1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2003 1:06 AM
Subject: Re: 1984 Foreword "fascistic disposition"


> on 2/5/03 1:00 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:
>
> > the exorbitant
> >> generalisations and bizarre (and actually quite
> >> offensive when you come to think about it)
> >
> > When YOU come to think of it, maybe ...
> >
> >> historical comparisons
>
> I think that comparing Clement Attlee to Hitler, or Bush to Saddam, -
> democratic governments to dictatorships - is patently ridiculous, and it's
> offensive to the memories and families of the millions of their own
> countrymen which the latter two totalitarian despots murdered.
>

1. Hitler has been elected 1933 as democratically (under the Weimar
Constitution) as Attlee, given the Florida-incident maybe even more than
Bush. But this has to be decided by later historians. How likely is it that
he will share Churchill's fate of being elected out of office after having
won the war?

2. Now there are thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam and thousands killed
by the coalition troops for a simple Iraqi (Shia, Sunni or Kurd) this
doesn't make a big difference. Whether your child has died of the
Baath-party, UN-sanctions or precision guided missiles doesn't matter in the
end.

> > "The dissident Left" vs. "the
> > official Left" (ix).  Cooptation of dissidence,
> > resistance, subversion, et al.
>
> But what happens when this "dissident Left" actually wins or seizes
> political power? Doesn't it then just become another "official Left"? What
> are the examples of the "dissident Left" in action? Stalin? Maoist China?
> Pol Pot? Saddam? North Korea? Robert Mugabe?
>

Nowhere at all; the "dissident Left" never won any power, in becoming
"official" like Stalin it looses its "dissident" qualities. But Trotzky,
Rosa Luxemburg & Karl Liebknecht have been murdered, Ulbricht & Honecker
hardly can be called radicals, Eric Blair never became Prime Minister but
wrote a novel and died, Rudi Dutschke never became Bundeskanzler but was
shot. Gorbatschov has been fired for doing the right thing. In Pynchon's
view Orwell has been afraid of the official Left becoming stalinist, not of
some dissidents starting a revolution.

The dissident left nowadays is maybe "Attack" and other anti-Globalist
activists, but no party in power anywhere on this planet, not even the
German Greens. The novel says (O'Brien to Winston) that the sole purpose of
power is to stay in power, therefor resistance against undemocratic (wrong)
political developments never is puerile but always justified, even and
especially in times of war. Defending the homeland that way is support of
the troops abroad because it's a defense of institutions the guys are
fighting for out there.

> As long as this "dissident Left" keeps defending the "rights" of
terrorists
> and tyrants then it's not going to have any impact in democratic
countries.
> And the fact that it does keep defending terrorists and tyrants leads me
to
> believe that that's probably a good thing. And, dissidence just for the
sake
> of dissidence is, well, puerile.
>

The "dissident Left" (like Orwell) are critisizing the "official" Left (or
those dissidents who strive to become official and acquiring habits
normally attached to the enemy) behaving the same as the Right. Remember
O'Brien reminding Winston what crimes he had promised to commit (especially
the last one) when entering the Brotherhood. (Sorry, I have no original text
yet to give page numbers, it's in the third chapter of the third part).

Again, I don't see a big difference to democrats defending racial filing,
the right to torture or to put people into camps without the chance of
seeing a lawyer (as in Guantanamo). It's very offensive to anybody who
thinks democracy is inevitably bound to justice for everybody. To put it
plain: it's in these details where he violates the American Constitution
that Bush has become some kind of nazi-ruler because he does things Hitler
has done too and to think that this could be right or justified because
we're at war is falling to Doublethink. And I'm not defending the rights of
terrorists here but the American Constitution that defends our democracy
too. This argument may be unseemly during the worldwide war on terror but
this unseemliness doesn't necessarily make it wrong. I pretty much go along
with Pynchon's politics (as I understand them) here.

> Pynchon's identification of "Ingsoc" with the British Labour Party is
silly.
> Certainly Orwell disagreed with the politics of Attlee & co., but he was
> more horrified and appalled by the actions of the Communists during the
> Spanish Civil War. Ingsoc is modelled on Stalinism, and it's a warning of
> what could happen in Britain if a Socialist Revolution ever did eventuate.
> There's no hint anywhere in the novel that it is meant to describe life
> under a democratically-elected British Labour (or Conservative, or
Liberal,
> or coalition) government. It depicts Britain after a *Revolution*, after
the
> ousting of capitalism and democracy.
>

1. Orwell was horrified that the side he was fighting for didn't behave much
differently than the fascists who had destroyed the young Spanish democracy.
Of course those "actions of the Communists during the Spanish Civil War"
Orwell was horrified by had been justified by the same "right or wrong, my
country"-argument by those who committed them.

2. There's no hint in the novel that there had been a chance to maintain or
reach democracy in any of the three systems, only that slight moment of hope
that can be drawn of the fact that there's this strange grammar at the end I
like to compare to what Father Rapier says on p. 540.12-15, that "some
chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History." The next
sentence begins with "To affirm Their mortality (...)" -- remember Winston
asking O'Brien whether the Big Brother is mortal or not.

> The mainstream political parties in most Western democracies can hardly
even
> be described as "left" or "right" - they're all within about half a
> micrometer of one another in some nondescript "centre".
>
> best

This is of course true. In the end I think I'm with Churchill in what he
says about the quality of democracy. But it has to be defended, more at home
than abroad.

But I accept the fact that the USA, the sole remaining superpower, being
attacked by Saudi terrorists, claims the right to take out any bad guy in
the world who might be able to develop weapons of mass destruction that
possibly could hit American soil, any bad guy who might support terrorist
networks to use these weapons, because in a way this protects me too. But
I'm not egoistic, as long as they do so constitutionally they may best take
Mugabe (whose weapon of mass destruction is the hunger which he uses to stay
in power) next.

Otto