/lit/ - Literature

orwell

there is no debate.

>>1731501
Huxley, he depicts pretty well where is our current society going.

my ogie-fu :3

These writers only have one point of contact - their dystopias. Huxley is the better writer.

>>1731505
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ytCEuuW2_A

Orwell tries to back up some kind of bizarre theory based on a mixture of Trotskyism and the `human nature' argument to show us why Revolutions in general and the Russian Revolution in particular, cannot work. Major, the pig who is supposed to represent Marx, has a dream which he passes on to the animals as his dying manifesto:

“Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever. . . No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, and that the prosperity of one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies”. (Animal Farm, George Orwell: Harmondsworth, 1989, pp4-5)

No-one in their right mind could equate the theories of Marx with this babble. Of course man and animals have a common interest. Orwell deliberately sets out to put Marxism in an absurd light by equating it with Major's nonsense. Marxism is presented as a theory of naive idealism, which in practice leads to cynical tyranny. The main tenet of Animal Farm, though, seems to be that humans are no better than animals; that `human nature' decides all. Some people are born to rule and others to be taken advantage of; all efforts to change the system will only lead to something worse, so we should be grateful for what we have. Unfortunately for Orwell, there is a blindingly obvious flaw in the plan. He uses different species to represent the different classes, but while it may be true that some animals are cleverer, quicker, stronger than others, and naturally inclined to prey on those that are weaker, the class structure of our society is a reflection of no such natural difference. Mankind is one species. Any attempt to justify the class divisions of society by saying that the ruling class rule because they are more intelligent and better suited to it, whilst the poor are simply stupid or lazy, is the worst kind of reactionary garbage, worthy of any nazi.

Stephen Sedley remarks that,

“Orwell's argument is pitched at a different level: it is that socialism in whatever form offers the common people no more hope than capitalism; that it will be first betrayed and then held to ransom by those forces which human beings have in common with beasts; and that the inefficient and occasionally benign rule of capitalism, which at least keeps the beasts in check, is a lesser evil. That proposition is Orwell's alpha and his omega”. (An Immodest Proposal: `Animal Farm', Stephen Sedley; Inside The Myth, p158)

What neither Orwell or Sedley seem to remember is that it is not merely capitalism which we are dealing with, but imperialism. If it appears to Orwell that capitalism in Britain is occasionally benign, this is because a certain section of the workers in this country have been provided for from the super-profits extracted so brutally from the oppressed nations. He himself worked for the imperial police in Burma and must have known exactly how `benign' British rule was to the colonial peoples.

Much is made by Trotskyites and bourgeois press alike of Orwell's self-proclaimed socialism. Where, though, is the evidence for any such thing? Can one become a socialist without ever having read or understood any of the basic tenets of socialism? The characteristic that shows most plainly in Orwell's work is his arrogance. Knowing nothing of what was going on in Spain, Orwell had no hesitation in pronouncing on military and political matters there. Knowing nothing about socialism, Orwell felt no bar on criticising all who `betrayed' that socialism. Having admitted, “I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers” (The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 3: Harmondsworth, 1970, p.457), he went on to write Animal Farm with all the conviction of one fully versant in all the details of the Revolution.

>>1731508

>implying Orwell couldn't be more relevant today, with totalitarian regimes being toppled all across north africa and the middle east
>implying Russia and China aren't next
>implying Huxley didn't have some nice ideas but his predictions are fundamentally intangible and still hasn't occurred in the 80 tumultuous years since it was written
>implying you don't just prefer Huxley because he isn't sensationally popular like Orwell.

Orwell's essays and nonfiction are better than everything Huxley ever wrote.

n his preface to the Ukrainian edition, Orwell draws a picture of English political life in the late 40s which not only exposes his ignorance and lack of experience in matters of politics, but also his astounding, truly upper-class, public school arrogance. Having blamed the naive notions of the British public on the relative liberality of English political life, he goes on to say:

“Yet one must remember that England is not completely democratic. It is also a capitalist country with great class privileges and (even now, after a war that has tended to equalise everybody) with great differences in wealth. But nevertheless it is a country in which people have lived together for several hundred years without knowing civil war, in which the laws are relatively just and official news and statistics can almost invariably be believed, and, last but not least, in which to hold and to voice minority views does not involve any mortal danger. In such an atmosphere the man in the street has no real understanding of things like concentration camps, mass deportations, arrests without trial, press censorship etc. Everything he reads about a country like the USSR is automatically translated into English terms, and he quite innocently accepts the lies of totalitarian propaganda”. (The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, p. 458)

Orwell quite clearly felt that the British public were too stupid to understand about Russia what he was qualified to pronounce on only from his reading of the bourgeois press! This from a man who obviously had no understanding of the society he himself lived in and certainly no understanding of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism, which he pretended to defend.

