An Orwellian sort of day

In today's New York Sun, Kerry Howley has a smart and interesting review of Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma, a sort of literary travelogue based on Orwell's five years as a colonial policeman and his resulting anti-colonial novel Burmese Days. Check it out.

I just finished rereading Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's unforgettable account of his participation in the Spanish Civil War, and still remain under the book's spell. At turns funny, infuriating, inspiring, and depressing, it's an amazing and a genuinely thrilling story. Briefly, Orwell spends a number of cold, hungry, bored, barely armed, tobacco-deprived, louse-ridden months at the front, a member of the anarchist militia of the Worker's Party of Marxist Unification. At one point he is shot (through the throat) and nearly killed, an event he describes in vivid detail. At another he becomes embroiled in the famous Barcelona street fighting, in the aftermath of which the Republican government, at the behest of the Communists, declares Orwell's party illegal and falsely brands its members as “Trotsky-Fascist” traitors. In reality, the Communists were centralizing their power and eliminating their opponents. Orwell and his wife barely make it out of Spain while several comrades with impeccable anti-fascist credentials end up in jail (some were certainly shot). If you haven't yet read it, you really ought to find some time for this remarkable book.

Speaking of the Red and the dead and so forth, today is the 64th anniversary of the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's long-fantasized invasion of the Soviet Union. Though it would ultimately prove the Nazi's undoing, Barbarossa caught Stalin entirely-and unconscionably, since his own intelligence officials gave him amble warning-off guard. Equally disconcerted were those Western Stalinists that had faithfully toed the Party line, offering moist rationalizations for the Russo-German Pact of 1939. “The English left-wing intelligentsia,” Orwell wrote in a 1940 letter to Partisan Review, “worship Stalin because they have lost their patriotism and their religious belief without losing the need for a god and a fatherland. I have always held that many of them would transfer their allegiance to Hitler if Germany won.”

From Orwell's diary on July 3, 1941, writing in response to Stalin's first major address since the Nazi invasion: “Stalin's broadcast speech is a direct return to the Popular Front, defence of democracy line, and in effect a complete contradiction of all that he and his followers have been saying for he past two years…. One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro-Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges etc. are suddenly forgotten.”