The Betrayl of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchen's and the New American Century

by Scott Lucas

Overview

Since his death in 1950, George Orwell has been canonised as England's foremost political writer, and the standard-bearer of honesty and decency for the honourable 'Left'. In this controversial polemic, Scott Lucas argues that the exaltation of Orwell, far from upholding dissent against the State, has sought to quash such opposition. Indeed, Orwell has become the icon of those who, in the pose of the contrarian, try to silence public opposition to US and U K foreign policy in the 'War on Terror'.Lucas's lively and readable critique of public intellectuals including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, David Aaronovitch, and Johann Hari – who have all invoked Orwellian honesty and decency to shut down dissent – will appeal to anyone disillusioned with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Lucas contends that these leading journalists and commentators have used Orwell to justify their own political transition from radicals to upholders of the establishment. All of them play influential roles in supporting the UK and US governments' charge that opponents of war -- and those who question the motives behind American foreign policy and its implementation -- should be condemned as 'appeasers of mass murder'.This controversial book shows how Orwell has been used since 9/11 to justify, in the guise of independent thought, the suppression of dissent. We must rescue ourselves from Orwell and from those who take on his guise so, as Lucas puts it, our ‘silencing is… vital to a "manufacture of consent" for the wars which are supposedly being fought in our name and for our good’.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745321981
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	02/20/2004
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Scott Lucas is a regular contributor to the New Statesman. He is Professor of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham and author of numerous books on US and British foreign policy, intelligence services, culture and ideology. He is the author of Orwell: LIfe and Times (2003).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Orwell, Policeman of the 'Left'

In 1942 the American journal Partisan Review set up a debate between three pacifists, D.S. Savage, Alex Comfort and George Woodcock, and the pacifist-turned-patriotic warrior George Orwell on 'Pacifism and the War'.

Savage was a poet who held to pacifism as a 'moral phenomenon' and who claimed (as had Orwell up to 1940) that Britain's prosecution of the war was leading to Fascism at home rather than vanquishing it abroad. Comfort, destined for fame as the author of The Joy of Sex, was a physician, novelist, poet and 'aggressive anti-militarist', who added that in this environment, 'It looks as if Mr Orwell and his warlike friends were being not objectively but constructively supporters of the entire philosophical apparatus which they quite genuinely detest.' It was the anarchist Woodcock, however, who laid the most damaging charge:

If we are to expose antecedents, Orwell does not come off very well. Comrade Orwell, the former police officer of British imperialism (from which the Fascists learnt all they know) in those regions of the Far East where the sun at last sets for ever on the bedraggled Union Jack! Comrade Orwell, former fellow-traveller of the pacifists and regular contributor to the pacifist Adelphi – which he now attacks! Comrade Orwell, former extreme left-winger, ILP partisan and defender of Anarchists (see Homage to Catalonia)! And now Comrade Orwell who returns to his old imperialist allegiances and works at the BBC conducting British propaganda to fox [mislead] the Indian masses!

Orwell was in no mood to compromise. He established, 'Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is clear common sense ... I am not interested in pacifism as a moral phenomenon.' Although he offered to differentiate between individuals in his judgement of 'true intellectuals', no examples were given, as he continued to target 'the Catholic gang, the Stalinist gang, and the present pacifist or, as they are sometimes nicknamed, the Fascifist gang'. As for his past, Orwell offered a response to the charge that he served imperialism in Burma and at the BBC. However, he renounced the 'independent' Marxist organisation POUM, which he had hailed in Homage to Catalonia, and somehow failed to mention his pacifist proclamations of 1937–39.

The most impressive feature of Orwell's reply was a passage in which he combined his portrayal of pacifists as accomplices of National Socialism with the denunciation of others who might have joined him in the fight against imperialism:

As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as 20 years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British Government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. But though not much interested in the theory of pacifism, I am interested in the psychological process by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism.

More than 60 years later, after all the celebration of the decency of Orwell, the sharpness of his pen is disorienting. How can his legendary defence of freedom of thought and expression be reconciled with his sweeping dismissal of erstwhile allies, his jibes at those fighting for independence, his ridicule of others pursuing a role for the intellectual and writer in critical times?3 The abrupt, if equally unsettling, answer is that it cannot, at least not through the iconic St George.

Orwell wrote of John Galsworthy, '[He] was a bad writer, and some inner trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, nearly made him into a good one; his discontent healed itself, and he reverted to type. It is worth pausing to wonder in just what form the thing is happening to oneself.' If Orwell followed this advice, his self-analysis would have revealed an aspiring novelist who, facing not only the outer troubles of imperialism, economic deprivation and the threat of war, but also inner concerns over women, finance and reputation, 'sharpened his sensitiveness' in political essays, literary criticism and newspaper columns. His discontent never healed itself, however. It may have yielded two memorable novels, but it cast doubts on Orwell's 'Socialism', his treatment of women and even the position of the common person whose cause he supposedly championed.

