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>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

by 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 ago
Yes, this is obviously the reason. Once the cold war kicks in, Animal Farm quickly becomes a Western classic.
- moomin 3y ago
  There 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 ago
      I 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.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      I think maybe this has happened, some. In many of the recent wars. Afghanistan/Iraq, or even others like Ukraine. The US 'group think' is to not criticize the 'people' of the country. The population is separated from the government. Most media is very pro - "The wonderful people of the country whom surely had nothing to do with the evil government we'd like to see defeated". Criticizing the population is not allowed. Even thought they must have had some influence on their government. Hence how it is very much not allowed to criticize Muslims. Even in Ukraine, it is not allowed to criticize the "Russian People", who surely are with us against their evil government.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  It was more than that among the Left. Yes, everybody on all parts of the political spectrum on the Allied side tolerated "Uncle Joe Stalin" during the war, as Germans fighting Soviet troops were Germans not fighting their troops, but this was just "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" reasoning. But until Khrushchev's leaked 1956 "Secret Speech" in which the crimes of Stalin were denounced, a large part of the Western Left really thought the USSR was a workers' paradise and that complaints about it were just right-wing propaganda spread by exiled Russian aristocrats bitter about losing their power and wealth. Trotsky of course had been telling the world about Stalin (until he got murdered in Mexico by one of Stalin's agents), but most people likewise assumed that he was just bitter for losing out in the competition to be Lenin's successor.
  - bnralt 3y ago
    Right, people overlook the fact that Stalin was popular among many on the left (Che Guevara gave him a lot of praise). Trotsky, for his part (as well as Lenin) was authoritarian himself. But all of the revolutionaries, including Stalin, were true believers in Communism, and acted accordingly. Orwell likes to present things as a few bad actors that just happened to betray the revolution, which suits his purpose, but that isn't an accurate portrayal.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  A large part of the reason for that is that the CIA promoted it _hard_ in the 1950s, including directly financing a motion picture.
nvm0n2 3y ago
Both the essay and Orwell's preface address this question directly. They say it wasn't wartime loyalty because the same people were perfectly willing to criticize their own government much more harshly than they'd criticize the USSR, and their love for the Soviets predated WW2 anyway. A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents, to the extent that in the UK some of the people responsible for catching Soviet spies were themselves Soviet spies. The issue was the intelligence agencies recruited exclusively from Oxbridge. The actual working classes in Britain had no time for the USSR, but graduates did. This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. You can just search journal articles for mention of him to find them: https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=marx&SeriesKey=soca&pageSize=10&startPage=1 https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=marx&S... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211037867 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211037... This article continues the conceptual work of developing a process-oriented perspective on belonging by taking up the active engagement of affiliation (and disaffiliation) as an undertheorised yet necessary aspect of accomplishing belonging. In developing the concept we draw on Marx’s notion of work as material activity in forms of life and the sociological concepts of face-work and emotion work.
- e12e 3y ago
  > This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. I don't think dismissing (all of) Marx because of Stalin makes much more sense than dismissing the idea of democracy because of the size of the US prison population or it's history of war crimes?
  - joenot443 3y ago
    Perhaps if democracy was an American invention your comparison could hold some water, it doesn't really make any sense otherwise. Democracy's practiced by the majority of nations worldwide, I don't see what the prison population of a single nation has to do with that. The reason myself and others are so dismissive of Marx's ideas is because time and time again, any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation. Every. Single. Time. Many of us have grown weary of tankie types trying to shoehorn pro-Marxist viewpoints into these conversations and are pretty quick to identify the dog whistles ("But, but, America!") when we hear them.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
As the preface points out, it was totally acceptable to denounce Churchill and even to advocate peace with Nazi Germany, but not to denounce Stalin.
MichaelMoser123 3y ago
> The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time? I think it started before the war. Orwell wrote in 1938 that "today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or 'Trotskyism'," See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia

by kgeist 3y ago

blast 3y ago

Yes, this is obviously the reason. Once the cold war kicks in, Animal Farm quickly becomes a Western classic.

