← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Howard Campbell, Jr.
Thread ID: 18182 | Posts: 17 | Started: 2005-05-10
2005-05-10 15:02 | User Profile
I just re-read Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and noted many of these passages--particularly the story of the Czarist officer Boris.
Orwell's Burmese Days also refers to Jewish prostitutes in Rangoon with "faces like crocodiles"...
[url]http://jewishtribalreview.org/orwell.htm[/url]
A wise, civil, and dignified Jewish email correspondent -- reeking with integrity -- writes to the Jewish Tribal Review the following:
Put this Orwell quote on your web site mother****er!!!!! (April 5, 2005)
"Anti-Semitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of specific offences which the person speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice. To attempt to counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be worse than useless. People can remain antisemitic, or at least anti-Jewish, while being fully aware that their outlook is indefensible. If you dislike somebody, you dislike him and there is an end of it: your feelings are not made any better by a recital of his virtues."
George Orwell From essay "Anti-Semitism in Britain"
And our humble reply:
Orwell's Example. A Review of Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens. Basic Books, 208 pages, $24.00, by Cheryl Miller, The Claremont Institute, October 2, 2002 "Hitchens does manage to register some minor arguments with Orwell ââ¬â he was often anti-Semitic and homophobic; he was too prone to pessimism ââ¬â but the whole of his argument is mainly devoted to demonstrating Orwell's superlative qualities: his integrity, his intellectual independence, and his honesty."
George Orwell's Lists, by Timothy Naftali, New York Times (posted here at the Chestnut Tree Cafe), July 29, 1998 "In his crabbed scrawl, and with characteristic acidity, Orwell secretly wrote down the names of prominent figures who he felt were so enamored of the Soviet Union that they had lost their political independence. He sent some names to a propaganda unit of the British Foreign Office, suggesting they were not fit for writing assignments. "It isn't a bad idea," he said, "to have the people who are probably unreliable listed." He was wrong-headed in a number of his listings. Stephen Spender, whom Orwell labeled a "sentimental sympathizer" in 1949, contributed an essay the next year to "The God That Failed," an indictment of Communism. And some comments are simply appalling. The anti-Semitic and anti-homosexual overtones of his notes are clear. Nevertheless, we should resist the temptation to condemn all of these secret scribblings as Orwellian double-think."
The Cold War Controversy, by Paul Foot, Socialist Review, July/August 2003 "Orwell got a job with Tribune where he wrote a weekly column full of unorthodoxy. All the staff there were supporters of Zionism, but not Orwell. He opposed it for the effect it would have on the people living in Palestine, and of course was denounced then and later for being anti-Semitic."
Orwell's Dirty Secret, by D. J. Taylor, Guardian (UK), (posted here at Home Planet), June 24, 2000 "My own particular biographer's dilemma started with the discovery, in the files of the publisher Victor Gollancz Ltd, of a letter sent to Gollancz himself in the spring of 1933. The writer, Mr GM Lipsey, had read a copy of George Orwell's newly published Down and Out in Paris and London. He was furious, not only with Orwell but also with his publisher. "On its merits or otherwise I have no desire to comment," he commented. "But I am appalled that a book containing insulting and odious remarks about Jews should be published by a firm bearing the name 'Gollancz'." A spirited correspondence followed. There were threats of legal action, and finally the row fizzled out. Its shadow, though, hangs over much of Orwell's early writings, and indeed his whole attitude towards Jews, Jewishness and, later on, the foundation of a Zionist state. Having read and annotated Down and Out in Paris and London half a dozen times, I was aware of the book's "Jew" references, just as one is aware of them in, to select a random handful of Orwell's 30s contemporaries, the work of Anthony Powell, JB Priestley, TS Eliot and Graham Greene. Reading it again, in the light of the Lipsey remonstrance, I was struck by how oddly gratuitous they are. Barely has the third chapter been reached, for example, before a hard-up Orwell is unloading clothes in a Parisian secondhand shop to "a red-haired Jew, an extraordinarily disagreeable man". Now, one can be disagreeable and a Jew, but the faint hint that the connection has a racial basis is somehow reinforced by the coda. "It would have been a pleasure to have flattened the Jew's nose, if only one could have afforded it." Back in London, Orwell wanders into a coffee shop near Tower Hill where "in a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon." How does Orwell know the bacon-wolfer is a Jew? And how does he know that the emotion he detects in his face is guilt? There is something loaded, too, about the reference to a "muzzle", as if the man is not quite human, and the explanation for this sub-humanity has something