Orwell was neither consistent nor complete. Indeed, what emerges on closer examination is not the depth but the superficial immediacy of his assurance, to 'which we have got to cling, as a life-belt, ... that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive'. The author wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier:

I had at that time no interest in Socialism or any other economic theory. It seemed to me then – it sometimes seems to me now, for that matter – that economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters.

His approach would change little in the following years, as he espoused an 'English Socialism' which was 'not ... doctrinaire nor even logical'. As he summarised in 1947, 'I became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.'

The simplicity of a political and social philosophy based on this supposed instinctive sense of decency lent Orwell the advantage of flexibility. He could contemplate as late as May 1937 joining a Communist brigade in Spain but, within weeks, castigate the Spanish Republican Government and its Red supporters as the primary threat to democracy and the working class. He could sneer on the eve of the Second World War at 'Quakers shouting for a bigger army, Communists waving union jacks, Winston Churchill posing as a democrat', yet on the strength of a dream in August 1939, decide 'that I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight in it'. He could work as the literary editor for the Labour Party's newspaper Tribune, yet shrug with resignation after Labour's historic access to power in the 1945 General Election, 'One cannot take this slide to the Left as meaning that Britain is on the verge of revolution. ... The mood of the country seems to me less revolutionary, less Utopian, even less helpful than it was in 1940 or 1942. ... Heaven knows whether this Government has any serious intention of introducing Socialism, but if it has, I don't see what there is to stop it.'

Unfortunately, the reluctance to delve beyond a basic response of decency also made Orwell a far from straightforward defender of the oppressed and powerless. With few exceptions, his portrayal of women was at best patronising and at worst fearful and vindictive. Working-class women could be pitied as the young woman 'kneeling ... in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe' or derided, such as the 'half-witted servant girl with huge body, tiny head and rolls of fat at back of neck curiously recalling ham-fat', the landlady who, 'as usual, does not understand much about politics but has adopted her husband's views as a wife ought to' and the abominable Mrs Brooker, 'a soft mound of fat and self-pity'. A fictional creation might be a female version of the struggling Orwell (Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter), a paragon of patient virtue (Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying) or a flawless saint (Winston's mother in Nineteen Eighty-Four), but she might also be an anchor pulling a worthy husband into mediocrity (Hilda in Coming Up for Air). The heroine collapses under her burdens or our scrutiny to re-emerge in simpler, 'essential' form. Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, unwilling or unable to pursue the Revolution with her intellect, is only 'a rebel from the waist down', but the washerwoman is transformed from a 'monstrous woman' into the maternal ideal of 'strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly'.

Similarly Orwell, the anti-imperialist, was never really at ease with the 'natives'. The corrupt local magistrates, exotic women and ignorant mobs in Burmese Days had factual counterparts in African soldiers portrayed as 'a flock of cattle', leaders such as Gandhi who were 'deliberately making trouble' and intellectuals going 'out of their way to antagonise those likeliest to help them'. Orwell's reaction to Nehru's famous question, 'Who dies if India lives?' was the sneer, 'How impressed the pinks will be.' In contrast, the scourge of British rule was writing in 1936 that 'it was still possible to be an imperialist and a gentleman'. He later assured, 'It may be that all that [Anglo-Indians] did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth.'

And Orwell was a far from secure bulwark for the working class. The Road to Wigan Pier, for all the power of its observation, ended with a chocolate-box portrait of 'Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a penn'orth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat.' Other portrayals were less flattering, such as the reduction of the real-life National Unemployed Workers' Movement to 'the same sheeplike crowd – gaping girls and shapeless middle-aged women dozing over their knitting – that you see everywhere else', or Nineteen Eighty-Four's fictional proles as degraded, Lottery-chasing drunkards and crazed old men. Orwell risked hoisting himself with his own damning petard: 'The trouble is that the socialist bourgeoisie, most of whom give me the creeps, will not be realistic and admit that there are a lot of working-class habits which they don't like and don't want to adopt.'

Fortunately for Orwell, there were easy exits from his suspect depictions. One was the sudden proclamation of the maxim at the start of the Second World War, 'We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.' This contrived equation elevated Orwell above all others, since the nationalism of his opponents was 'the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests', while he was simply an Englishman speaking for an ideal English revolution of decency happening 'in a sleepy, unwilling way'.

