Hmmm, Huxley wrote a letter to Orwell....

[JackRiddler]

Over in Greece the Communist party, and particularly the Stalinists (but of course), have been working with the police and the government forces on the streets to help quell/attack/disrupt the socialist left's (and the people's) attempts to derail the EU austerity agenda. That's more recent than Orwell's day, and there's no excuse for it. Orwell would've understood very easily the reason that Communists are siding with the authorities - it's because they are authoritarian.

That was a great post, Ahab, and much appreciated, however, can you back this up, because I had not heard it. Are you saying the KKE is doing this? Sources, please.

.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Shit. Jack, I think I spoke unwisely. It's possible that I have been too faithfully following the Anarchist line on this, and they, like everyone else, have an agenda. Either way, I shouldn't've said it without being more sure of my sources and my own (very basic and sketchy) knowledge of events.

Here's one of my sources, though, the Anarchist leaning website ROAR:

In anticipation of the vote, a 48-hour strike brought the country to a complete standstill, while the single largest demonstration since the fall of the military junta sent hundreds of thousands of people into Syntagma Square and surrounding streets. For the first time, the communist party and union, KKE and PAME, joined the protests by blocking off Parliament so MPs would not be able to enter for the vote.

Carrying red flag sticks and wearing helmets, the unionists formed a human chain around Parliament. In the process, however, they ended up defending the state from the angry mob outside. Rather than turning their anger at the politicians, they protected them. Riot police were therefore happy to sit back and let the two sides fight each other. Dozens of people were injured in the clashes. One older man suffered a heart attack after being hit with a stone in the head. He died in hospital.

According to some rumors, police actually infiltrated the protests — either on the communist side or on the anarchist side, depending on whom you ask — to instigate the Leftist infighting. The truth, however, is that the Stalinist Left and the anti-authoritarian Left in Greece have a long history of antagonism. While this mutual distrust is understandable, the division itself remains a highly regrettable impediment to the creation of a united revolutionary front. Now, more than ever, we need to become and stay united.

Towards the end of the second video below, Stalinist union members can clearly be seen talking to police and telling them to attack anarchist protesters. There was a nauseating degree of collaboration between communists and police — a collaborative attempt to defend the last vestiges of the Greek state — that protesters were right to be angry about. But hurling stones and petrol bombs at fellow protesters? Following the death of three people in a bank arson last year and now the death of a communist union member, the time has come for the anarchists to revisit the use of escalating violence as a protest strategy.
http://roarmag.org/2011/10/anarchists-c ... ce-greece/

There are pictures and videos at the link. I have also heard of clashes between Anarchist and Communist supporters on other forums I visit, with the Communists being supported by police. The people discussing it might well have been Anarchists, though, with a vested interest in portraying the Communists in a bad light.

Could you have a look at the site and let me know if I have made an arse of myself and slandered the KKE, as that is possible. If I have I'll make a very large retraction of what I said.

[compared2what?]

Orwell was an anti-socialist, and "Animal Farm" was blatant anti-revolutionary propaganda. Orwell would be in the Alex Jones camp today, calling the New World Order a communist conspiracy. And his connections to M15... so fuck George Orwell AFAIC.

Don't write him off without reading him, wordspeak2. You'll be glad you did.

Also:

* Animal Farm is not anti-revolutionary, it's anti-Stalinist (and also anti-Bolshevik and anti-totalitarian).

* He did not have MI5 connections. MI5 had a file on him, in fact. The sum total extent of his cooperation with the government in the way of naming names was as follows:

When he was in the sanatorium he went to during his final illness, nine months before his death, a woman he'd proposed to after his first wife died came to visit him. She had just started working for the then-Labor government at the then-brand-new Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, which was an anti-Soviet propaganda shop. She asked him if there were any red-commie-sympathetic writers they should avoid using. And he gave her a list of names.

He was, as mentioned, very opposed to Soviet communism, on the grounds that it was, you know, a harsh and bloody totalitarian regime that killed millions and millions of people and forced millions and millions more to live in a state of constant, unnatural fear.

The world was different in 1949 than it is now. There were still people from the real political left in the Labour Party. So the government wasn't yet absolutely and conclusively the enemy on an a priori basis then, and working within the system wasn't yet dishonorable or a compromised act.

* George Orwell and Alex Jones are so very different from one another that they're practically not members of the same species.

