Comment by lostlogin
7 months ago
He literally fought fascists. And during that time became anti-communist. He was a socialist in the end and against both extremes. I think he was involved with The Labour Party after the war - can you explain your view?
Unless we are literally doing Orwellian doublespeak, he was pretty much the polar opposite of a fascist/authoritarian. He was against strong central governments and was quite critical of his own government (In one of the diary entries even lamenting that the germans failed to jam one of the British propaganda broadcasts).
> Nehru, Gandhi, Azad and many others in jail. Rioting over most of India, a number of deaths, countless arrests. Ghastly speech by Amery, speaking of Nehru and Co. as “wicked men”, “saboteurs” etc. This of course broadcast on the Empire service and rebroadcast by AIR. The best joke of all was that the Germans did their best to jam it, unfortunately without success.
I suspect we'll never know, but it's somewhat typical of blithe idealists who would rather hear supportive platitudes than confront hard decisions or tradeoffs. Painting complex individuals who are a product of their time (pretty much everyone) with a broad reductive brush makes life decisions easy and forces others to deal with reality. It was a fairly effective trope from the 60s to the 2010s (the end of history), and even Chomsky failed to really spot the turning point for the Manufacture of Discontent until 2020, a solid 4 years too late. Now they seem lost in the old narrative, fighting old inconsequential battles in a new world.
George Orwell wrote a lot, and not just novels. It's actually pretty easy to know where he was, politically: he wrote political columns in the newspaper and you can read them.
what is the difference between socialism and communism
Bertrand Russell published a collection of essays in 1935 titled _In Praise Of Idleness_ which are well worth reading.
One of the essays is called _Between Scylla and Charybdis_ (the original rock and a hard place!) which explains why he rejects the commonly accepted idea that an intellectual should naturally be politically either a Communist or a Fascist. Remember Fascism was not a dirty word at this point; the Nazis destroyed it's legitimacy through their actions.
Anyway, if you want a better understanding read that. And the rest because they're very interesting.
Read The Lion and the Unicorn if you want an overview of Orwell's political views: https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20180531/html.php
He was was in favor of wealth redistribution and nationalisation of key industries, but his political views were very far from Communism.
the guy hated the USSR for its authoritarianism. And he hated lefties who forgave Communist crimes.
Anyway, I really like this piece of his:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
> During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won?’ even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.
Now to type that in the search field…
Please don't ask Grok!
It's all just labels.
"United" States of America. "People's" Republic of China. "Democratic People's" Republic of Korea.
At the end of the day you either get services in return for your taxes, or you don't.
Not in the 1940s it wasn't: neither Orwell nor the communists would have claimed the other, and it wasn't just a matter of "labels."
Like, communism has some specific ideas about how to organize society that your average democratic socialist or Labour person just doesn't agree with.
Depends on your definition amd usually requires more specific words, like marxist style socialism, anarcho communism, maoism ...
Very trivially speaking, socialism is communism light.
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I'll respond to this on its face, because its important:
The "socialist" part of the moniker was 2 things.
First, it was misdirection. Hitler believed that Bolshevisim, and left-wing revolutions in general, were Jewish plots. He was stridently anti-communist, yes, but also anti-socialist, and anti-democratic. The party he took over called themselves "socialist" because they needed a way to telegraph that they were the party of the workers, and at the time, workers' parties were socialist parties, at least in name. Mussolini did the same thing (although, he did start out as a socialist, so that's a bit more complex).
Second, the nazis were all about socializing the property of the outgroups. Vis the banning of Jewish businesses, the confiscation of Jewish property, etc etc. Several pretty prominent Nazis were tried, convicted and imprisoned or executed for stealing Jewish property for themselves (Amon Goth was dismissed from his role as commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp of Schindler's List fame over exactly that). The Nazis considered such theft to be stealing from the Reich.
All of that to say, fascists are happy to exercise socialism, provided the people they are taking from are part of the vilified outgroup that the fascist identity opposes.
Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We're trying for something different here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The nazis were socialist in the same sense that the German Democratic Republic was democratic, and the same way the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. hth
the nazis where?
3 replies →
"First they came for the communists"
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