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Old February 17th, 2013 #17
Alex Linder
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Orwell's private writings reveal he detested jews, like all good men
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/019_03/10013

As He Pleased
Plumbing the mystery of the first-person Orwell


Jack Shafer

We know from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that he thought of the diary as a potentially seditious form. Diaries are not illegal in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four because nothing is—Airstrip One’s legal code has been abolished. But Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, understands the consequences of committing his private thoughts and personal observations to the page well before he lifts his pen to print the words “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.” “If detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp,” Orwell wrote. As Smith prepares to scribble his first passage, he asks himself why he’s keeping a diary, and surmises that it’s a letter to the future, to the unborn.

Diaries aren’t just generational time tunnels or rebellions against the state—they can also serve as self-dossiers, self-indictments, and confessions, as Smith also comes to learn. Orwell discovered the same during his adventures as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War when police confiscated a wartime diary (or two) of his from his wife’s Barcelona hotel room in 1937 during a raid. According to Peter Davison, an Orwell scholar and the editor of this volume, the diary may have been forwarded to Moscow—which considered him a Socialist enemy of communism—and added to the archive of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.

Another Orwell diary that appears to be MIA dates from the mid-1920s, when he was working in Burma as a colonial policeman. It has never surfaced and probably never will—though Orwell published a fictionalized account of his Burmese tour of duty in the 1934 novel Burmese Days. The surviving eleven diaries have been collected here under the sensible title Diaries and annotated expertly by Davison.

Fantasize all you want about Orwell’s lost volumes, but you’re probably wasting your time. Orwell produced six novels, most of them loosely autobiographical; three nonfiction books; and hundreds of reviews, editorials, and essays, as well as pamphlets, poems, radio broadcasts, and war dispatches. He was a literary fat-rendering plant when it came to reducing the raw material of his notes and diaries into something more distilled, as well-known works such as Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia all attest. Had Orwell turned himself inside out and hauled himself up a flagpole we couldn’t have gotten a better look at him.

So the possibility that Diaries may reveal a new and improved Orwell—or a new and diminished one—can be easily dismissed. That’s the case whether you aligned yourself with Orwell’s celebrator and intellectual inheritor, Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the introduction for this edition, or that other recently departed leftist public intellectual, Alexander Cockburn, who likened Orwell to a “snitch” for informing on Communists (which he did).

Diaries combines both the lengthy, staccato logs and lists Orwell kept of his domestic life (number of eggs laid by his hens, the size of his garden harvest, the weather, the price of staples, the arrival of a milking goat, birds spotted on a walk) and his more considered entries, and for its publication we can all be grateful. But as your consumer adviser, I must add that this book isn’t “new.” It was published in the United Kingdom two years ago, and many of the best passages were previously published. Every time I underscored a memorable sentence in this American edition and plugged it into Google Books, I found it in an existing Orwell title.

For example: “I cannot get them to treat me precisely as an equal, however,” Orwell complains of the proletarians while collecting material in 1936 for what will become The Road to Wigan Pier. You can find that diary entry in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell (1968) and The Complete Works of George Orwell (1998). “Our broadcasts are utterly useless because nobody listens to them,” he states on October 5, 1942, about his work for the BBC in India. Google Books locates that entry in multiple Orwell volumes. Likewise, “Evidently most English people have no idea that there are French books which are not pornographic,” which he wrote on August 27, 1931, is gettable in various Orwell books.

Or, if you don’t have time for a trip to the library or the money to buy these volumes, consult the Web. Great sections of the best of the Orwell diaries, including his hop-picking escapades, his Wigan Pier journey, and his war journals, have been posted with permission on the Orwell Prize website. These entries also include Davison’s notes and annotations.

