The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Orwell genel büyüleyici genel bakış açısı yerine bu kez sosyoloji ve siyaset içeren uzunca bir makale yazmış. Hakkındaki türlü dedikodulara karşın Sosyalizme ne kadar inandığını, katıksız bir anti-faşist olduğunu net olarak görebilirsiniz. Sometimes, on top of a cupboard or at the bottom of a drawer, you come on a pre-war newspaper, and when you have got over your astonishment at its enormous size, you find yourself marvelling at its almost unbelievable stupidity (ibid: 145). There will be a bitter political struggle, and there will be unconscious and half-conscious sabotage everywhere. At some point or other it may be necessary to use violence. It is easy to imagine a pro-Fascist rebellion breaking out in, for instance, India. We shall have to fight against bribery, ignorance and snobbery. The bankers and the larger businessmen, the landowners and dividend-drawers, the officials with their prehensile bottoms, will obstruct for all they are worth. Even the middle class will writhe when their accustomed way of life is menaced. But just because the English sense of national unity has never disintegrated because patriotism is finally stronger than class-hatred, the chances are that the will of the majority will prevail. It is no use imagining that one can make fundamental changes without causing a split in the nation; but the treacherous minority will be far smaller in time of war than it would be at any other time. England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not. The critique of the 1936 royal coverage is not the only occasion when Orwell enjoys deconstructing the contents of newspapers and magazines. Let’s look at just a few other examples. Significantly, his first published piece in the UK, ‘A farthing newspaper’ (for Chesterton’s review G. K’s Weekly) adopts a political economy approach that he is to maintain throughout his writing career (Orwell 1970 [1928]: 34-37). Ami du Peuple, costing just ten centimes, has recently been launched in Paris with a manifesto claiming it is ‘uncontaminated by any base thoughts of gain’ (ibid: 34). Blair adds, ironically: If you cannot open a .mobi file on your mobile device, please use .epub with an appropriate eReader. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.

Orwell on stage

His criticism of left-wing intelligentia ('And from that they will proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is “just the same as” or “just as bad as” totalitarianism.') is just as relevant today as it was in 1941. Outside the Labour Party there existed several extremist parties, of whom the Communists were the strongest. The Communists had considerable influence in the Labour Party in the years 1920-26 and 1935-9. Their chief importance, and that of the whole left wing of the Labour movement, was the part they played in alienating the middle classes from Socialism. In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy shipowner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus. And considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and considering that they were buying their way into a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such way. Previous winner Peter Beaumont and previously longlisted Lindsey Hilsum both pay tribute to Marie Colvin, killed in Syria this week

Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one. However, it has become clear in the last few years that ‘common ownership of the means of production’ is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralized ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. ‘The State’ may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.You always get some salt-and-vinegary phrasemaking with Orwell which makes the political turgidity readable (just). Here he is having a go at the rich who thought they could deal with Hitler : In addition to his literary career Orwell served as a police officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922-1927 and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1937. Orwell was severely wounded when he was shot through his throat. Later the organization that he had joined when he joined the Republican cause, The Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), was painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organization (Trotsky was Joseph Stalin's enemy) and disbanded. Orwell and his wife were accused of "rabid Trotskyism" and tried in absentia in Barcelona, along with other leaders of the POUM, in 1938. However by then they had escaped from Spain and returned to England. Leading on to the relationship between the economy and the war effort, there’s much focus on weapons manufacturing and how to stimulate it: however, I feel like Orwell slightly twists the narrative again for his own argument. We were undeniably old-fashioned in our tactics in 1914, especially in the use of horses, bayonets, and the like, but by the end of the war we’d progressed remarkably, inventing tracer bullets, aircraft carries, and the tank. (This is not to mention perhaps the most significant invention, radar, which was not conceived until the Second World War.) There was a big difference between 1914 and 1918: we learned our lesson, although we would have to learn it again in the Second World War. Orwell’s criticism is fair, but I feel he was neglectful on the point of adaptation. Given the recent, unprecedented avalanche of complaints to the BBC over its coverage of Prince Philip’s death, it’s interesting to consider George Orwell’s views on the press handling of the royals of his day. Britanya, Büyük Britanya, Britanya Adaları, Birleşik Krallık ve çok heyecanlı durumlarda Albion) hakkında yazılmış üç denemeden oluşuyor. Kendi ülkesine ve toplumuna çok sert eleştiriler yönelten Orwell, sosyalist dünya görüşüne sahip bir birey olarak ülkesinin sol aydın sınıfına da özeleştiri yapmaktan kaçınmıyor.

