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This forward hints at a missing puzzle piece for me, regarding history. Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it
by RajT88 3y ago
This forward hints at a missing puzzle piece for me, regarding history.
Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it would be by extension criticizing Communism which at the time was a popular idea among intellectuals? Was this the progress being referred to?
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoOrwell was certainly not a fan of Soviet communism. In fact, an especially astute reader of "Animal Farm" may notice subtle hints concerning Orwell's opinion of communism.
- lurquer 3y agoThey are indeed very subtle. Easy to miss.
- hinkley 3y agoSo easy it would be futile to make it assigned reading for 13-14 year olds, who could not possibly grasp the nuance.
- lurquer 3y agoAlmost as easy to miss as sarcasm, apparently. Sigh….
- hinkley 3y agoIf you think I missed the sarcasm, look in the mirror. Cold War era middle schoolers in the US had that book as required reading in some parts of the country. At least it got us out of reading Shakespeare for a few months. You don’t assign complex reading to middle schoolers.
- lurquer 3y agoHa. You’re right. Sarcasm via text is, indeed, easy to miss (and probably more befitting Reddit than HN.) I try to avoid snark on this site as it’s greatest value, to me anyway, is precisely it’s absence of same. Mea culpa.
- vasco 3y agoThe best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it. Therefore one should trust no system that depends on a few people being trustworthy, the system itself should have self defense mechanisms and limits both in scope and in time, for wielding power. Communism or at least the soviet flavor failed completely on this last count, and I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. Social democracies seem to have a nice balance but in online discussion it's like people are either Milton Friedman or Marx apologists and nobody in the middle.
- gonehome 3y ago> The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it. I think it was more that a system will abused by the extent to which abuse is possible. Someone benevolent (in the book snowball who was a stand in for Trotsky) will get out maneuvered by someone willing to weaponize all available power (Napolean in the book, Stalin). It’s possible to have someone good for a time (there are occasionally successful monarchs), but the system is not resilient to bad actors. Norms or good intentions are not enough, you have to look at incentives and what abuse is possible within the system. The US is a more resilient system (trump failed to hold onto power despite best efforts), but even so it has weaknesses in places governed primarily by norms. A political system needs to be evaluated by its outcomes in practice, not hypothetical “best case” implementations that ignore incentives.
- toyg 3y agoThe US is not particularly resilient. FDR got 3 terms and would have probably got a 4th, GWB pre-Katrina had enough political capital to abolish the 2-terms limit had he dared to do so... GWB also widely abused his presidential powers, and never faced any consequences. Trump had to resort to violence simply because he was too weak.
- mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
- philjohn 3y agoIs it not fairer to say that Orwell was not a fan of totalitarianism of any form?
- input_sh 3y agoOf course. > 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. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- TMWNN 3y agoThere is nothing subtle about Animal Farm's critique of Soviet Communism. From Wikipedia: >The Guardian on 24 August 1945 called Animal Farm "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few". Tosco Fyvel, writing in Tribune on the same day, called the book "a gentle satire on a certain State and on the illusions of an age which may already be behind us". Julian Symons responded, on 7 September, "Should we not expect, in Tribune at least, acknowledgement of the fact that it is a satire not at all gentle upon a particular State – Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years perhaps, Animal Farm may be simply a fairy story; today it is a political satire with a good deal of point". Symons's point is that The Guardian and Fyvel called Animal Farm "delightfully humorous" and "gentle satire" because that was the only way they could blunt the sharp attack aimed directly at the USSR, by insinuating that it was not actually serious.
- kgeist 3y ago>Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time? UPD. From Wikipedia: >Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, when the United Kingdom was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated.
- blast 3y agoYes, this is obviously the reason. Once the cold war kicks in, Animal Farm quickly becomes a Western classic.
- moomin 3y agoThere was, at the time, something of a doublethink going on. Whilst publicly friendly, the U.K. was privately discussing scenarios up to and including invading the USSR (Operation Unthinkable). However, again, it was wartime. And not one of these wars where your professional army fights far from home against an asymmetrically weaker foe. People tend have fairly negative views of dissenters in that circumstance. Look at what happened in America after 9/11.
