questioned? Don't equate the "right" not following your advise with that of not listening or being too good to be questioned.

By this thing here:

All governments view armed insurrection identically. If you can show me one that doesn’t, I’ll show you a government not long for this world. And yes, conservatives do believe in law and order. What would you prefer? Crime and disorder? Wait, don’t answer that.

I am sure that Orwell can be invoked to refer to a lot of what goes on in this world; my point has always been that the original author of this thread was incorrect in calling others sheep when he and his associates were the ones who went to that place with the intention of silencing those that oppose them. They were Orwell’s sheep, bleating away.

As far as listening to the Left, I assure you that we do. When have you ever seen a bunch of Right-wingers attempt to stop someone from speaking at a university or other public forum? It is imperative to listen to your opponents; they often believe what they say.

"The USSR fell because of some really groovy anarchists that listened to Rage Against the Machine, right? Wrong. Massive expenditures by the United States and a determined hand at the wheel brought that abomination to its end. "

Weird that almost seems like a Left wing argument. I mean, most economic conservatives claim the USSR fell due to problems with its economic system. Claiming Reagan's Big Government jobs programs brought the USSR down almost sounds Socialist when you think about it (the military being the public sector after all).

But "Right" and "Left: tend to be meaningless labels since they never really describe most people's politics. Which makes the posts about rich media types agreeing with anarchists especially funny.

"When have you ever seen a bunch of Right-wingers attempt to stop someone from speaking at a university or other public forum"

What about the hundreds of DOS attacks against this site??????

"If one looks at Orwell's entire output it is clear (to me at least) that of all the Socialist variants Orwell was closest to Anarchism. However, we cannot label Orwell an Anarchist as he rejected the idea of the stateless society - one of the basic tenets of Anarchism. Or perhaps one could say that Orwell was so much of an Anarchist that he even rejected Anarchism because of the (to him) inherent totalitarian tendencies in the stateless society. "
from http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/messages/1248.sht

Notes on Nationalism (May 1945)

Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word "nationalism", but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation -- that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.
By "nationalism" I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled "good" or "bad". But secondly -- and this is much more important -- I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By "patriotism" I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseperable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word "nationalism" for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movments and tendencies as Communism, political Catholocism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one's own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the USSR without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist -- that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating -- but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also -- since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself -- unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the USSR, Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments that seemd to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of al the "experts" of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the USSR seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties. And aesthetic judgements, especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It would be difficult for an Indian Nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a Conservative to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a literary point of view. People of strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being conscious of dishonesty.

In England, if one simply considers the number of people involved, it is probable that the dominant form of nationalism is old-fashioned British jingoism. It is certain that this is still widespread, and much more so than most observers would have believed a dozen years ago. However, in this essay I am concerned chiefly with the reactions of the intelligentsia, among whom jingoism and even patriotism of the old kind are almost dead, though they now seem to be reviving among a minority. Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism -- using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but "fellow travellers" and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the USSR as his Fatherland and feels it his duty t justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs. Obviously such people abound in England today, and their direct and indirect influence is very great. But many other forms of nationalism also flourish, and it is by noticing the points of resemblance between different and even seemingly opposed currents of thought that one can best get the matter into perspective.

Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent -- though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one -- was G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestan or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it --- as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine -- had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overstimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such as "Lepanto" or "The Ballad of Saint Barbara", make "The Charge of the Light Brigade" read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialsm and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following are the principal characteristics of nationalist thought:


OBSESSION. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named. Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e.g. "Patriots" for Franco-supporters, or "Loyalists" for Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of the which the two rival factions could have agreed to use.


INSTABILITY The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, ans some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H.G. Wells's Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bgoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.

But for an intellectual, transference has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic -- more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest -- that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realizes that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion -- that is , the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware -- will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack -- all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognized for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.


INDIFFERENCE TO REALITY. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by "our" side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell's soldiers slashing Irishwomen's faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the "right" cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities -- in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna -- believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should -- in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 -- and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists "didn't count", or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of progaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.

Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported -- battles, massacres, famines, revolutions -- tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

I have examined as best as I can the mental habits which are common to all forms of nationalism. The next thing is to classify those forms, but obviously this cannot be done comprehensively. Nationalism is an enormous subject. The world is tormented by innumerable delusions and hatreds which cut across one another in an extremely complex way, and some of the most sinister of them have not yet impinged on the European consciousness. In this essay I am concerned with nationalism as it occurs among the English intelligentsia. In them, much more than in ordinary English people, it is unmixed with patriotism and therefore can be studied pure. Below are listed the varieties of nationalism now flourishing among English intellectuals, with such comments as seem to be needed. It is convenient to use three headings, Positive, Transferred, and Negative, though some varieties will fit into more than one category.


POSITIVE NATIONALISM

1. NEO-TORYISM. Exemplified by such people as Lord Elton, A.P. Herbert, G.M. Young, Professor Pickthorn, by the literature of the Tory Reform Committee, and by such magazines as the New English Review and the Nineteenth Century and After. The real motive force of neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognize that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain's military position is not what it was, tend to claim that "English ideas" (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectuals, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed throught the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who illustrate this tendency are F.A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.

2. CELTIC NATIONALISM. Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation. Members of all three movements have opposed the war while continuing to describe themselves as pro-Russian, and the lunatic fringe has even contrived to be simultaneously pro-Russian and pro-Nazi. But Celtic nationalism is not the same thing as anglophobia. Its motive force is a belief in the past and future greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has a strong tinge of racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the Saxon -- simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish, etc. -- but the usual power hunger is there under the surface. One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection. Among writers, good examples of this school of thought are Hugh MacDiarmid and Sean O'Casey. No modern Irish writer, even of the stature of Yeats or Joyce, is completely free from traces of nationalism

3. ZIONISM. This has the unusual characteristics of a nationalist movement, but the American variant of it seems to be more violent and malignant than the British. I classify it under Direct and not Transferred nationalism because it flourishes almost exclusively among the Jews themselves. In England, for several rather incongrous reasons, the intelligentsia are mostly pro-Jew on the Palestine issue, but they do not feel strongly about it. All English people of goodwill are also pro-Jew in the sense of disapproving of Nazi persecution. But any actual nationalistic loyalty, or belief in the innate superiority of Jews, is hardly to be foung among Gentiles.


TRANSFERRED NATIONALISM
1. COMMUNISM

2. POLITICAL CATHOLOCISM

3. COLOUR FEELING. The old-style contemptuous attitude towards "natives" has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasizing the superiority of the white race have been abandoned. Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalized by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.

4. CLASS FEELING. Among upper-class and middle-class intellectuals, only in the transposed form -- i.e. as a belief in the superiority of the proletariat. Here again, inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoise, can and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

5. PACIFISM The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.


NEGATIVE NATIONALISM
1. ANGLOPHOBIA. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell ore when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, "enlightened" opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

2. ANTISEMITISM There is little evidence about this at present, because the Nazi persecutions have made it necessary for any thinking person to side with the Jews against their oppressors. Anyone educated enough to have heard the word "antisemitism" claims as a matter of course to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are carefully eliminated from all classes of literature. Actually antisemitism appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps exacerbate it. People of Left opinions are not immune to it, and their attitude is sometimes affected by the fact that Trotskyists and Anarchists tend to be Jews. But antisemitism comes more naturally to people of Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of weakening national morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at least intermittently.

3. TROTSKYISM This word is used so loosely as to include Anarchists, democratic Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here to mean a doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the Stalin regime. Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea. Although in some places, for instance in the United States, Trotskyism is able to attract a fairly large number of adherents and develop into an organized movement with a petty fuerher of its own, its inspiration is essentially negative. The Trotskyist is against Stalin just as the Communist is for him, and, like the majority of Communists, he wants not so much to alter the external world as to feel that the battle for prestige is going in his own favour. In each case there is the same obsessive fixation on a single subject, the same inability to form a genuinely rational opinion based on probabilities. The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is obviously false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference. The most typical Trotskyists, in any case, are ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one of the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party by years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into Trotskyism. The opposite process does not seem to happen equally often, though there is no clear reason why it should not.