DV8 physical theatre company at the National Theatre Uses part of our event, ‘What can’t you speak about in the 21st Ce ntury?’ At the heart of Homage to Catalonia, his eye-witness account of fighting in a Republican militia during the Spanish Civil War, is Orwell’s anger at the coverage of the conflict by both mainstream and alternative/left newspapers – and his desire to put the record straight. As he writes: ‘One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right’ (though he excludes the Manchester Guardian from this criticism) (Orwell 1962 [1938]: 64). With typical wry humour, he tells of the ‘fat Russian agent’ at the Hotel Continental, in Barcelona: ‘I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies – unless one counts journalists’ (ibid: 135). Llevaba mucho tiempo sin leer un libro completo de ensayos. Aunque el género me agrada, estaba destinando mi tiempo libre para abordar algunos textos filosóficos y literarios (me refiero a ficción y poesía) que me llamaban la atención. Ahora, aprovechando la oportunidad de dictar un curso de Ensayos de opinión en la universidad en la que trabajo, decidí abordar algunos textos que había comprado hace tiempo.

Essay

Bazı tartışmalı noktaları yok değil, tüm dünyanın kaos içerisinde olduğu ve de geleceğin pek belirsiz olduğu bir tarih döneminde yazıldığı unutulmamalı. Enternasyonalizm eleştirisi, yurtseverlik övgüsü ve İşçi Partisi'nin aslında kapitalizmle uzlaşmak için var olduğu yönündeki tespitleri radikal solcuları rahatsız edebilir. İşçi Partisi hakkındaki tespiti sanırım 50 sene sonra Blair yönetimi ile ispatlandı. Enternasyonalizm- Yurtseverlik konusu ise hiç bitmeyen bir tartışma. It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it sometimes appears. A foreign observer sees only the huge inequality of wealth, the unfair electoral system, the governing-class control over the press, the radio and education, and concludes that democracy is simply a polite name for dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable agreement that does unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. However much one may hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the National Government represented the will of the mass of the people. It tolerated slums, unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy. Yes, but so did public opinion. It was a stagnant period, and its natural leaders were mediocrities. Orwell's analysis of the state of India (and other colonies) and how we should leave colonialism was spot on. If only we had had the self-confidence to do this. And now look at the results. After 1934 it was known that Germany was rearming. After 1936 everyone with eyes in his head knew that war was coming. After Munich it was merely a question of how soon the war would begin. In September 1939 war broke out. Eight months later it was discovered that, so far as equipment went, the British army was barely beyond the standard of 1918. We saw our soldiers fighting their way desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane against three, with rifles against tanks, with bayonets against tommy-guns. There were not even enough revolvers to supply all the officers. After a year of war the regular army was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There had even, previously, been a shortage of uniforms – this in one of the greatest woollen-goods producing countries in the world! And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air. The mishandling of England's domestic problems during the nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but British foreign policy between 1931 and 1939 is one of the wonders of the world. Why? What had happened? What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct?

In his lengthy essay, The English People (also written in 1944 but only published in 1947), Orwell’s critique again focuses on the press (1998 [1947]): ‘It is a fact that the much-boasted freedom of the British press is theoretical rather than actual. To begin with the centralised ownership of the press means in practice that unpopular opinions can only be printed in books or in newspapers with small circulations.’ Shopkeepers at War - He makes the case for a socialist system in England and declares that the old ruling class and their capitalism must be overthrown for the simple reason that private capitalism, that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit- does not work. I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity of England, the patriotism that runs like a connecting thread through almost all classes. After Dunkirk anyone who had eyes in his head could see this. But it is absurd to pretend that the promise of that moment has been fulfilled. Almost certainly the mass of the people are now ready for the vast changes that are necessary; but those changes have not even begun to happen.They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil. This rhyme was played upon by Lewis Carroll, who incorporated the lion and the unicorn as characters in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass. Here, the crown they are fighting for belongs to the White King which, given that they are on the White side as well, makes their rivalry all the more absurd. Carroll subverts the traditional view of a lion being alert and calculating by making this particular one slow and rather stupid, although clearly the better fighter. The role of the Unicorn is likewise reversed (or mirrored, as in a looking-glass) by the fact that he sees Alice as a "monster", though he promises to start believing in her if she will believe in him. Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for the section caricature Benjamin Disraeli as the Unicorn, and William Ewart Gladstone as the Lion, alluding to the pair's frequent parliamentary battles, although there is no evidence that this was Carroll's intention. [2] See also [ edit ] George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London: Penguin Books, 1982 [1941]), p. 100. The Lion and the Unicorn as they appear in A Nursery Rhyme Picture Book by L. Leslie Brooke. The lion and the unicorn Were fighting for the crown The lion beat the unicorn All around the town. Some gave them white bread, And some gave them brown; Some gave them plum cake and drummed them out of town. [1] Some people might blanch at the idea that Orwell was influenced by communist texts, but his debt to the CPGB’s intellectuals is not as surprising as it may seem. The communists were among the only people in inter-war Britain seeking to analyse culture from a socialist perspective. As one of the few other writers whose understanding of culture was shaped by socialist ideas, Orwell naturally paid close attention to what they said. Many of his non-fiction writings either restate, develop or refute the communist position. It is just another example of Orwell’s admirably broad-minded capacity to learn from his enemies.