The Postel Service: May 2003 Archives

May 20, 2003

George Orwell at 100

The Chicago Tribune
May 20, 2003

Free thought flows at George Orwell's 100th birthday bash

By Danny Postel
Special to the Tribune

WELLESLEY, Mass. -- The business of intellectuals, George Orwell once quipped, is that of "mutual arse-licking." So it wouldn't stretch the imagination much to divine his thoughts on the three days of adulation that intellectuals heaped on him at a recent conference to mark his 100th birthday.

The author of "1984" and "Animal Farm" was hailed as the 20th Century's patron saint of intellectual courage. A champion of lucid prose. A prophetic voice against some of the most sweeping political movements of the modern world. The creator of such chillingly apt terms as "Big Brother," "thought police" and "doublethink," which have become so ingrained in the English lexicon that many know them without ever having read "1984."

The irony did not go unnoticed. "We don't do that most skeptical of figures a favor by adopting such a reverential attitude toward him," said author David Rieff, one of the speakers at the confabulation, which was, according to the organizers, the biggest Orwell gathering ever held.

But such chiding was pretty much drowned out as close to 300 Orwell devotees from all over the world gathered at Wellesley College earlier this month to celebrate the iconoclastic British writer and to ponder how his work remains pertinent today.

Irony was to be found elsewhere in the conference too. After hearing "The Orwell Mystique" author Daphne Patai declare Orwell a misogynist during one session, a student at the women's college posted a message on the school's electronic bulletin board challenging Thomas Cushman, the Wellesley sociology professor who organized the conference.

How, her message asked indignantly, could a conference about the work of a misogynist take place at a women's college? A protest of the event soon was spreading rapidly across the campus via e-mail.

Full of contradictions

Meanwhile at the conference, Patai's contention that Orwell was a misogynist became the subject of considerable debate. Other scholars argued that while Orwell might have been a sexist, he was certainly no misogynist; one speaker even held that there were feminist motifs in his writing. Virtually all agreed that if ever there was a writer full of contradictions, it was Orwell. But such nuances went unreported in Wellesley's cyber-commons.

Instead, a blanket condemnation of the event and its cause celebre was issued, leaving Cushman and others feeling that the thought police were alive and well. Combating the "orthodoxies of the academic world," Cushman remarked, is a struggle in an "Orwellian key."

In the conference's keynote address, journalist Christopher Hitchens also made a case for "Why Orwell Matters" (the title of his most recent book) even today. With respect to what he called the three biggest questions of the 20th Century -- fascism, Stalinism and imperialism -- not only was Orwell right, he said, but he was way ahead of the pack in seeing all three "isms" for what they truly were.

While opposing Nazism and communism seems like a no-brainer now, the fact is that very few of Orwell's contemporaries opposed both simultaneously and as early on as he did, according to Hitchens and others at the conference.

Orwell's timing was among his most striking attributes. He wrote "Animal Farm," a savage satire on Stalin's Russia, at a point when sympathy for the Soviet Union in the West was at an all-time high -- in the middle of World War II, when Moscow was an official Anglo-American ally.

He paid a price for cutting against that grain: "Animal Farm," though now a classic, was rejected by publisher after publisher. Orwell, in fact, had grave doubts about whether it would ever see the light of day.

Though "1984" went on to sell millions of copies and is regarded by many as among the most influential books of the 20th Century, Orwell pushed himself to the brink of death completing it in 1949, and by all accounts would have been stunned at its posthumous success.

And what many consider Orwell's most powerful work, "Homage to Catalonia" -- his account of the Spanish Civil War -- sold only 700 copies in his lifetime.

Relevance to today

Much of the discussion at the Wellesley conference sought not only to revisit Orwell the historical figure, but also to relate him to present-day issues.

Cushman suggested that Orwell's stance on the war in Iraq likely would have been fraught with complexity. As an anti-fascist, said Cushman, Orwell would have been decidedly against Saddam Hussein, but as an anti-capitalist, he would have been against President Bush. As a critic of pacifism, he would have taken issue with the anti-war movement, but as a devout civil libertarian, he would have big problems with John Ashcroft too.

Such frictions speak to the fiercely independent spirit of Orwell's thinking.

One of the most famous anti-communists was a man not of the right but of the left -- a self-described democratic socialist.

