Tag: literature

The Complex Legacy Of George Orwell

George Orwell, one of the most influential political writers of the 20th century, is widely recognized for his searing critiques of totalitarian regimes in his novels Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell’s portrayal of state control, propaganda, and the manipulation of truth has resonated with readers across the political spectrum. However, Orwell’s personal political ideology and his critiques of totalitarianism are far more complex than is often acknowledged. Rather than being a passive observer or simply an opponent of dictatorship, Orwell was deeply involved in the socialist movements of his time, aligning himself—whether accidentally or intentionally—with Trotskyist circles. Orwell was a powerful voice of the left, despite being a target in the war among socialist factions.

Orwell’s Political Ideology and Alignment with Trotskyism

While Orwell is best remembered for his criticism of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, it is essential to understand that he was, first and foremost, a committed socialist. Despite never formally joining a political party, Orwell was an active and vocal participant in the socialist movement. This may surprise those who associate Orwell solely with his critiques of state tyranny. Indeed, Orwell’s disdain for the left dictatorship did not extend to all forms of socialism, and his political writings often reflect an internal critique of socialist regimes rather than a wholesale rejection of socialist principles.

Orwell’s critique of Stalinist totalitarianism is best understood as part of a broader ideological struggle within the socialist movement itself. Specifically, Orwell’s critiques echo the views of Leon Trotsky, a key figure in early Soviet history and one of Stalin’s most prominent critics. Trotsky was a revolutionary Marxist who played a crucial role in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war. He was instrumental in founding the Red Army, which secured the Bolshevik victory over the anti-communist White Army during the Russian Civil War. However, Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” set him at odds with Stalin, who favored the consolidation of socialism in one country—namely, the Soviet Union—before pursuing global revolution. Trotsky’s insistence that socialism must be spread worldwide made him a figure of suspicion within the Soviet hierarchy. In the early 1920s, Stalin consolidated power, leading to Trotsky’s exile in 1929. Despite this, Trotsky continued to oppose Stalin’s policies from abroad, particularly through his writings.

Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism included accusations that Stalin had betrayed the original goals of the Russian Revolution. According to Trotsky, Stalin had established a bureaucratic dictatorship rather than a dictatorship of the proletariat, as envisioned by Marxist theory. He argued that Stalin’s regime represented, not the rule of the working class, but the rise of a privileged bureaucratic elite, a “nomenklatura,” that dominated Soviet society. In addition, Trotsky accused Stalin of fostering a cult of personality, suppressing political opposition, and betraying the internationalist principles of socialism.

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‘Amazon Files’: Emails Show Amazon Caved to Pressure From White House to Suppress Books Critical of Vaccines

In addition to pressuring social media platforms to censor content during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration also worked with Amazon to suppress books questioning the safety or efficacy of vaccines, according to internal emails obtained through a series of subpoenas, Fox Business reported.

The emails — dubbed “The Amazon Files” — were included in a report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

In a June 21 post on X (formerly Twitter), Committee Chair Jim Jordan shared a list of 43 books that Amazon initially added to a newly created “Do Not Promote” class of allegedly anti-vaccine books.

The No. 2 book on the list — “Vaccine Epidemic” — was co-authored and edited by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland, CHD General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg and Louise Kuo Habakus.

The first book on the list is, “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History” by Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk.

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Biden Admin Asked Amazon To Hide Vaccine-Critical Books During Pandemic

The Biden Administration pressured Amazon to hide books for sale on its platform that were critical of vaccines during the pandemic, it has been revealed.

The findings were presented by the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in documents that show Amazon reduced the visibility of titles that the government deemed overly critical of big pharma shots.

The documents show that some books were simply generally critical of vaccines, with several written by medical professionals. Some were even just reviews of scientific studies.

The Federal government compiled a “Do Not Promote” list, to which more than 40 titles were added.

In a series of X posts, Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan explained how internal emails from Amazon contain employees revealed that “the impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration.”

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Was George Orwell defending the Left, the Right or was he simply defending freedom?

No writer’s legacy and approval is so fought over as George Orwell, whose final – and most celebrated – work Nineteen-Eighty-Four was published seventy five years ago this month.

The most influential piece of political fiction in history, such is the success of the dystopian novel that its themes have been recited to death by columnists, often by people I imagine he would have loathed (including me). 

