Cuba looks at George Orwell

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A Granma article about George Orwell's imaginings about the future
follows these comments of my own.

I'm very glad to see that the Cuban press is taking a positive view of
Orwell. (I guess this indicates that the convergence between myself
and Fidel over the years has not been all one-way.)

The Cubans take a very different tack from those who place some of the
blame for the cold war and the fall of Moscow and Eastern Europe on
Orwell. You see, he made them look real bad in Animal Farm and 1984,
and he certainly did that. His fictional creations were a pretty
devastating portrayal but hardly as effective in discrediting these
regimes (and, for most people including Orwell, communism along with
them) as what these regimes were doing.

The Cubans are open to the many useful and powerful observations
Orwell made.  They are not embarrassed by his fanatical hatred of
Stalinist totalitarianism because they genuinely don't feel implicated
in it, or a need to sort of defend it in order to defend themselves.
Others should learn from them about this.

"Saint Orwell" was  an invention of the cold war intellectuals, who
presented Orwell as a knight of pure truth, far above being influenced
by ideas or prejudices. Orwell was a professional journalist, on the
whole a pretty honest reporter -- and he didn't make the kind of
pompous claims for  himself that are made for him today.

Orwell tended to see himself as a seedy half-plebeian,
half-intellectual of the Winston Smith type. (Smith, the point-of-view
character in 1984, is a great creation and hardly a morally spotless
hero.) The cold war intellectuals who invented Saint Orwell are simply
presenting their own candidacies for sainthood --and the prize money
they assume comes with the title.

I read "1984" in 1956, and to me it represented not only Stalinism but
McCarthyite America.  More than that, I saw it as highlighting
historical trends towards stronger, antipopular, antidemocratic states
around the world. We are again seeing an acceleration  of those trends
in the capitalist world today.

And the fact is that I have kept going back to "1984," rereading
various chapters over the years, including as I saw, as a member of
the Socialist Workers Party, how the party was being transformed into
something quite different.

SWP leaders, by the way, internally denounced Orwell as a cold-war
social democrat, which he was among other things at various times.  Of
course, such labeling, even when accurate, is too often used to avoid
responding to or even thinking about the concrete insights that a
political "opponent" may offer.

I now know, which I didn't then, that the tendency toward the pushing
aside of democracy by totalitarianism in modern states is actually
built into the development of monopoly capitalism. As Lenin wrote,
"Imperialism seeks domination, not freedom."

Fascism may seem to overthrow bourgeois democracy, and it does to a
degree, but it even more grows out of bourgeois democracy.  That is
why supporting the Democrat next year in order to dump Bush won't halt
the process or even slow it down. It could even contribute to
advancing it, by undermining the fighting independence of the
opposition -- and give the rightwing a clearer field for their own
radical solutions as the only uncompromising alternative to the
increasingly ugly and antihuman bourgeois democratic status quo.

The following item appeared in the daily Granma on May 28. The
introductory comments in parentheses are by Walter Lippmann.
Fred Feldman


(This year is the centenary of the birth of British author George
Orwell, author of ANIMAL FARM and later of 1984.

(With discussion in the Cuban media about what it says is the Bush
Administration's efforts to install a Nazi-fascist government over the
globe, the following article from the Cuban daily GRANMA will be of
particular and unusual interest, I think.

(The author is a regular contributor to the Cuban daily on cultural
matters, particularly about movies. Of Orwell's 1984 he writes, "1984
is not an anticommunist novel, but rather a work aimed against
totalitarianism of whatever stripe." Finally, he writes that, "Orwell
called his novel 1984, and there are plenty of indications to suggest
that he was only off by 20 years."

(When I was a kid, in the 1950s, and later in college in the 1960s,
Orwell's work was presented as a dystopian fantasy and an attack on
Stalinism. Thus, its publication in the Cuban media is notable all the
more.

(When the US media writes about Cuba, it nearly always focuses on
things which might portray the country in a negative manner.

(It's now been a month since this article was printed in the Cuban
daily Granma, and it has been completely unreported in the media of
the United States or similar media. And you might think they would
even remark on what THEY would think was the irony of the Cuban daily
praising Orwell. But it seem quite likely that, as the Cuban writer
suggests, Orwell's words are rather too close to home for the media in
the United States today.)


