[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
Of course we know nothing about what his opinions might have evolved into by the mid-50’s. That isn’t the point. We know very well what they were. In other words, you’re the one taking the leap here, offering a counterfactual vis-a-vis what may have happened had he lived longer. Maybe he becomes a conservative…I mean, why not, it’s unprovable. Maybe he becomes a Jain. Or a fascist. Maybe he overthrows Stalin and sets himself up as the Soviet strongman. Maybe he falls desperately in love with a turtle. No way to know.
[/quote]
Russell Kirk: ‘Orwell was a leftist by accident. His instincts were more aristocratic than egalitarian…When a man like Orwell begins to see what State Socialism really must become in the age that is dawning, he writes 1984, grits his teeth, and dies.’[/quote]
Historiography–the “curls in the squat rack” of historical understanding. I proffer a notion from the man himself, and you return with Kirk? This is risible revisionist drivel. Absolute nonsense.
Wait, you found a conservative who’d like to claim Orwell for himself? Oh, Orwell must have been a conservative then.
No. He was a democratic socialist, and staunchly anti-Soviet. And that’s it. I have quote upon quote upon quote to back that up–and I’m talking “from the horse’s mouth,” not second-hand “interpretation.”
The thing about history as an academic discipline is that anybody can argue anything, and fame and riches are awarded to the people who argue the most counter-intuitive bullshit possible. Strange and desperate positions can be gotten away with pretty easily. More importantly to the present discussion: The people you’re writing about…they’re dead. So you get a whole lot of extra leeway vis-a-vis the “truth” that a journalist, for example, doesn’t enjoy. Thus you have the spouting of much nonsense–Mark Twain was gay, Charles Martel was a descendant of Christ, etc.
Or will you accept it at face value in a decade or two when I come to you with the discipline’s canonized interpretation of Bush and the Iraq War? I promise you you won’t like it. How about of the Vietnam War? Reagan? How about this one:
“Alexis de Tocqueville is not easily characterized as either a liberal or a conservative. In this respect he resembles Edmund Burke.” --Lakoff, Review of Politics, 1998
So, Burke was no conservative. I mean, I found a guy sayin’ so–and he’s talking about modern politics, not politics contemporary to Burke. And he said that. And that’s all it takes, right?
Yes, and the Treaty of Versailles started WWII by fomenting nationalist irredentism in Germany, eh? And the United States started 9/11 by supporting Israel?
The chains stretch back forever. In general, the first guy to shoot is the one who most deserves to be thought of as having “started” it. Not always, but in general. And certainly here.
I’m not turning this into an Iraq War discussion, but suffice it to say that almost every informed observer–and I’m talking both sides of the aisle–considers it to have been an eminently stupid disaster–a bonfire of wealth and human life with very little got in return–and further considers Bush to have dropped the first bombs out of almost nowhere.
By the way, I’m perfectly confident that O’Brien could have made a pretty attractive case as to how and why Eurasia had been the one to “start” the war.
I said “does not apply,” not “does not count.” As in, an acknowledgement that Afghanistan is not evidence of what I’m talking about. This seems obvious.