Orwell’s nightmare became a particular focus of conservative commentators from the 1990s with the rise of ‘political correctness’, which might be seen as both a form of politeness and at the same time a way of policing opinions by changing the language. As Orwell’s Newspeak was described, it was to ensure that dissent cannot be voiced because ‘the necessary words were not available’. Newspeak, along with thought police and doublethink, has become a part of our political vocabulary, while even the proles have Big Brother to entertain them. No one can doubt that Orwell has won the final victory, and the struggle for the writer’s soul forms part ofDorian Lynskey’s entertaining and informative The Ministry of Truth, a biography of Nineteen-Eighty-Four which was published at the time of the last significant anniversary. 

Lynskey, a hugely gifted writer who specialises in the relationship between arts and politics, is very much on the Left and sees the modern parallels with the Trumpian disdain for truth, although the great man himself is now often more cited by the Right. Indeed the anniversary was recently celebrated by the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs with a new edition and an introduction by my friend Christopher Snowdon.

Orwell was a paradoxical man, contradictory, sometimes hypocritical (aren’t we all?). In the preface to his book, publisher Victor Gollancz wrote that ‘The truth is that he is at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual. Similarly he is a frightful snob – still (he must forgive me for saying this), and a genuine hater of every form of snobbery.’

As Lynskey writes: ‘Until the end of his life, Orwell acknowledged that microbes of everything he criticised existed in himself. In fact, it was this awareness of his own flaws that inoculated him against utopian delusions of human perfectibility.’

Such awareness is surprisingly rare among intelligent journalists and commentators, especially when ideology takes a grip – and Orwell was introduced to this reality in quite brutal form.

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On the 75th Anniversary of Orwell’s ‘1984’, Five Predictions From The Book That Came True

75 years ago, George Orwell’s novel ‘1984’ was published. In the book, writing became the ultimate act of subversion and we started to see that happening in real life during the pandemic. Fortunately, enough people fought back and a few places, such as Substack, remained where we could express our opinions.

Professor Jean Seaton, Director of The Orwell Foundation, said:

“In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell posed the most terrifying of all questions: could people be brought to really believe (rather than merely pretend to believe) the lies they are told? Seventy-Five years later we are at the start of a roller-coaster experiment with our minds as we battle, rather feebly, to manage the information technologies that already do much to control us and our societies, alongside the resurgence of authoritarianism”.

The pandemic certainly showed us that people could be brought to really believe the lies that they were told.

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When the C.I.A. Turned Writers Into Operatives

Benjamen Walker, the creator and host of “Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything,” is a pod-maker of the mad-scientist variety: he cooks up projects using his own zeal, research, and audacious notions, then unleashes the results on the world. “Theory of Everything,” which originated in 2004, a decade before the podcast boom, has always been intellectually rigorous, funny, and whimsical, with a format that David Carr, the late Times media reporter, once described as “What are we talking about this week? Who knows! Off we go! 1984! The year, not the book.” Recently, Walker released his magnum opus, a nine-episode miniseries called “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” which he started reporting while hunkered down on a French island in the early days of the pandemic. It bears the marks of the feverish isolation of that time, conjuring a mid-century transatlantic world of left-wing intellectuals, the cultural Cold War, the C.I.A., mass culture, high culture, post-colonialism, and a whiff of conspiracy. Fittingly, it begins with “1984”—the book, not the year.

The series takes its name from the Orwell quote “All art is propaganda . . . on the other hand, not all propaganda is art”—an idea, Walker tells us, perhaps best expressed by the 1956 film version of Orwell’s novel, which was “secretly made by the C.I.A.” (This is a truthful simplification.) We hear old newsreel audio describing the film’s glamorous London première, where there were evening gowns, tuxedos, and people dressed as Thought Police. The novel, we recall, is about a totalitarian future, in which the dictator Big Brother controls and mass-surveils the populace; it ends with its once rebellious hero, Winston Smith, accepting his love for Big Brother. The 1956 film had two versions: one faithful to the novel, the other with a “happy” ending, for European audiences, screened at the première. (In it, Smith defiantly yells “Down with Big Brother!” in front of a Lenin-style propaganda poster, then dies in a hail of secret-police gunfire.) Walker chats with the British historian Tony Shaw, who argues that the U.S. government thought the movie’s “twist” made it more “anti-Soviet.” Nikita Khrushchev had just announced his policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the West, and Walker believes that the film was the West’s unofficial response. “Peaceful coexistence: not an option,” he says. “Only freedom or death.”