In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that I have often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted assumptions and have left out of account the existence of ordinarily decent motives. This was inevitable, because in this essay I am trying to isolate and identify tendencies which exist in all our minds and pervert our thinking, without necessarily occurring in a pure state or operating continuously. It is important at this point to correct the over-simplified picture which I have been obliged to make. To begin with, one has no right to assume that everyone, or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism. Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man may half-succumb to a belief which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issues are involved. Thirdly, a nationalistic creed may be adopted in good faith from non-nationalistic motives. Fourthly, several kinds of nationalism, even kinds that cancel out, can co-exist in the same person.

All the way through I have said, "the nationalist does this" or "the nationalist does that", using for purposes of illustration the extreme, barely sane type of nationalist who has no neutral areas in his mind and no interest in anything except the struggle for power. Actually such people are fairly common, but they are not worth the powder and shot. In real life Lord Elton, D.N. Pritt, Lady Houston, Ezra Pound, Lord Vanisttart, Father Coughlin and all the rest of their dreary tribe have to be fought against, but their intellectual deficiencies hardly need pointing out. Monomania is not interesting, and the fact that no nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems worth reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorizing effect. But when one has admitted that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere, that there are still peoples whose judgements are not at the mercy of their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing problems -- India, Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the Moscow trials, the American Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you -- cannot be, or at least never are, discussed upon a reasonable level. The Eltons and Pritts and Coughlins, each of them simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie over and over again, are obviously extreme cases, but we deceive ourselves if we do not realize that we can all resemble them in unguarded moments. Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be trodden on -- and it may be corn whose very existence has been unsuspected hitherto -- and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may suddenly be transformed into a vicious partisan, anxious only to "score" over his adversary and indifferent as to how many lies he tells or how many logical errors he commits in doing so. When Lloyd George, who was an opponent of the Boer War, announced in the House of Commons that the British communiques, if one added them together, claimed the killing of more Boers than the whole Boer nation contained, it is recorded that Arthur Balfour rose to his feet and shouted "Cad!" Very few people are proof against lapses of this type. The Negro snubbed by a white woman, the Englishman who hears England ignorantly criticized by an American, the Catholic apologist reminded of the Spanish Armada, will all react in much the same way. One prod to the nerve of nationalism, and the intellectual decencies can vanish, the past can be altered, and the plainest facts can be denied.

If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:

BRITISH TORY: Britian will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.
COMMUNIST. If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.
IRISH NATIONALIST. Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.
TROTSKYIST. The Stalin regime is accepted by the Russian masses. PACIFIST. Those who "abjure" violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.

All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the MOI issued "as background" a warning that Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when "our" side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified -- still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a question to be raised here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in which it appears among English intellectuals, it is a distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the external world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the breakdown of patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of being led into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly argued, for instance -- it is even possibly true -- that patriotism is an inocculation against nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organized religion is a guard against superstition. Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible, that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics -- using the word in a wide sense -- and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.

You want to focus your energies on bringing down corporations? Why? Do you think that eeking out at subsistance levels of agriculture will feed us (or for that matter the world) any more efficiently? Bono asks for U.S. banks to 'forgive' massive loans granted to the third world (man do I want some of that freaking forgiveness), money that was squandered or stolen by unscrupulous people. Do you think your little mom & pop savings and loan in mayberry could have made those loans? Or could afford to 'forgive' them? When's the last time you drove your automobile? Do you own a Ford or a Toyota? I don't imagine the blacksmith in your village could whip up a SUV for you, and if he could, would he be able to give you a warranty? Or perhaps you are thinking that a great worker's collective will build them: the peoples car. Those pieces of crap are rusting all over Eastern Europe. It's easy to talk revolution when your words are being hustled over fibre-optic lines from your air conditioned home on your Dell computer. I'm sure all the corporations that make every damn thing you eat and wear and operate deserve to be taken down. But what can you build?

"It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and looking at them merely from a liberal, negative standpoint, the British ruling class had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists. But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from the outside.

They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns - by ignoring it. After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they must be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military effort it was capable of making, the sort of tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the ‘red’ does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is preaching; if he did his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties.
"
from The Lion and the Unicorn
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/lion.htm

Holy Crap that Orwell quote was long. But interesting.

"This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
"
from the Lion and the Unicorn
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/lion.htm

Amazing how good the socialists were at opposing Hitler. Decided he was to be opposed about two minutes after he attacked the USSR. Of course, for most of 1938 and 1939 they were cheerfully trading with him and gobbling up all those pesky little states on the Russian border. Socialism didn't defeat Hitler, Russia, the United States, and England did. If Russia had been run by an organ grinder's monkey it would have resisted as well or better than the Socialists did, and with less loss of life. Murder any Polish army officers recently, comrade? Katyn forest ring a bell?