moomin 3y ago
There 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 ago
    I 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.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    I think maybe this has happened, some. In many of the recent wars. Afghanistan/Iraq, or even others like Ukraine. The US 'group think' is to not criticize the 'people' of the country. The population is separated from the government. Most media is very pro - "The wonderful people of the country whom surely had nothing to do with the evil government we'd like to see defeated". Criticizing the population is not allowed. Even thought they must have had some influence on their government. Hence how it is very much not allowed to criticize Muslims. Even in Ukraine, it is not allowed to criticize the "Russian People", who surely are with us against their evil government.
jhbadger 3y ago
It was more than that among the Left. Yes, everybody on all parts of the political spectrum on the Allied side tolerated "Uncle Joe Stalin" during the war, as Germans fighting Soviet troops were Germans not fighting their troops, but this was just "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" reasoning. But until Khrushchev's leaked 1956 "Secret Speech" in which the crimes of Stalin were denounced, a large part of the Western Left really thought the USSR was a workers' paradise and that complaints about it were just right-wing propaganda spread by exiled Russian aristocrats bitter about losing their power and wealth. Trotsky of course had been telling the world about Stalin (until he got murdered in Mexico by one of Stalin's agents), but most people likewise assumed that he was just bitter for losing out in the competition to be Lenin's successor.
- bnralt 3y ago
  Right, people overlook the fact that Stalin was popular among many on the left (Che Guevara gave him a lot of praise). Trotsky, for his part (as well as Lenin) was authoritarian himself. But all of the revolutionaries, including Stalin, were true believers in Communism, and acted accordingly. Orwell likes to present things as a few bad actors that just happened to betray the revolution, which suits his purpose, but that isn't an accurate portrayal.
empath-nirvana 3y ago
A large part of the reason for that is that the CIA promoted it _hard_ in the 1950s, including directly financing a motion picture.

nvm0n2 3y ago

Both the essay and Orwell's preface address this question directly. They say it wasn't wartime loyalty because the same people were perfectly willing to criticize their own government much more harshly than they'd criticize the USSR, and their love for the Soviets predated WW2 anyway. A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents, to the extent that in the UK some of the people responsible for catching Soviet spies were themselves Soviet spies. The issue was the intelligence agencies recruited exclusively from Oxbridge. The actual working classes in Britain had no time for the USSR, but graduates did. This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. You can just search journal articles for mention of him to find them: https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=marx&SeriesKey=soca&pageSize=10&startPage=1 https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=marx&S... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211037867 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211037... This article continues the conceptual work of developing a process-oriented perspective on belonging by taking up the active engagement of affiliation (and disaffiliation) as an undertheorised yet necessary aspect of accomplishing belonging. In developing the concept we draw on Marx’s notion of work as material activity in forms of life and the sociological concepts of face-work and emotion work.

e12e 3y ago
> This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. I don't think dismissing (all of) Marx because of Stalin makes much more sense than dismissing the idea of democracy because of the size of the US prison population or it's history of war crimes?
- joenot443 3y ago
  Perhaps if democracy was an American invention your comparison could hold some water, it doesn't really make any sense otherwise. Democracy's practiced by the majority of nations worldwide, I don't see what the prison population of a single nation has to do with that. The reason myself and others are so dismissive of Marx's ideas is because time and time again, any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation. Every. Single. Time. Many of us have grown weary of tankie types trying to shoehorn pro-Marxist viewpoints into these conversations and are pretty quick to identify the dog whistles ("But, but, America!") when we hear them.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

As the preface points out, it was totally acceptable to denounce Churchill and even to advocate peace with Nazi Germany, but not to denounce Stalin.

MichaelMoser123 3y ago

> The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time? I think it started before the war. Orwell wrote in 1938 that "today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or 'Trotskyism'," See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia