Orwell Prize: Stalinist loathing of George still raw

Sometimes a thing is true even if George Orwell says it's true. Old grudges die hard; Stalinists still hate George (not Galloway) while 'decents' claim him for their own.

My fellow blogging longlister in the Orwell Prize, Dave Osler, has posted a defence of Gorgeous. And I guess that's my cue to do likewise with an article I wrote on this very subject a few years ago on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, reviewing John Newsinger's biography, Orwell's Politics.

Orwell's writing was the source of as much controversy during his life as it was when left and right fought over his literary corpse after his death. The right claimed him for themselves, "embracing him as an emotional conservative who had given terrible warning of the totalitarian logic inherent in the socialist cause", while the Stalinist dominated left were willing to give away the man H.G. Wells once described as the "Trotskyist with big feet". Nineteen Eighty Four, Orwell's final novel and a satire of Stalinist Russia, has been defined as "the 'canonical text' of conservative anti-Communism, as 'the key imaginative manifesto of the Cold War' and gives Orwell the dubious honour of having 'invented ... a complete poetics of political invective'." Isaac Deutscher, Marxist historian, famed anti-Stalinist and biographer of both Trotsky and Stalin, weighed into the debate, dismissing Orwell as "a 'simple minded anarchist' for whom any movement 'forfeited its raison d'etre the moment it acquired a raison d'etat'."

The 1970 publication of Orwell's miscellaneous writing under the title The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters provided a context for Orwell's best known books and put the Stalinists and right wingers on the back foot as a new generation of socialists, unfettered by loyalty to the Communist Party, broke through the claims and counter-claims. And in 1980 Bernard Crick's exhaustively researched biography, George Orwell: A Life, lifted Orwell out of the quagmire of malice and misinformation and placed him firmly on the left, albeit as a Tribune socialist grown shy of revolutionary politics. However, even this mild reclamation of Orwell for the reformist left proved too much for adherents to the Communist tradition. Their reaction plumbed new depths with the publication in 1984 of Inside The Myth: Orwell - Views from the LefT, a collection of essays attacking Orwell, edited by Christopher Norris and published by Lawrence and Wishart, a book which Newsinger calls "an unholy alliance of feminists, cultural theorists and old fashioned Stalinists, dedicated to reversing his influence".

Orwell's Politics by John Newsinger moves the debate a critical step further. Taking the end of the Cold War as "an ideal context for a reassessment" of Orwell's political ideas, Newsinger gives us a map of Orwell's intellectual terrain, and deftly orientates the reader around the key Orwellian debates. He examines how Orwell's politics developed in a changing world, and extracts a through-line strung like a piano wire through volatile circumstances, warring ideologies and intellectual sleight of hand in the century that promised workers in the saddle. Newsinger's thesis is that, although Orwell's politics shifted throughout his lifetime, the one constant was his unwavering socialism. What detractors - and even some admirers - have missed is that he never ceased to write from within the left, attacking the betrayal of the revolution rather than the revolution itself.

To read more click here

Orwell Prize: Stalinist loathing of George still raw

Sometimes a thing is true even if George Orwell says it's true. Old grudges die hard; Stalinists still hate George (not Galloway) while 'decents' claim him for their own.

My fellow blogging longlister in the Orwell Prize, Dave Osler, has posted a defence of Gorgeous. And I guess that's my cue to do likewise with an article I wrote on this very subject a few years ago on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, reviewing John Newsinger's biography, Orwell's Politics.

Orwell's writing was the source of as much controversy during his life as it was when left and right fought over his literary corpse after his death. The right claimed him for themselves, "embracing him as an emotional conservative who had given terrible warning of the totalitarian logic inherent in the socialist cause", while the Stalinist dominated left were willing to give away the man H.G. Wells once described as the "Trotskyist with big feet". Nineteen Eighty Four, Orwell's final novel and a satire of Stalinist Russia, has been defined as "the 'canonical text' of conservative anti-Communism, as 'the key imaginative manifesto of the Cold War' and gives Orwell the dubious honour of having 'invented ... a complete poetics of political invective'." Isaac Deutscher, Marxist historian, famed anti-Stalinist and biographer of both Trotsky and Stalin, weighed into the debate, dismissing Orwell as "a 'simple minded anarchist' for whom any movement 'forfeited its raison d'etre the moment it acquired a raison d'etat'."

The 1970 publication of Orwell's miscellaneous writing under the title The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters provided a context for Orwell's best known books and put the Stalinists and right wingers on the back foot as a new generation of socialists, unfettered by loyalty to the Communist Party, broke through the claims and counter-claims. And in 1980 Bernard Crick's exhaustively researched biography, George Orwell: A Life, lifted Orwell out of the quagmire of malice and misinformation and placed him firmly on the left, albeit as a Tribune socialist grown shy of revolutionary politics. However, even this mild reclamation of Orwell for the reformist left proved too much for adherents to the Communist tradition. Their reaction plumbed new depths with the publication in 1984 of Inside The Myth: Orwell - Views from the LefT, a collection of essays attacking Orwell, edited by Christopher Norris and published by Lawrence and Wishart, a book which Newsinger calls "an unholy alliance of feminists, cultural theorists and old fashioned Stalinists, dedicated to reversing his influence".