Of course, some Orwell enthusiasts might seek Diaries in hopes that it maps the path he cut from first observations to finished works. These readers will come away brokenhearted. Orwell appears to have had two writing modes: publishable copy and domestic lists. According to Davison, Orwell would type up his diaries from his handwritten copy, making revisions on the fly or adding them after with a pen. (Sometimes wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy did the typing.) Diaries proves that the best writing happens in the brain—before a pen is picked up or a keyboard pounded—not through revisions.

Orwell semi-endorses this idea in a diary passage dated March 30, 1948, as he reflects on the difficulty of building a decent paragraph or even a working sentence while ill. He knew his way around being sick—disease was his lifelong companion. Cyril Connolly, a friend from childhood, recalled Orwell being a “chesty” and “bronchial” kid, which Orwell attributed to “defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung.” Orwell encouraged advanced respiratory breakdown via his lifelong tobacco habit, acquired in his teens. In Burma, he came down with dengue fever and suffered chronic bronchitis. Biographer D. J. Taylor wrote that Orwell had “four bouts of pneumonia” by the time he turned thirty-four, a life-endangering malady back in the days before antibiotics. Later came Orwell’s influenza and the tuberculosis that would combine with his cigarette habit to ruin his lungs and finally kill him on January 21, 1950, at the age of forty-six.

Exiting sick bay in 1948, Orwell wrote:

When it is a case of a long illness, where you are weak & without appetite but not actually feverish or in pain, you have the impression that your brain is quite normal. Your thoughts are just as active as ever, you are interested in the same things, you seem to be able to talk normally, & you can read anything that you would read at any other time. It is only when you attempt to write, even to write the simplest & stupidest newspaper article, that you realise what a deterioration has happened inside your skull. At the start it is impossible to get anything on to paper at all. Your mind turns away to any conceivable subject rather than the one you are trying to deal with, & even the physical act of writing is unbearably irksome. . . . You have also no command of language, or rather you can think of nothing except flat, obvious expressions: a good, lively phrase never occurs to you. And even when you begin to re-acquire the habit of writing, you seem to be incapable of preserving continuity.

This self-diagnosis says more about the craft of writing than any dozen manuals on the subject for sale at bookshops.

Elsewhere in the collection, Orwell does produce the raw material of closely observed reportage with considerably less anguish. Take, for example, the extended description of descending into the double blackness of the mines with “coal-cutters”—the finished account of which ends up in Wigan Pier. Orwell’s chronicle of miners quarrying and transporting coal deposits to the surface echoes Herman Melville’s dissertation on whale disassembly in Moby-Dick, and his prose glows lovingly on the miners as they perform their labors. “Above ground, in their thick ill-fitting clothes, they are ordinary-looking men, usually small and not at all impressive,” Orwell wrote. “Below, when you see them stripped, all, old and young, have splendid bodies, with every muscle defined and wonderfully small waists. I saw some miners going into their baths. As I thought, they are quite black from head to foot. So the ordinary miner, who has not access to a bath, must be black from the waist down six days a week at least.”

The diaries, which span from 1931 to 1949, are not continuous: There are no entries between late 1931 and early 1936, none from 1937, and nothing between late 1942 and May 1946. The page count of his diary entries appears to spike when he’s working on one of his assigned books, like Wigan Pier, or a magazine piece, in the case of the hop-picking notes, which he promptly refashioned for a New Statesman essay, or when he’s preoccupied with one subject in particular and needs to clear his mind by formulating lists. Some of the lags can be attributed to hard work on other writerly fronts, such as his time during World War II as a BBC propagandist and a war correspondent for The Observer, which had him reporting from Paris after the liberation, as well as from Germany.

In his “domestic” diaries from Morocco (1938–39) and the island of Jura in Scotland (1946–47), Orwell gathers and stacks the mundane observations the way matchbook collectors fill cabinet drawers with their stashes. This love of lists surfaces frequently in his published work, most notably his 1946 essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” in which he catalogues the detritus surrounding a lowly reviewer. Cigarette butts, cups of half-drunk tea, unanswered letters, and unpaid bills, as well as the stack of books awaiting review. Orwell is something of a naturalist in many of the domestic pages, spotting and naming birds and noting their mating calls, and dilating briefly on the hunting strategies of otters he’s watching.

