You might have heard of a guy named George Orwell. I don’t consider myself an “intellectual”, and I know I haven’t read an enormous amount of literature, but I can proudly said that I have read, and liked, two major classics of 20th century literature: George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Even tough these two books amazed me at the time; I haven’t though about them for a while. Last November, during a quick visit to Paris, I came along with the December’s issue of the French magazine Le magazine Littéraire. (N° 492, Dec, 2009); entitled “Orwell, writer and political poet”. Several articles tell us about the life and works of George Orwell. In Burmese Days (1934), Orwell reflects on British colonialism; in Homage to Catalonia (1938) he tells about the chaos that was the Spanish civil war, where different factions wanted to fight each other while fighting Franco at the same time.
The two master pieces however, or to be honest, the only two I have read, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are “must-read” classics because even if they seem to describe one particular situation, i. e. the soviet revolution, they are universal tales of truth. These two stories have no time or place… a farm, and England in 1984 maybe… but they perfectly describe All revolutions everywhere. Chaos, fear, struggle for power, death, repression, propaganda, fear, lies, brutality, confusion, lies, and fear. All together, and all at the same time, one next to the other… describe what revolutions are. The revolution, the revolutionary process, the never ending revolution, the great laws, the exception to great laws, the exception to the exception to the great laws, and so on.
It seems that Orwell was one of the few that detested Stalin during WWII. In England, and I guess in the US, Stalin was an allied, THE allied against Germany. If you were to criticize Stalin, you were criticizing Roosevelt, and Churchill, and all the “good guys”. However ask a Polish about this story. Anyone in Poland knows who Orwell was, and they would tell you about Orwell’s stand before, during and after the “Battle of Warsaw” (the rising of the Polish underground army to get hold of Warsaw before the arrival of the Russians, for more read Rising’44). Orwell defended democracy, truth, and absolute democracy, at all cost, against ALL types of totalitarianism. Does it matter if it’s Fascism or Communism… (I guess if your Chilean or Cuban … it does... I don't know).
Anyhow, back to the subject, the question was: What would Orwell say today? About what? You know about what. Let’s say Cuban political prisoner Zapata dying of a hunger strike… or, and we’re getting there, Venezuela… Michael Walzer, Emeritus professor at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton said (in Le magazine Littéraire), and I translate from the French; “Orwell was above all a ‘democratic socialist’. He was certainly an anti-totalitarian intellectual, decided to enlighten the British left-wingers about the treat of Stalinism. Overall, he hated every arrangement of left-wing excuses with power, every absolution of dictatorship… Today, I am sure, he would be an enemy of left-wingers that adore populist autocrats like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or Islamist radicals like Ahmadinejad in Iran”.
I’m not really sure what is today’s English debate on Venezuela and Chavez, but I would love to see Orwell writing a piece in The Times, or Tribune (why not an op-ed in the The York Times) about Sean Penn, Dany Glover, or anyone on the long list of “personalities” that praise Hugo Chavez anytime they can…
There is too much to say, in so short time… but trying to answer the question of what would George say…? The answer is quite simple… who cares?
No comments:
Post a Comment