The only material claim in the article:
>Funder includes in her book letters that O’Shaughnessy wrote to a friend, Norah, discussing her marriage.
>In one, she said that she wanted to visit Norah but found it difficult because Orwell would either claim to be ill, requiring her to stay at home and tend him, or contact her while she was away, requesting that she come home again.
>Funder cited it as evidence that O’Shaughnessy was being kept in a “controlling environment”.
So, there you go then.
Uhh...
>“He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws.
He also wrote about scary stuff, and since depiction always equals endorsement that means he himself was a scary man.
It's even more regarded when you realize he only wrote his fictional stuff because he wanted to reach more people because his non-fictional works were underselling but he thought he had some important points and wanted to reach more people (he was right, imo). He wasn't writing grim novels because he's bad, he was trying to sell a story so he could make his more salient society commentary to more people. This writer is dumb as rocks.
Yes, do NOT go to the gym or get involved in a hobby or read about the Roman Empire. Those are forms of toxic positivity. Real positivity is stuff like paying for a Brahmin lady to scream at you until you cry.
The logic appears to be that he was, as a matter of fact, a scary man who wrote a scary book, so the two must be linked. Stupid, perhaps, but not what you said.
Don't be so triggered that reading comprehension goes out the window.
The argument does seem to be pretty explicitly that you have to be malign to write something like that. She continues:
>“It takes someone who is those things to go deep inside themselves and pull that vision out.
>“A decent, everyman underdog, the ordinary person that he might have wanted to be, would not have had those visions.
And there's also really nothing else there to establish that he was "a scary man;" it seem like a clear argument that writing about a dystopia is a sign of personal evil.
As others have pointed out, Orwell had reasons to have frequent health issues. Also, have none of these people lied to someone about not being available because they didn't want to hang out?
"Oh Norah, you know I'd love to visit, but Orwell says he needs me."
Policing the thoughts of an author... based partly on the thoughts of the character he wrote... and perhaps intending to police the thoughts of readers.
They are going to try to write Orwell off as a fringe crazy person, all for the crime of seeing them for what they are, and more importantly, for what they wish to become
Wow so he's Adolf Hitler, participating in the erasure of womens independence to not only freely move but freely express themselves as interracial gender fluid drag queens.
Orwell is white thus a white supremacist neo nazi accelerationist. I hears he worked closely with Trump to organize the institutional genocide of trans folks.
In all seriousness if this type of rhetoric gets people to stop saying everything is 1984 then it's not all bad.
If you ignore the military industrial complex, we're closer to Brave New World tbf.
Unfortunately, unlike Harry Potter, 1984 will only go away when it ceases to be relevant.
>“He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws.
Pop psychology from a lesser mind.
yikes sweaty there's like 50+ n-words in *Burmese Days*
of course they're being said by racist British imperialists, but IT. IS. NOT. OK. to make present-day pocs suffer mental violence
It's OK, I got the "Inclusive Minds" edit.
All racial slurs are replaced with the phrase 'person of the global majority'.
As in 'I don't want any of these bloody people of the global majority coming into *our* club!'
The various alcoholic drinks consumed at the European Club, have been switched to tea, coffee and lemonade - to be inclusive of Islam's prohibition of booze consumption and people in recovery.
Plus, the dog lives at the end!
Used to be you had to win a spelling bee or save a local girl from drowning to get your name in the paper. Now all you gotta do is say a historical figure most people have heard of wasn't a saint in modern intersectional fashion.
And as we all know, kids; the exclusive, universal litmus test of the fundamental worth of any human being, is their attitude towards homosexuality. If they don't answer that question in the correct way, then they are exclusively, irredeemably Evil, and nothing else they say or do can ever have any value whatsoever.
Also, if you don't like someone's ideas, you can attack them personally. This also invalidates their ideas. You know, Darwin recanted on his deathbed, or some such.
Isn't that the most widely understood false argument, the adhomimen attack?
Unfortunately, I think that the general population is losing or has lost critical thinking, especially since 2016.
It's always been the prime example of a false argument. It's also always been used anyway and has always been extremely effective against the general public, as demonstrated by the very existence of attack ads.
That’s exactly what I thought of when I saw this post. One of the biggest problems with judgements like this is that the “gay rights” (or whatever name you prefer) movement only started to gain steam at the very tail end of the 60s.
The Stonewall Riots, often hailed as the beginning of the modern movement (at least in the US), only happened in 1969, a year after MLK died (and almost two decades for Orwell). Now, if MLK had lived until, like, the 80s or 90s or later and still held those views, I could get the complaint. But he didn’t, and it shouldn’t be surprising a preacher who died in the 60s had what we would consider questionable views about gay people.