>>1731523
>>1731527
>writers face when

It is worth noting here that Orwell's understanding of fascism and the threat it posed during the 30s was entirely negligible, as is pointed out by Bill Alexander in his article George Orwell and Spain:

“Orwell went to Spain largely ignorant of the background, situation and the forces involved. He admits `when I came to Spain I was not only uninterested in the political situation but unaware of it.' Unlike many European intellectuals he had not understood the essential clash between liberty and fascism. Hitler's brutal destruction of democracy in Germany and even Mosley's violence against opponents in Britain in 1934 must have passed him by. Crick, his biographer, could write that before March 1936, when Orwell saw Mosley's blackshirts beating up questioners at a Barnsley meeting, `there is no indication before this incident of any great concern in Orwell with the nature and spread of fascism. . .

“Orwell had no understanding of the world-wide significance of the struggle in Spain, he knew little of the national efforts of the Popular Front government to achieve a united front against fascism, he had never seen the Republican flag, he did not agree with the actions of the POUM - he took a rifle in the role of an outsider, a journalist looking for experiences to figure in a future book. . .

>>1731528
>Orwell's essays and nonfiction are better than everything Huxley ever wrote.
Maybe
>>implying you don't just prefer Huxley because he isn't sensationally popular like Orwell.
Not such a faggotry.
>>implying Huxley didn't have some nice ideas but his predictions are fundamentally intangible and still hasn't occurred in the 80 tumultuous years since it was written
Who knows?
I still fucking like Orwell, he's a very good writer with interesting ideas. I prefer Huxley for what I've said, globalization is not about totalitarian regimes, it's about making us stupid so we're easily manipulable.

“His aloofness from the common spirit of Popular Front Spain is strikingly exposed in his cynical dismissal of the fact that wounded soldiers demanded to return to the front. It happened! Without this spirit the Republican forces, outnumbered and outgunned, could not have fought on for eighteen more months after Orwell had gone home. Resistance to Franco would not have persisted despite forty years of terror and repression following his victory. . .

“The fundamental reason for Orwell's attitude to the war - on top of his British upper-class arrogance and overriding personal objective to write a book - was his lack of understanding of anti-fascist feeling. He had visited, with an eye to a future book, the down-and-outs in London. Commissioned to write a book, he had briefly visited the distressed industrial areas of the North of England. But there was no sense of identification with the men and women caught in the capitalist crisis - no sense of `there but for my family background go I.' The horrors of fascism in Italy and Germany do not appear to have made him angry, emotionally concerned to do something. This lack of deep feeling, almost one of neutrality, shows itself throughout his writing. . . Orwell feels no anger at the man who wounds him - indeed wishes to congratulate him on his good shooting. He is certainly not concerned at his own absence from the battle line. Orwell saw the war as a game, material for a book”. (Inside The Myth, ed. Christopher Norris: London, 1984, pp.85-97)

Orwell's lack of understanding of politics, combined with his rabid anti-communism, meant that he was trying to get Animal Farm published in 1943, just as the future of humanity was being decided and the USSR was sacrificing all at Stalingrad. Publisher after publisher rejected it, until the war ended and the book's usefulness as a tool in the coming Cold War was recognised. Writing in The Guardian in August 1995, Stuart Jeffries says that although “many of those who read the book were right-wingers eager for a novel which appeared to show an ex-socialist recanting his beliefs. . . the book was chiefly aimed at the faithful, those who believed that the Soviet Union was the way and the truth”. (An Arable Parable, Stuart Jeffries: The Guardian, 9 August 1995)

Orwell the State Informer

As if more proof were needed of Orwell's anti-communist credentials, it was revealed in 1996 that in 1949, Orwell offered to provide a secret Foreign Office Propaganda Unit linked to the intelligence services with the names of writers who could be trusted to write anti-communist propaganda, and also with the names of writers and journalists whom he regarded as being `crypto-communist' and `fellow-travellers'. This unit had been set up by the Attlee government in response to the “developing communist threat to the whole fabric of Western civilisation”. Well-known writers, such as Bertrand Russell, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler were employed to disseminate misinformation about the USSR, the East European Peoples' Democracies and the communist Parties of Western Europe. Papers release also show that the IRD (Information Research Department) actively promoted the foreign language publication of Animal Farm in places such as Saudi Arabia, where anti-imperialist activity was threatening the oil revenues of imperialism.