Orwell's Politics by John Newsinger moves the debate a critical step further. Taking the end of the Cold War as "an ideal context for a reassessment" of Orwell's political ideas, Newsinger gives us a map of Orwell's intellectual terrain, and deftly orientates the reader around the key Orwellian debates. He examines how Orwell's politics developed in a changing world, and extracts a through-line strung like a piano wire through volatile circumstances, warring ideologies and intellectual sleight of hand in the century that promised workers in the saddle. Newsinger's thesis is that, although Orwell's politics shifted throughout his lifetime, the one constant was his unwavering socialism. What detractors - and even some admirers - have missed is that he never ceased to write from within the left, attacking the betrayal of the revolution rather than the revolution itself.

To read more click here

1000 Ways To Die review: lurid, shocking, gruesome TV

Has anyone else stumbled across the Bravo cable TV show, 1,000 Ways To Die? It's a sweet little offering from the US, re-enacting the weirdest ways people have met their end — usually prime contenders for the Darwin Awards.

I'm sitting here squirming having just watched the fate of the scumbag robber who stole groceries from a pregnant blind woman (aw, presumably with one leg and five grandparents to look after). Now, robbery isn't a capital crime to anyone except the Joe Sixpack couch potatoes who enjoy this lowly entertainment, whose ranks I now admit to joining in a rare confessional moment I'll probably live to regret, especially if the Orwell Prize judges are reading this (please look away now). But the gleeful voice-over assures us that the evil perp got his just deserts.

Escaping from the pursuing cop, the villain runs into a doorway, unaware that he is now in a car wash. At that moment, an attendant, oblivious to the presence of the unwanted visitor, starts up the machinery for its daily test run. Said crimo, disorientated by flailing brushes, oceans of soap and jets of water, slips and falls back onto a high-pressure nozzle in the wall that spears his head. So far, so banal.

Did I mention this was a high-pressure nozzle?

We are treated to a very surprised criminal whose head suddenly explodes, leaving a stump of neck above his rather fetching blue jumper.

To an animated illustration of the inside of the human anatomy, a Scientist then tells us in a serious tone befitting the sad occasion, exactly what happens when water is rapidly pumped into your cranial cavity at kazillions of pounds per square inch. "It raises the brain to the top of the skull and, having nowhere to go, is ejected upwards and out at force," because, of course, we needed that explained.

Cue illustration showing said brain squeezed up until the skull shatters.

It's all done with no pretence of good taste whatsover, tells the stories with lipsmacking delight, makes us contemplate our own mortality and thank the lord there but by the grace of god/luck/smarts go I.

What's not to like?

1000 Ways To Die review: lurid, shocking, gruesome TV

Has anyone else stumbled across the Bravo cable TV show, 1,000 Ways To Die? It's a sweet little offering from the US, re-enacting the weirdest ways people have met their end — usually prime contenders for the Darwin Awards.

I'm sitting here squirming having just watched the fate of the scumbag robber who stole groceries from a pregnant blind woman (aw, presumably with one leg and five grandparents to look after). Now, robbery isn't a capital crime to anyone except the Joe Sixpack couch potatoes who enjoy this lowly entertainment, whose ranks I now admit to joining in a rare confessional moment I'll probably live to regret, especially if the Orwell Prize judges are reading this (please look away now). But the gleeful voice-over assures us that the evil perp got his just deserts.

Escaping from the pursuing cop, the villain runs into a doorway, unaware that he is now in a car wash. At that moment, an attendant, oblivious to the presence of the unwanted visitor, starts up the machinery for its daily test run. Said crimo, disorientated by flailing brushes, oceans of soap and jets of water, slips and falls back onto a high-pressure nozzle in the wall that spears his head. So far, so banal.

Did I mention this was a high-pressure nozzle?

We are treated to a very surprised criminal whose head suddenly explodes, leaving a stump of neck above his rather fetching blue jumper.

To an animated illustration of the inside of the human anatomy, a Scientist then tells us in a serious tone befitting the sad occasion, exactly what happens when water is rapidly pumped into your cranial cavity at kazillions of pounds per square inch. "It raises the brain to the top of the skull and, having nowhere to go, is ejected upwards and out at force," because, of course, we needed that explained.

Cue illustration showing said brain squeezed up until the skull shatters.

It's all done with no pretence of good taste whatsover, tells the stories with lipsmacking delight, makes us contemplate our own mortality and thank the lord there but by the grace of god/luck/smarts go I.

What's not to like?

Belle Curve De Jour: GCSE Chinese and Indians not British

What's wrong with this headline?