to do with being Jewish. One could ignore this, just possibly, if it existed in a single book. And yet for 10 years the abstract figure of "the Jew" makes regular appearances in Orwell's diaries. Out tramping in the early 30s, he falls in with "a little Liverpool Jew, a thorough guttersnipe" with a face that recalls "some low-down carrion bird". Watching the crowds thronging the London underground in October 1940, he decides that what is "bad" about the Jews is that they are not only conspicuous but go out of their way to make themselves so. He is particularly annoyed by "a regular comic-paper cartoon of a Jewess" who literally fights her way on to the train at Oxford Circus. Again, it is perfectly possible that the woman in question resembled an extra from Fiddler On The Roof and that the incident took place exactly as Orwell describes it. Even so, it is a safe bet that no early 21st-century liberal will be able to read Orwell's account without clenching their teeth. It would be idle to classify Orwell as "anti-semitic". He had dozens of Jewish friends and kept a vigilant eye out for evidence of anti-semitism, both on theatre stages and in print. In fact, the complexities of what he thought and wrote about Jews defy easy summary (although it is worth pointing out that in an argument with Aneurin Bevan, he once referred to Zionists as "a gang of Wardour Street Jews" with a controlling interest over the British press.) But having come across these attitudes, what do you do with them? Context, inevitably, is all ... Orwell's fixation with doling out the word "Jew" like a kind of party badge raises fundamental questions about the social milieu he inhabited and the upbringing that put stereotypes of this sort into his head. Above all, perhaps - and this is a man regularly marked down by posterity as a secular saint - it makes him seem human in a way that much of the posthumous embalming of his reputation does not."
Reach-Me-Down Romantic, by Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books, June 19, 2003 "Orwell was a self-mythologising romantic toff who went in for the odd spot of sentimental slumming, sometimes adopting a ludicrous Cockney accent in the process, and ended up in political defeatism and despair. A second-rate novelist and a furtively fabricating social commentator, he was homophobic, anti-feminist, unsociable, anti-intellectual, authoritarian and latently violent. He was also an anti-semitic, sexually promiscuous, self-pitying Little Englander, whose later fantasies about Big Brother and pigs running farms (they don't have the trotters for it) bequeathed a set of lurid stereotypes and convenient caricatures to the Right. In this sense, Orwell, like Freud but unlike Marx, has passed into the common language."
Orwell in Perspective, by Herb Greer, Commentary, March 1983 "[H]he knew well enough (as Fyvel must) that a casual anti-Semitism was normal among his class and generation and, as Crick makes very clear, Orwell was anti-Semitic in this way himself..."
Down and Out in Paris and London, [Full Review] Epinions, November 16, 2004 "Orwell is a hero to many people nowadays because of his writing. Both his journalism and his creative work are an open attack on the political and economic systems which exploited the poor and deprived them of their liberty. It is a bit of a shock therefore to see that he was not free from the anti-Semitism so common in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The Jews are the villains of many of the anectodes from Paris and when describing a coffee-shop in Tower Hill, London he says: "In a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon (133)". No other group is written about in this fashion."
Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell, [Sample excerpt from Chapter 6] "On some mornings Boris collapsed in the most utter despair. He would lie in bed almost weeping, cursing the Jew with whom he lived. Of late the Jew had become restive about paying the daily two francs, and, what was worse, had begun putting on intolerable airs of patronage. Boris said that I, as an Englishman, could not conceive what torture it was to a Russian of family to be at the mercy of a Jew. 'A Jew, mon ami, a veritable Jew! And he hasnââ¬â¢t even the decency to be ashamed of it. To think that I, a captain in the Russian Armyââ¬âhave I ever told you, mon ami, that I was a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles? Yes, a captain, and my father was a colonel. And here I am, eating the bread of a Jew. A Jew . . . 'I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early months of the war, we were on the march, and we had halted at a village for the night. A horrible old Jew, with a red beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to my billet. I asked him what he wanted. ââ¬ÅYour honour,ââ¬Â he said, ââ¬ÅI have brought a girl for you, a beautiful young girl only seventeen. It will only be fifty francs.ââ¬Â ââ¬ÅThank you,ââ¬Â I said, ââ¬Åyou can take her away again. I donââ¬â¢t want to catch any diseases.ââ¬Â ââ¬ÅDiseases!ââ¬Â cried the Jew, ââ¬Åmais, monsieur le capitaine, thereââ¬â¢s no fear of that. Itââ¬â¢s my own daughter!ââ¬Â That is the Jewish national character for you."
