My friends who are veterans of the Lincoln Brigade would agree. Bill
Mandel
Sorrento95@aol.com wrote:
> To my horror, in 1998 I read an AP news story which disclosed the fact that George Orwell himself was a snitch. He was turning in the names of communists to British state police.
>
> This fact caused me no longer to revere Orwell, and to see his novel 1984 in an entirely different light. I think Orwell somewhat identified with the lead character Winston Smith, and was expressing his own darkest fears of what would happen to him if he didn't become a rat. Orwell had left-wing leanings, and therefore had reasons to fear repression. Smith, in retaliation for his own minor defiance against the regime, was tortured and later executed in the novel.
>
> Another motive for Orwell was (I speculate) that he was attempting to clear his own conscience for having been a police state rat by writing a novel which would be seen as a warning and condemnation of police states.
>
> As for me, I don't buy it. A rat is a rat, even though some rats might be talented writers.
>
> -- Michael Wright
> Norman, Oklahoma
>
>
>
-- ======================================================== 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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