Chinese and Indian pupils get more top grades at GCSE than British children

The Daily Mail does it again. In an article that's supposed to prove Chinese and Indian kids are high in Geek Factor when it comes to exams, Laura Clark effectively says that UK Chinese and Indians living, studying and most likely born here aren't British. At no point are we described as such. I know it shouldn't come as a shock to me that on Planet Mail, only white children can be classed as Brits, but it still annoys me to see us defined as "Other" in this underhand way.

Clark writes:

Chinese and Indian pupils gain more top grades than white British children in every school subject, official figures reveal. The biggest gulf in attainment is in GCSE maths, where Chinese children are three-and-a-half times more likely to get an A than white British children.

Yeah, we're fiendishly clever and foreign. So watch out!

This naked expression of a fear of (a) intellectuals and (b) forners plays on the dawning realisation that deteriorating living standards threaten to regress us all back to Victorian levels of poverty. Someone ate all the pies, but the the finger keeps getting pointed to other groups struggling to make a good life instead of the kleptocrats currently stealing everything that isn't nailed down (and, thanks to the clawhammers supplied under Blair, quite a lot that was). While Dyson relocates his domestic appliance business to hoover up cheap labour in Malaysia, company directors lay workers off and then pay themselves the stolen wages in fat bonuses and peers of the realm on both sides of the House refuse to pay British taxes, we're supposed to blame other workers. We should at least be smart enough not to allow politicians and media to turn us into rats in a sack while the super-rich wreck our lives.

Lies, damned lies and The Bell Curve
I was greatly amused when all the rednecks started quoting soi-disant "libertarian political scientist" Charles Murray (no relation, thankfully, to the British blues-rock guru of almost the same name), whose mission seems to be to render racism respectable. His dubious 'Bell Curve' statistics were supposed to prove that whites were intellectually superior to blacks, as if there were no other factors in the way these tests were organised. But the same tests and dodgy methodology also showed that Chinese, Japanese and Koreans scored higher than whites. Somehow his adherents excised that latter chunk of data from their arguments whilst waging their race war.

So, what do we learn from the latest statistics? Curry feeds the brain? Eating with chopsticks increases your intelligence? Perhaps it's the delicate co-ordination required every mealtime that forges those synaptic links in the young brain which will stand you in such good stead when it comes to writing your dissertation on genetic degeneration in the grey matter of certain white scientists and Daily Mail journalists.

Hat-tip, Navjot Singh.

Belle Curve De Jour: GCSE Chinese and Indians not British

What's wrong with this headline?

Chinese and Indian pupils get more top grades at GCSE than British children

The Daily Mail does it again. In an article that's supposed to prove Chinese and Indian kids are high in Geek Factor when it comes to exams, Laura Clark effectively says that UK Chinese and Indians living, studying and most likely born here aren't British. At no point are we described as such. I know it shouldn't come as a shock to me that on Planet Mail, only white children can be classed as Brits, but it still annoys me to see us defined as "Other" in this underhand way.

Clark writes:

Chinese and Indian pupils gain more top grades than white British children in every school subject, official figures reveal. The biggest gulf in attainment is in GCSE maths, where Chinese children are three-and-a-half times more likely to get an A than white British children.

Yeah, we're fiendishly clever and foreign. So watch out!

This naked expression of a fear of (a) intellectuals and (b) forners plays on the dawning realisation that deteriorating living standards threaten to regress us all back to Victorian levels of poverty. Someone ate all the pies, but the the finger keeps getting pointed to other groups struggling to make a good life instead of the kleptocrats currently stealing everything that isn't nailed down (and, thanks to the clawhammers supplied under Blair, quite a lot that was). While Dyson relocates his domestic appliance business to hoover up cheap labour in Malaysia, company directors lay workers off and then pay themselves the stolen wages in fat bonuses and peers of the realm on both sides of the House refuse to pay British taxes, we're supposed to blame other workers. We should at least be smart enough not to allow politicians and media to turn us into rats in a sack while the super-rich wreck our lives.

Lies, damned lies and The Bell Curve
I was greatly amused when all the rednecks started quoting soi-disant "libertarian political scientist" Charles Murray (no relation, thankfully, to the British blues-rock guru of almost the same name), whose mission seems to be to render racism respectable. His dubious 'Bell Curve' statistics were supposed to prove that whites were intellectually superior to blacks, as if there were no other factors in the way these tests were organised. But the same tests and dodgy methodology also showed that Chinese, Japanese and Koreans scored higher than whites. Somehow his adherents excised that latter chunk of data from their arguments whilst waging their race war.

So, what do we learn from the latest statistics? Curry feeds the brain? Eating with chopsticks increases your intelligence? Perhaps it's the delicate co-ordination required every mealtime that forges those synaptic links in the young brain which will stand you in such good stead when it comes to writing your dissertation on genetic degeneration in the grey matter of certain white scientists and Daily Mail journalists.

Hat-tip, Navjot Singh.