Sorry about the length of this, but thats why your browser has a scroll bar....

----
Spilling the Spanish Beans
George Orwell
form New English Weekly, 29 July and 2 September 1937

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of Daily Mail reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the News Chronicle and the Daily Worker, with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle

The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some kind of compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time past a reign of terror – forcible suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the press, ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial – has been in progress. When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes – the Communists.

Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the front-line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The real struggle is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers who are vainly trying to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the Liberal-Communist bloc who are so successfully taking it away from them. It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them. Mr Wyndham Lewis, for instance, ought to love the Communists, at least temporarily. In Spain the Communist-Liberal alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that the Spanish workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year; and presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later, when there is no longer any need to placate them. To see how the present situation arose, one has got to look back to the origins of the civil war.

Franco’s bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in that it was a military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion, and therefore had not much mass backing, though Franco has since been trying to acquire one. Its chief supporters, apart from certain sections of Big Business, were the land-owning aristocracy and the huge, parasitic Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will array against it various forces which are not in agreement on any other point. The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and clericalism; but so does the ‘liberal’ bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more modern version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn’t called Fascism. The ‘liberal’ bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for the degree of progress implied in the phrase ‘la carrière ouverte aux talents’. For clearly he has no chance to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are too poor to buy goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for bishops’ vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course to the friend of the catamite of the duke’s illegitimate son. Hence, in the face of such a blatant reactionary as Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the worker and the bourgeois, in reality deadly enemies, are fighting side by side. This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular Front (or, in the Communist press, to give it a spuriously democratic appeal, People’s Front). It is a combination with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.

In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front is bound to make itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting against Fascism, they are not fighting for the same things; the bourgeois is fighting for bourgeois democracy, i.e. capitalism, the worker, in so far as he understands the issue, for Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers understood the issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was defeated they did not content themselves with driving the rebellious troops out of the towns; they also took the opportunity of seizing land and factories and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers’ government by means of local committees, workers’ militias, police forces, and so forth. They made the mistake, however (possibly because most of the active revolutionaries were Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments), of leaving the Republican Government in nominal control. And, in spite of various changes in personnel, every subsequent Government had been of approximately the same bourgeois-reformist character. At the beginning this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in Catalonia, was almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or even (this was still happening when I reached Spain in December) to disguise themselves as workers. Later, as power slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came out of hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor reappeared, not much modified. Henceforward every move, except a few dictated by military emergency, was directed towards undoing the work of the first few months of revolution. Out of the many illustrations I could choose, I will cite only one, the breaking-up of the old workers’ militias, which were organized on a genuinely democratic system, with officers and men receiving the same pay and mingling on terms of complete equality, and the substitution of the Popular Army (once again, in Communist jargon, ‘People’s Army’), modelled as far as possible on an ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense differences of pay, etc. etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a military necessity, and almost certainly it does make for military efficiency, at least for a short period. But the undoubted purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In every department the same policy has been followed, with the result that only a year after the outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary bourgeois State, with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the status quo.

This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have taken place without foreign interference. But the military weakness of the Government made this impossible. In the face of France’s foreign mercenaries they were obliged to turn to Russia for help, and though the quantity of arms sup- plied by Russia has been greatly exaggerated (in my first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian weapon, a solitary machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the Communists into power. To begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good military qualities of the international Brigades (not necessarily Communist but under Communist control), immensely raised the Communist prestige. But, more important, since Russia and Mexico were the only countries openly supplying arms, the Russians were able not only to get money for their weapons, but to extort terms as well. Put in their crudest form, the terms were: ‘Crush the revolution or you get no more arms.’ The reason usually given for the Russian attitude is that if Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet pact (and the hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it may be, also, that the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would rouse unwanted echoes in Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any direct pressure has been exerted by the Russian Government. But this, even if true, is hardly relevant, for the Communist Parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and it is certain that the Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom they control, plus the Communist press of the whole world, have used all their immense and ever-increasing influence upon the side of counter-revolution.

In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in Spain, on the Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was accompanied.

Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully dishonest. He would tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish Government crushing the revolution, because the revolution never happened; and that our job at present is to defeat Fascism and defend democracy. And in this connexion it is most important to see just how the Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works. It is a mistake to think that this has no relevance in England, where the Communist Party is small and comparatively weak. We shall see its relevance quickly enough if England enters into an alliance with the U.S.S.R.; or perhaps even earlier, for the influence of the Communist Party is bound to increase – visibly is increasing – as more and more of the capitalist class realize that latter-day Communism is playing their game.

Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending – not in so many words, but by implication – that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, ‘mass sadism’, the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs. Present Fascism in this form, and you can mobilize public opinion against it, at any rate for a while, without provoking any revolutionary movement. You can oppose Fascism by bourgeois ‘democracy, meaning capitalism. But meanwhile you have got to get rid of the troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois ‘democracy’ are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You do it at the beginning by calling him an impracticable visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the issue, that he is splitting the anti-Fascist forces, that this is not the moment for revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the moment we have got to fight against Fascism without inquiring too closely what we are fighting for. Later, if he still refuses to shut up, you change your tune and call him a traitor. More exactly, you call him a Trotskyist.

And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word – in Spain at this moment you can be thrown into jail and kept there indefinitely, without trial, on the mere rumour that you are a Trotskyist – is only beginning to be bandied to and fro in England. We shall be hearing more of it later. The word ‘Trotskyist’ (or ‘Trotsky-Fascist’) is generally used to mean a disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary in order to split the left-wing forces. But it derives its peculiar power from the fact that it means three separate things. It can mean one who, like Trotsky, wished for world revolution; or a member of the actual organization of which Trotsky is head (the only legitimate use of the word); or the disguised Fascist already mentioned. The three meanings can be telescoped one into the other at will. Meaning No. 1 may or may not carry with it meaning No. 2, and meaning No. 2 almost invariably carries with it meaning No. 3. Thus: ‘XY has been heard to speak favourably of world revolution; therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a Fascist.’ In Spain, to some extent even in England, anyone professing revolutionary Socialism (i.e. professing the things the Communist Party professed until a few years ago) is under suspicion of being a Trotskyist in the pay of Franco or Hitler.

The accusation is a very subtle one, because in any given case, unless one happened to know the contrary, it might be true. A Fascist spy probably would disguise himself as a revolutionary. In Spain, everyone whose opinions are to the Left of those of the Communist Party is sooner or later discovered to be a Trotskyist or, at least, a traitor. At the beginning of the war the P.O.U.M., an opposition Communist party roughly corresponding to the English I.L.P., was an accepted party and supplied a minister to the Catalan Government, later it was expelled from the Government; then it was denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that the police could lay their hands on being flung into jail.

Until a few months ago the Anarcho-Syndicalists were described as ‘working loyally’ beside the Communists. Then the Anarcho-Syndicalists were levered out of the Government; then it appeared that they were not working so loyally; now they are in the process of becoming traitors. After that will come the turn of the left-wing Socialists. Caballero, the left-wing Socialist ex-premier, until May 1937 the idol of the Communist press, is already in outer darkness, a Trotskyist and ‘enemy of the people’. And so the game continues. The logical end is a régime in which every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any importance is in jail. Of course, such a régime will be Fascism. It will not be the same as the fascism Franco would impose, it will even be better than Franco’s fascism to the extent of being worth fighting for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be called something different.

Meanwhile, can the war be won? The Communist influence has been against revolutionary chaos and has therefore, apart from the Russian aid, tended to produce greater military efficiency. If the Anarchists saved the Government from August to October 1936, the Communists have saved it from October onwards. But in organizing the defence they have succeeded in killing enthusiasm (inside Spain, not outside). They made a militarized conscript army possible, but they also made it necessary. It is significant that as early as January of this year voluntary recruiting had practically ceased. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons, and it is unlikely that the Government will ever have a large preponderance of arms unless France intervenes or unless Germany and Italy decide to make off with the Spanish colonies and leave Franco in the lurch. On the whole, a deadlock seems the likeliest thing.

