RE: [Marxism] Re: Hitchens and Orwell

["acpollack2@xxxxxxxx" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxx>]

This whole thread is absurd (except for Einde's comment and perhaps 
another I've forgotten), and the Dolan article provoking it seems to 
have been written by a wacko.

I haven't read "Shooting an Elephant," nor "Burmese Days," in years, 
but both played a role in making me an anti-imperialist -- and in 
believing - I still feel correctly -- that at the time of their 
writing Orwell himself was. By the same token "Homage to Catalonia" 
helped make me a socialist.

That's not to say an accurate description of the evils of capitalism 
and imperialism are enough to qualify an author as a genuine leftist; 
Lord knows Conrad wasn't.

But it seems to me the blanket denunciations of Orwell as being 
always anticommunist are as absurd as trying to claim that Max 
Shachtman started and ended as one.

Stalinist comrades on this list: When it came to the battle in 
Barcelona, the POUM (and Orwell) were on the correct class side of the 
barricades, and your cothinkers were on the same side as the 
bourgeoisie and therefore of the counterrevolution. That has nothing 
to do with Orwell's later devolution.



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