.
(Thanks to Robert Sandels for translation.)
==================================

GRANMA DIARIO May 28, 2003

Big Brother Is Watching You. The Predictions of Orwell ROLANDO PEREZ
BETANCOURT

Without ceremony from those who, during the Cold War, exalted him as
if he were a god of letters, Englishman George Orwell reaches his
100th birthday.  Orwell was the great critic of the Soviet State and
of fascism, and his sublime obsession was to transform political
literature into art.

Complex and contradictory, on occasions profound, on others naively
schismatic starting from a utopian concept of independence, Orwell won
the mistrust of conservatives and anarchists, of Stalinists and social
democrats. Nevertheless, his two final novels, Animal Farm (1945) and
1984, published in 1949, one year before his death from tuberculosis,
made him a standard-bearer for international anticommunism.  As he
made clear in his work, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), Orwell wanted
the triumph of English socialism for his country, free of Soviet
influences.

To compete with that "alien  model," for which there was no lack of
sympathizers in Europe, he wrote Animal Farm, a satire about animals
that was aimed directly against Stalin, the person he considered
responsible for  deviations in the Russian revolution.

However, the completion of the novel coincided with the Soviet defeat
of the Germans, and no English publisher wanted to risk publishing
something that went against the ovations and gratitude of half the
world.

Finally, an edition of 25,000 copies appeared in England, and the
novel crossed the Atlantic to the United States. Great surprise!  The
1946 American edition sold around
600,000 copies.  The New Yorker, always sparing with its praise,
proclaimed that the book was "absolutely masterly," drawing
comparisons with Voltaire and Swift and recommending that we begin
thinking of Orwell as an author of the first order.

As Orwell's American biographer Michael Shelden wrote, "Animal Farm
had an impact on the popular imagination at a time when the Cold War
was beginning to make itself felt. For many years, anticommunism used
the book as a propaganda tool distorting the spirit in which Orwell
had conceived it."

At the height of the war, Orwell had written, "I believe that if the
USSR were conquered by some foreign power, the working class
everywhere would become discouraged, at least for the moment, and the
capitalist cretins who never stopped suspecting Russia would feel
encouraged....I do not want to see the USSR destroyed and I think that
I would have to defend it if necessary."

The loudly trumpeted anticommunism of the Cold War, about which
Shelden speaks, also advanced the novel 1984.  Weighed down by the
propaganda, many people who had not read it assumed that the book was
an attack on the socialist ideas of Marx, and talked about an
"Orwellian universe" and other distorted concepts foreshadowed by the
constant battles of the global right.

However, it is clear that 1984 is not an anticommunist novel, but
rather a work aimed against totalitarianism of whatever stripe.  The
work describes a gloomy and oppressive future dominated by thought
police.  It takes place in London, where Winston Smith is a
functionary in the Ministry of Truth responsible for "correcting"
historical facts so that they always coincide with what is wanted by
the leaders.

They are lords of half the world, with designs on subjugating the
universe and whose principal slogans are "War is Peace,"  "Freedom is
Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength."  All this is controlled by
television monitors, the eyes and ears of the government--Big Brother
determined to know everything and to eliminate the slightest privacy.

More than 50 years have passed since Orwell wrote this cautionary book
and after the febrile anticommunist exaltation, it is scarcely
mentioned in recent times by those who glorified it.  One has to be
suspicious.

Today, a neoliberal totalitarianism with a leader from the North seeks
to dominate the world and in it, the three previously mentioned
slogans fit like a ring on a finger. Big Brother lies like the witch
in Snow White and then transmits on his screens whatever suits him.
He creates super ministries of espionage, searches libraries to see
what citizens are reading, controls telephones and other means of
communication, and accuses those who do not support militaristic
adventures of being unpatriotic.

Two days ago, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon were cut off as they
talked on the Today Show about freedom of expression, while the
contracts of other critics have been cancelled as in the case of actor
Sean Penn.

Big Brother buys (according to the AP) "access to data banks of
hundreds of millions of inhabitants in Latin American countries,"
calls into his service the phantoms of McCarthyism, and coins the
maximum slogan with no room for shading: "Those who are not with us
are against us."

Orwell called his novel 1984, and there are plenty of indications to
suggest that he was only off by 20 years.
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