Ian Williams, George Orwell and snitching

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Comrades might have heard me refer to Ian Williams's talk on Orwell that
was part of a panel at the last Socialist Scholars Conference in NYC.
Apparently he polished it up and gave it at an Orwell conference at
Wellesley College last weekend.

http://www.orwell2003.com/pages/722302/index.htm)

The speakers were a who's who of the anti-Communist left and the
neoconservative movement, from Daniel Bell to Todd Gitlin. If there are
any serious revolutionaries who carry Orwell's banner nowadays (except
for Einde O'Callaghan), I don't know who they are. I do, however, think
that the image of the "minute of hate" drawn from 1984 does have some
staying power, even if all of the conference speakers--including
Williams especially--take part in it in one fashion or another. In his
case, it was honed to a sharp point in his frequent ritualistic
denunciations of Slobadan Milosevic.

This is an excerpt from his talk that showed up on Henwood's list.
(http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0305/0654.html). What is not so obvious, but
much more so in his impromptu-like talk at the SSC, was that this is a
*justification* for Orwell's snitching in Williams's view. If you
penetrate through the vain attempt at wittiness below, you will figure
out that Williams saw his own witch-hunting in the Liverpool Labor Party
as much necessary as Orwell's naming names. I guess there is something
to be said in favor of Williams and the like being the lineal
descendants of George Orwell. Myself, I'll stick with his contemporary
Christopher Caudwell, who died in the Spanish Civil War.

===

In the late 1970's and early 1980's Liverpool Labour Party was in the
process of being infiltrated and taken over by a secret entrist
organization, the Revolutionary Socialist League, which for those of who
you are interested in the obscure taxonomy of the Trotskyist movement
was part of the Pabloite Fourth International. It was to some extent
competing with and filling the ecological niche formerly held by the now
waning Communist Party fellow travelers, who had, for example managed to
make Liverpool a twin city with the East German port of Rostock.

I take some modest pride in playing a part in defeating the attempts of
the RSL, partly on ideological grounds, and partly by exposing some of
its leading members for adding Al Capone to the canon of Leon Trotsky.
The RSL had in fact tried to recruit me, and then later stood up at
meetings and denounced me as both a liar and a redbaiter for mentioning
their existence.

They never seemed to notice the contradiction. All through this period,
I was profoundly grateful to Orwell, since 1984 and his essays provided
me with the intellectual tools to understand what I was dealing with.


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