Posted on 08/11/2018 8:11:33 AM PDT by Mark was here
“...most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a classless society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige.”
“For every person there [International Labor Party meeting], male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry, and disgusted; some, I think, would have fled holding their noses.”
The fact is that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types. On the one hand you have the warm-hearted un-thinking Socialist, the typical working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilization down the sink and is quite willing to do so. And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from the middle class, and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that. Still more unfortunately, it includes - so much so that to an outsider it even appears to be composed of - the kind of people I have been discussing; the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the more-water-in-your-beer reformers of whom Shaw is the prototype, and the astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they will be Fascists five years hence, because it is all the go, and that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat.
I think of this when I read the word "progressive". Orwell was himself a passionate socialist when he wrote the book - 1933 - largely because the communists hadn't tried to kill him in Spain yet. He wasted (IMHO) the last two chapters of TRTWP ranting that socialism was the only cure for fascism, forgetting, I think, that he'd pretty much disproved that in the first ten chapters. Interesting stuff.
Another convinced socialist who came to realize what the thing really involved was Oscar Wilde. You seldom hear that from his largely liberal fans. This is Wilde from his Soul Of Man Under Socialism:
High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising.
And yet today progressive ranters are once again shrieking about Democracy as a pious ideal. These issues are very old.
I was thinking about this after reading about someone attacking Mike Rowe, for being “anti-intellectual”. Reminded me of the intellectuals who hold in contempt those they claim to be one of and defend.
Meant as critiques of Socialism, Kankles loved ‘em as “how-to” manuals...
In what book does Orwell talk about college professors with patches “on their jacket elbows”, who claim to “be for the working man” yet in reality they hold themselves to be of a higher class status than the mere working man?
The old rocker wore his hair too long
Wore his trouser cuffs too tight
Unfashionable to the end drank his ale too light
Death’s head belts buckle, yesterday’s dreams
The transport caf’ prophet of doom
Ringing no change in his double sewn seams
In his post-war babe gloom
Now he’s too old to rock ‘n’ roll
But he’s too young to die
Yes, he’s too old to rock ‘n’ roll
But he’s too young to die
....
Too Old to Rock ‘N’ Roll: Too Young to Die
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwn0R1PFUwU
Animal Farm & 1984 were HIllary’s favorite books when she was growing up.
_________________
Hillary Clinton! They ain’t training manuals!!
She thinks they are training manuals.
CDid a quick search and didn’t find it - if it ain’t readily available on the internet, it ain’t real...ask Facebook....
In Homage to Catalonia I couldn’t figure out who the bad guys.
##############
The answer was ‘D. All of the above.’ Usually a safe default answer in the Spanish Civil War, especially on the Red side.
Orwell joined with a Trotskyite faction, POUM, with whom Trotsky had issues because the left is always cannibalizing itself. Later, Stalin’s influence was so overwhelming that those Moscow backed factions tried to liquidate the Trotskyites, who were caught between the Nationalists and the Redder-Than-You-Pinko Reds of the government and USSR’s hmmm... I’m going to call them ‘NGOs’. That murderous treachery was the event that crystallized Orwell’s anti-Statist thought, and led to Animal Farm and all the rest.
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