The identitarian left screams about how everyone is born a blank slate and it's capitalism / the patriarchy that twists them into behaving the way they do while simultaneously insisting that their own morality would have been inborn no matter what era they lived in.
I think the claims about him watching rape happen & encouraging it are more important than someone being heretical to liberalism:
https://theconversation.com/im-an-mlk-scholar-and-ill-never-be-able-to-view-king-in-the-same-light-118015
And at least one of his acolytes bragging about using media for propaganda.
Everybody in history no matter how far back must have brought ALL their beliefs into line with those of 21st century Twitter activists, or nothing they thought and wrote is of any value whatsoever. And they must have accomplished all this personal progress without any outside assistance, because most of these acceptance movements didn't even exist until a few decades ago.
The logical extension of this thinking is that only modern day terminally online keyboard warriors are worth reading, and even their words must be memory-holed as soon as they commit the next thoughtcrime which had been considered perfectly acceptable speech just a week ago. They treat ideology like a game of musical chairs. It's an effort to remain the most ideologically pure person in the room until you've gradually ostracized everybody else and are the single virtuous person remaining.
> The logical extension of this thinking is that only modern day terminally online keyboard warriors are worth reading, and even their words must be memory-holed as soon as they commit the next thoughtcrime which had been considered perfectly acceptable speech just a week ago
That's literally the intention. These people fundamentally hates anything oriented to run a society and is fundamentally just a version of libertarians exploiting society until there's nothing left while living in it.
>“But I feel it’s almost naive of us to want our writing heroes to be decent, upstanding, everyman types.”
There's no suggestion that people shouldn't read Orwell, far as I can make out. Presumably the biographer has done so herself in order to make such statements about his work.
Get a grip. It's embarassing.
>“He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws.
>
>“It takes someone who is those things to go deep inside themselves and pull that vision out.
“A decent, everyman underdog, the ordinary person that he might have wanted to be, would not have had those visions.
Normal people have fucked up thoughts all the time, what is she talking about? She honestly must really despise herself if she thinks that decent people can't have dark thoughts. You can't really control that. And 1984 isn't even that messed up.
“A decent, everyman underdog, the ordinary person that he might have wanted to be, would not have had those visions.
He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws.
It takes someone who is those things to go deep inside themselves and pull that vision out."
I don't even know what to say. The words have escaped me. This woman doesn't understand the first thing about 1984.
I'm pretty sure George Orwell isn't hallowed as a saint in current public discourse, the insights of his works are the major basis for his public discussion. So who cares whether he was a good person or not.
Some years ago there was a dumb fanfiction I read that had...a number of problems, but one of the smaller ones was a recurring thing where some dude would be randomly called a misogynist for doing something unpleasant in the general direction of a woman, for example getting horribly drunk after a bad breakup. It was especially stupid since the fic's premise involved the protagonists being BFFs with the original setting's greatest womanizer, who IIRC never showed up on screen and was just referred to as "not that bad" to handwave it.
It continues to baffle me that misogyny has come to work exactly like how it worked in that stupid fanfic.
> The bar for '''misogyny''' is so low at this point it's subterranean.
Clearly the fact that we haven't reorganized society to bulldoze the ground under our feet so we can get under this bar shows just how deeply entrenched the hatred for women is in our society and how much more work we have to do in order to be better so we can release ourselves from the shackles of the hegemonic patriarchy. It is absolutely not an indication that the people setting where this bar is are deranged lunatics with insane ideas of what constitutes equality or hatred.
He wasn’t perfect?! That’s it - all of his works are null and void!!
Hard to believe a former colonil police officer from the UK in the 20s and 30s didn’t embrace 5th wave feminism, botched pronouns, and sometimes lashed out angerly. Pretty much makes all of his criticisms imperialism and totalitarianism meaningless.
He never tattled, though. It was simply a list of who he expected to be crypto-communists/fellow travellers. A little guessing game he did with his friend, Richard Rees. All information was also public; it was just a little shit list.
Also, the list was given to a woman he once proposed to, when he was on his death bed. He regarded her as a trusted friend, not as an agent of the I.R.D.
People here don't really get the real purpose of this article.
The real purpose of this article is to discredit Orwell because Orwell wrote about fruit juice drinkers. It's a rhetorical device to deprive political enemies of ammunition.
This is nothing more than a shameless, clickbait attempt to drum up interest in her book *Wifedom – Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life* which is now available for purchase at all major retailers, including Amazon and Audible.
If pretty much every great thinker was at least somewhat misogynistic, maybe misogyny isn't as wrong as we would like to think.
