Those quotes from Orwell finally makes clear to me why he deserves to be
despised.
William Mandel
Uriah768@aol.com wrote:
> As long as we are using Orwell for our own purposes here, I thought I
> would share a few other quotes from him...just for fun. :-)
>
> "Insofar as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on
> the side of the Nazis, and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side
> of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in
> countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more
> effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively, the pacifist is
> pro-Nazi." George Orwell, from a review of Alex Comfort's book "No Such
> Liberty: No Not One", Adelphi, October 1941
>
> Another...this time from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism, 1945:
> "There is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though
> unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and
> admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down
> to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely
> at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they
> do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed
> almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do
> not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in
> defense of western countries."
>
>
========================================================
Do you teach in the social sciences? Consider my SAYING NO TO POWER
(Creative Arts, Berkeley, 1999), for course use. It was written as a
social history of the U.S. for the past three-quarters of a century
through the eyes of a participant observer in most progressive social
movements (I'm 84), and of the USSR from the
standpoint of a Sovietologist (five earlier books) knowing that country
longer than any other in the profession. Therefore it is also a history
of the Cold War. Positive reviews in The Black Scholar, American
Studies in Scandinavia, San Francisco Chronicle, forthcoming in Tikkun,
etc. Chapters are up at http://www.billmandel.net
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