George Orwell at 100: Revisiting a Life Steeped in Contradictions, by Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, June 23, 2003 "[Orwell] couldn't quite remove the anti-Semitism as well. [Frederic] Mullally recalls complaining one day, when they were having pints at the pub near the Tribune offices, about the difficulties he was having turning German Jewish writer Ricky Loewenthal's tortuous prose into readable English. "What do you expect," Orwell replied, "with all these Middle European Jews practically running the paper's politics?" Mullally says he waited for the grin that would signal Orwell was joking. It never came."
Orwell offered writers' blacklist to anti-Soviet propaganda unit, by Richard Norton-Taylor and Seumas Milne, The Guardian (UK), (posted here at Net Charles), July 11, 1996 "George Orwell's letter to Celia Kirwan of Whitehall's secret Information Research Department (6-4-1949): I read the enclosed article with interest, but it seems to me anti-religious rather than anti-semitic. For what my opinion is worth, I don't think anti-anti-semitism is a strong card to play in anti-Russian propaganda. The USSR must in practice be somewhat anti-semitic, as it is opposed both to Zionism within its own borders and on the other hand to the liberalism and internationalism of the non-Zionist Jews, but a polyglot state of that kind can never be officially anti-semitic, in the Nazi manner, just as the British Empire cannot. If you try to tie up Communism with anti-semitism, it is always possible in reply to point to people like Kaganovich or Anna Pauleer, also to the large number of Jews in the Communist parties everywhere. I also think it is bad policy to try to curry favour with your enemies. The Zionist Jews everywhere hate us and regard Britain as the enemy, more even than Germany. Of course this is based on misunderstanding, but as long as it is so I do not think we do ourselves any good by denouncing anti-semitism in other nations. I am sorry I can't write a better letter, but I really have felt so lousy the last few days. Perhaps a bit later I'll get some ideas. With love, George"
Virtually anybody who was anybody has been called an "anti-Semite," sooner or later. Including Orwell.
2005-05-10 16:39 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Howard Campbell, Jr.]I just re-read Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and noted many of these passages--particularly the story of the Czarist officer Boris...[/QUOTE]I cannot give the exact reference, but during the Second World War Orwell commented on the great number of Jews taking refuge in a subway station. I suspect he was also aware that the Jews of Britain were ducking the war with Hitler.
From my book: [QUOTE]In 1992 the [I]Jewish Veteran [/I] reported on the World War II effort by British Jews[B].[1] [/B] With a Jewish population in Britain of 385,000 some 60,000 Jewish men and women served in British forces. Participation of over 15 percent of the Jewish population was stated as being greater than participation by the British Commonwealth. Then came information that over 1100 British Jews died in action. This computed to a contribution of about 1 in 350, or slightly less than 3 per 1000. The British survey of their dead from World War II revealed 264,000 died while serving in the armed forces with an additional 31,000 dying from natural causes, over 30,000 dying in the merchant navy and fishing fleet and over 60,000 civilians died. In addition the armed forces had over 6000 missing as of June 1946. This sacrifice came from a population estimated slightly over 46 million in 1940 by the [I]Encyclopedia Judaica[/I]. Over 9 million Britons served in the British defense effort. Participation by Jews in that war was lower than their countrymen who died at two to three times the Jewish rate[B].[2] [/B] The determined reader will confirm these observations for himself. Lack of full participation in wars by Jews has not been confined to the United States.
2005-05-11 00:12 | User Profile
Even so, it is a safe bet that no early 21st-century liberal will be able to read Orwell's account without clenching their teeth.
