"fascistic disposition" paragraph

[jbor]

on 9/5/03 11:20 AM, David Morris wrote:
 
> Can you post us this bit, maybe with the part you note here?  I'm out of that
> Guardian edit loop.

Sure. No problem.

      Orwell thought of himself as a member of the
    "dissident Left", as distinguished from the "official
    Left", meaning basically the British Labour Party,
    most of which he had come, well before the Second
    World War, to regard 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 - will
    immediately point out that this is prewar thinking,
    and that the moment enemy bombs begin to fall on one's
    homeland, altering the landscape and producing
    casualties among friends and neighbors, all this sort
    of thing, really, becomes irrelevant, if not indeed
    subversive. With the homeland in danger, strong
    leadership and effective measures become of the
    essence, and if you want to call that fascism, very
    well, call it whatever you please, no one is likely to
    be listening, unless it's for the air raids to be over
    and the all clear to sound. But the unseemliness of
    an argument - let alone a prophecy - in the heat of some
    later emergency does not necessarily make it wrong.
    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.
      Orwell's critique of England's official Left was to
    undergo some modification in July 1945, when, at the
    first opportunity they got, the British electorate, by
    a landslide, threw out their wartime rulers and put in
    a Labour government, which would remain in power until
    1951 - beyond what would be left of Orwell's lifetime -
    during which period Labour finally got its chance to
    reshape British society along "Socialist" lines. Orwell,
    being a perpetual dissident, must have been delighted to
    help the party confront its contradictions, notably
    those arising from its wartime acquiesence to, and
    participation in, a repressive Tory-led government. Once
    having enjoyed and exerted that sort of power, how likely
    would Labour be to choose not to extend its scope, rather
    than stick to the ideals of its founders, and go back to
    fighting on the side of the oppressed? Project this will
    to power four decades into the future, and you could easily
    end up with Ingsoc, Oceania, and Big Brother.
      What is clear from his letters and articles at the time
    he was working on _1984_ is Orwell's despair over the
    postwar state of "Socialism". ... (ix-xi)

The edited version which appeared in the _Guardian_ is here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,948203,00.html

best