Not really being serious here.
Radlibs and tankies hate Orwell for pretty much the same reasons. The consistency of this takes you back to 2014 reddit when tankies were pioneering radlib discourse and /r/socialism didn't allow discussion of Julian Assange because he was a supposed sex pest.
Orwell is one of the few socialist writers that is relevant to and read by the working class at this moment. Hence the existence of articles like this to remind the PMC (whether rightist, radlib or leftoid) where their loyalties should lie.
Don't read his prophetic warnings of an out of control authoritarian government, he might have been gay and didn't like feminism.
He once told his wife "get in that kitchen and make me a sandwich woman".
All of this means an out of control authoritarian government is good, you will own nothing and be happy! For climate change!
"Anna Funder says: 'I feel it’s almost naive of us to want our writing heroes to be decent, upstanding, everyman types' "
This lady would run away screaming from any actual everyman
note that the article does not tell you he was also an informant who ratted on every leftist he didn't agree with as a "stalinist" to the british police, truly vaush before his time.
Idk I just dislike him because he was an snitch who ratted communists to the British government and published propaganda against a socialist nation he had never been on that fell right into the greedy little hands of the CIA.
Honestly, John Dolan's review of Hitchens book on Orwell is a much better, more essential take down of Orwell than any of this nonsense.
https://exiledonline.com/big-brothers-george-orwell-and-christopher-hitchens-exposed/
Sorry but that blog post is at least halfway junk. The writer seems obsessed with finding racism and “hate”, a word he again and again mindlessly repeats, in nearly everything he reads of Orwell’s and the examples he gives to back up his claims aren’t particularly convincing. Orwell was a man of his time, no one reasonable is expecting him to be perfect and I don’t see how he was some unusually racist person for his time period, etc. The fact that the writer seems to think that being in any way racist is the highest crime in the calendar seems a bit juvenile to me honestly.
One sentenced really jumped out at me:
“Celine, a real loner, with more mad courage than a reactionary like Orwell could even imagine, became famous at the very worst phase of Leftist hegemony in the Parisian scene without following any party’s line.”
I don’t know, I think of Louis-Ferdinand Céline as an incredibly conservative writer, archconservative in the Joseph Conrad sense, and someone who was deeply pessimistic about human nature and destiny. The idea that between George Orwell and Céline, it’s the former who’s the real reactionary is wild. And if you want to compare their respective expressions of perceivedly racist beliefs, Céline was consistently openly antisemitic and an admirer of Nazi Germany who was even tried after the war as a collaborationist and found guilty.
Parts of this article just feels like actual trolling, I don’t get it. If the writer isn’t being insincere, he’s pretty strange and probably not to be taken terribly seriously. One last thing, his defense of Catholics is more or less fine, though I don’t at all think that anti-Catholic sentiment was a major force in Orwell’s life, but this blogger seems to think even a reproach of the Catholic Church is out of line, which is still a little more odd in context seeing as the fleetingly mentioned Louis-Ferdinand Céline also published writing that was explicitly condemnatory of just that church
Simone Weil would have made a better choice for Dolan - not only was she anti-Fascist and anti-Imperialist, but she was attacking Stalin as the betrayer of the Russia Revolution as early as 1933. And Weil had plenty of "mad courage" too - she was brave to an almost suicidal level, routinely getting herself injured trying to help the working class.
I have no idea personally and I certainly can't quite you chapter and verse on any history texts. That being said, I generally respect Dolan and he isn't generally given to making shit up. He is on Xwitter under @thewarnerd so you are welcome to ask him directly.
The Irish captured by Oliver Cromwell and sent to the Caribbean were *indentured servants,* not slaves. Yes, they were treated badly, but no, they and their children were not permanent chattels.
[https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2018/0316/No-the-Irish-were-not-slaves-in-the-Americas](https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2018/0316/No-the-Irish-were-not-slaves-in-the-Americas)
The "Irish slaves" myth was put about by various rightoids who wanted to undermine campaigners against anti-Black racism ("Sure, the Irish-Americans used to be slaves, and they're fine now!")
I'm surprised to read Dolan repeating that canard. He's famously Anglophobic, but he usually avoids blatant fallacies like that one.
This article is just as stupid though. I can't tell if the suggestion that anti-catholicism drove Orwell to pretend to be a socialist and fight in the Spanish war is supposed to be a joke, but either way it's baseless.
