Some great passages in there. This one could have been written today:
One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the
renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist
claim that 'bourgeois liberty' is an illusion, there is
now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only
defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves
democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies
by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It
always appears that they are not only those who attack
it openly and consciously, but those who 'objectively'
endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other
words, defending democracy involves destroying all
independence of thought. This argument was used, for
instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent
Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were
guilty of all the things they were accused of. but by
holding heretical opinions they 'objectively' harmed the
régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to
massacre them but to discredit them by false
accusations. The same argument was used to justify the
quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press
about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in
the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason
for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was
released in 1943.
These people don't see that if you encourage
totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will
be used against you instead of for you...
Indeed, there appears to be no reason to believe in objectivity and any claim to it should be viewed as highly suspect. Subjectivity is the best we can do.
> A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
Still true today, as is the observation that it is intellectuals who are most hostile to heterodox ideas.
The preface to the preface(not by Orwell, but by the webmaster) whining about how mean people were to leftists--who all went strangely quiet for a decade or more after the Soviet empire collapsed and the true extent of the horrors perpetrated could be fully exposed without a constant barrage of propaganda attempting to bury the details--is a nice illustration of how "truly unpopular" democratic capitalism and the Enlightenment values that underpin it remain.
Socialists still steadfastly believe they have the moral high ground, even after they and those almost all of them actively or passively supported had piled up tens of millions of innocent dead. And their support went on for decades after the truth had been thoroughly documented by people like Robert Conquest and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Orwell stands today, still, as one of the very, very few voices on the Left who called out the Soviets for what they were. He did so early. Decades later most Western leftists were still quietly accepting Soviet hegemony, or actively defending the Soviet regime.
So Orwell's voice is notable not just because of his insight and eloquence, but because so few of his comrades had the courage to follow his lead and condemn the Soviets or their puppets in other nations.
The fact of his uniqueness is a far deeper condemnation of 20th century socialists than anything he actually wrote, and that's saying something.
This is exactly the point. He was a socialist who was able to call out other socialists. Most socialists of the time (and even today) were/are not prepared to do this (why I don't know - and I suspect some Russian control on elements of the British socialist mainstream at the time may have played a role). This one of the reasons that people on the right of the political spectrum think that socialism is a dirty word.
The reality is that socialism itself is not bad but that the implementation as seen in the USSR was terrible. The principle needs to be separated from the poor implementation.
HOWEVER, how to implement socialism well? Any implementation would have to account for people's inherent selfishness etc. I don't have an ideas for how to overcome this and I don't think anyone ever has yet. Therefore I prefer that we stay with market driven capitalism (which deliberately uses people's selfishness and in a pure from has very simple implementation) for the foreseeable future.
Firstly - I feel there are very few socialists today who would still support the old Soviet regimes (and other similar totalitarian implementations worldwide). In Orwell's time, this was much more common because it was a political situation people were living in, nowadays it's just something from history, so it's much easier to judge. I totally agree that anyone who is still looking up to Stalin today shouldn't be taken seriously.
Secondly - the supposed inherence of values that support capitalism is completely false. Every system has its way of promoting values that it is based on and can benefit from. In past regimes, this was mostly state driven propaganda, in modern capitalism it's popular culture. Anthropologists and sociologists can easily point to a bunch of cultures that developed value systems very different from ours, simply because they were isolated or affected by different influences.
Throughout history, the currently employed system always tries to assert itself as "the natural state of people" in order to be superior to anything else in comparison, but I firmly believe political discussions remain much more rational if we agree that every economic/political system is just a man-made construct.
I always enjoy reading Orwell's writing, mostly for the technical side. It is so fluid and clear. This was pleasing:
It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other,
but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times
it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.
And as mentioned elsewhere, still applies today (i.e. the British media + the BBC's silence over Snowden, D-Notice or not).
A few curiosities from a writing point of view, sticking to his advice about avoiding the traditional elementary school grammar rules:
. 'Every-one' and 'everyone' in the same sentence. I can just about
see how that could have a literary effect, but part of me thinks
it could just be a quirk.
. Starting sentences with 'and' and 'but'. Great!
. A liberal use of commas.
. The use of a single - dash - combo instead of brackets/parentheses.
. The use of the now-American-only: Start everything after a colon
with a capital letter. Nearly everything, anyway.
. The editor's decision between s/or/of should IMO be 'of',
if the style of the sentence is to match Orwell's style, and indeed
if it is to make complete sense.
. The use of 'traduce', to slander or defame, was fun. And educational...
A quote to wrap up this rambling comment:
The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees
with the record that is being played at the moment.
I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom
of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist,
and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply
that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a
period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.
I remember reading 1984 when I was very young and finding all the linguistic stuff he'd written terribly dull. Coming back to it when I was a teenager, it was considerably more interesting than the book itself. Rare that such a great story teller also had so many interesting structured thoughts to share.
