Discussing Selected Writings By George Orwell

In this episode of Canonball we discuss selected writings by George Orwell. I forgot to mention that Orwell was shot in the neck in the Spanish Civil War.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Orwell's Life
• 4:13 Some Of His Friends And Publishers
• 5:10 His Publisher Working With The Information Research Department And CIA To Translate And Disseminate "Animal Farm" After Orwell's Death
• 6:10 His Position On Stalin And The Shifts Before And After WWII Reflected In "1984"
• 7:53 Difficulty Publishing "Animal Farm"
• 8:58 His Influence
• 9:43 His Ideology – Defining Socialism, "The Road To Wigan Pier," "Toward European Unity," Orthodox Marxism
• 21:09 "Shopkeepers At War" – Socialism As State Ownership Of Means Of Production
• 25:33 "The London Gutters Will Have To Run With Blood" And Economic And Intellectual Liberty
• 31:04 "Some Central-Heated Air-Conditioned Strip-Lighted Paradise"
• 32:13 Trotsky, Stalin, And Communism As A Counter-Revolutionary Force
• 36:23 "Why I Write" And "Dickens"
• 38:52 "Inside The Whale"
• 40:16 "Ought I To Say This? Is It Pro-Fascist?"
• 42:55 "The Prevention Of Literature"

Transcript

George Orwell is actually the pen name of a writer named Eric Arthur Blair. Blair apparently chose this pen name because the Orwell River, which runs through Suffolk County in England, was a favorite location of his. But since he's better known as George Orwell, I'll use that name. Orwell was born in British India in 1903, and he moved to England when he was a year old. When he was much older, he worked for a while as an imperial policeman in Burma, but later returned to England, where he made a living working as a teacher, as a bookseller, and as a journalist. Following Jack London's lead, whose writing Orwell reportedly admired, Orwell started to live among the poor in London in various ways, and some of his experiences in doing that are reflected in Down and Out in Paris and London, which was published in 1933. Then in late 1936, he went to join the Spanish Civil War. He went in December, it had only really started in July of that year, and it lasted until April of 1939. And it was fought between the Republicans on one side and the Nationalists on the other, though it is also sometimes described as being fought between Communists on one side and Fascists on the other. And Orwell fought on the Republican side. He fought with the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, which as you can tell is a Marxist group, and it was formed from the fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain and the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc. So one of the groups that merged to form this new group that Orwell fought in was ideologically Trotskyist, though I couldn't see that Trotsky was involved in the group in any way, but he did apparently oppose the merger to form the group that Orwell fought in, whose acronym is POUM. And one of the things I tried to do this week was to clarify a bit in my mind more specifically what Orwell's ideology was, because I think part of his broad appeal is that he's not very obviously factional. As we'll see, he does have his beliefs, but a lot of what he writes, a lot of comparisons can be made with 1984, for example, and the right or the left. Animal Farm, of course, applies to one historical context, but even lines from that are taken and applied to many different contexts. All animals are equal, some are more equal than others, for example, does not by itself appear to apply to any one political ideology. But as we try to get a more clear picture of Orwell's views, it's worth noting, one, that he fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans and the Communists, and two, that he spent much of that time in a group that had formed from the merger of two groups, one of which was a Trotskyist organization. So for a while he was in that group, and if you read Homage to Catalonia, he describes his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and a lot of it seems like it was kind of cold and boring. And so he then wanted to get to the Madrid Front, and to do that he would have to join the International Brigades, which was the fighting group set up by the Comintern, the Communist International, which of course was openly an arm of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, of the Central Communist Party. But when he reached Barcelona, he found that there was a lot of infighting there among the factions, and the group that he had been in, the POUM, was accused of collaborating with fascists, and of being fascist itself. And this might be because by that time Trotsky had been exiled from the Soviet Union, and so anything that would have been affiliated with him might have been totally rejected by the Communist Party. The official party line would have been that none of its organs can have anything to do with anything associated with Trotsky. So that might have been what was going on there. And one academic, Giles Tremlett, wrote that Soviet files reflect that in 1937 in Barcelona, Orwell and his new wife Eileen, they'd only gotten married in June of 1936, were being watched by the communists in Barcelona at that time. But eventually the war ended and he left, and in 1940 he started working for the BBC as a producer on their Indian section. And then in early 1941, he began to write for the American Partisan Review, which got him connected to a group called the New York Intellectuals, who were also anti-Stalinist. Some of the people in that circle include Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, who was prominent in the Democratic Socialists of America, Seymour Lipset, Leslie Fielder, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol, who is sometimes referred to as the godfather of neoconservatism, though he was also a Trotskyist, and normally we do not usually think of those two things going together, but apparently they do. He was also friends with Isaac Deutscher, who among other things wrote a three-volume bookbiography of Trotsky and with a Zionist activist Tosco Feivel and Frederick Warburg a member of the prominent banking family by the same name and in 1935 Frederick had founded the publishing company Secker and Warburg which would later