____________

^^

That's intended in good faith, but please stick to your guns if you're not feeling it, by all means.

[compared2what?]

c2w wrote:

It's worth remembering that he was born in 1903, wrt the schools he attended and his later acquaintance with "elites." I mean, he really just had the kind of education that all the sons-of-gentlefolk who were bright enough to make the cut received at the time, and which no one questioned. Despite which, he hated his schooldays and condemned them in print, at some point subsequent to choosing, of his own accord (and in the face of the implacable non-interest of the world) to acquaint himself so thoroughly with the lives led by the non-gentlefolk -- ie, the poor and oppressed -- that he'd be in a position to convey it accurately and insightfully to the world by writing The Road to Wigan Pier (and so forth and so on).

Yeah, interesting bit of synchronicity Huxley was actually Orwell's French teacher briefly at Eton or his school previous to that. Both really came from a certain class strata that is hard to fathom now. I always felt Orwell was more pragmatic and challenging and less prone to mystical answers to social conditions then Huxley.

I agree, pretty much. (I think I'd probably say "more politically serious" rather than "pragmatic," but that's more or less what you mean anyway, right?)

It's been so long since I've read Brave New World that I'm not sure whether this is true or not, but...

...Isn't it, in fact, fundamentally reflective of kind of a conservative worldview, socially-politically speaking?

IIRC, it's implicitly pro-family, pro-church, and anti-(sex/pleasure/hedonism/not-sure-what-the-right-word-is). I've always thought it was basically anti-Jazz-Age, I guess, given the date of publication. I could be totally wrong about that, though. I have nothing against the book, particularly, but it didn't make all that much of an impression on me.

[compared2what?]

In re: The OP.

SHORTER VERSION:

Dear George Orwell --

I liked your book, but I think mine's better. Don't you agree?

Sincerely yours,

Aldous Huxley

[AhabsOtherLeg]

There were still people from the real political left in the Labour Party.

Aye, there were giants on the earth in those days.*

* I increasingly hate the UK Labour party for it's long and pathetic history of treacheries which began (in my view) shortly after it's inception, but of course I am biased in that regard, and I have to admit they did do a lot of good things, but only when forced just like any other party.

[compared2what?]

I think that's just realism, actually. But one can see how a socialist in the '40s might still have had some not unreasonable hopes, right? That was really all I was saying. I mean, you all's post-war governmental policies were (and still are, actually) way lefter than ours here in the U.S. of A., but it wasn't ever a socialist idyll, obviously.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Yes, sorry C2W?, I can completely understand why a socialist would've supported Labour then - there was nobody else around for them to support. Hell, I can even understand why a socialist would still support Labour now - there is still nobody else for them to support. That's what makes Labour's betrayal so rank and disgusting, though. They knew fine well they were leaving us with nothing.

The Parliamentary Labour Party of the United Kingdom has never given official support to a worker-led strike in it's history. I will say that again - the Parliamentary Labour Party of the United Kingdom has never given official support to a worker-led strike in it's history.

Hell, even the unions are useless. During the General Strike of 1926 the Trades Union Congress collaborated with the
UK government to crush the general strike that they themselves had called, and supported the deployment of tanks and military troops to George Square, Glasgow, where the strike had reached it's most fervent expression. The Scottish regiments were confined to their barracks for fear they might join the strikers.

I just don't agree with what Labour is now, or even what it was then, and can get all angry about it, and have an increasing tendency to do so. It died the instant that the first Labour MP took a seat in the House of Lords. There are now more Labour peers than Tories. This is not the fault of socialists, or even Labour. It's a fault of the United Kingdom.

It can be quite funny, though, for me as a Scots Nationalist. We had a US Teabager over on one of our forums recently, saying, basically: "Hai guyz, I heard you hate unionism, Labour, and big central government. Wanna cyber?"

He got disillusioned fast once we explained to him exactly what kind of Unionism, and what kind of Labour Party, and what kind of big central government (defence) we dislike. But he was good fun in the meantime.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

The NHS was great, I enjoyed it while it was around, but they really only brought it in because they were appalled by the state of their troops when they called them up for WW2. Scurvy, rickets, lice, diptheria. Four-foot tall men with heads like grapefruits and pumpkin-lantern jaws. A bow-legged half-dead ricketty-toothed procession from the long-ignored slums and mines of Great Britain, a peoples wholly unsuitable to their war plans. They realised then that, as Germaine Greer put it, the "teeth of the nation" were important. Like I said, they have never given us anything voluntarily. They have never given us anything unless forced.

For the record, Zamyatin's "WE" was only partially based on Leninst Russia. He also lived in Britain for a while, and was amazed by our capacity for queueing up, standing in line, taking whatever shit we were given, and acting like everything was fine. There is more of a story behind his time in Britain, and the influence it had on "WE", but I've went and forgot it.

[Stephen Morgan]

Yes, sorry C2W?, I can completely understand why a socialist would've supported Labour then - there was nobody else around for them to support.

The Communists. ILP. Common Wealth was Orwell's fave.

Hell, I can even understand why a socialist would still support Labour now - there is still nobody else for them to support.

Might as well go Tory now. Plenty fell for that LibDem shit. And SDP before.

Hell, even the unions are useless. During the General Strike of 1926 the Trades Union Congress collaborated with the
UK government to crush the general strike that they themselves had called, and supported the deployment of tanks and military troops to George Square, Glasgow, where the strike had reached it's most fervent expression. The Scottish regiments were confined to their barracks for fear they might join the strikers.

One of the leading traitors was Jimmy Thomas who went on to be one of the 1931 "Gang of Four" who were kicked out of Labour for forming a "National" government, which is to say a Tory coalition without the support of the rest of the Labour party. Obviously wrecked Labour's electoral chances until after the War too.

The General Strike also gave us the BBC.

There were still people from the real political left in the Labour Party.

Aye, there were giants on the earth in those days.*

* I increasingly hate the UK Labour party for it's long and pathetic history of treacheries which began (in my view) shortly after it's inception, but of course I am biased in that regard, and I have to admit they did do a lot of good things, but only when forced just like any other party.

Can't argue with that. Keir Hardie was a traitor, then there were the 4 of 1931, the Great Strike, the conflict between the CDS and IWC, the other Gang of Four and their SDP, and so on.

[Byrne]

Orwell's research for The Road to Wigan Pier led to him being placed under surveillance by the Special Branch in 1936, for 12 years, until 1 year before the publication of 1984.source.

Celia Kirwan [née Paget then Celia Goodman] (who had a twin sister Mamaine, then married to Orwell's friend Arthur Koestler) was the IRD worker (who Orwell had clumsily proposed to in earlier days) to whom Orwell gave his list to.

"Dearest Celia," he now wrote from the Cotswold Sanatorium on February 13, "how delight-ful to get your letter and know that you are in England again." "I will send you a copy of my new book [i.e., 1984] when it comes out (about June I think), but I don't think you'll like it; it's an awful book really." Saying he hoped to see her "some time, perhaps in the summer" he signed off "with much love, George."

Sooner than expected, on March 29, Celia came to visit him in Gloucestershire; but she also came with a mission. She was working for this new department of the Foreign Office (IRD), trying to counter the assault waves of communist propaganda emanating from Stalin's recently founded Cominform. Could he help? As she recorded in her official memorandum of their meeting, Orwell "expressed his whole-hearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims." He couldn't write anything for IRD himself, he said, because he was too ill and didn't like to write "on commission," but he suggested several people who might. On April 6 he followed up with a letter in his neat, rather delicate handwriting, suggesting a few more names and offering his list of those "who should not be trusted as propagandists. But for that I shall have to send for a notebook which I have at home, and if I do give you such a list it is strictly confidential, as I imagine it is libellous to describe somebody as a fellow-traveller."
source

More articles on Orwell's 'list':
Revealed: George Orwell's Big Brother dossier by Michael Shelden Electronic Telegraph, Saturday 27 June 1998
Orwell's List by Timothy Garton Ash, The New York Review of Books, 25 September 2003
Orwell offered writers' blacklist to anti-Soviet propaganda unit by Richard Norton-Taylor and Seumas Milne The Guardian, 11 July 1996


More on the Information Research Department (IRD) here.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Keir Hardie was a traitor

Mmmhhh, I haven't seen very much that's bad about him? Accused of treachery for his pacifism in WW1, but I doubt that's what you mean? Have I missed something else? He supported Home Rule and the Highland Land League, another set of ideals and people that the Parliamentary Labour Party betrayed wholesale, and the Lib Dems (in the case of Home Rule) continue to betray daily, so I liked him for that... what did he do wrong? Something to do with Black Friday?