It’s a zesty beginning, meant to draw us into the heart of Walker’s project: a group biography, as he calls it, of the writers Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Richard Wright, whose trajectories help to illuminate the shadowy maneuverings of the cultural Cold War between 1956 and 1960. (Macdonald and Tynan contributed to The New Yorker.) All three men’s lives intersect with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a lavishly funded anti-Communist organization secretly set up by the C.I.A. and headquartered in Europe, which sponsored conferences, literary magazines, art exhibitions, and other projects. Macdonald, an ornery American essayist, was a critic of Stalin and totalitarianism, and then a critic of paranoid McCarthyism. Tynan, the influential British theatre critic for The Observer, lustily called for political engagement in art, for dissent, and for “anti-anti-Americanism”; during the series’ time frame, he lives in London and New York. Wright, the American novelist and essayist (“Native Son,” “Uncle Tom’s Children”), was living in Paris, where he had moved in the forties, partly for the freedom from American racism. An anti-Communist former Communist, he was involved in many C.C.F. projects, and contended with his literary antagonist and fellow-expatriate James Baldwin, who was on the C.C.F.’s radar, too.

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Anger As Shakespeare Plays Infested With Trigger Warnings

Productions of Shakespeare plays in the UK have had “content guidance” trigger warnings placed on them, prompting a backlash.

Recent productions of Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London have seen audiences being forewarned that the plays contain “depictions of suicide, and scenes of violence and war.”

The warnings have also prepared audiences to expect “misogynoir references,” a made up mashed together term for misogyny and discrimination against black people.

Theatre goers have blasted the move as ridiculous.

Actors Ralph Fiennes and Ian McKellen both recently slammed the trend, noting that people shouldn’t be mollycoddled when it comes to theatre.

Fiennes recently noted “There are very disturbing scenes in Macbeth, terrible murders and things, but I think the impact of theatre is that you should be shocked and you should be disturbed. I don’t think you should be prepared for these things and when I was young we never had trigger warnings before a show.”

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New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco

Yesterday, a team of specialists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico, led by the historians Baltazar Brito Guadarrama and María Castañeda de la Paz, the philologist Michel Oudijk, and the Nahuatl specialist Rafael Tena, presented to the public the discovery of three new Aztec codices, collectively known as the Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco, formerly a part of the Culhuacan polity of Central Mexico, and nowadays located within the Iztapalapa borough in Mexico City. This is one of the most exciting and spectacular discoveries regarding codical sources in recent years, and is no doubt closely related to the topic of this blog. The discovery has been already covered by the Mexican press and explained in detail in yesterday’s presentation at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which can be seen in Youtube. However, an English summary will be presented for the readers of this blog.

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Government Funded Study Claims Shakespeare Made Theatre ‘Too White, Male And Cisgender’

A study funded by the British government to the tune of almost a million pounds claims that William Shakespeare, one of foremost the literary icons in history, has been disproportionately represented and has enabled “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives” to dominate theatre.

The study, by academics at the University of Roehampton, was funded by the government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and essentially claims that Shakespeare is not diverse enough.

The Telegraph reports that the overseer of the study, Andy Kesson, complains that “masculinity and nationalism were crucial motivating factors in the rise of Shakespeare as the arbiter of literary greatness” adding that “[w]e need to be much, much more suspicious of Shakespeare’s place in contemporary theatre”.

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Pastor Removed From Meeting By Police For Reading Pornographic Book Available In School Library

A pastor who has made it his mission to expose sexually graphic material that is being made available in schools was forcibly removed from a high school in Midland, Texas by police officers Tuesday after reading aloud explicit passages from a book available to children in the library there.

Pastor John K. Amanchukwu Sr. read aloud passages from for around three minutes from a 1996 book titled PUSH by American author Sapphire before his mic was cut, he was asked to leave by administrators, and escorted out by five police officers.

As you can hear, the book contains graphic descriptions of child rape that are patently unsuitable for high school kids to read.

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