publish both Animal Farm and 1984. After Orwell's death in 1950 Warburg would work with his widow Sonia Orwell by then Eileen had died and Orwell had remarried in 1949 Warburg and Sonia would work with the information research department Which was a secret propaganda section of the British Foreign Office in order to increase the fame of Animal Farm in 1984 the information research department with Warburg's help Translated Animal Farm into more than 16 languages and British embassies disseminated it in 14 countries Warburg was also involved in selling the film rights to Animal Farm to the CIA which resulted in the 1954 animation of that book which was also the first feature-length Animated film ever made in Britain, but now jumping back to Orwell's life during the Second World War he served as a sergeant in the Greenwich Home Guard and worked as a journalist and between 1941 and 1943 he worked for the BBC and he apparently wrote in his diary in July of 1941 Quote, one could not have a better example of the moral and emotional Shallowness of our time than the fact that we are now all more or less pro-Stalin This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side. And so the purges etc are suddenly forgotten end quote now that strongly anti-Stalin statement Which came at a time when much of Western Europe was very pro-Stalin does not necessarily reflect Anti-communism as we'll see and in 1984, of course the line we had always been at war with Eurasia This idea that now because the policy changed the history had changed that's something that comes up and when you think of Eurasia you sort of think of that as something like Russia or the Soviet Union and in 1984 it's talking about a shift toward war with that country rather than in the period that Orwell is writing about here It's a shift toward peace with the Soviet Union So it's not a perfect analogy But then after the war one could imagine that the propaganda would then have suddenly shifted against the Soviet Union but either way this dynamic appears in 1984 and Orwell was writing about it a little bit there in his diary and it's an interesting detail that during the war Orwell's wife Eileen worked for the censorship department of the Ministry of Information in London I'd be curious to know what conversations the two of them had about that topic and if any of it found its way into 1984 Orwell apparently had a little trouble getting Animal Farm published. The book was ready by April of 1944 But Victor Golan's who had published some of Orwell's stuff in the past refused to publish it because he considered it an attack on the Soviet Union which in 1944 was an ally of the British government or well also sent the book to T.S. Eliot who at that time was a director at Faber and Faber a major British publishing house But Eliot called the book unconvincing eventually another publisher Jonathan Cape agreed to publish it But then Cape also went back on it reportedly after a visit with Peter Smollett Who was an official at the British Ministry of Information and was later identified as a Soviet agent It's unfortunate that such a person would share his name with Tobias Smollett Anyway Warburg took on the book and in August of 1945 Animal Farm was published and it made Orwell famous He then finished 1984 in 1949 before dying in London in 1950 and it goes without saying that Orwell and the vision that he depicted of a possible political future have had tremendous effect on Political thought in the 20th and 21st century He originated a lot of phrases that are widely in use big brother thought police New speak memory whole double think thought crime two minutes hate I've seen room 101 use sometimes and as I mentioned earlier He partially has such broad appeal because it seems that his main ideology is a kind of anti authoritarianism So then anyone can use these images from 1984 to accuse their political opponents of being authoritarian or totalitarian and if you start from there You might imagine that Orwell was a kind of anarchist that he opposed government generally except that it's pretty clear that the term or pair of terms that he identified with the most and Wrote a lot about were the terms socialsocialism, and democratic socialism. Maybe his most clear statement on this issue is in his essay entitled, Why I Write. He says, quote, every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it. End quote. And he wrote that essay in 1946. So he was saying for the past 10 years, and also 1936 to 1946 was of course a very significant period in history. So he's saying during that time he was writing for democratic socialism as I understand it. So then the tricky part is figuring out those last four words. What did he understand by democratic socialism? And in Toward European Unity, another essay, he talks about the need for democratic socialism and how it needs to be applied in a wide area in order to avoid a nuclear war. And he says that it might be done in China or India, but it'll probably take too long. So initially it'll have to be done in Europe because of the urgency of this problem of avoiding nuclear war. And there he's writing in 1947. But again, I couldn't see that he defined the term very clearly there, what he meant by it. And the phrase comes up again in England, you're England, but also without defining it. But if we look at what he says, not about democratic socialism, but about socialism, then we get a little more information. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he writes, quote, At this moment it is a waste of time to insist that acceptance of socialism means acceptance of the philosophic side of Marxism plus adulation of Russia. The socialist movement has not time to be a league of dialectical materialists. It has got to be a league of the oppressed against the oppressors. You have got to attract the man who means business, and you have got to drive away the mealy-mouthed liberal who wants foreign fascism destroyed in order that he may go on drawing his dividends peacefully. The type of humbug who passes resolutions against fascism and communism, i.e. against rats and rat poison. Socialism means the overthrow of tyranny, at home as well as abroad. So as long as you keep that fact well to the front, you will never be in much doubt as to who are your real supporters." So now we're getting a little bit more at his political thought. He uses a couple of key phrases. He talks about the oppressed against the oppressors, and he says socialism means the overthrow of tyranny, at home as well as abroad. Now that by itself doesn't make up a political ideology, it's too vague, but at least this is now getting us toward what Orwell thought about what he was doing. And again, in The Road to Wigan Pier, he writes, quote, In the earlier chapters of this book, I have given a rather fragmentary account of various things I saw in the coal areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire. I went there partly because I wanted to see what mass unemployment is like at its worst, partly in order to see the most typical section of the English working class at close quarters. This was necessary to me as part of my approach to socialism, for before you can be sure whether you are genuinely in favor of socialism, you have got to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable, and you have got to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult issue of class." So for him, socialism included class and whether the current situation should be changed. He doesn't there use the term revolutionary, but that suggests a revolutionary aspect to his politics, that it was about changing the order of things. And this next one is again from The Road to Wigan Pier, and it's a bit longer, but he says a number of things about socialism, so I think it's worth looking at. Quote, And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that socialism, as a world system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with potentially plenty of provisions for everybody. The idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. Yet the fact that we have got to face is that socialism is not establishing itself. Instead of going forward, the cause of socialism is visibly going back. At this moment, socialists almost everywhere are in retreat before the onslaught of fascism, and events are moving at terrible speed. End quote. And Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937, so sometime in the year or two before that he was writing this. Back to the text. As I write this, the Spanish fascist forces are bombarding Madrid, and it is quite likely that before the book is printed we shall have another fascist country to add to the list. Not to mention a fascist control of the Mediterranean which may have the effect of delivering British foreign policy into the hands of Mussolini.I do not, however, want here to discuss the wider political issues. What I am concerned with is the fact that socialism is losing ground exactly where it ought to be gaining it, with so much in its favor, for every empty belly is an argument for socialism. The idea of socialism is less widely accepted than it was ten years ago. The average thinking person nowadays is not merely not a socialist, he's actively hostile to socialism. This must be due chiefly to mistaken methods of propaganda. It means that socialism, in the form of which it is now presented to us, has about it something inherently distasteful, something that drives away the very people who ought to be knocking to its support. A few years ago, this might have seemed unimportant. It seems only yesterday that socialists, especially orthodox Marxists, were telling me with superior smiles that socialism was going to arrive of its own accord by some mysterious process called historic necessity." End quote. So let's stop there a second. He's there putting orthodox Marxists under the heading of socialists. Not every socialist is an orthodox Marxist, but an orthodox Marxist can be considered a socialist. He says, it seems only yesterday that socialists, especially orthodox Marxists, and that's not a very surprising definition, but since we're trying to get at exactly how Orwell thought about these things, it's worth pointing out that he considered an orthodox Marxist to be a type of socialist. Back to the text, and remember he was talking about people believing that communism will come about by historic necessity. He writes, quote, "...possibly that belief still lingers, but it has been shaken, to say the least of it. Hence the sudden attempts of communists in various countries to ally themselves with democratic forces which they have been sabotaging for years past. At a moment like this, it is desperately necessary to discover just why socialism has failed in its appeal, and it is no use writing off the current distaste for socialism as the byproduct of stupidity or corrupt motives. If you want to remove that distaste, you've got to understand it, which means getting inside the mind of the ordinary objector to socialism, or at least regarding his viewpoint sympathetically. No case is really answered unless it has had a fair hearing. Therefore, rather paradoxically, in order to defend socialism, it is necessary to start by attacking it." In the last three chapters, I tried to analyze the difficulties that are raised by our anachronistic class system. I shall have to touch on that subject again, because I believe that the present intensely stupid handling of the class issue may stampede quantities of potential socialists into fascism. In the chapter following this one, I want to discuss certain underlying assumptions that alienate sensitive minds from socialism, but in the present chapter, I am merely dealing with the obvious preliminary objections, the kind of thing that the person who is not a socialist, I don't mean the where's the money to come from type, always starts by saying when you tax him on the subject. Some of these objections may appear frivolous or self-contradictory, but that is beside the point. I'm merely discussing symptoms. Anything is relevant, which helps to make clear why socialism is not accepted. And please notice that I am arguing for socialism, not against it. But for the moment, I'm advocatus diaboli. I'm making out a case for the sort of person who is in sympathy with the fundamental aims of socialism, who has the brains to see that socialism would work, but who in practice always takes to flight when socialism is mentioned. Question a person of this type, and you will often get the semi-frivolous answer, I don't object to socialism, but I do object to socialists. Logically, it is a poor argument, but it carries weight with many people. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherence. The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes." So let's stop there briefly. And what he's doing here is winding up to examine why people resist socialism. Why does the public not convert to socialism in droves? So he's examining the technical political project of the spread of socialism and trying to figure out where it's getting snagged and how to clear those snags. And one last section from The Road to Wigan Pier, he writes, quote, The first thing to notice is that the idea of socialism is bound up more or less inextricably with the idea of machine production. Socialism is essentially an urban creed. It grew up more or less concurrently with industrialism. It has always had its roots in the town proletariat and the town intellectual, and it is doubtful whether it could ever have arisen in any but an industrial society. Granted industrialism, the idea of socialism presents itself naturally because private ownership is only tolerable when every individual or family or other unit is at least moderately self-supporting. But the effect of industrialism is to make it impossible for anyone to be self-supporting even for a moment. Industrialism, once it rises above a fairly low level, must lead to some sort of collectivism. Not necessarily to socialism, of course. Conceivably, it might lead to the slave state of which fascism is a kind of prophecy. And the converse is also true. Machine production suggests socialism, but socialism as a world system implies machine production because it demands certain things not compatible with a primitive way of life.for instance, constant intercommunication and exchange of goods between all parts of the earth. It demands some degree of centralized control. It demands an approximately equal standard of life for all human beings and probably a certain uniformity of education. We may take it, therefore, that any world in which socialism was a reality would be at least as highly mechanized as the United States at this moment, probably much more so." End quote. So there Orwell is talking about socialism as a reaction to industrialism, that industrialization makes collectivization inevitable. That if you're not self-sufficient, then you have more connections to other people and industrialized society is only possible through an interconnected economy. And so it leads to that kind of collectivization. But that again is a very broad definition of socialism. It sounds like the effort to, given that historical development, the explosive development of machine technology in the 18th and 19th century, given that that has happened and that a kind of collectivization will result from it, socialism is, for Orwell, at least according to this passage, the effort to create some kind of justice in that context. In an essay titled Shopkeepers at War, which was published in 1941, Orwell writes, quote, socialism is usually defined as common ownership of the means of production. Crudely, the state, representing the whole nation, owns everything and everyone is a state employee. This does not mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it does mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships, and machinery, are the property of the state. The state is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times, a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus. Wheat burns in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea, etc, etc, and always unemployment. In times of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. Skipping ahead. However, it has become clear in the last few years that common ownership of the means of production is not in itself a sufficient definition of socialism. One must also add the following. Approximate equality of incomes, it need be no more than approximate, political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class system. Centralized ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level and have some kind of control over the government. The state may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party and oligarchy and privilege can return based on power rather than on money. Skipping ahead. The difference between socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might install a new piece of machinery in a factory and then carry on as before with the same people in positions of control. Obviously, there is also needed a complete shift of power, new blood, new men, new ideas. In the true sense of the word, a revolution." And I was a little startled when I found this one because in modern parlance we sometimes think of socialism as simply a bigger government. More taxes and more government services. And that might be a little bit generational. I think that my dad would have a stronger reaction against the word socialism than a lot of people my age would because the word has often been used alongside left politics or what the left was doing 30 years ago, not what the left is doing now. But here, Orwell gives the definition of socialism, which he hadn't done yet. That is exactly the definition I would have given to communism. He says, "...socialism is usually defined as common ownership of the means of production. The state, representing the whole nation, owns everything and everyone is a state employee. All productive goods such as land, mines, ships, and machinery are the property of the state. The state is the sole large-scale producer." And then he says, "...however..." and you think maybe he's gonna say we can now see what's been going on in the Soviet Union over the past two decades, that that's no longer a viable approach. On the contrary, he says, "...however, it has become clear in the last few years that common ownership of the means of production is not in itself a sufficient definition of socialism. One must also add the following..." So he's not saying get rid of that principle, bring in something else. He's saying you have to have that and you have to have these other things, which are equality of incomes and the abolition of hereditary privilege, a goal that remains poorly defined to this day. And he winds