And does the Government seriously intend to win? It does not intend to lose, that is certain. On the other hand, an outright victory, with Franco in flight and the Germans and Italians driven into the sea, would raise difficult problems, some of them too obvious to need mentioning. There is no real evidence and one can only judge by the event, but I suspect that what the Government is playing for is a compromise that would leave the war situation essentially in being. All prophecies are wrong, therefore this one will be wrong, but I will take a chance and say that though the war may end quite soon or may drag on for years, it will end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic zones. Of course, such a compromise might be claimed as a victory by either side, or by both.

All that I have said in this article would seem entirely commonplace in Spain, or even in France. Yet in England, in spite of the intense interest the Spanish war has aroused, there are very few people who have even heard of the enormous struggle that is going on behind the Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There has been a quite deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent the Spanish situation from being understood. People who ought to know better have lent themselves to the deception on the ground that if you tell the truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist propaganda.

It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had been given a truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an opportunity of learning what Fascism is and how it can be combated. As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating in the economic void has been established more firmly than ever. And thus we are one step nearer to the great war ‘against Fascism’ (cf. 1914, ‘against militarism’) which will allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.

- voice of right
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post a link. if we wanna read your spam, we'll click the link. we already know you can cut and paste.

If your going to claim Orwell was rightwing you might as well be forced to read him :)

If you do read him you will see that he was a Socialist who didnt trust any of the Socialist organizations of the time. He hated the USSR because he was sympathetic to Trostsky not because he was disillusioned with his original ideals. In his later life he grew cynical and quite nationalistic but he was a Socialist to the end.

Wow, I go to work, spend some time with my wife and kids and meanwhile this place has become the Oxford Debate Club. :-)

With Orwell, I agree with a critic who said that he was disillusioned by intellectualism, either on the left or right; all ideologies and systems that made the claim that humanity should be in service to it and not the other way around. I personally am opposed to any leftist, rightist, corporatist, istist POV that insists it should be my Ultimate Concern. Systems (ideological, economic, political, etc) need to help us serve the basic needs of humanity, and should help to deepen and to broaden our basic humanity.

I think I admire Orwell so much because, in my reading of him, he was on the side of fragile humanity and tried to protect it from those on the right or the left who would use intellectualism (not intellectuality, there's a difference) to manipulate, exploit, cheapen, control, imprison or crush it (his image of the boot marching on a human face from 1984 comes to mind).

Great discussion, everyone (mostly). But my son needs me now, so I'm out of here.

Peace, everyone.

I think that when I read Orwell, I see a believer in Man. In searching for a movement to identify with he chose the anarcho-syndicalists. Not that he was an Anarchist, but because they were the organisation that was free from Soviet control and believed in Socialism as he envisioned it. He is to me an idealist who truly believed in the nobility of Man, of his potential. On the battlefields and in the streets of Catalonia he had his eyes opened, however, and this political awakening was what shaped his later writing. Seeing first hand the gangsterism and terror of Soviet Socialism - witnessing his friends and comrades being eradicated- this changed his worldview greatly. I believe that he held onto his humanism to the end of his life, and perhaps he himself would call it a Socialist ideology. But it was the Socialism of the textbook or the dream, and he knew it. He saw the reality of Socialism - deceit and brutality - and this bore no resemblance to his humanism.

By the way, I too have enjoyed this conversation. Regards to all, and a happy Labor Day.

ZIONISM. This has the unusual characteristics of a nationalist movement, but the American variant of it seems to be more violent and malignant than the British. I classify it under Direct and not Transferred nationalism because it flourishes almost exclusively among the Jews themselves. In England, for several rather incongrous reasons, the intelligentsia are mostly pro-Jew on the Palestine issue, but they do not feel strongly about it. All English people of goodwill are also pro-Jew in the sense of disapproving of Nazi persecution. But any actual nationalistic loyalty, or belief in the innate superiority of Jews, is hardly to be foung among Gentiles.

"i also want to point out that capitalism is changing before our very eyes. .... it's about the top down. capitalism can only find efficiency by getting larger and larger. it can only find efficiency as a system, not a patchwork of chaotic individuals. and the larger it gets, the more obstacles it will clear from its path. "

Hmm that doesnt sound like neoliberal economics to me. According to most economists who advocate free trade, an idea capitalist system would be composed of thousands of small businesses. Large businesses have the power to influence the markets themselves screwing up many of the most basic economic assumptions of those who believe in free markets. As the scale and scope of businesses increased in the late 1800s markets stopped acting as the prime movers for many of the new industries and managers took the place of the invisible hand. Managers in a large business do react indirectly to market forces but not much more than people working inside a more democratic Socialist beurocracy.