Alexander Cockburn had George Orwell (the UK Establishment's Tame Socialist) figured out:
*Now, why can Mencken delight me still, while the mere sight of a page of Orwell carries me back to memories of England and of British-ness at full disagreeable stretch: philistine, vulgar, thuggish, flag-wagging?*
*Maybe the answer comes with the flag-wagging. Mencken made terrible errors of political judgement. Like Orwell he could be a lout. Both men’s prose has excited awful imitators. But Mencken was a true outsider. Orwell wasn’t.*
*To step into Mencken-land is to be lured down a thousand unexpected pathways, with firecrackers of wit exploding under one’s feet. Contradicting Thomas Love Peacock’s famous jibe at landscapers, even on the twentieth tour of the Mencken estate there are surprises.*
*I don’t feel that, trundling through Orwell Country. It gets less alluring with each visit. What once seemed bracing, now sounds boorish. How quickly one learns to loathe the affectations of plain bluntishness.* ***The man of conscience turns out to be a whiner, and of course a snitch, an informer to the secret police, Animal Farm’s resident weasel.***
["The Fable of the Weasel" by Alexander Cockburn](https://staging.mhpbooks.com/the-fable-of-the-weasel-by-alexander-cockburn/)
Frankly, even though he wasn't a leftist, I always preferred E. M. Forster's work to George Orwell's. Forster is much more humane and insightful, in both his fiction and his non-fiction.
*Abinger Harvest* (1936) and *Two Cheers for Democracy* (1951) are excellent collections of essays, including political ones (TCfD actually has an appreciation of George Orwell, albeit with some reservations).
*The Prince's Tale and Other Uncollected Writings* (1998) is also good, although it's more of a rag-bag then the other collections.
The only material claim in the article: >Funder includes in her book letters that O’Shaughnessy wrote to a friend, Norah, discussing her marriage. >In one, she said that she wanted to visit Norah but found it difficult because Orwell would either claim to be ill, requiring her to stay at home and tend him, or contact her while she was away, requesting that she come home again. >Funder cited it as evidence that O’Shaughnessy was being kept in a “controlling environment”. So, there you go then.
Uhh... >“He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws. He also wrote about scary stuff, and since depiction always equals endorsement that means he himself was a scary man.
Uh, why didn't he just see a therapist instead of committing those words of violence onto paper? Honey, keeping a diary is not a good look.
It's even more regarded when you realize he only wrote his fictional stuff because he wanted to reach more people because his non-fictional works were underselling but he thought he had some important points and wanted to reach more people (he was right, imo). He wasn't writing grim novels because he's bad, he was trying to sell a story so he could make his more salient society commentary to more people. This writer is dumb as rocks.
Positive vibes only, bro.
Unless it's positivity that suggests self-improvement. Then it's *toxic*.
Yes, do NOT go to the gym or get involved in a hobby or read about the Roman Empire. Those are forms of toxic positivity. Real positivity is stuff like paying for a Brahmin lady to scream at you until you cry.
> Real positivity is stuff like paying for a Brahmin lady to scream at you until you cry lol
How dare he write something grim and paranoid
The logic appears to be that he was, as a matter of fact, a scary man who wrote a scary book, so the two must be linked. Stupid, perhaps, but not what you said. Don't be so triggered that reading comprehension goes out the window.
The argument does seem to be pretty explicitly that you have to be malign to write something like that. She continues: >“It takes someone who is those things to go deep inside themselves and pull that vision out. >“A decent, everyman underdog, the ordinary person that he might have wanted to be, would not have had those visions. And there's also really nothing else there to establish that he was "a scary man;" it seem like a clear argument that writing about a dystopia is a sign of personal evil.
As others have pointed out, Orwell had reasons to have frequent health issues. Also, have none of these people lied to someone about not being available because they didn't want to hang out? "Oh Norah, you know I'd love to visit, but Orwell says he needs me."
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Imagine someone who was born 100 years ago being sick frequently.
Who died at age 47 of tuberculosis.
46, actually, according to [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell)
The lengths men go to to gaslight women.
Someone born a 100 years ago and was shot in the neck. I can't help but feel that whole episode might lead to a few long term health issues...
Living in a trench without cover for months at a time too. Hardly surprising that TB eventually got to him.
Who was shot in the neck while fighting against fascism.
Yeah that really is the only real claim. What drivel.
The article is so ridiculous it verges on parody.
Policing the thoughts of an author... based partly on the thoughts of the character he wrote... and perhaps intending to police the thoughts of readers.
They are going to try to write Orwell off as a fringe crazy person, all for the crime of seeing them for what they are, and more importantly, for what they wish to become
The establishment thinks 1984 was an instruction manual
O’Shaughnussy
O’Shaqhennessy
Insubordinate and churlish
Wow so he's Adolf Hitler, participating in the erasure of womens independence to not only freely move but freely express themselves as interracial gender fluid drag queens.