Referring to Orwell's early stint as a police officer in Burma, an experience that made the Englishman queasy about the British Empire, literary critic Jonathan Rose characterized him as having "the soul of an anarchist trapped in the body of a colonial policeman."

These seeming inconsistencies in Orwell have long made him appealing to what Rieff called a "strangely broad constituency." How many other political thinkers are claimed by both neoconservatives and liberals, by leftists as well as libertarians?

Yet Orwell's appeal goes beyond all of this, participants at the conference agreed. What makes people want to read him today, with the Cold War over and the curtain seemingly drawn on most of the world he described, is the visceral sense of passion and immediacy that leap off the pages of books such as "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier."

"What parlor intellectuals only fantasized about, Orwell lived," said journalist Jim Sleeper. Orwell took menial jobs and lived among destitute workers. He also took up arms.

Not content merely to write about fascism, he went to Spain, volunteered with an independent radical militia that fought against both Franco's fascists and Stalin's communists), and took a bullet through his throat that just about finished him off.

His life-risking commitment to the truth, said journalist Ian Williams, is an urgently needed tonic at a time when "collective memory is being pulverized by a tidal wave of 24-hour trivia and sound bites."

Hitchens continues to assign "1984" to his students, he explained, "because I want to see if it still frightens them."

"It still does."

Posted by Danny at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2003

Cuba and the Left

The Democratic Left Speaks Out on Cuba

We are women and men of the democratic left, united by our commitment to human rights, democratic government and social justice, in our own nations and around the world. In solidarity with the people of Cuba, we condemn the Cuban state's current repression of independent thinkers and writers, human rights activists and democrats.

For "crimes" such as the authorship of essays critical of the government and meeting with delegations of foreign political leaders, some 80 nonviolent political dissidents have been arrested, summarily tried in a closed court without adequate notice or counsel, convicted and given cruel, harsh sentences of decades of imprisonment. These are violations of the most elementary norms of due process of law, reminiscent of the Moscow trials of the Soviet Union under the rule of Stalin.

The democratic left worldwide has opposed the US embargo on Cuba as counterproductive, more harmful to the interests of the Cuban people than helpful to political democratization. The Cuban state's current repression of political dissidents amounts to collaboration with the most reactionary elements of the US Administration in their efforts to maintain sanctions and to institute even more punitive measures against Cuba.

The only conclusion that we can draw from this brute repression is that the Cuban government does not trust the Cuban people to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from disinformation. A government of the left must have the support of the people: It must guarantee human rights and champion the widest possible democracy, including the right to dissent, as well as promote social justice. By its actions, the Cuban state declares that it is not a government of the left, despite its claims of social progress in education and health care, but just one more dictatorship, concerned with maintaining its monopoly of power above all else.

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La izquierda democrática se expresa sobre Cuba

Nosotros somos mujeres y hombres de la izquierda democrática, unidos por un avenimiento a los derechos humanos, al gobierno democrático y la justicia social, tanto en nuestras propias naciones como en todo el mundo. En solidaridad con el pueblo cubano, denunciamos la represión actual del gobierno de Cuba contra los intelectuales y escritores independientes, activistas de derechos humanos y la democracia.

Por haber cometido “crímenes” tales como escribir ensayos criticando al gobierno y reuinirse con delegaciones de líderes políticos extranjeros, 80 disidentes políticos no violentos han sido arrestados, procesados en juicios sumarios en una corte cerrada sin notificación y sin representacion legal adecuada, juzgados culpables y dados crueles sentencias de décadas en prisión. Estas son violaciones de las normas más fundamentales del debido proceso legal, evocador de los juicios fraudulentos de Moscú de la Unión Sovietica bajo el régimen de Stalin.

La izquierda democrática mundial se ha opuesto al bloqueo estadounidense contra Cuba como contraproductivo, más dañino a los intereses del pueblo cubano que contribuyente a la democratización política. La represión actual del estado cubano contra los disidentes políticos equivale a una colaboración con los elementos más reaccionarios de la administración estadounidense en sus esfuerzas para mantener el bloqueo e instituir medidas aun más punitivas contra Cuba.