Confronted at first-hand with the intricacies of a Spanish Civil War where military strategy clashed with social and economic revolution, where the threat to the Republican Government were the factions within its ranks as much as the 'fascists' without, Orwell had taken refuge in the 'crystal spirit' of the individual. The difficulty of explaining the sudden move from pacifist to warrior was justified by a home country of 'solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes ... a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers'. And the complications of an emerging Cold War in which the path of social progress had to be negotiated between Washington and Moscow were met with repeated declarations of clear language equalling clear thought and an honest politics, a defence of 'certain moral and intellectual values whose survival is dangerous from the totalitarian point of view'.

Orwell never set aside the label of 'Socialist'. In 1941, for the first and arguably the last time, he set out a programme. Its six points included nationalisation of key industries, land and banks, limitations on top incomes, reform of the educational system and independence for India. Eight years later, months before his death, he would rebut American critics seizing Nineteen Eighty-Four as a condemnation of postwar Britain as well as Communism:

My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism.

The difficulty was that Orwell rarely saw how his socialist dream could be achieved. Wartime hopes for the English Revolution gave way by 1943 to the glum assessment that 'the forces of reaction have won hands down' and anticipation of 'the dreary world which the American millionaires and their British hangers-on intend to impose upon us'. Orwell's future was one in which his son would have to be a farmer as 'that may be the only job left after the atom bombs' when, foreshadowing Nineteen Eighty-Four, there were 'three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world ... [in] an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity'.

The working class for whom the battle was supposedly being waged were not smart enough to claim this future; trying to uplift them, Orwell had 'all the time the sensation of kicking against an impenetrable wall of stupidity'. So he could only offer a benediction in a final review, using Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism to sigh:

Socialism, in the sense of economic collectivism, is conquering the earth at a speed that would hardly have seemed possible 60 years ago, and yet Utopia, at any rate Wilde's Utopia, is no nearer. ... The trouble with the transitional periods is that the harsh outlook which they generate tends to become permanent.

Had Orwell, like Winston Smith, fought the honourable crusade of the lone liberal? Perhaps, but for more than 20 years, there was always a negative dimension. From his days in Burma, when Eric Blair of the Imperial Police took potshots at the 'Left' journal Adelphi, to the moment when he strode into the same Adelphi's office and described 'himself as a Tory anarchist but admitt[ing] the Adelphi's socialist case on moral grounds', to the caricature of the Adelphi editor and Orwell's patron Richard Rees in Keep the Aspidistra Flying as Ravelston, the naive millionaire, 'apologizing, tacitly, for the largeness of his income',35 the creation of 'Orwell' always rested on the denigration of threats, real or imagined, from the 'Left'.

Up to 1936 Orwell put on no false left-wing airs, preferring to be called 'a kind of intellectual anarchist'. There were omens, however, of battles to come. Orwell wrote to a friend of the evening when, having ventured to Rees's flat to borrow money, he learned that his benefactor was at a socialist meeting. Orwell followed and recalled, 'I spent three hours with seven or eight Socialists harrying me, including a South Wales miner who told me – quite good-naturedly, however – that if he were a dictator he would have me shot immediately.'

When Orwell chose confrontation with the 'Left' in The Road to Wigan Pier, it was far more than a skirmish. It had to be. For all the power of his observations of economic deprivation in northern England, Orwell had reached a troublesome impasse at the end of Part I. To his noble miners, his working-class family sitting in the parlour, his woman poking a blocked drainpipe with a stick, his unemployed and bedridden, he could offer nothing beyond the visceral insistence that willpower alone could stop economic injustice. He had no knowledge of Adam Smith, no Karl Marx, no John Maynard Keynes, whose General Theory of Unemployment had been published four years earlier. He did not provide the context of history from the cataclysm of the First World War through the General Strike to the fall of the Labour Government in 1931. Orwell's social and economic vision did not notice the Jarrow March, in which hundreds of the unemployed marched 300 miles from north-east England to London, and he glimpsed only briefly groups like the National Unemployed Workers' Movement.

Orwell's solution to his quandary was a sustained attack, not on the leaders and systems that had brought the crisis of Part I, but on the organised activism of Socialists. He would give no quarter for 'everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out'. The movement consisted of either the 'warm-hearted, unthinking' Socialists from the working class or the 'intellectual, book-trained' Socialist from the middle class, 'out of touch with common humanity' with his 'soggy half-baked insincerity' and 'his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation'. These woeful figures were joined by a 'prevalence of cranks', including 'every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England'.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Betrayal of Dissent"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Scott Lucas.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
1 Orwell, Policeman of the 'Left'
2 The Canonisation of St. George
3 Christopher Hitchens: Becoming George
4 9-11
5 Beyond the Spirit of '68
6 Our Friends in America
7 How We Dissent: On Bushmen and the 'Preponderance of Power'
8 On the Eve of War: March 2003
9 Dissent and 'Liberation'
EPILOGUE Beyond Orwell in Our New American Century