(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?