He also was a rat that betrayed British communist to be persecuted by the government
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Orwell fought in a Marxist militia (the POUM) during the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascists, and got a bullet to the neck for it. He then had to quickly flee Spain while still recovering from the wound when the Stalinist Marxist-Leninist faction turned on both the Marxists and the Anarchists, and began to round them up for imprisonment or execution, justifying the betrayal by calling them ‘secret fascists’ that were somehow collaborating with the enemy (which was obviously absurd).
That event fully soured Orwell on Marxist-Leninist authoritarian communism, inspiring both Animal Farm and 1984, as well as motivating him to make that list of ‘communists’ which he thought sympathetic to authoritarianism and the USSR. I can’t say I would’ve made that same choice, but I can certainly understand why he would’ve wanted to prevent USSR collaborators from gaining more power after what he’d directly experienced.
Saying that, as with most figures of that time, he also had some pretty fucking bad takes, such as being pretty homophobic and antisemitic, and may have included some people on that list for being either of those things (he also possibly could’ve written that list while pretty deluded with advanced tuberculosis, as some later figures have postulated). That’s not to say we should throw out the baby with the bath-water, otherwise we’d also have to dismiss the entire works of most historical figures, such as Bakunin (Antisemite, racist) or Marx (Antisemite, Racist), and certainly Engels (Racist, Antisemite) instead of sifting the good from the bad (though Engels in particular has little to offer, other than justifications for authoritarianism).
To build on this, no matter who you are, or who your leftist fave is, they have problems. There are aspects of revolutionary thought where they are failing their comrades either through having a biased blindspot or through experiencing some trauma that makes it hard for them to trust.
Me for example, I have trouble trusting and will occasionally take an ungracious approach to someone because when you spend your whole life fighting for the survival of your community, you lose patience sometimes. It’s something I take effort to ensure I’m being constructive, but sometimes I fail. And as for my lefty fave, he believed that all people’s morality needed to be rooted in religious faith and denounced agnostics through most of his life up until his later years when he started making more room in his heart for them.
The key isn’t to look for perfect figures to idolize, but instead to look for people who did their level best to defy the status quo in their time. Because the thing to realize to is that somewhere out there is someone you could inspire to action through your defiance of your own status quo. Because that’s the thing I’ve learned about leftist organizing in my time on this earth: all of us are someone else’s hero, we just don’t realize it. So instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, highlight the positive aspects and present the issues and failures.
For example, for all of their talk of class consciousness, the ML Union organizers of the 1930s threw out a lot of the prior 50 years of racial consciousness that the US labor movement had built, making the unions long term more fragile. They were correct that they needed to get all the laborers on side to succeed, particularly in the southern coal fields, however they failed to realize that they couldn’t do this by recruiting the Klan to terrorize Black people into joining the union. A mere 30 years later, and the union was no longer advocating for workers rights, and was instead was disrupting laborers from organizing to gain more rights and protections (such as respirators to prevent the proliferation of black lung that was associated with the proliferation of mechanized drilling).
In conclusion: was George Orwell perfect? No. But we don’t waste that much time talking about Karl Marx being a sex pest, now, do we?
Well said, Quill. :)
He wasn’t perfect, but inchoate criticism of Orwell, like this, is a tell for people who don’t actually believe in things, just know how to be a member of cliques and swing identities around.
If you just want to repeat the party line and be applauded as a fine parrot with beautiful feathers; there are many tankie servers that would be happy to host you. Why not go there?
A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a “willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual’s point of view is really dangerous” (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.
Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish—while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba, provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa.
M. Parenti Blackshirts and Reds
Or a more “choate” criticism of Orwell is here.
Well, a simple dedicated anticommunist who only ever talked shit about Stalin was clearly a thinly veiled cryptofascist. Very good, comrade. Beautiful feathers.
pure projection lol. Your brave antitankie stance is designed to garner upvotes by your fellow antitankie crusaders. There’s no argument, just “lol tankies amirite” smugposting
I am not antitankie! I’m ingroup, and if you disagree youust be a literal Nazi, which is bad because it’s another group!
inchoate criticism of “tankies”, like this, is a tell for people who don’t actually believe in things, just know how to be a member of cliques and swing identities around.
If you just want to repeat the party line and be applauded as a fine parrot with beautiful feathers; there are many antitankie comms that would be happy to host you. Why not go there?
I would never criticize tankie! Am tankie!
make your point or don’t. i don’t even know what you’re trying to do here 😐
What an absolute brain dead take.
Go back to reading fantasy novels and Noam Chomsky lol
Go back to reading your rules about solidarity.
Which wars against fascists have you fought in?
Orwell was an anti-communist rat, no solidarity there.
Regarding Chomsky:
(Also you seem to have missed Rule 3)
Orwell opposed authoritarianism in all of its forms, including Soviet style “communism”. He witnessed first hand what that supposed “communism” was. He spent an awfully long time thinking about totalitarianism, both from the perspective of the British Empire and of the Soviet Union. The man was committed to a sanatorium when he handed over his list. Which he handed over to a socialist Labour government, whilst fearing the rise of authoritarian “communism”. And not long after living through his second world war, against the very same fascist forces he’d been fighting against in Spain.
He was anti-communist in as much as Emma Goldman or Alexander Berkman or Nestor Makhno or any leftist with a fucking brain was.
Orwell has done more for leftism than I doubt you or I ever will. Both through his widely read writings and his on the ground, life on the line, physical direct action. He could have lived a comfortable life of an English gentleman, but he didn’t because he cared about more than his own comfort.
As for your bracketed comment, are you so weak in your conviction that anybody who opposes you is automatically a dirty “shitlib”?
I think you need to do some reading instead of parroting talking points from other parts of the internet, so you actually understand what solidarity is. Here’s a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity
Orwall
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Yeah… this community has been hijacked by tankies.
👍🤣
Whcih part of what I said triggered you, tankie?