Lo único que se puede concluir de esta represión brutal es que el gobierno cubano no confia que el pueblo cubano pueda distinguir la verdad de las mentiras, el hecho de la desinformación. Un gobierno de la izquierda debería de tener el apoyo del pueblo. Debería de garantizar los derechos humanos y promover la más amplia democracia possible, incluyendo el derecho de disentir tanto como promover la justicia social. Con sus acciones, el estado cubano declara que no es un gobierno de la izquierda, a pesar de sus declaraciones del progreso social en la educación y el cuidado médico sino que otra dictadura mas que todo preocupada por mantener su monopolio de poder.

Theresa Alt
Eric Alterman
Ayaz Ahmed
David Anderson
Kevin Anderson
Hugh Appet
Leah Appet
Stanley Aronowitz
Tony Avirgan
Margot Backus
Asatar Bair
Sanda Balaban
Joanne Barkan
Ike Balbus
Ivan Baxter
Marshall Berman
Paul Berman
David Bensman
Michael Bérubé
Ken Brociner
Dan Brook
Geoffrey Brown
Ricardo Brown
Wendy Brown
Wayles Browne
Chaz Bufe
Tristan Call
Eamonn Callan
Lorenzo Canizares
Leo Casey
Natasha Chart
Aaron Cohen
Mitchell Cohen
Walter Cole
Mike Conley
Marc Cooper
Ciaran Cronin
Francesco D'Alessandro
Peter Danbury
Jackie Danicki
Lennard Davis
Bogdan Denitch
Bill Dixon
Mark Dow
Mel Dubofsky
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
Taner Edis
Eli Edwards
Stuart Elliot
Victoria Elliott
Itzhak Epstein
Andy English
Cynthia Epstein
Miriam Erlich
Gertrude Ezorsky
Hampton Fancher
Michelle Fine
Barry Finger
Joyce Fitzgerald
Merrill R. Frank
Nancy Fraser
David Garrow
Peter Gay
Joyce Gelb
Todd Gitlin
Ernest Glinne
Peter Goodman
Bud Gordon
Robert J. Grocholski
J-C Gumucio-Castellon
Andrew Hagen
Laura Hague
Adil Hajjoubi
Andrew Hammer
Matthew Harwood
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Richard Healey
Michael Hirsch
Peter Hudis
Gerry Hudson
Karen Huggins
James Hughes
Maurice Isserman
Doug Ireland
David Jacobs
Martin Jay
Alan Johnson
Carol Joyner
M. Kaplan
Ira Katznelson
Harvey Kaye
Art Kazar
Michael Kazin
Gary Kent
Michael Kircher
Eric Kirk
Gary Kinsman
Peter Kosenko
Nell Lancaster
Magali Sarfatti Larson
Eric Lee
Lee Levin
Jeffrey Levine
Mark Levinson
Ernie Lieberman
Ann Lieberman
Melvin Little
Brian L. Linse
Chris Lowe
Josh Lukin
Paul Lyons
Anora Mahmudova
John G. Mason
Marvin and Betty Mandell
Pamela McCarthy
Duane L. McCormick
Shannon McLeod
R. Miles Mendenhall
Mark Crispin Miller
Jeremy Miller
Nicolaus Mills
Erika Munk
Cary Nathenson
Nathan Newman
Adam Pappas
Rick Perlstein
Rafael PiRoman
Maxine Phillips
David Plotke
Stephen Plowden
Katha Pollitt
Danny Postel
Samantha Power
Adam Przeworski
Michael Pugliese
Jeremy Reff
Peter Reardon
David Richardson
Tony Cas Ringley
Skip Roberts
Matthew Rothschild
Rita Rousseau
Joel Rogers
Michele L. Rossi
A. F. Saidy
Nick Salvatore
John Sanbonmatsu
Sherie Scheer
Anders Schneiderman
Joseph M. Schwartz
Jason Schulman
Michael H. Shuman
Timothy Sears
Mark Seddon
David Norman Smith
Robert J Smith III
John Soldini
Gus St. Anthony
Clifford Staples
Judith Stein
Paul Thomas
Eric Umansky
Rick Vaill
Andrew Vierra
Michelle Wade Taylor
Daniel Walkowitz
David Walls
Michael Walzer
Bert Wand
Diane Warth
Peter Waterman
Luke Weiger
Alma Whitten
D. Langlois Williams
Ian Williams
Ellen Willis
Reginald Wilson
Jim Woods
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Robert H. Zieger