"How about "1984" (try reading it some time and try to understand it... you might learn something)."It's much too deep for me, I'm sure.
I seem to know something you don't.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,986354,00.html(and related, most interesting links at the bottom of that page)
Corin Redgrave responds to last week's news that his father was named on George Orwell's blacklist
Saturday June 28, 2003
The Guardian
... For a long time I thought the bigotry that blighted Brown's career <Phil Brown, an American actor and one of McCarthy's blacklistees, and friend of Corin's father, actor Michael Redgrave> was something peculiarly American, deriving from that prurient guilt which Hawthorne exposes in The Scarlet Letter. But English actors were blacklisted too. Not so many, and not for so long. But it had happened. My father had been blacklisted, which was no doubt one of the reasons he felt sympathy for Phil Brown and wanted to help him.
My father had signed a manifesto in January 1941 called the People's Convention. It was organised by the Communist party, at a time when the pact between Hitler and Stalin was still in place. It was not overtly a pacifist or even an anti-war document. But it addressed a very widespread suspicion of the government's intentions, and an even more widespread resentment at the lack of provision that had been made for the protection of people in the Blitz.
My father thought it a good socialist document and signed it. ... Altogether 12 artists, including my father, were banned from broadcasting because they had signed the People's Convention and refused to publicly withdraw their support. Leslie Howard organised a petition. Laurence Olivier rang my father very indignantly to say "I thought this was the kind of thing we were supposed to be fighting against". Forty Labour MPs circulated a letter against the ban. Ralph Vaughan Williams withdrew permission for the BBC to broadcast his latest work. EM Forster addressed a packed meeting at Conway Hall, organised by the National Council for Civil Liberties.
My goodness. However did Michael Redgrave get on a blacklist administered by the right wing in the UK??
George Orwell's diary entry for January 22 1941 quotes a friend saying "the People's Convention racket is much underestimated and... one must fight back and not ignore it. He said that thousands of people are taken in by the appealing programme of the People's Convention and do not realise that it is a defeatist manoeuvre intended to help Hitler." Orwell goes on to say that he himself ripped down a number of their posters, "the first time I have ever done such a thing".
True, by the time Orwell wrote to Celia Kirwan in 1949 with his list, my father was beyond the reach of his spite. Apparently Orwell's purpose was simply to advise the Information Research Department about people whose patriotism was in question and who therefore should not be trusted as propagandists.
Was this the Orwell you were referring to?
Did you learn something?
Am *I* comparing CO Liberal to the
real Orwell? Nope. I don't think that everyone who acts on his/her conscience in what s/he perceives to be the public interest, and particularly in a manner and matter that is entirely unrelated to any form of official repression of ideas or words or actions, or persecution of the individual whose ideas or words or actions they are, is a George Orwell.
I would certainly agree that we all have different ideas about what is in the public interest, and what it is appropriate to do in our efforts to advance it, and that no one's judgment in these matters is revealed truth and not open to criticism.
*I* certainly draw the line at
reporting decent people of conscience to right-wing governments with the power to cause them immeasurable harm, if not before. Orwell didn't. I'm quite sure CO Liberal would.
And I simply see no likeness between
- exposing someone who is improperly exploiting the public's entirely natural and reasonable assumption of the legitimacy and credibility of an autonomous registered website and its owner, while refusing to provide the information that is the basis of that trust -- who is thereby violating the conventions that are the basis of the trust that is essential to civil society, of which we are all members and for which we all have responsibility
and
- reporting someone who is engaged in sincere and transparent efforts to influence public policy in the direction that s/he conscientiously believes to be best -- to a government that, to anyone who shares those conscientious beliefs and to anyone honest enough to admit the truth, is engaged in improper and oppressive actions against innocent people.
And I wonder how anyone could see such a likeness, or pretend to see it.
Perhaps what we all really need to read is a little more Jane Austin.
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