There is so much, a regular world full of political incorrectness, that makes a liberal clench their teeth, who care? :thumbsup:
2005-05-11 00:31 | User Profile
*By 1928, Paris had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom, the quality fell off, until toward the end there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads... I remember a fat Jewess inlaid with diamonds, who sat behind us at the Russian ballet and said as the curtain rose, 'That's luffly, they ought to baint a picture of it.' This was low comedy... There were citizens traveling in luxury in 1928 and 1929 who, in the distortion of their new condition, had the human value of Pekinese, bivalves, cretins, goats. (Tales of the Jazz Age)
-F. Scott Fitzgerald*
Even liberal intellectuals prior to WWII were unabashed about Tribal critique. Here's an invaluable compendium--though compiler Grimstad missed Orwell's "Hate" entirely:
ANTI-ZION [url]http://www.ety.com/HRP/booksonline/antizion/aztoc.htm[/url]
[img]http://www.ety.com/HRP/immages/antizion.jpg[/img]
2005-05-11 00:58 | User Profile
You can read Anti-Semitism in Britain here:
[url="http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/England/antisemitism.html"]http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/England/antisemitism.html[/url]
Coincidently, I referenced this recently.
If Orwell is to be considered an authority on the views and opinions of Orwell, this essay seems to indicate that he was not an anti-Semite. This is manifest in such statements that anti-Semitism is "irrational" , "All I would say with confidence is that anti-Semitism is part of the larger problem of nationalism, which has not yet been seriously examined, and that the Jew is evidently a scapegoat, though for what he is a scapegoat we do not yet know." and
[QUOTE]"There is more anti-Semitism in England than we care to admit, and the war has accentuated it, but it is not certain that it is on the increase if one thinks in terms of decades rather than years. It does not at present lead to open persecution, but it has the effect of making people callous to the sufferings of Jews in other countries."
[/QUOTE] and
[QUOTE]"It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now almost universal. Anti-Semitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form".[/QUOTE]
2005-05-11 01:07 | User Profile
Note, robinder, the 1945 date of that essay.
Orwell's "problematical" remarks were written in the early and mid-thirties...though he also caught enormous flack for defending Ezra Pound's Bollingen Prize even after WWII.
2005-05-11 01:21 | User Profile
There is even some latitude in interpreting the essay. But, like in many other cases, it would seem Orwell was being intellectually honest, and that is what I consider to be one of his most admirable traits and this integrity shines forth, whatever one might think of any particular point he expressed. Politics do not take precedence over his principles. He may have disliked some Jews, or most Jews, or Jews in general, but like others who adopted those outlooks he is far from what could be safely called a confirmed anti-Semite. At times, he sounds undecided or unclear about his precise views on this issue, but he does appear sincerely opposed to "prejudices" of an anti-Semitic sort.
He also defended Wodehouse against charges of collaboration, another example of his fundamental even-handedness and decency.
2005-05-11 01:58 | User Profile
[QUOTE=robinder] He may have disliked some Jews, or most Jews, or Jews in general, but like others who adopted those outlooks he is far from what could be safely called a confirmed anti-Semite.[/QUOTE]
I must say I find it hard to understand how any thinking white person these days could not be a "confirmed anti-Semite". What bastards, lets see, they are the richest ethnic group in the country, they own or control the greater portion of the media, yet they claim, through of all things "victimhood", to be above criticism. No ruling elite can be above criticism in any free country. It's as simple as that. Next time, real gas chambers!
2005-05-11 09:17 | User Profile
Orwell's work stands on its own regardless of what he thought about the Jews. Whether or not he was an anti-Semite should matter little to us, as we know things about world Jewry that Orwell might not have been aware of.
2005-05-11 16:14 | User Profile
[QUOTE=robinder]There is even some latitude in interpreting the essay. But, like in many other cases, it would seem Orwell was being intellectually honest, and that is what I consider to be one of his most admirable traits and this integrity shines forth, whatever one might think of any particular point he expressed. Politics do not take precedence over his principles. He may have disliked some Jews, or most Jews, or Jews in general, but like others who adopted those outlooks he is far from what could be safely called a confirmed anti-Semite. At times, he sounds undecided or unclear about his precise views on this issue, but he does appear sincerely opposed to "prejudices" of an anti-Semitic sort.
He also defended Wodehouse against charges of collaboration, another example of his fundamental even-handedness and decency.[/QUOTE]
Wodehouse is an interesting case. He was certainly no collaborator--he was unable to escape the Blitzkrieg's sweep into Paris and basically went on the German Radio to reassure his friends and family that he was safe.
