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> A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. Still true today, as is t

> A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. Still true today, as is the observation that it is intellectuals who are most hostile to heterodox ideas. The preface to the preface(not by Orwell, but by the webmaster) whining about how mean people were to leftists--who all went strangely quiet for a decade or more after the Soviet empire collapsed and the true extent of the horrors perpetrated could be fully exposed without a constant barrage of propaganda attempting to bury the details--is a nice illustration of how "truly unpopular" democratic capitalism and the Enlightenment values that underpin it remain. Socialists still steadfastly believe they have the moral high ground, even after they and those almost all of them actively or passively supported had piled up tens of millions of innocent dead. And their support went on for decades after the truth had been thoroughly documented by people like Robert Conquest and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Orwell stands today, still, as one of the very, very few voices on the Left who called out the Soviets for what they were. He did so early. Decades later most Western leftists were still quietly accepting Soviet hegemony, or actively defending the Soviet regime. So Orwell's voice is notable not just because of his insight and eloquence, but because so few of his comrades had the courage to follow his lead and condemn the Soviets or their puppets in other nations. The fact of his uniqueness is a far deeper condemnation of 20th century socialists than anything he actually wrote, and that's saying something.

cma 12y ago
Orwell was socialist.
- JupiterMoon 12y ago
  This is exactly the point. He was a socialist who was able to call out other socialists. Most socialists of the time (and even today) were/are not prepared to do this (why I don't know - and I suspect some Russian control on elements of the British socialist mainstream at the time may have played a role). This one of the reasons that people on the right of the political spectrum think that socialism is a dirty word. The reality is that socialism itself is not bad but that the implementation as seen in the USSR was terrible. The principle needs to be separated from the poor implementation. HOWEVER, how to implement socialism well? Any implementation would have to account for people's inherent selfishness etc. I don't have an ideas for how to overcome this and I don't think anyone ever has yet. Therefore I prefer that we stay with market driven capitalism (which deliberately uses people's selfishness and in a pure from has very simple implementation) for the foreseeable future.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - MatekCopatek 12y ago
    I disagree with 2 things. Firstly - I feel there are very few socialists today who would still support the old Soviet regimes (and other similar totalitarian implementations worldwide). In Orwell's time, this was much more common because it was a political situation people were living in, nowadays it's just something from history, so it's much easier to judge. I totally agree that anyone who is still looking up to Stalin today shouldn't be taken seriously. Secondly - the supposed inherence of values that support capitalism is completely false. Every system has its way of promoting values that it is based on and can benefit from. In past regimes, this was mostly state driven propaganda, in modern capitalism it's popular culture. Anthropologists and sociologists can easily point to a bunch of cultures that developed value systems very different from ours, simply because they were isolated or affected by different influences. Throughout history, the currently employed system always tries to assert itself as "the natural state of people" in order to be superior to anything else in comparison, but I firmly believe political discussions remain much more rational if we agree that every economic/political system is just a man-made construct.

cma 12y ago

Orwell was socialist.

JupiterMoon 12y ago
This is exactly the point. He was a socialist who was able to call out other socialists. Most socialists of the time (and even today) were/are not prepared to do this (why I don't know - and I suspect some Russian control on elements of the British socialist mainstream at the time may have played a role). This one of the reasons that people on the right of the political spectrum think that socialism is a dirty word. The reality is that socialism itself is not bad but that the implementation as seen in the USSR was terrible. The principle needs to be separated from the poor implementation. HOWEVER, how to implement socialism well? Any implementation would have to account for people's inherent selfishness etc. I don't have an ideas for how to overcome this and I don't think anyone ever has yet. Therefore I prefer that we stay with market driven capitalism (which deliberately uses people's selfishness and in a pure from has very simple implementation) for the foreseeable future.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- MatekCopatek 12y ago
  I disagree with 2 things. Firstly - I feel there are very few socialists today who would still support the old Soviet regimes (and other similar totalitarian implementations worldwide). In Orwell's time, this was much more common because it was a political situation people were living in, nowadays it's just something from history, so it's much easier to judge. I totally agree that anyone who is still looking up to Stalin today shouldn't be taken seriously. Secondly - the supposed inherence of values that support capitalism is completely false. Every system has its way of promoting values that it is based on and can benefit from. In past regimes, this was mostly state driven propaganda, in modern capitalism it's popular culture. Anthropologists and sociologists can easily point to a bunch of cultures that developed value systems very different from ours, simply because they were isolated or affected by different influences. Throughout history, the currently employed system always tries to assert itself as "the natural state of people" in order to be superior to anything else in comparison, but I firmly believe political discussions remain much more rational if we agree that every economic/political system is just a man-made construct.