- saalweachter 3y ago... after 9/11, when America's professional army fought an asymmetrically weaker foe far from home?
- moomin 3y agoI mean, that was the consequence. The trigger was, I think, the greatest American loss of life on home soil since the Civil War. Imagine what America would have been like if Al-Qaeda had bombed all major cities on a daily basis for years, and the US had won with the help of Iran. I think pointing out reservations with the current regime there would be quite unpopular.
- 3y ago
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoSoviets were their allies against the Nazis.
- mantas 3y agoAnd Nazis allies against the West. Essentially a 3rd power that tried to win against both. And looking at how they helped Nazis/Germany before the war, they were one of the main actors to kickstart the war.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wrp 3y agoAdmiration for the USSR among English intellectuals predates WW2. So the answer to your question is in the social milieu of the 1920s-30s. Someone else will have to try a detailed explanation.
- azangru 3y ago> Admiration for the USSR among English intellectuals predates WW2. While this may be so — although I am sure there were enough intellectuals in both camps — it cannot explain the atmosphere that Orwell is describing: > At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. What is this prevailing orthodoxy? How has it been reached and maintained? What happens to dissenters? What enforces the unprintability of the criticism? To achieve such a level of control, full government and media support is necessary.
- atchoo 3y agoIt's worth bearing in mind that the West was pretty awful too with a vast quantity of appalling crimes that our rose-tinted spectacles might like to forget because the victims were "non-people". It was Imperial Britain with it's colonies, the US with it's viciously racist segregation, Leopold II of Belgium chopping of limbs in the Congo. Not cool. It's not difficult to see that the early Soviet Union was actually better on a number of dimensions over both the Tsars and the West on basic equality and humanity when comparing against the life of an Indian or an African American. It had decriminalized homosexuality and was arguably less anti-Semitic than the West. The trajectory was utopian... but it nosedived into Stalinism which was, well..., a nightmare.
- XorNot 3y agoEhhh...it's not like Lenin was much better. As soon as he was in power, he pretty rapidly got to "actually we should do some purges". The history of Russia is one of an endless parade of terrible leadership which invariably decides that a quick round of death squads will solve all the problems. Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism if people were starving in the streets, whereas ultimately the USSR liked to pretend they fixed that while just doing it to the Ukrainians, Polish and other Baltic states.
- publicola1990 3y agoDo English intellectuals even criticise Churchill?
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago[flagged]
- simonh 3y agoOh boy, do they ever.
- dotancohen 3y agoHonestly, English intellectuals are a good yardstick for how history will remember people and events. If the English intellectuals esteem someone or some event, then generally those people and events are widely considered disparaged two generations down.
- ReptileMan 3y agoSo we know where Jim Cramer descends from ...
- bazoom42 3y agoSince English intellectuals at the time included both Orwell and TS Eliot (and I suppose Tolkien and Chesterton and Aleister Crowley) is it really fair to paint them with such a broad brush?
- otherme123 3y agoLots of them were admirers of USSR and Stalin himself. Sartre, one of the most admired intellectuals of the time, was openly a fan until the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956. Lots of people, and lots of intelectuals, firmly believed that the USSR was building an utopia. The advantage for Orwell was that he went to Spain to fight for the left, but as a Trotskist, and he and his friend were violently prosecuted, some killed, by the comunist party. You can read about it in his book "Homage to Catalonia".
- TotalCrackpot 3y agoOrwell wasn't a trotskyist, but democratic socialist. He probably leaned libertarian in his socialism, cause he admitted that he should join anarchist side and not POUM, which was some coalition of trotskyist and libertarian Marxists.
- vidarh 3y agoRead his treatise about the need for revolution in England ("The Lion and the Unicorn"), and it's clear he was firmly statist, not libertarian, but you're right he was certainly a democratic socialist.
- TotalCrackpot 3y agoSure, but there are statists who dismiss libertarian leftism outright and there are ones who travel to fight for libertarian leftist project. Orwell was the second type clearly judging by his actions.
- vidarh 3y agoAbsolutely agree with that. I think Orwell overall was sympathetic to any anti-authoritarian socialists, even though his own thinking was still caught up in the need for a state. E.g. what he argued for in Lion and the Unicorn [1] is more early (pre-Paris Commune) Marx, with his emphasis on nationalisation [2]. I've always found it curious that given both what he experienced in Catalonia, and his firm rejection of Stalinism in particular, but really the Bolsheviks as a whole, that he did not move further towards the libertarian socialist side out of fear of the power of the state. Instead he seems to think that the problem brought by the Bolsheviks was mainly the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", rather than the notion of a more powerful state in general. As much as I love Orwell's writing, I don't tend to find him a very deep thinker. Animal Farm and 1984 are fantastic at ripping apart the surface problems, but juxtaposed against The Lion and the Unicorn, it feels like he just stopped delving deeper than the persons involved and the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and control of the press, and didn't think more about what e.g. allowed Lenin and Stalin to gain control of the Bolsheviks (e.g. he didn't delve into the split that created the Bolshevik faction itself, nor much into the effects of Lenins "democratic" centralism), as if he thought he had sufficiently solved the problem of what made them possible. [1] https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20180531/html.php https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20180531/html.php [2] "What is needed is that the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the State, representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes possible to eliminate the class of mere owners who live not by virtue of anything they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share certificates." -- George Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, part 3, section II
- imjonse 3y agoMaybe they knew they were being spied on by Stalin. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/11/revealed-soviet-spies-targeted-george-orwell-during-spanish-civil-war https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/11/revealed-sovie... Animal Farm is a great and easy read, but for something much less metaphorical, Homage to Catalunia is a wonderful (and sad) book about Orwell's experience in the war, where both western powers and stalinists had tried to eliminate the smaller and more idealistic faction he fought alongside.
- publius_0xf3 3y agoThe affection precedes the Second World War. Victor Gollancz, a notable left-wing publisher at the time, wrote this mea culpae in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led to his disillusionment with the Soviet cause. >Looking back, I think I erred more as a publisher than as a writer or speaker, and more by omission than commission. I accepted manuscripts about Russia, good or not so good, because they were "orthodox"; I rejected others, by bona fide socialists and honest men, because they were not. It was in the matter of the Trials that the inner conflict was greatest. I well remember a Christmas in Paris when I read the thousand-page verbatim report of one of them : it was like living in some urwelt of intellectual terror, where men had lost, or had never had, the pride of free and independent humanity. But every Tycoon in Britain was using that trial to stir up hatred of Russia, because, twenty-three years ago, she had abolished the exploitation of man by money. So I remembered Bolshevo, and the Red Corner in the Soviet ship, and the Prophylacterium, and the singing of the children when we went, in Moscow, to the Palace of Pioneers ; and I published only books that justified the trials, and sent the socialist criticisms of them elsewhere. >I am glad to remember that, when directly challenged by questioners at public meetings, I always spoke my mind, giving the pros and cons as honestly as I could ; but I did not strive officiously to speak it, preferring to avoid awkward topics when the choice rested with me alone. >I am as sure as a man can be — I was sure at the time in my heart — that all this was wrong : wrong in the harm it did to people from whom one was keeping some part of the truth as one saw it ; wrong in the harm it did to oneself (which was important, not because it was oneself, but because oneself was part of humanity) ; wrong in the harm it did to Russia, because that country, in which there is so much greatness and still more hope, can only be injured by a sycophancy that treats her as a spoilt child instead of as an adult with errors and crimes as grievous as our own ; and wrong above all in the harm it did to the sum total of truth and honest thinking, by an increase of which we can alone find the way forward.
- pie_flavor 3y agoThere had been by that point a long-standing admiration among the British (and American) intelligentsia for Stalin, the USSR, and in general Soviet Communism; this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country and the aforementioned unprintability of any real criticism of it. The best source for getting the picture of this is Malcolm Muggeridge's book Chronicles of Wasted Time; he was a reporter tasked with going to the USSR and telling the Brits about what it was like there, years before WWII. Having believed, like his friends, that it was paradise on earth, it was a shock to discover how terrible it was, and even more of a shock to see his honest reporting junked and to be told to make it out to be more of a paradise on earth. You can also get the key points from Scott Alexander's review of it. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles...
- DoughnutHole 3y ago> this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today. It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky). It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]