Eric Arthur Blair once wrote, "Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious." He probably did not intend that duty as a maxim imploring posterity to vindicate his work -which he wrote under the pen name of George Orwell- from the manipulative mechanisms of history. As an ironic twist of fate would have it, the obvious core of his legacy requires a restatement by honest persons who would not have him go down in history as a champion of the very ideas he spent his life opposing.
In the decades since writing Animal Farm and 1984 Orwell has become a household name. His political philosophy took a number of forms over the course of his life, but there is one thing he never was: a capitalist opponent to socialism. And yet this is the figure he is most often misunderstood to have been. I thought of him under such terms after reading Animal Farm in a high school class. I have encountered doubt in nearly every instance where I have suggested that he was not a staunch defender of capitalism. As an example of just how deeply entrenched this misconception is consider the fact that the September edition of the Observer, a staunchly pro-capitalist campus newspaper, published a favorable book review of 1984 citing it as a warning against socialism next to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged . I imagine Blair to be rolling over in his grave with disgust.
In 1946 he writes, "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." In other instances he espoused federal socialism, quipped that he was being paid by the capitalist class to write books against capitalism, and expressed sympathy for anarcho-syndicalists (a leftist form of anarchism). At one point he said, ""I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country."
To describe him as a capitalist opponent to socialism betrays who he actually was doubly. In addition to supporting socialism, he was a fierce advocate of maintaining the integrity of political discourse. A deep irony exists in the fact that a man who expended considerable effort in his writing to show the disconcerting easy with which political language can be corrupted has had his own political views manipulated to the extent that much of the public sees him as a strong advocate a system he opposed.
Blair's words now appear ominously prophetic: "The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history." His corrupted legacy is a symptom of a deeper problem, namely that many (probably most Americans) have come to incorrectly understand socialism as being synonymous with totalitarianism and capitalism as being synonymous with democracy. The ideas have been confounded by those who abuse language to further their political agenda. As Blair recognized, the integrity of our political language and the functionality of our democracy have a shared fate. We will lose the latter if we cease protecting the former.
In 1984 Blair warns, "He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." I can think of few political maneuvers more despicable than re-writing this man's past to further the future of a political ideology he spent his life opposing.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
first post
give me the primary email of you blog account so i can give you permission to post (earlier, i mistakenly thought i only needed your account name)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)