The main argument I have heard from conservative (ie neoliberal) economists is that teh free market works in that Capitalism does NOT result in more concentarted industries (and they always point to the concentration of things like oil and steel in teh late 1800s and compare that to now trying to claim things are not moving in that direction). But if you DO feel like things are movng that way I guess that would make you more in line with a Marxist perspective (or Leninist if you feel that Capitalism can only surive by growing ).

That brings me back to Orwell. He may have been a humanist (although a bit antiSemitic at times) but despite having had isues with many of the contemporary Socialist parties I havnt seen anything written by him that was too critical of Socialism as an economic and political concept.

what i am isn't important to this discussion. i don't apply ideological labels to myself. i just try to write. i try to put "left" and "right" in quotes (although i sometimes forget), because humans are way too complex to fit neatly in little pigeon holes...

never read marx, ain't no ism chaser...

perhaps i shouldn't have said capitalism needs to grow. it does, but maybe that wasn't what i was trying to say.

capitalism is a life form. it cannot survive by being static and changeless. it must move. it must evolve. it must change. it must grow stronger. it must grow quicker. larger. as a life form does.

the point, the crucial, crucial, point is: what is it evolving into? where is it going? where is it taking humanity? because we are strapped in to it. because like it or not, the entire WORLD will be under capitalist market economics soon. there won't be any other ism except capitalism.

perhaps this could be answered by asking, what does capitalism want? what is capitalism's perfect world?

i believe a multi-national corporation is the finest example of a capitalist life form. it is strong, efficient, healthy, wealthy. it is capitalism's golden child. its finest offspring. it is the offspring that results from years of testing called the capitalist evolutionary game.

this is what capitalism wants. it wants corporations. it wants its children to be as large and strong as possible. to be as efficient and fast as possible. not to be concerned with quality ( "quality" is the realm of advertising, the generation of false value, false meaning, false worth, which can then be applied like paint to any old product), only quantity. orders of scale. spreadsheet computations.

unfortunately, capitalism, like any good parent, wants a safe environment for its offspring to grow up in, to evolve in. it wants as few restrictions and regulations as possible. it wants a labor force that will behave according to its demands. it wants a society where money is the ultimate language, the only key that will open a door. it wants a fresh supply of natural resources, whenever it so demands. it wants an cultural environment where everything can be reduced to a monetary value, fit in a package, and sold (i.e. trinkets tourists buy, cultural symbols in miniature, the events of sept. 11th. fit inside a book for $19.99...).

and sometimes the demands it puts on its "operating environment" run counter to the interests of humanity, another life form, as i'm sure we are all well aware. in order for the corporation to stay solvent, it must pollute the air and water with mercury because it could not afford the equipment that cleans its waste. yes, eventually the managment was pilloried and thrown in prison, but you see, the damage was already done. and it isn't the damage so much as the reason WHY, the imperative to stay solvent, corporate survival, that is important. in order for the business to stay solvent, it must hide its debt in numerous partnerships. this practice is discovered, the business fails, and employees lose their jobs. jobs that provide money for shelter, health care, and food, all things necessary for the human life form to stay alive. the point is, conflict is inherent, is the default, as the capitalist life form clashes with the human life form for survival.

so given the right conditions in the petri dish, if you will, and a management team that isn't dumb and inept, any small business has the potential to become a multi-national corporation. this is after all, what capitalism wants its offspring to become.

but this world ain't a petri dish. no business is an island in itself. economies are integrated, first and foremost. which brings me to my second point. the systematic nature of capitalism today. it wants everything in order, everywhere. it wants the same environment and the right conditions for every one of its golden children, anywhere on the face of the earth. it wants no friction, anywhere. it wants a flexible labor force, everwhere. it wants access to natural resources, anywhere and everywhere. it wants goods to move accross oceans and borders with speed and safety.

