1984 Foreword: "even the British Labour Party"

[jbor]

>> One could certainly argue that Churchill's war cabinet
>> had behaved no differently than a fascist regime,
>> censoring news, controlling wages and prices,
>> restricting travel, subordinating civil liberties to
>> self-defined wartime necessity. (ix-x)

on 25/4/03 2:28 AM, jbor wrote:
 
> Any chance of quoting the next couple of sentences? (Apparently no plans at
> present to publish the Plume edition over here.) I mean, one "could" argue
> this I guess, but old Winston was fighting ("... on the beaches ... never
> surrender ... yada yada") *against* a very *real* fascist regime in that
> particular war. Which surely should rate a mention. (And it brings the whole
> "Counterforce" quandary in GR to mind as well.) There seems to be some
> hedging in this sentence which makes me wonder where the particular train of
> thought actually ends up.

>> Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis
>> defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that
>> far from having had its day it had perhaps not yet
>> even come into its own - the corruption of spirit, the
>> irresistible human addiction to power, were already
>> long in place, all well-known aspects of the third
>> Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour
>> party - like first drafts of a terrible future. (xv-xvi)

Ah, this makes more sense. The attack on "Churchill's war cabinet" (which
was a coalition between Churchill's Liberals and Labour leaders such as
Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Stanley Morrison, with Attlee as
Deputy Prime Minister from 1942 and Morrison as Minister of Supply and then
Home Secretary), as akin to a "fascist regime" is tied in to the critique of
Attlee's post-war government and the devolution of the British Labour Party.

Any plans to put up an unbowdlerised version of the foreword? Or is someone
able to scan it and forward it on? With the currency exchange rate and
shipping costs I'm disinclined to fork out $100-00 to amazon.com for a novel
I already have and a fifteen page (?) introduction which is no doubt going
to surface on the web soon enough. It'd be nice to read it intact.

best