I suspect I know what was going on here. In a February 3, 1936, passage, from his domestic diaries, Orwell the diarist slides a note through the time tunnel to Orwell the novelist, reminding him to someday use the “most melancholy noise” ever, which is broken ice rocking up and down. “Mem. to use in novel some time and to have an empty Craven A packet bobbing up and down among the ice,” he wrote. (Craven “A” was a brand of cigarettes.) I’ve searched Orwell’s work thoroughly to see if the message was acted on, but have failed to locate it. On the other hand, it doesn’t take much prospecting to find him transmuting observations about livestock into fiction.

In his introduction, Hitchens comments that you’d never deduce from reading the Morocco pages that Orwell was simultaneously conceiving and writing his novel Coming Up for Air, which is about England before the Great War. “I am as usual taking careful notes of everything I see, but am not certain what use I shall be able to make of them afterwards,” Orwell wrote in a September 29, 1938, letter. Evidently, the Moroccan climate was supposed to calm his lungs as his journals steadied his mind.

For someone so chronically ill, Orwell doesn’t devote many of his diary entries to the state of his health. Even when writing from a hospital bed, he avoids whinging. “Have not been well enough to enter up diary,” he wrote on December 19, 1948, more in apology than self-pity. Perhaps he wasn’t a stoic but had merely normalized his bloody coughing fits the way he normalized air-raid warnings in London during the Blitz, calling them “a great bore.” Or perhaps he was able to make peace with regular bouts of sickness because he equated illness with the creative act: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness,” he famously observed in his 1946 essay “Why I Write.”

FOR ALL OF ORWELL’S unflinching encounters with casual brutality in the world at large, the diaries do illuminate one dark and private secret: the author’s own bigoted views of Jews. Orwell clearly maintained two sets of books, privately slagging Jews in his notebook while publicly condemning bigotry in his 1945 essay “Antisemitism in Britain,” in which he denounced anti-Semitism as “an irrational thing.” At one point in his travels around London during the Blitz, Orwell visited three subway stations that doubled as bomb shelters. There, he wrote, he found “a higher proportion of Jews than one would normally see in a crowd of this size. What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so. A fearful Jewish woman, a regular comic-paper cartoon of a Jewess, fought her way off the train at Oxford Circus, landing blows on anyone who stood in her way.” Deeper in that entry, he wrote, “What I do feel is that any Jew, i.e. European Jews, would prefer Hitler’s kind of social system to ours, if it were not that he happens to persecute them.”

In his hop-picking diary, he teed off on a “little Liverpool Jew of eighteen, a thorough guttersnipe.” Orwell doesn’t even dignify the Liverpudlian with a name, calling him “the Jew” throughout.

I do not know when I have seen anyone who disgusted me so much as this boy. He was as greedy as a pig about food, perpetually scrounging round dustbins, and he had a face that recalled some low-down carrion-eating beast. His manner of talking about women, and the expression on his face when he did so, were so loathsomely obscene as to make me feel almost sick. We could never persuade him to wash more of himself than his nose and a small circle around it, and he mentioned quite casually that he had several different kinds of louse on him.

I don’t know what’s more remarkable here: Orwell’s self-confidence about his Jew-dar, his calculations of the proper percentage of Jews who should be escaping death by rushing to the stations, or his assessment of the filthy, greedy, pushy people he has identified as Jews.

Orwell’s novels mention Jews, but don’t excoriate them. On the basis of his published record, does Orwell thereby qualify for the same indulgence that some awarded to H. L. Mencken because his anti-Semitic comments were largely confined to his unpublished works? Do we reach for the other rationales that have been floated in defense of unconfessed anti-Semites in the literary world: that his offenses were committed in a less enlightened time, that England wasn’t a very friendly place for Jews in the first place, that his phobia of Jews appears to have been fragmentary, etc.?