the scale of this, the fact that it is taking place everywhere on the face of the earth, shows the system is starting to take hold. all these separate, individual capitalist points (nations...) want to join, want to come together, want to integrate, link up, and network, want to operate under the same rules, want to be successful all the time, everywhere. and like any good system, any part of it will share the same fate as any other part. just look at the influence of the u.s. economy on the economies of europe and asia, and vice versa. the links are there. the fates tied. the network is running. the capitalist global system is in place.

so finally, what about a failure of the system itself? failures of individual corporations mean nothing. what about a failure of the entire global network? you see, here it gets interesting. because with the stakes so high, and with the u.s. with so much to lose, you can bet that we will do anything to prevent it from going down. but the point is, if failure is not allowed, the economy is no longer a free market. is no longer responsible for itself. is no longer capable of facing the consequences. it has become so linked to the government by fate (if it goes, so goes the gov.) that it is nothing more than an instrument of national security. it must live, or the state will perish.

so what does this do? it creates a crazy dynamic. imagine a heart monitor. a beating heart has a jagged line. a non-beating heart has a flat line.

but for argumants sake, lets say each jag in the line represents everything capitalism doesn't like. all the qualities it cannot handle, such as quality over quantity. such as friction. such as inefficiency. such as a restless labor force. such as chaotic markets. such as risks. such as failure. such as human nature. such as unpredictable results. such as respect for the environment...

i sincerely believe that as capitalism becomes a worldwide system, the stakes regarding its survival will become so huge, that it will dominate everything. every issue. on any one issue, the question will become, "how does it effect the economic system." it will become the dominate life form on earth. it will ask everything else to sacrifice to it, so that it can survive. i sincerely believe that capitalism wants to remove all risks and all inefficences. it wants the money that results from risks, but not the tossing at turning at night, the possibility of failure. all the money, none of the risk.

you see, that jagged, chaotic line is slowly becoming flatter and flatter. as a crow flies. point to point with ease. all the things that drag capitalism down, that prevent it from evolving as a life form, that might cause it to fail, are being eliminated. the dynamic is almost as if, "IT CANNOT FAIL!" anytime a corporation or an entire industry is bailed out (the airlines after 9-11), we can see this mindset clearly. "we cannot let it go down! the stakes are too high..."

so it is not a chaotic, free market anymore. it is a system. it is a system that is evolving, growing better and quicker and stronger. finding new ways to make the same old money, without the risk. the line is becoming flatter and starting to move quicker as all the chaos and friction is eliminated. for its survival must be a sure thing.

i don't have any advice whatsoever about what to do about it. how to keep it from becoming the number 1 life force on earth, while everything else takes a distant second place. but i sincerely believe that the more capitalism is critiqued and sharply criticized, the better its going to get. for fucks sake, we have brains, lets use them. what's the point of just shrugging shoulders and saying "this is just the way it is, forever and ever..."?

and i wish people here would realize that the american dream must be broken into parts. capitalism, and democracy. they are not the same thing, at all. they are not "one". i think the fact that i can freely criticize capitalism is infinitely more important than capitalism itself. this is gonna sound cheesy, but the treasure of america isn't the money, isn't the way we live. its the freedoms we have. that, that is what is the most important thing. that should be defended tooth and nail.

but i think in the future, capitalism itself will threaten democracy. capitalism has the ability to liquidate anything and everything into values, into money. even untangible, non-physical things. rights that were inalienable will become transferable, for the proper sum. freedom will become a matter of having the proper money. sums of money will become the keys and the doors. the nails and the hammers. the software and the hardware. the more money, the freer you get. the more freedom you'll have to move about inside the capitalist system. the more doors you'll be able to open. it will dominate life in this way.

without freedom, we're like saudi arabia. we got the wealthy life style, the villas, the surround sound, the gold chains, the pimped out yukons, but no real freedom. to me, that's unnacceptable. but i fear thats the direction we seem to wanna go. we don't really care about the bill of rights no more, not when we can be wealthy and live in mansions and drive in lexuses. that's what the american dream seems to be. "i'll give up my freedom to live that way..."

"i was free enough to buy this Mercedes S500, what more freedom do i need? i mean, really? thanks, but no thanks. i'm happy as a clam."

a radical thought. . . tolerance must respect it . . . capitalism, socialism, economics . . . laws of nature are they not? all possible under the the right circumstances. . . humanity attempts to define the cirucmstances . . . humanity is selfish, humanity is proud, humanity is blind, humanity fails.