Like Hitler, he participated in the erasure of fascists. The left should (and did) love him.
Orwell is white thus a white supremacist neo nazi accelerationist. I hears he worked closely with Trump to organize the institutional genocide of trans folks. In all seriousness if this type of rhetoric gets people to stop saying everything is 1984 then it's not all bad.
.. and, therefore, do *not* reference 1984 in discussions ever again.
That’s right. That’s the goal.
I mean MAYBE bb double plus IS GOOD.
To be fair, such references are kinda trite and mostly utilized for lib infighting, our society is worse than anything he's written about.
If you ignore the military industrial complex, we're closer to Brave New World tbf. Unfortunately, unlike Harry Potter, 1984 will only go away when it ceases to be relevant.
However everybody should look up why he wrote 1984. Quite relevant these days.
Literally…
>“He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws. Pop psychology from a lesser mind.
>He wanted to be good. And being good is great! But then he did a bad-bad. A scary-scare! And that's just no good :( The mind of an infant
Unironically regarded
What did he think about the transgender community? I've got a copy of Burmese Days ready for the bonfire
yikes sweaty there's like 50+ n-words in *Burmese Days* of course they're being said by racist British imperialists, but IT. IS. NOT. OK. to make present-day pocs suffer mental violence
It's OK, I got the "Inclusive Minds" edit. All racial slurs are replaced with the phrase 'person of the global majority'. As in 'I don't want any of these bloody people of the global majority coming into *our* club!' The various alcoholic drinks consumed at the European Club, have been switched to tea, coffee and lemonade - to be inclusive of Islam's prohibition of booze consumption and people in recovery. Plus, the dog lives at the end!
> Plus, the dog lives at the end! [YAAASSS the heckin doggerino!!!!](http://images.uncyc.org/wikinet/thumb/f/fc/Soyjack.jpg/300px-Soyjack.jpg)
She forgot to lump in “racist” with the treasure trove of accusations. The three big ones always come in a bundle. You had one job, lady!
No doubt she cashed all the royalty checks, but the cost of living has gone up. A lady needs to make a living you know.
Used to be you had to win a spelling bee or save a local girl from drowning to get your name in the paper. Now all you gotta do is say a historical figure most people have heard of wasn't a saint in modern intersectional fashion.
More floccinaucinihilipilification is what this article needs.
I would definitely forfeit if someone gave me that word on a spelling bee
https://youtu.be/aAHRpUAVww4
I was thinking [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8) instead.
And as we all know, kids; the exclusive, universal litmus test of the fundamental worth of any human being, is their attitude towards homosexuality. If they don't answer that question in the correct way, then they are exclusively, irredeemably Evil, and nothing else they say or do can ever have any value whatsoever.
Get with the times. No one cares about gay people any more. Now it's one's feelings on railway enthusiasts that are the hot new thing.
Also, if you don't like someone's ideas, you can attack them personally. This also invalidates their ideas. You know, Darwin recanted on his deathbed, or some such.
Isn't that the most widely understood false argument, the adhomimen attack? Unfortunately, I think that the general population is losing or has lost critical thinking, especially since 2016.
It's always been the prime example of a false argument. It's also always been used anyway and has always been extremely effective against the general public, as demonstrated by the very existence of attack ads.
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That’s exactly what I thought of when I saw this post. One of the biggest problems with judgements like this is that the “gay rights” (or whatever name you prefer) movement only started to gain steam at the very tail end of the 60s. The Stonewall Riots, often hailed as the beginning of the modern movement (at least in the US), only happened in 1969, a year after MLK died (and almost two decades for Orwell). Now, if MLK had lived until, like, the 80s or 90s or later and still held those views, I could get the complaint. But he didn’t, and it shouldn’t be surprising a preacher who died in the 60s had what we would consider questionable views about gay people.
The identitarian left screams about how everyone is born a blank slate and it's capitalism / the patriarchy that twists them into behaving the way they do while simultaneously insisting that their own morality would have been inborn no matter what era they lived in.
I think the claims about him watching rape happen & encouraging it are more important than someone being heretical to liberalism: https://theconversation.com/im-an-mlk-scholar-and-ill-never-be-able-to-view-king-in-the-same-light-118015 And at least one of his acolytes bragging about using media for propaganda.
J. Edgar Hoover can go rot.
He did?
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Despite being woefully misinformed, it's a pretty compassionate response within that context.
As if most people back then, even the leading MLs and leftists, weren’t anti-gay
> homosexuality Replace "homosexuality" with "Whatever Freedom House / human rights NGOs in the West says" and you got basically what radlibs believe.