In his introduction, Hitchens writes that he recoiled at the range of Orwell’s prejudice against Jews to be found in these diaries—but offers little in the way of judgment beyond his own visceral response as a reader.

One might have expected Hitchens—who has written eloquently on anti-Semitism and his own Jewish heritage—to address these issues in his introduction. All he allows is that Orwell expressed disgust and repulsion at all stupid and dirty people, directed his misanthropy and xenophobia at other groups, and that this was a “stage in Orwell’s own evolution” toward greater tolerance. (Davison takes a neutral, basically silent corner.) Hitchens mistakenly treats the issue as an embarrassing tic in a revered thinker and writer. That’s a shame: By issuing Orwell a get-out-of-jail-free card, he avoided deeper engagement with what it meant to be a public advocate of tolerance and a private bigot, a subject that was in his métier. The dateline on the Hitchens introduction is a little more than two months before his own premature death, so we can spot him a bundle of points. Still, by letting his hero off easy, Hitchens lets his readers down.

Davison informs us that Orwell invested little energy in preserving the manuscripts of his published work. The likely reason the Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four typescripts still exist, says Davison, is because Orwell didn’t “live long enough to destroy them.” But he valued these diaries, and made certain they survived, probably, like other literary diary keepers, in case his next novel called for the melancholy sounds of ice clanging, or he needed to wake memories of the Blitz, the souk, or the simple excitement of seeing the gold-crested wren for a new essay.

With the exception of Orwell’s disparagement of Jews, Diaries parallels what you already know about the author: Readers conditioned to the full-scale confessional mood of the modern memoir and diary have been warned. Orwell was at home in his diaries, writing most for himself, not for posterity. He trusted these pages, whose primary subject was the world, not George Orwell, and certainly not the inner George Orwell, a room that appears to have lacked a public entrance. Writing, for Orwell, was an illness you didn’t conquer in private any more than you did on the printed page. How many writers would assent to that view today?

Jack Shafer writes a column about the press and politics for Reuters.


31 comments

Jacob arnon
October 18, 2012
10:57 pm

In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell wrote about Jews from an almost Russian (not Nazi) antisemitic point of view.

He spoke of his desire to punch a "Jew pawnbroker) in the face.

Ironically he published that book in 1933 the year Hitler came to power and Russian Tsarist type antisemitic (the occasional Pogrom to intimidate Jews and keep them in their place) had become a thing of the past.

I was therefore not surprised that he indulged in private antisemitism in his diaries.

Unlike many people I don't believe that Orwell has much to teach us about today's political problems in the world.

Even in his life time there were better spokesman against fascism and Communism.




RameshR
October 19, 2012
2:38 am

Many renown writers were antiSemiteT.S Eliot, Carl Max ,Hegal all were wrote very nasty language against Jews.Form beginning Christanity Christans whole heartedly hate Jews.There may economic reason behind that.Another cause is from childhood Christans . mothers teaching their child to hate Jews.May be Jews lived isolataed getto and did minge in with Chrisrtans that is also reason




J.p.allen
October 19, 2012
9:53 am

A person in the past who didn't perfectly share the mores of contemporary people? Shocking. It's amazing, how people in the past did not exactly align themselves with our conceptions of proper etiqitte, correct thought, and allowable emotion. I never cease to be amazed.




snapperheadsoup
October 19, 2012
10:02 am

Most Americans(and Europeans as well) seem to think the main evil of 'antisemitism' is the dislike, distrust, and/or hatred of Jews—or the hostility toward Jews. Therefore, the logical conclusion drawn by many people is that they must be nice to Jews at all times, try to love Jew as much as possible, blame themselves for harboring queasiness about certain aspects of Jewish culture and politics, and remind themselves constantly than any critical or hostile feelings regarding Jews must be evil and their own fault—and never that of Jews. This, of course, is crazy.

