Essays by George Orwell

Essays George Orwell 

The first thing that I want to notice is that the cover image of the edition I have is a detail from an Empire Marketing Board Poster  which to me is rather odd as I doubt that Orwell would have been in anyway comfortable with the activities of the EMB, and so this is something of a faux pas by Penguin.

To turn to the essays themselves, they range widely over political, literary, and sociological topics yet time and again the same classic "Orwellian" themes unsurprisingly come to the fore.  As someone who finds 1984 one of to the most incisive political works in the modern canon the essays were rich in contextual material which links 1984 to Orwell's lived experiences.  This clarifies the core evil in Orwell's eye is the Establishment's bending of the truth - which often leads to the demolition of 'truth' as a meaningful concept. It is Orwell's time in Spain that focused him on this, and as shown by Stradling in "Your Children Will be Next...", the Spanish Civil War was a test bed not only of the aeroplanes of WWII but the media manipulation that is now the norm in both war and peace.

Many of the Essays are critiques of writers, one I found particularly interesting was that on Dickens.  Orwell notes that Dickens is claimed as a hero by both the 'Right' and the 'Left' - but Orwell argues that he defies them both because fundamentally Dickens did not see a 'political' solution to the ills he saw around him.  Dickens was a moralist not a politician, in the sense that the ills of society would be cured if only people lived righteously, that is lived up to the highest ideals of human nature.  What Dickens (according to Orwell) saw was that neither this political system nor another would make better people, and also almost any system if populated by the best of people is preferred to the 'best' system populated by ordinary human corruption. Through Dickens, Orwell advances his distrust of politicians of every colour and the belief that people, people with freedom, are the answer and the only hope (however often they fail).

I found myself often in agreement with Orwell and while he dismisses religion, much of his hope in people is for me core to the Christian hope, that liberated people can become the salvation of the world.

Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler

Scum of the Earth

I read this of the back of references to it in one of the collection of George Orwell Essays I have also been reading, and it gives a griping account of Koestler's experince in the opening years of the Second World War in France - with all the tension and drama of the best thriller writing - and while you clearly known he must escape to tell his tale for much of the time you live in the moment where its impossibility is the reality.

Koestler had travelled across Europe ahead of the tide of the Nazi advance and made a home in France, only to be betrayed by the French along with countless other 'enemies' of the Nazis.  The reasons behind his arrest and imprisomeant go to the core to the France collapse and murky years of collaboration with the Nazis.   And this is a lesson writ large in the truth of the saying of Burke ""All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." In the French Concentration Camp Koestler receives numerous acts of kindness from the guards which sound them to be fundamentally 'good' which only adds to the tragedy of their failure to see the evil of which they had become a part.

Koestler's escape was a stroke of luck, many other remained imprisoned and found themselves handed over to the Gestapo and in most cases death. One of the most interesting perspectives we gain from this account is the complete sense of hopelessness of 1940 as France fell, and Britain gave no real sign at that stage of having either the will of the capacity to fight on let alone to ultimately triumph.

Your children will be next: Bombing and propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Robert Stradling

Your childern will be next

This is a book I found out about through a review in Planet Magazine some time ago but it is particularly interesting to have read it just now while I am the middle of also reading a collection of Essays by George Orwell and to have followed it up by Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth. Orwell and Koestler both had personal experience of the Spanish War fighting for but ultimately disillusioned with the Spanish Republic who were the author of the Poster that gives Stradling his title and his starting point.

The Poster featuring a child killed, allegedly, at Getafe in an air raid bore the legend "If you tolerate this your children will be next", which Stradling an historian of the Spanish War began to investigate when the Manic Street Preachers took the phrase and turned it into a hit record.

What Stradling found was that the is no evidence of a raid at Getafe, and that after a brief interval the Republicans stopped mentioning and even explicitly denied it, in part because the phantom raid of Getafe could be replaced with the all to real raid on Gernika. This process of making and unmaking of an event is in strong accord with Orwell - reading his Essays (of which I will say more separately) you see that the focus of most people reading 1984 on Big Brother is perhaps a distraction.  I think for Orwell the real crime is the (re)writing of History.  Big Brother is just a symptom of the real Orwellian nightmare which is the abolition of truth - that it is a crime to state that 2 + 2 = 4 is the problem with in which the gaze of the telescreen is, almost, morally neutral.

The strange fact Stradling reveals is that in the case of the Spanish Civil War it is clear that history hasn't been written by the winners.  Not only has the non-event of the fascist air raid on Getafe remained a historical fact but the extensive use of air raids by the Republican side against civilian targets has become a non-fact - this is as true during the lifetime of Franco as it now decades after his death.  Because of Franco's links to Nazi Germany the Spanish Republic, the Allies of WWII did nothing to protect, was given (posthumously) hero's status.

We are part of this myth-making when we continue to see Nazi bombs on London and Coventry as criminal and Allied bombs on Dresden and Berlin as liberation - as if it were the case that bombs dropped by democracies could not possibly kill or main the righteous. Even our new words like collateral damage struggle to legitimise the relentless fire-stroms.

Stradling successfully kills the sacred cow of black and white readings of the Spanish Civil War - but that leaves us with the familiar task of deciding which shade of murky grey to favour.

Childhood an anthology for grown-ups Compiled by Dewi Roberts

Childhood

I have been dipping into this anthology over the last few months and I have enjoyed the mix of poems and prose.  One of the interesting features is most of the prose is snippets taken from larger autobiographical works of writers whose mature voice you are familiar with and in some it is clear that they are using that mature voice to reflect on their childhood while other narrate whatever the incident is firmly within the experience of childhood.

This is loosely a 'Welsh' collection but there is not much within it that could not have been written in an English context.  For me where there was a foreignness about the collection its due to much of it coming from rural settings in the early to mid twentieth century and therefore the absence of most of the 'comforts' we now not only taken for granted but find civilised live unimanginable without.