Posted on 08/21/2012 11:31:07 PM PDT by Olog-hai
When the George Orwell Memorial Trust proposed a statue of the writer for outside the BBC’s new headquarters it expected an enthusiastic response.
However, not everyone appeared enamored of the plan.
According to Baroness Bakewell, who is backing the campaign, Mark Thompson, the Corporation’s outgoing director general, said the statue could not be erected on BBC premises because Orwell was “too Left-wing”. …
Orwell worked for the BBC’s Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943, producing broadcasts to India designed to counter Nazi propaganda. … His experience at the BBC became unlikely source material for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell is said to have based Room 101 on a conference room at Broadcasting House where he attended staff meetings. …
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
George Orwell was anti-communist, anti-peacenicks who he called objectively pro-nazi, even though he was a socialist
Yet here’s this Mark Thompson feller trying to depict Orwell as to the left of Stalin, after a fashion.
Until such time things will remain double-plus-ungood.
George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, the definitive anti-communist novel today
The truth of the matter is that they probably find his staunch defence of liberty and his hostility to ‘political correctness’ more offensive than his left-wing views, which would probably be to the right of those of Mark Thompson anyway...
Huh? The writer of 1984 and Animal Farm too left wing?
The comrades do not forget or forgive. Orwell committed the unpardonable sin of telling the truth about Stalinists.
Orwell considered himself a Socialist. If you have any doubt read The Road to Wigan Pier. He was though a socialist in a time when most of the working class in England were underpaid and worked in horrible unsafe conditions. Really he was a decent man who wanted his countrymen to be treated well and for them to have some hope in life.
He lived amongst the poor of Britain for well over a year and lived the lives that they lived so he knew what he was talking about.
Even todays Liberals make him look decidedly middle of the road to right-wing.
Mel
Something has gone terribly wrong if one of history’s great writers worked at your company and you don’t want to associate your brand with his genius, a little.
Actually he was an anarchist - basically someone who has reached an individualist anti-statist position by journeying from the left as opposed to the right. The philosophy is an unbelievably naive one that utterly discounts the realities of Human psychology, but it does mean that he was very anti-communist. Well anti-stalinist anyway.
One of the leading anti-American, commie-loving broadcast companies in the world the BBC, that is so left-wing that it makes NBC look like Fox News. There is a reason why the limeys call it Al Beebeezeera.
And I agree, as I had a term paper in my university useless curriculum LIT101, and Orwell was my subject. Orwell, I noticed had the same awakening as Ayn Rand had about communism.
He also wrote “homage to catalonia” and “the road to Wigan Pier”, and “Animal Farm”, although it mostly targets communism, is also highly critical of both western civilisation and organised religion as well.
Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. — Robert A. Heinlein
Nice quote!
Mel
I think they are confused by the fact that Obama’s dystopian models in Animal Farm and 1984 are being used as a blueprint by Obama and other far left tyrant wannabes. Orwell was warning about communism and big government, not advocating it.
And Paris too, and chronicled it in one of the best books I have ever read (many of which were also written by Orwell).
It’s just another example of British humor: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Orwell is Right-Wing.
How long before the BBC starts calling the island of Britain “Airstrip One” in that case . . . ?
oops...meant to say
It’s just another example of British humor: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Orwell is Left-Wing.
The BBC is filled with piggies who walk upright while sneering down their snouts at those who pay their way.
speaking of piggies I wonder if Biden was making reference to Animal Farm when he called GOP piggies - the irony
It is one of the few of Orwell’s writings that I have not read. I read most of his stuff in a spurt but by the time I had waded through 1984, Animal Farm, Keep the Apsidistra Flying, Burmese Days, The Clergyman’s Daughter and then The Road to Wigan Pier I couldn’t bear to read on. That was over 20 years ago but I will take up the challenge and read Down and Out in Paris and London on your recommendation.
Mel
and by stuff I meant books - I don’t even want to contemplate the rest of his writings, poems, articles.
I wouldn’t describe him as an anarchist. He definitely believed in state institutions, including the monarchy, albeit in the purely practical sense that it generally prevented charismatic demagogues like Hitler and Stalin from building a personality cult inspiring personal loyalty to them and seizing power.
Nah, Orwell was definitely left-wing, just not in the controlling, totalitarian sense. He described himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ in times before the British welfare state came into being when Britain’s poor really did have an absolute dog’s life.
Whether he would describe himself as left wing and a socialist in today’s Britain with its over-generous welfare state and its arrogant non-working underclass is open to debate...
Well, he fought with the POUM in the Spanish Civil War as part of the international brigades. I’m sure he rated the monarchy above Hitler and Stalin, but then what happens when Hitler and Stalin were beaten and gone?
Darn right - spot on Oz. If we could only get rid of these stupid left-wing/right-wing labels (now totally obsolete) and get the real political divisions instead...
I don’t think every one who fought for the POUM was a true anarchist. If you were pro-liberty and anti-communist as well as anti-fascist but really wanted to stop Franco, the POUM was probably the faction to join.
Finally got around to reading ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’. It is a wonderful read and well worth your recommendation. The pace seems to skip along and unlike (Road to Wigan Pier) it does not get bogged down in facts or pity. I to like his simple fixes at the end and rather than proposing to give people money or better treatment his main push was to provide men with meaningful work.
Mel
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