Foreword "Not Exactly Orwell's Intention" (for Keith)

[Dave Monroe]

   "The Korean conflict (1950-53) would also soon
highlight the alleged Communist practice of
ideological enforcement through 'brainwashing,' a set
of techniques said to be based on the work of I.P.
Pavlov, who had once trained dogs to salivate on cue,
as the Soviet tecnocrats after him were conditioning
their human subjects into political reflexes that
would be useful to the State.  The Russians were
supposed to be sharing these methods with their
puppets, the Chinese and the North Korean Communists. 
That something very much like brainwashing happens in
1984, in lengthy and terifying detail, to its hero,
Winston Smith, did not surprise those readers
determined to take the novel as a simple condemnation
of Stalinist atrocity.
   "This was not exactly Orwell's intention.  Though
1984 has brought aid and comfort to generations of
anticommunist idealogues with Pavlovian-response
issues of their own, Orwell's politics were not only
of the Left, but to the left of the Left.  He had gone
to the Sapin in 1937 to fight against Franco and his
Nazi-supported fascists, and there he had quickly
learned the difference between real and phony
antifascism.  'The Spanish war and other events in
1936-7,' he wrote ten years later, 'turned the scale
and thereafter I knew where I stood.  every line of
serious work that I have written since 1936 has been
written, directly or indirectly, against
totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I know
it.'
   "Orwell thought of himself as a member of the
'dissident Left,' as distingushed from the 'official
Left,' meaning basically the British Labour Party,
most of which he had come, well before the Second
World war, to reagrd as potentially, if not already,
fascist.  More or less consciously, he found an
analogy between British Labour and the Communist Party
under Stalin--both, he felt, were movements professing
to fight for the working classes against capitalism,
but in reality concerned only  with establishing and
perpetuating their own power.  The masses were only
there to be used--for their idealism, their class
resentments, their willingness to work cheap--and to
be sold out again and again.
   "Now, those of fascistic disposition--or merely
those among us who remain all too ready to justify any
government action, whether right or wrong-- ..."
("Foreword," p. ix)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0304&msg=78527&sort=date

--- s~Z <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:
>
> I have that passage. I was interested in the 
> paragraphs preceding this passage to see what was
> being referred to by the phrase: 'this is prewar
> thinking.'

I do and do and do for you kids.  Sure I can't put
this in the aeromail for you?  Still not too late for
the 4:30 autogyro ...

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