The true danger of Antisemitism was the scapegoating and dehumanization of Jews. Scapegoating is a dangerous form of blaming or accusation for it can falsely blame an innocent person or group for a crime committed by others OR disproportionately blame a single group for the problems of the world. Scapegoating can also be a form of projection, i.e. dumping one's transgressions, sins, and ill-feelings onto another person or group, thus absolving oneself of vices and negative characteristics by conveniently seeing them in the scapegoat.

So, the real lesson of Antisemitism is that we must be careful about being critical of a person or group, and we mustn't be too quick to leap to conclusions. It also means we must be honest with ourselves, face up to our own flaws, problems, and sins instead of projecting all our faults onto another people.
The lesson of Antisemitism is NOT that we should love Jews unconditionally, praise Jews(at all times), suppress all critical thoughts regarding Jews, and/or deny every hostile feeling we might feel toward Jews. Rather, we need to assess rationally and factually what it is about Jews and Jewish power that may do good or harm to us and why.

For if Antisemitism can be mindless, so can Semitism. We now live in the Semitist age in the West. The misguided lesson we took from Antisemitism is not the need to be careful in our criticism of Jews but that we shouldn't be critical at all. Ironically, Jews, the most secular and intellectual people on Earth(who take pride in their commitment to Reason), don't want us to think about them rationally, empirically, or critically. Even the most liberal Jewish publications will seethe and foam at the mouth if anyone talks about Jews in the 'wrong way'. There is no paucity of discussion of Jewish matters in the media and academia. If anything, the subject of Jewishness is even more disproportionately discussed than the subject of homosexuality. (Though gays are Jews' closest allies, Jews wanna be #1.) What is not permitted is any genuine critical view of Jews, Jewishness, and Jewish history. So, we can discuss Jewish history, Jewish achievements, Jewish influences(at least those deemed to have been positive), Jewish humor, Jewish suffering, Jewish brilliance(but not quite Jewish intelligence, with its connotations of genetic origins), and a host of other Jewish matters, BUT we cannot discuss Jewish POWER. Mark Sanchez found out the hard way. Schmcarthyism is many times more pervasive, destructive, and repressive than McCarthyism.

The main problem today isn't Antisemitism but Semitism. We are all blindly Semitist, and if you have any doubt, just consider the content of American conservatism. No people are as 'liberal' and anti-conservative(and anti-white-gentile and anti-Christians)as the Jews are. So, one would think the natural tendency of American conservatism would be a critical stance toward Jewish power. Of course, conservatives should be careful not to dehumanize Jews or blame Jews for everything, but Jewish power is a reality; it is immense, especially in finance, high-tech, law, academia, media, entertainment, government, and so on. If most of Jewish power regularly attacks and criticizes—and even scapegoats and dehumanizes the American right—, then it would only be natural for American conservatives to challenge and counter Jewish power.
But instead, American mainstream conservatism is even more slavish toward Jewish power than most liberals in the Democratic Party are. American conservatives will rail against liberals but never mention Jewish power, as if Turkish-Americans and American-Indians are as powerful within the Democratic Party and in the MSM. Throughout the 20th century, Jews didn't just criticize American conservatism in general. They called out the Wasps, and they continue to do so to this day. Jews know very well that not everyone in the GOP has equal amount of power. Jews have always characterized the GOP as the party of Wasp power or 'angry WHITE MALES', as if liberal Jews are without anger and always full of brotherly love. If Jews have fixated on Wasp power because Wasps were indeed more powerful than other groups in America(especially in the GOP), wouldn't it make sense for American conservatives to fixate on Jewish power since Jews have long dominated American liberalism? Yet, the iron law of Semitism says American conservatism should never speak truth to Jewish power, as if any discussion + Jews + Power = Antisemitism.