Yes, aside from Orwell's intellectual honesty his greatest character trait may be his great sense of fair play.
One of PGW's most hilarious Bertie tales is the one spoofing Mosely's movement--the pompous Roderick Spode and the "Blackshorts"...
2005-05-11 23:09 | User Profile
Bertie Wooster vs. Roderick (Mosely) Spode:
*Wodehouse books do contain politics, usually the larks and lunacy of the old-fashioned hustings. But the politics are scrupulously fair in party-political terms and the only character subject to sustained ridicule is Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the comically fascist Blackshorts.
In one episode, Wooster reduces Spode to a snivelling wreck by threatening to reveal his professional sideline as a designer of women's silk underwear.
Bertie also tells him: "The trouble with you, Spode, is that because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of halfwits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting, 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'"*
The "collaborator" charges:
*This was in 1938. By 1944, Wodehouse was being denounced as a traitor. In 1940, he was living in northern France when it was overrun by the Germans. He was taken to an internment camp.
Thinking to use the popular writer, the Nazis let him make radio broadcasts to America, then uninvolved in the war. Wodehouse, for his part, thought to use the Nazis' offer to reassure concerned Americans, many of whom had written to him in captivity, that he was all right.
It was a dumb move. Goebbels sent the tapes to the BBC and a furore erupted. The Daily Express called him "Herr Wodehouse". The BBC banned anything by him and broadcast condemnations.
His own broadcasts had taken a whimsical look at life in internment (Plum's case was not helped by the fact that he was shortly released). In one, he said: "I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent about some country, I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings."
The Germans seemed largely to have left him to his own devices, not even censoring remarks such as "the internees at Trost camp all fervently believe that Britain will eventually win".
This was fine and dandy, but the fact remained that he seemed to be living in a happy, fantasy world while thousands of people were being killed. No-one wants to drag anyone into the real world, particularly at that time, but what of duty?
Two British Intelligence officers, one of them Malcolm Muggeridge, cross-examined Wodehouse in Paris in 1944 and concluded he was naive but not a traitor.
A Whitehall official's note described him as a man "without political cause who lives in a world of his own and is only interested in creating humorous characters and incidents to please himself and his book-buying public". It added: "He was a silly ass and a selfish ass to broadcast, but there seems no point in trying to charge such an ass with treason."
Distressed and bewildered, Wodehouse apologised fulsomely for his misjudgment. But, while being cleared officially, there was no going back, and he spent the rest of his life in America.*
2005-05-12 21:16 | User Profile
[img]http://www.palynology.org/images/wodehouse.jpg[/img]
2005-05-12 21:21 | User Profile
[img]http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/imgs/pictures/Image_02.jpg[/img]
2005-05-12 21:47 | User Profile
Of course Orwell disliked the Jews! He was that most uncommon of Socialists, one who actually cared about the welfare of the working class. His version of Socialism had nothing in common with Jewish socialism, which is just a movement to destroy Goy institutions out of hatred for gentiles.
2005-05-15 09:13 | User Profile
Yes George Orwell was an "Anti-Semite" because he thought Soviets murdering people were just as evil as Nazis murdering people.
2005-05-16 04:17 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Faust]Yes George Orwell was an "Anti-Semite" because he thought Soviets murdering people were just as evil as Nazis murdering people.[/QUOTE]
Orwell's real political education took place in Spain--where he witnessed the wholesale betrayal of his comrades, the POUM Anarcho-Syndicalists by the Stalinists (who dominated the "International Brigades")...
In WWII he was assigned to the BBC Indian radio service to script and produce counter-propaganda to the German and Japanese appeals for a Hindu nationalist independence movement under Bose.
2005-06-10 04:22 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Howard Campbell, Jr.]Orwell's real political education took place in Spain--where he witnessed the wholesale betrayal of his comrades, the POUM Anarcho-Syndicalists by the Stalinists (who dominated the "International Brigades")...
In WWII he was assigned to the BBC Indian radio service to script and produce counter-propaganda to the German and Japanese appeals for a Hindu nationalist independence movement under Bose.[/QUOTE]
And no doubt understood his terrible error with regard communist evil.
He made many mistakes in judgement and thus made attempt rectify it as he matured into political adulthood.
Mentzer