(Source.)
Well, I can see how summarizing 1984 as ‘useless’ is a slight overreaction. If nothing else, 1984 at least serves as a model for how neoliberals misunderstand, oversimplify, or caricature almost all illiberal societies.
Nevertheless, what makes Animal Farm and 1984 so frustrating is the overwhelming number of adults who treat them as acceptable substitutes for actually studying history. George Orwell was neither a historian nor a political scientist, and he never even visited the U.S.S.R. As far as I know, he based his misunderstanding of the U.S.S.R. on the capitalist media’s newspapers, so his caricature thereof in 1984 is garbage in, garbage out. No-one should use his fiction as a means of understanding any society, but this is exactly what neoliberals and social democrats recommend.
Being an anarchist, I can’t recommend ‘banning’ any books, but eventually we shall live in a society that has no need to promote Animal Farm and 1984 to death, and institutions shall be promoting books that are more relevant and more useful for ordinary people; we would be better off if Orwell’s fiction were relegated to the bin of fringe literature rather than the mass-produced and widely recommended works that they are today.
Banning books is the act of sniveling fascists and if you support that or are indifferent to it, I have some bad news for you.
We’ve got a regular Kyle Broflovski on our hands, don’t we? What an insight. You don’t have to read much history to understand that while the Fascists did ban many books, book-banning is a phenomenon that occurred centuries before Benito Mussolini & alii were even born. Logically, this would also imply that those who prohibit Fascist literature are theirselves ‘sniveling fascists’, which is patent nonsense (even if I can agree that banning any literature is misguided at best).
I get why everyone is dumping on Orwell in here but 1. Homage to Catalonia rocks and 2. I instinctively recoil against the idea that a novel is "useless" for whatever reason. its use is to be read! if you have an issue with the readers, have at it.
The issue with Homage to Catalonia is that, after reading it, you’re left with the sense that the Soviet role in the civil war was to crush the “true revolutionaries” when the reality is that the only power willing to support the republicans was the Soviets and the main reason the republicans lost was the British strong-arming the French into remaining neutral.
He turns the communists into the enemy when they were, in fact, the only ally.
It’s typical faux-leftism that only supports revolutionaries who have been defeated. And, in the case of Homage to Catalonia, the POUM were twice defeated and thus twice as deserving of romanticism and praise in the eyes of bourgeois leftist Orwell.
He was a British aristocrat on tour. He didn’t spend his time fighting. He says himself he spent most of his time drinking wine and was based in Aragon far from the front and he left before the war came close. His only impact in Spain was to spin Soviet support for the struggle against fascism into a criticism of the USSR.
He criticizes “leftist infighting” by supporting exactly one faction against the united front. See him for who was. An aristocratic propagandist and this poisons all his works, just as his racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, colonialism, and practice ofremoved women poisons his works as well.
I didn't read it as or expect it to be a definitive read on the conflict, I expected a very readable and surely biased memoir from someone who was present for some events, and lucid enough to write about the experience of being shot in the neck. Not everything I read is a matter of strict political education, and why should it be?
Why should a book by George Orwell about the Spanish Civil War be read politically? Is that really a question you’re asking?
Down & Out in Paris and London and Burma Days were very informative and taught me much.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon's poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line ‘Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres’ by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man's experience.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.’ He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart’ hotels.
To sum up. A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the plongeur because it is his case I have been considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only my own ideas about the basic facts of a plongeur's life, made without reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one's head by working in an hotel. Orwell did what we would today call poverty tourism, by voluntarily entering the working class and working in a hotel as a laborer, plongeur. Then he went to London and stayed in the houses of the poor, in which you were only allowed to stay one night. Thus they had to tramp to the next one. Following a path around England, constantly on the move.