THANKFULLY HE WAS A BETTER WRITER THAN SOLDIER:

Orwell's "Catalonia" revisited (Anthony Daniels, February 2007, New Criterion)

[B]y far the worst aspect of Homage to Catalonia is its strong advocacy of totalitarianism. It is the literary equivalent of an urban myth that the book argues against the Stalinist deformation of socialism, when the very opposite is much nearer the truth. Of course, Orwell does indeed object to the Stalinist resort to lying on an industrial scale, but that is only a minor part of his objection to Stalin's policy in Spain. His real objection is that Stalin did not want the radical revolution--as exemplified by the destruction of the church, the collectivization of the land, the nationalization of all major industry, the elimination of the bourgeoisie, the prohibition of prostitution and the legal profession, and the complete equalization of wages--to proceed, because he thought that a popular front, in which liberal democrats would be taken into temporary partnership, would be more effective in stopping Franco.

Orwell objected to Stalin's policy because Stalin maintained that "we can't afford to alienate the peasants [in Spain] by forcing collectivization upon them," whereas Orwell thought that the war was lost unless it was turned into a true revolutionary war, which included such forced collectivization. "It was easy," he lamented, "to rally the wealthier peasants against the collectivization policy." There are no prizes for guessing, then, on whose side he would have been on in the struggle against the so-called kulaks in the Soviet Union, and necessarily so: for kulaks are money-grubbers, the air they breathe is money-tainted, and so forth.

It requires a kind of dimwittedness not to see that forced collectivization of land, nationalization of industry, and the complete equalization of pay for work of all kinds, such as Orwell strongly advocated, must have profound economic effects and consequences for freedom. Orwell objected to Stalin--who, as supplier of arms to the loyalist side, was in a position to dictate policy--telling the Spanish (according to Orwell) "Prevent revolution or you get no weapons." He, Orwell, wanted the totalitarian society that he had glimpsed in Barcelona. Therefore, in Spain at least, Stalin was a freedom fighter by comparison with Orwell.

Well, you might say, we have all committed bêtises in our time, and so we have. But Orwell never fully repudiated the ideas of Homage to Catalonia. Let us remember that in Why I Write, eight years later, he said that every line he had written was in favor of democratic and against totalitarian socialism. Either he forgot what he had written, didn't understand its implications, stood by it, or was re-writing his own history à la Stalin. He never really asked the right question, which is not whether there could be democratic socialism (clearly there can be, in the one-man-one-vote sense, just as there can be democratic racism or even participatory democratic genocide, as there was most notably in Rwanda), but whether socialism is compatible with freedom.

The key to Homage is that by writing honestly about his own side he forced open-minded people to repudiate it. Meanwhile, without even realizing it he repudiated democratic socialism in texts like Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 1, 2007 6:05 PM