up by saying, "...the difference between socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might install a new piece of machinery in a factory and then carry on."as before with the same people in positions of control. Obviously, there is also needed a complete shift of power, new blood, new men, new ideas, in the true sense of the word, a revolution." So these are the words of a Marxist revolutionary. And somewhere between hanging out with the coal miners in the road to Wigan Pier and worrying about the poor, that was in 1937, and here in 1941, his ideology appears to have become much more mainline orthodox Marxist. I have trouble looking at that passage and seeing anything that's not basically 1917 Bolshevism. And there's a passage in My Country, Right or Left, which was written in 1940, so a year earlier, which is also relevant here. He writes, quote, only revolution can save England. That has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out. Within two years, maybe a year, if only we can hang on, we shall see things that will surprise the idiots who have no foresight. I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them if it is necessary. But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz, I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago for such different reasons is somehow persisting." End quote. So he says, if necessary, let the gutters of London run with blood for the sake of a revolution. But now going back to 1941, to the previous article, four months later, the previous one was written in February of 1941. This next essay, Literature and Totalitarianism, was written in June of 1941. Talks about a different aspect of this question. Orwell writes, quote, as I say, we take this notion for granted. And yet, as soon as one puts it into words, one realizes how literature is menaced. For this is the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and probably cannot allow the individual any freedom whatever. When one mentions totalitarianism, one thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy. But I think one must face the risk that this phenomenon is going to be worldwide. It is obvious that the period of free capitalism is coming to an end and that one country after another is adopting a centralized economy that one can call socialism or state capitalism, according as one prefers. With that, the economic liberty of the individual, and to a great extent, his liberty to do what he likes, to choose his own work, to move to and fro across the surface of the earth, comes to an end. Now, until recently, the implications of this were not foreseen. It was never fully realized that the disappearance of economic liberty would have any effect on intellectual liberty. Socialism was usually thought of as a sort of moralized liberalism. The state would take charge of your economic life and set you free from the fear of poverty, unemployment, and so forth, but it would have no need to interfere with your private intellectual life. Art could flourish just as it had done in the liberal capitalist age, only a little more so, because the artist would not any longer be under economic compulsions. Skipping ahead. I said earlier that liberal capitalism is obviously coming to an end, and therefore, I may have seemed to suggest that freedom of thought is also inevitably doomed, but I do not believe this is so, and I will simply say in conclusion that I believe the hope of literature's survival lies in those countries in which liberalism has struck its deepest roots, the non-military countries, Western Europe, and the Americas, India, and China. I believe, it may be no more than a pious hope, that though a collectivized economy is bound to come, those countries will know how to evolve a form of socialism which is not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of economic individualism. That, at any rate, is the only hope to which anyone who cares for literature can cling. Whoever feels the value of literature, whoever sees the central part it plays in the development of human history, must also see the life and death necessity of resisting totalitarianism, whether it is imposed on us from without or from within." So there he seems to be much more cautious about socialism. It sounds like he's saying that economic central planning will inevitably lead to intellectual central planning and the end of literature. And he says, I believe, and it may be a pious hope, so he's not very confident that there are some countries who might be able to resist this process if they can have socialism while maintaining against that current some kind of individual liberty. And if anybody were to say that socialism or economic central planning will lead to the end of intellectual liberty, that's what an opponent of socialism would say, usually. That's not what somebody who advocates for socialism would say. So I don't know if he had changed his opinion or was changing it or was adding some nuance to it, but we have to put this thought of Orwell's alongside that passage in Shopkeepers at War in order to see what his view of all this was. And it's likely that this concern he had about the relationship between economic liberty and intellectual liberty and the...future of socialism was one of the thoughts behind 1984. It's worth noticing that the ideology in 1984 is Ingsoc, English socialism. He could have easily made it Ingfash or something else, but he made it the ideology that he apparently identified with the most, which also reflects this tension or contradiction that he seems to be writing about in literature and totalitarianism. In 1984, he writes, quote, It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, socialism must follow. And unquestionably, the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them. And since these things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the socialist program, with the result foreseen and intended beforehand that economic inequality has been made permanent, end quote. Wrapping up the passages about socialism specifically, Orwell wrote in an article titled Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun in 1943, quote, I suggest that the real objective of socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a byproduct, and for all we