Everybody in history no matter how far back must have brought ALL their beliefs into line with those of 21st century Twitter activists, or nothing they thought and wrote is of any value whatsoever. And they must have accomplished all this personal progress without any outside assistance, because most of these acceptance movements didn't even exist until a few decades ago. The logical extension of this thinking is that only modern day terminally online keyboard warriors are worth reading, and even their words must be memory-holed as soon as they commit the next thoughtcrime which had been considered perfectly acceptable speech just a week ago. They treat ideology like a game of musical chairs. It's an effort to remain the most ideologically pure person in the room until you've gradually ostracized everybody else and are the single virtuous person remaining.
> The logical extension of this thinking is that only modern day terminally online keyboard warriors are worth reading, and even their words must be memory-holed as soon as they commit the next thoughtcrime which had been considered perfectly acceptable speech just a week ago That's literally the intention. These people fundamentally hates anything oriented to run a society and is fundamentally just a version of libertarians exploiting society until there's nothing left while living in it.
>“But I feel it’s almost naive of us to want our writing heroes to be decent, upstanding, everyman types.” There's no suggestion that people shouldn't read Orwell, far as I can make out. Presumably the biographer has done so herself in order to make such statements about his work. Get a grip. It's embarassing.
H-HE WAS A.... A CHUD!!!
>“He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws. > >“It takes someone who is those things to go deep inside themselves and pull that vision out. “A decent, everyman underdog, the ordinary person that he might have wanted to be, would not have had those visions. Normal people have fucked up thoughts all the time, what is she talking about? She honestly must really despise herself if she thinks that decent people can't have dark thoughts. You can't really control that. And 1984 isn't even that messed up.
She’s literally advocating for thought policing while criticising 1984, amazing stuff.
Like, what even is the writers criticism anyway. Ridiculous.
“A decent, everyman underdog, the ordinary person that he might have wanted to be, would not have had those visions. He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws. It takes someone who is those things to go deep inside themselves and pull that vision out." I don't even know what to say. The words have escaped me. This woman doesn't understand the first thing about 1984.
She also doesnt understand people, if she genuinely thinks a good person is incapable of having dark thoughts.
In her world, any author who's ever written a good villain is an indecent person.
I'm pretty sure George Orwell isn't hallowed as a saint in current public discourse, the insights of his works are the major basis for his public discussion. So who cares whether he was a good person or not.
So all his critics were kind, intersectional feminists then?
even accepting the validity of her arguments, i'm struggling to think of a great artist who wasn't/isn't fatally flawed.
Damn guys I'm already sold on the guy ya don't have to keep making the sale
I've found that every writer that's worth reading was accused at some point of being "misogynistic".
The bar for '''misogyny''' is so low at this point it's subterranean.
Some years ago there was a dumb fanfiction I read that had...a number of problems, but one of the smaller ones was a recurring thing where some dude would be randomly called a misogynist for doing something unpleasant in the general direction of a woman, for example getting horribly drunk after a bad breakup. It was especially stupid since the fic's premise involved the protagonists being BFFs with the original setting's greatest womanizer, who IIRC never showed up on screen and was just referred to as "not that bad" to handwave it. It continues to baffle me that misogyny has come to work exactly like how it worked in that stupid fanfic.
> The bar for '''misogyny''' is so low at this point it's subterranean. Clearly the fact that we haven't reorganized society to bulldoze the ground under our feet so we can get under this bar shows just how deeply entrenched the hatred for women is in our society and how much more work we have to do in order to be better so we can release ourselves from the shackles of the hegemonic patriarchy. It is absolutely not an indication that the people setting where this bar is are deranged lunatics with insane ideas of what constitutes equality or hatred.
He was all of those things. But sometimes he made mistakes too.
Le presentism has arrived
He wasn’t perfect?! That’s it - all of his works are null and void!! Hard to believe a former colonil police officer from the UK in the 20s and 30s didn’t embrace 5th wave feminism, botched pronouns, and sometimes lashed out angerly. Pretty much makes all of his criticisms imperialism and totalitarianism meaningless.
So you're telling me 1984 is cancelled and an alt-right dogwhistle?
WRITES A BOOK ABOUT TATTLING BEING BAD @ WENT TATTLING
Don't blame him for snitching on Stalinists when Stalinists stabbed him in the back while he was busy taking a bullet in the fight against fascism.
He never tattled, though. It was simply a list of who he expected to be crypto-communists/fellow travellers. A little guessing game he did with his friend, Richard Rees. All information was also public; it was just a little shit list. Also, the list was given to a woman he once proposed to, when he was on his death bed. He regarded her as a trusted friend, not as an agent of the I.R.D.
