Foreword "Anti-Semitism"

[Dave Monroe]

   "On the other hand, Orwell did not foresee such
exotic developments as the religious wars with which
we have necome all too familiar, involving various
sorts of fundamentalism.  Religious fanaticism is in
fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form
of devotion to the Party.  Big rother's regime
exhibits all the elements of fascism--the single
charismatic dictator, the total control of behavior,
the absolute subordination of the individual to the
collective--excpet for racial hostility, in
particular, anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent
feature of fascism as Orwell knew it.  This is bound
to strike the modern reader as puzzling.  The only
Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein,
and maybe only because his original, Leon Trotsky, was
Jewish too....
   "Much has been made recently of Orwell's own
attitude toward Jews, some commentators going so far
as to call it anti-Semitic.  If one looks in his
writing of the time for overt references to the topic,
one finds relatively little--Jewish matters did notv
seem to command much of his attention--what published
evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness
before the enormity of what had ahppened in the camps
or a failure at some level to appreciate its full
significance.  There is some felt reticence, as if,
with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell
would have preferred that the world not be presented
the added inconvenience of having to think much about
the Holocaust.  The novel may even have been his way
of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not
happen.
   "As close as 1984 gets to an anti-semitic moment is
in the ritual practice of the Two Minutes Hate .... 
But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here
with such toxic immediacy is never generalized into
anything racial.  The strategy of pitting race against
race does not seem to be found in the Party's tool
kit.  'Nor is there any racial discrimination,' as
Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the
book--'Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian
blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the
Party....'  As nearly as one can tell, Orwell
considered anti-emitism 'one variant of the great
modern disease of nationalism,' and British
anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British
stupidity....  Amid the novel's general pessimism,
this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as
unwarrantedly chirpy analysis.  The hatreds Orwell
never found much worse than ridiculous have determined
too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so
easily." ("Foreword," p. xvii-xviii)


George Orwell, "Antisemitism in Britain" (1945)

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/o79e/part24.html

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/antisemitism/e/e_antib.htm

http://www.sozialistische-klassiker.org/Orwell/Orwelle3.html

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