Orwell on Hitler

[friedrich braun]

I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler...The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him...It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs...He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds...One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to.

-George Orwell in a review of Mein Kampf in 1940

[Europe Endless]

interesting. do you have a link?

[Magog]

Karna in the Mahabratha was the very same. He was the very best of the Pandavas. Althought they called him evil, he never relented gave in, even when he found out the truth. He never changed sides and stayed true to his friends, and knowing he would die, allowing it to happen, even after he was warned and told not to do so, he would not give up honor and fought to the death like a Noble Aryan Warrior. When he died his sould went to heaven , and they said it was like watching a second sun riase in the sky. The Pandavas never new they killed their older borther until afterwards. And as the story end so it begins.

[friedrich braun]

interesting. do you have a link?

Hitler's Mistakes: New Insights into What Made Hitler Tick, by Ronald Lewin (New York:William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984) at 73.

[Gott]

I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler...The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him...It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs...He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds...One feels, as with Napolean, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to.

-George Orwell in a review of Mein Kampf in 1940


What a wonderful quote - thanks very much.

[KraftAkt]

Here is another quote from Orwell:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/GeoreOrwell.jpg/180px-GeoreOrwell.jpg


"He [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all 'progressive' thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to find a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won't do..... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people, 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itslef at his feet."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Orwell

[TwistedCross]

Do you have a quote rather than 'wiki' anything?

[KraftAkt]

Here:

http://www.orwelltoday.com/readerfordlindbergh.shtml

[Herman van Houten]

Good find. George Orwell took quite a risk publishing this in 1940.

[Lars Redoubt]

I have read quite a lot of Orwells essays, articles, political commentaries etc, but I can not remember that he even once have said a negative word about Hitler.