Posted on 06/01/2004 5:27:52 PM PDT by doug from upland
Another beautiful find... thanks much for the ping!
I was forced to read ALL of the books you mentioned and it was a VERY painful episode in my education.The teacher was MAD for dos Passos;damned near genuflected every time she said his name.YUCK!
Thanks for the ping. I'm enjoying reading these and I'm sending them around to my email list
Prairie
ping
Not true. He was a socialist but left the Left because of their devotion to Stalin in spite of his atrocities. He loathed the Left for covering up for him. He split with the Left after the Spanish Civil War and went on to write in praise of American democracy, Jefferson, etc. He wrote great novels of outrage against the system, including sticking up for the little guy against the union goons in MidCentury and against the super-government of the New Deal in District of Columbia.
Even the USA trilogy and works before are hardly communist. As we say to New York Times journalists, check your sources.
Not a commie - the Reds always sickened him, even though he rubbed shoulders with them as a Leftie. I'm sorry your teacher made you read USA - I happen to like those books but can understand why they'd stick in your throat, especially if you were forced to read them. You ought to read "Adventures of a Young Man" if he want to see how he viewed the Marxist crowd in later years (later? - it was published in 1939).
To me USA was mostly opposed to the collusion between banks, big business, big government, and jingoistic big media. I imagine most workers today, union and non-union, enjoy many benefits that were unheard of when company goons were killing strikers in coal country and outside auto plants. Those are the times he was writing his early stuff in.
I don't believe that Orwell was ever a strident commie. He made the distinction between socialism and communism. He was always an avid socialist...but he was a rabid anti-Stalinist.
What an interesting find that was.
Thanks, Doug. Bookmarked & bumped.
See DFU's post #34. In the 20's and early 30's while not formally a CPUSA member he was certainly aiding and abetting the cause. During the later 30's and 40's he was still a "man of the left" a la Christopher Hitchens but like Hitchens began to show streaks of Libertarianism. Where he was exactly in 1945 was anybodys guess but he was almost certainly not a conservative.
Basically what he was doing here is a call for the establishment of what eventually became the Marshall Plan.( A Big Government/Statist program if ever I saw one.)
bump for later reading
The media has done its homework. They're well aware of effectiveness of "The Big Lie" method: Tell a lie long enough and loud enough and it becomes the truth.
It's enough to keep me awake nights.
WWII Quagmire Ping..............
Whoops, I didn't know it had been posted before.
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