Thus we can see that

“What attracted the bourgeoisie to this third-rate writer was not his pretended support for the ideals of the October Revolution, but his real driving hatred for the ideals of communism. Had Orwell's characterisation of Stalin, and the CPSU that he led, corresponded to the truth, that would have made Stalin the darling of the imperialist bourgeoisie; had there been a steady erosion of revolutionary principles and had the dictatorship really collapsed into the dictatorship of a cynical few, Stalin's Russia would have been warmly embraced to the point of suffocation by imperialism”. (Lalkar, September/October 1996)

It was precisely because Stalin's USSR did not conform to the picture painted by Orwell that it posed such a threat to imperialism, and this in turn explains the bourgeoisie's joyful embrace of Orwell's tawdry novels and their continued place as compulsory reading for students the world over.

>>1731553

that's some of the most nonsensical shit i've ever read

Tawdry? Really?

3/10

“The `Orwell' myth involves a type of canonisation. A version of the individual as embodiment of human values leads inevitably to his status as a `trustworthy guide'. It is a curious rhetorical mixture: moral values of `bravery', `honesty', `sympathy' are linked directly to criteria of `objectivity' and `straightforward fact'”. (Examining Orwell, p.43)

The cost of a 1984 police state would be too high to maintain. Huxley is just better, I think. I liked Homage to Catalonia, but at some point in each of Orwell's books which I have read, I felt flagged and gave up, only finishing out of habit..anyway Huxley is not that great either, but I'm reading his book "The Perennial Philosophy" now which is kind of interesting..Brave New World bored the hell out of me too. Britain has terrible writers who are famous simply because they are British.

>>1731583

have you ever heard of North Korea, son?

>>1731583

> Britain has terrible writers who are famous simply because they are British.

wat

>>1731590

^ Only people like this like Orwell more than Huxley.

they are both for casuals

>>1731604

lol

The truth is, there are no good dystopian novels.

>>1731600

people with a social conscious?

yea maybe.

>>1731604
entry level is best level

>>1731590
TBH I don't really know what N.Korea is like..who's biased analysis do i trust? I would have to see it with my own eyes to know for sure. Or at least something more convincing than the Vice documentary of the National Geographic piece on N.Korea. I know it is bad, but, I don't think it's like 1984 How could it be? They really can't monitor each person like that.

>>1731611

http://www.slate.com/id/2117846/

>>1731607

No, ranting Reader's Digest dittoheads.


>>1731613

Holy shit, look at it post a link to Slate! Hahaha!

Orwell was a writer in the same way that Jack Webb was a great social critic. Avoid avoid avoid unless you've got a fifties household fetish.

>>1731613
That article appears to be storytelling, with a little dogma thrown in..i'm not defending N. Korea, but where are the actual facts? Where is an account by N. Koreans living in N. Korea? I've seen an interesting documentary about it..and yes they appear to live a very agrarian "mundane" (by western standards) existence..there are zealots for the state, there are people too afraid to resist the authority of the state..but this idea that individuals are so totally controlled seems like propaghanda for the N.Korean state..you know? To make it seem more powerful than it is. Read Shelley's poem "The Mask of Anarchy'' --when the idea that a state can have this kind of power, this kind of impenetrable structure, is pronounced it really does nothing but elevate the true nature of the state--which is nothing but individuals acting out of extreme self-interest..a network of criminal behavior no less..I really don't know..I haven't seen any hard facts about korea..a lot of speculation.

>>1731640

That's because they are so suppressed they probably cannot even conceive of the idea of revolution right now.

If you really want to see the peoples reaction to a totalitarian state, although you'll struggle to find a better journalist than Christopher Hitchens, then look at Libya right now and listen to what the revolutionaries are saying about life under Gaddafi.

Why do you think they are so willing to die for freedom? There is nothing romantic about it.

>>1731618

what's the matter, anon?

too insecure to read outwith papers which pander to your retarded prejudices?

>>1731682
I just don't see how it would be possible to actually monitor anything like they did in 1984..that's all i was saying..pointing out that Orwell kind of had a state-fetish and I don't like it..

>>1731698

I think you should experience it for yourself to understand that literally anyone could potentially report you for acting 'suspiciously'.