know, it may always remain so. The real objective of socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, nor not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heartbreaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo not in order to establish some central heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue, end quote. That's an interesting short passage about human motivation, and maybe why many people feel unsatisfied in the 21st century, because they think what they're looking for is some version of the central heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted paradise. And to look at just a few passages on some other concepts or political terms in Notes on Nationalism, which was published in October of 1945, Orwell wrote, quote, 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 travelers and Russophiles generally. A communist, for my purpose, is one who looks upon the USSR as his fatherland, and feels it is his duty to 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, end quote. Let's look at a couple other short ones about communism, and then we'll talk about them. In Spilling the Spanish Beans, which was published in September of 1937, Orwell writes, quote, 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, end quote. And that idea is repeated in Homage to Catalonia, which was published in 1938. He writes, quote, The tactics of the communist party elsewhere, especially in France, have made it clear that official communism must be regarded at any rate for the time being as an anti-revolutionary force, end quote. And for that to make sense, for communism to be thought of as counter-revolutionary, the history matters. So you have, in 1917, Bolshevik Revolution, Russian Civil War, 1924, Stalin takes power, Trotsky, who was a major leader in the revolution, is gradually marginalized. In 1929, he is deported from the country and he lives in various places. He lives on Büyükada, an island, a short ferry ride from Istanbul for a while under the surveillance of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. He eventually ends up in Mexico City where he's assassinated in 1940. So you have this arc of communism going from a revolutionary force in the 1900s, 1910s, to in the Soviet Union, it ossifying into the state ideology. And it no longer wants to disrupt, but wants rather to maintain the international order under Stalin. And that's also how you get in 1945, the first of the three passages I just read, Orwell talking about a communist as somebody who advocates for Soviet foreign policy, or that's the position of a communist who doesn't live in the Soviet Union. And him.talking like that could bring us to the conclusion that he was a Trotskyist, that he was somebody who continued to follow the revolutionary ideology, the world revolution vision of the future, whereas Stalin was more focused on the power of his state rather than provoking revolutions all over the place. It's hard not to think if he was writing against communism, but he was in favor he gave that shopkeepers-at-war definition of socialism and was maintaining that view. To me, that sounds like a Trotskyist. But also in Notes on Nationalism, he writes quote 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 absolutely false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to communism, but it is doubtful whether there is much difference, end quote. And in trying to figure out Orwell's politics, it's worth noting that in 1997 the British Foreign Office declassified documents that showed that in 1949, shortly before he died, Orwell had compiled a black and white list of communist and anti-communist fellow travelers for some section of the British Foreign Office and that included the names of 130 prominent people, along with some comments about each of them. But that's enough specifically about Orwell's politics. Now we can look at his writing more generally, though inevitably his politics are part of that. In Why I Write, he talks, not surprisingly, about his motivation for, but also his approach to writing, how he thinks about his writing. He writes quote, What I have most wanted to do throughout the past 10 years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, I'm going to produce a work of art. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda, it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I'm not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the worldview that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information." End quote. Orwell wrote a very long essay on the writing of Charles Dickens, and there are a few passages we can look at from there. In this first one, he's talking about the experience of reading, and one thing that he feels in general when he's reading, and he winds up with a nice line here. Orwell writes, quote, When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like, and I do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens, I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens' photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about 40, with a small beard and a high color. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open, and is not frightened. The face of a man who is generously angry, in other words, of a 19th-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls, end quote. In the next one, he gives some general comments about the world that he felt he was living in at the time, and this and some of the ones that come after it are from an essay called Inside the Whale. He writes, quote, Unquestionably, our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The democratic vistas have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and becomes a passive attitude, even decadent, if that word means anything, end quote. In this next one, he gives an interesting comment on prose and poetry and on the novel form generally. He writes, quote, It is probably not a coincidence that the best writers of the 30s have been poets. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all, it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all.all forms of literature. How many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a Protestant form of art. It is a product of the free mind of the autonomous individual." End quote. Later he writes, quote, not everyone, of course, was definitely in the political racket, but practically everyone was on its periphery and more or less mixed up in propaganda campaigns and squalid controversies. Communists and near communists had a disproportionately large influence in the literary reviews. It was a time of labels, slogans, and evasions. At the worst moments, you were expected to lock yourself up in a constipating little cage of lies. At the best, a sort of voluntary censorship. Ought I to say this? Is it pro-fascist? Was it work in nearly everyone's mind? It is almost inconceivable that good novels should be written in such an atmosphere. Good novels are not written by orthodoxy sniffers, nor by people who are conscious stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened." End quote. And in the last section that I'm going to read from Inside the Whale, he touches on a little bit some of what he said in Literature and Totalitarianism. He writes, quote, almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships, an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence, but this means that literature, in the form in which we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism is coming to an end, and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely imaginable." End quote. And he, of course, doesn't mean liberalism in the modern sense. He's using it there to mean whatever is not totalitarian or some kind of opposite of totalitarian. He goes on, quote, as for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg. He is merely an anachronism, a hangover from the bourgeois age, as surely doomed as the hippopotamus. Skipping ahead, from now onwards, the all-important fact for the creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer's world. That does not mean that he cannot help to bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process as a writer, for as a writer, he is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of liberalism. Skipping ahead, the passive attitude will come back, and it will be more consciously passive than before. Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism, robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale, or rather, admit you are inside the whale, for you are, of course. Give yourself over to the world process. Stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it. Simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to be the formula that any sensitive novelist is now likely to adopt. A novel on more positive, constructive lines, and not emotionally spurious, is at present very difficult to imagine." And this next passage, describing the years leading up to the Second World War, has some things in it that sound a little familiar. This is from an essay called The Prevention of Literature. Orwell writes, quote, by 1937, the whole of the intelligentsia was mentally at war. Left-wing thought had narrowed down to anti-fascism, i.e. to a negative, and a torrent of hate literature directed against Germany and the politicians supposedly friendly to Germany was pouring from the press. The thing that, to me, was truly frightening about the war in Spain was not such violence as I witnessed, nor even the party feuds behind the lines, but the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the mental atmosphere of the Great War. The very people who for 20 years had sniggered over their own superiority to war hysteria were the ones who rushed straight back into the mental slum of 1915. All the familiar wartime idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing, sniff-sniff, are you a good anti-fascist? The retailing of atrocity stories came back into vogue as though the intervening years had never happened." End quote. Later on in the same one he writes, quote, the freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. The familiar tirades against escapism and individualism, romanticism, and so forth are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of history seem respectable. End quote. Later in the same essay he's talking about against whom you need to defend the freedom of the intellect and he writes, quote, 15 years ago when one defended the freedom of the intellect one had to defend it against conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent, for they were not of great importance in England, against fascists. Today one has to defend it against communists and fellow travelers. One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small English communist party, but there can be no question about the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it, known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written. End quote.And I don't remember if I mentioned he wrote the prevention of literature in 1946, but later he's talking about the manipulation of history in a totalitarian society or under a totalitarian government. He writes, Quote, We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. Skipping ahead, it is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it's scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying a historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual." And we somehow managed to go all this time without getting at all to politics in the English language, which is absolutely required reading for anyone who's doing any writing on politics, certainly, but perhaps writing on any subject, or even thinking on any subject, because it's almost as much an essay about how to think clearly as it is about how to write well and how to write clearly, because those two are so closely linked. It's also quite funny, and it's not very long. I was lucky enough to have a professor introduce me to it when I was 20, I think, and I've gone back and read it probably every year and a half or so since then, but if you haven't read that one, I will just sincerely recommend you go and check it out. It's a very valuable piece of writing, and I'll leave it there. If you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you'll go to my website, vollrathpublishing.com. The link is in the description, and pick up some books for yourself, for your family, for your friends, and do your part to support independent book publishing. Farewell until next time. Take care.