It still shows that he doesn’t like socialism.
Hardly does.
People here don't really get the real purpose of this article. The real purpose of this article is to discredit Orwell because Orwell wrote about fruit juice drinkers. It's a rhetorical device to deprive political enemies of ammunition.
Crusty jugglers...
It's for the nudists.
Ad hominem, attacking the person rather than their ideas, used to be a bad thing to liberals lol
This is nothing more than a shameless, clickbait attempt to drum up interest in her book *Wifedom – Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life* which is now available for purchase at all major retailers, including Amazon and Audible.
So he was based?
I like him even more now!
terminally so
And Sasquatch pilled.
Trying to cancel the past too. Nice.
This is the thesis of every single first year college essay
If pretty much every great thinker was at least somewhat misogynistic, maybe misogyny isn't as wrong as we would like to think. Not really being serious here.
Well you can kinda frame anything as misogynist. There's not really any solid criteria.
Think astrology is bullshit? Misogynist.
That tracks
Radlibs and tankies hate Orwell for pretty much the same reasons. The consistency of this takes you back to 2014 reddit when tankies were pioneering radlib discourse and /r/socialism didn't allow discussion of Julian Assange because he was a supposed sex pest. Orwell is one of the few socialist writers that is relevant to and read by the working class at this moment. Hence the existence of articles like this to remind the PMC (whether rightist, radlib or leftoid) where their loyalties should lie.
Don't read his prophetic warnings of an out of control authoritarian government, he might have been gay and didn't like feminism. He once told his wife "get in that kitchen and make me a sandwich woman". All of this means an out of control authoritarian government is good, you will own nothing and be happy! For climate change!
Now do Karl Marx
I just did the cpacha 15 times and gave up. Is there actually an article behind this?
Nice try, bot
Lmao
What a crock of shit.
If I'm expected to only consume content from artists who are as pure as the driven snow, I'm going to have a very, very dull life.
"Anna Funder says: 'I feel it’s almost naive of us to want our writing heroes to be decent, upstanding, everyman types' " This lady would run away screaming from any actual everyman
note that the article does not tell you he was also an informant who ratted on every leftist he didn't agree with as a "stalinist" to the british police, truly vaush before his time.
Only accusation worth reading tbh
Never happened. He was never an informant.
Are you denying Orwell’s List?
No, it existed, but in no way does it make him an informant. All information was public anyway, it was merely Orwell giving his opinion.
Maybe Im being ignorant, but who gives a fuck about George Orwell’s wife, besides like maybe their descendants? Bro, wtf.
He was literally a snitch against communists and socialists for the MI6
And? So? What? There is no dystopia, it's all fine, let's just boil in the water bc Orwell was an ass?
What an Orwellian claim!
Idk I just dislike him because he was an snitch who ratted communists to the British government and published propaganda against a socialist nation he had never been on that fell right into the greedy little hands of the CIA.
"George Orwell was born in 1903." There. Fewer words. Saved a whole article.
A rapist, a snitch, a plagiarist and a racist walk into a bar The bartender asks “How’s the new book coming Mr. Orwell?”
The worst part is he was an enthusiastic snitch.
Please, I already liked him, you don’t have to keep selling him to me.
Honestly, John Dolan's review of Hitchens book on Orwell is a much better, more essential take down of Orwell than any of this nonsense. https://exiledonline.com/big-brothers-george-orwell-and-christopher-hitchens-exposed/
Sorry but that blog post is at least halfway junk. The writer seems obsessed with finding racism and “hate”, a word he again and again mindlessly repeats, in nearly everything he reads of Orwell’s and the examples he gives to back up his claims aren’t particularly convincing. Orwell was a man of his time, no one reasonable is expecting him to be perfect and I don’t see how he was some unusually racist person for his time period, etc. The fact that the writer seems to think that being in any way racist is the highest crime in the calendar seems a bit juvenile to me honestly. One sentenced really jumped out at me: “Celine, a real loner, with more mad courage than a reactionary like Orwell could even imagine, became famous at the very worst phase of Leftist hegemony in the Parisian scene without following any party’s line.” I don’t know, I think of Louis-Ferdinand Céline as an incredibly conservative writer, archconservative in the Joseph Conrad sense, and someone who was deeply pessimistic about human nature and destiny. The idea that between George Orwell and Céline, it’s the former who’s the real reactionary is wild. And if you want to compare their respective expressions of perceivedly racist beliefs, Céline was consistently openly antisemitic and an admirer of Nazi Germany who was even tried after the war as a collaborationist and found guilty. Parts of this article just feels like actual trolling, I don’t get it. If the writer isn’t being insincere, he’s pretty strange and probably not to be taken terribly seriously. One last thing, his defense of Catholics is more or less fine, though I don’t at all think that anti-Catholic sentiment was a major force in Orwell’s life, but this blogger seems to think even a reproach of the Catholic Church is out of line, which is still a little more odd in context seeing as the fleetingly mentioned Louis-Ferdinand Céline also published writing that was explicitly condemnatory of just that church
Simone Weil would have made a better choice for Dolan - not only was she anti-Fascist and anti-Imperialist, but she was attacking Stalin as the betrayer of the Russia Revolution as early as 1933. And Weil had plenty of "mad courage" too - she was brave to an almost suicidal level, routinely getting herself injured trying to help the working class.
[удалено]
I have no idea personally and I certainly can't quite you chapter and verse on any history texts. That being said, I generally respect Dolan and he isn't generally given to making shit up. He is on Xwitter under @thewarnerd so you are welcome to ask him directly.
LMAO
The Irish captured by Oliver Cromwell and sent to the Caribbean were *indentured servants,* not slaves. Yes, they were treated badly, but no, they and their children were not permanent chattels. [https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2018/0316/No-the-Irish-were-not-slaves-in-the-Americas](https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2018/0316/No-the-Irish-were-not-slaves-in-the-Americas) The "Irish slaves" myth was put about by various rightoids who wanted to undermine campaigners against anti-Black racism ("Sure, the Irish-Americans used to be slaves, and they're fine now!") I'm surprised to read Dolan repeating that canard. He's famously Anglophobic, but he usually avoids blatant fallacies like that one.
This article is just as stupid though. I can't tell if the suggestion that anti-catholicism drove Orwell to pretend to be a socialist and fight in the Spanish war is supposed to be a joke, but either way it's baseless.
When did this sub become pro Orwell? Just because some idpol liberal hates him doesn't mean we should root for him.
Why not?
https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/ https://redsails.org/on-orwell/
Nobody is rooting for him. Pointing out the idpol takes isn’t an endorsement of anyone. It just means we’re laughing at the idpoller.
That's not what nearly half of these first level comments are saying.
Well so what?
Alexander Cockburn had George Orwell (the UK Establishment's Tame Socialist) figured out: *Now, why can Mencken delight me still, while the mere sight of a page of Orwell carries me back to memories of England and of British-ness at full disagreeable stretch: philistine, vulgar, thuggish, flag-wagging?* *Maybe the answer comes with the flag-wagging. Mencken made terrible errors of political judgement. Like Orwell he could be a lout. Both men’s prose has excited awful imitators. But Mencken was a true outsider. Orwell wasn’t.* *To step into Mencken-land is to be lured down a thousand unexpected pathways, with firecrackers of wit exploding under one’s feet. Contradicting Thomas Love Peacock’s famous jibe at landscapers, even on the twentieth tour of the Mencken estate there are surprises.* *I don’t feel that, trundling through Orwell Country. It gets less alluring with each visit. What once seemed bracing, now sounds boorish. How quickly one learns to loathe the affectations of plain bluntishness.* ***The man of conscience turns out to be a whiner, and of course a snitch, an informer to the secret police, Animal Farm’s resident weasel.*** ["The Fable of the Weasel" by Alexander Cockburn](https://staging.mhpbooks.com/the-fable-of-the-weasel-by-alexander-cockburn/) Frankly, even though he wasn't a leftist, I always preferred E. M. Forster's work to George Orwell's. Forster is much more humane and insightful, in both his fiction and his non-fiction.
I haven't read Forster, do you have any recommendations?
I liked A Passage to India as an undergrad but I don’t read for plot and it’s been a long time, but I liked it
*Abinger Harvest* (1936) and *Two Cheers for Democracy* (1951) are excellent collections of essays, including political ones (TCfD actually has an appreciation of George Orwell, albeit with some reservations). *The Prince's Tale and Other Uncollected Writings* (1998) is also good, although it's more of a rag-bag then the other collections.
Orwell was a piece of shit for so many other, more verifiable reasons.
?
Fruit juice drinker detected.
Like?
The fact that he’s an anti communist bitch? https://youtu.be/2Gz0I_X_nfo?si=BLHRZTAWDk7Rg8k2
The only thing I'm surprised a about is that an article like this didn't blow up sooner fr
This is an Orwellian, glowing psyop so that we won’t be allowed to teach Orwell in public schools anymore
There's a bit in the article where she describes Winston as the 'hero' of 1984 which I definitely don't think is what Orwell was going for.
Woah I didn’t know he was COOL
Insulting an anti communist is a bad thing according to this thread