Being critical of power is necessary and being critical of absolute power is absolutely necessary. This isn't to say Jews have total and absolute power in America. They don't. But in one way, they do, and it is due to the wrong lesson we took from Antisemitism. After all, power isn't just a matter of money and influence but of taboos. Even if someone doesn't own all the wealth and influence in the world, he can possess power beyond his means if taboos forbid anyone from criticizing, challenging, or countering him. After all, why did God or gods grow so immensely powerful though they were but figments of man's imagination? Because taboos protected them from 'sacrilege' and 'blasphemy'. So, if a fantasy can amass that kind of power via the power of taboos, imagine the kind of power a people can have if they are protected from criticism by taboos.
This false lesson of Antisemitism—that we must never criticize Jews, we must love Jews at all times, and we must never confront Jewish power—has shielded Jews from any kind of criticism, no matter how necessary and justified. So, even though Jews don't have absolute power, we are absolutely powerless to criticize Jews, and that means Jews might as well be absolutely powerful. Anyone who dares to link 'Jewish' with 'Power' in a negative way is excommunicated from the institutional community. While individual Americans can still discuss Jewish power privately and on the internet, individual power is nothing compared to institutional power. At any given time, only those with the levers of power really make a difference, especially in our age of conglomeration where a few tycoons and oligarchs own and control vast networks of information, news, and entertainment(which may be as or even more effective as mind-control tools. After all, would so many foolish Americans have been weaned and leaned toward 'gay marriage' if it weren't for celebrity endorsement, TV talk shows and sitcoms, and etc.?) And in time, institutional power will control individual freedom, what with the likes of Elena Kagan and Elena Sotomayor itching to end the Constitutional guarantees of the First Amendment in the name of protecting minorities from 'hate speech', when the real reason for 'hate speech' laws is to protect powerful and privileged Jews from necessary criticism. Already in California, laws have been passed to condemn and ban speech critical of Zionism, its oppression of Palestinians, and its perversion of American foreign policy that have led to Wars of Israel where thousands of mostly white gentiles have been killed or crippled for life(and never mind the 100,000s of dead 'Muzzies').

The wrong lesson of Antisemitism has made us blind to the insane American foreign policy in the Muslim and Arab world. Again, the true lesson of Antisemitism shouldn't be Semitism—mindless worship of Jews and everything Jewish—but the danger of dehumanizing and scapegoating Jews OR ANY OTHER PEOPLE. If it was wrong to do it to Jews, then it is equally wrong to do it other peoples. Dehumanization is something other than being critical of a people. It is the denial of their humanity. But lack of criticism(and necessary condemnation at times) doesn't humanize a people either. It deifies them, and this is equally dangerous, for people, even ones as intelligent as Jews, are not gods and shouldn't be worshiped as such. Indeed, the deification of a people is related to the dehumanization of a people. It was because the Nazis deified the 'Aryans' as a sacred race that some non-'Aryan' races, such as Jews, had to be dehumanized. If the 'Aryans' are the perfect race—the fountain of everything beautiful, noble, creative, and brilliant—, then it follows that people presumed to the enemies of 'Aryans' must be the evil race.

Having deified Jews, we find it easy to dehumanize people whom Jews don't like and people perceived to the 'enemies' of Jews or Zionism. So, we turn a blind eye to the terrible suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank. Why should we acknowledge their humanity when they are less-than-human in contrast to the god-like Jews? And what did it matter that America's Zionist-driven policy starved 100,000s of women and children to death in Iraq in the 90s? And what does it matter that the Iraqi Christian community suffered greatly ever since the American invasion? They too are Arab, right? And since our main perception of Arabs is as 'enemies' of Jews and Zionism, what cares if they suffer as the result of America's Semitist foreign policy? Who cares if those Iraqis were Christian since, of course, we know all Arabs are subhuman 'Muzzies'. Besides, since Jews, by and large, are no great fans of Christianity, it might be 'antisemitic' for American Christians to be concerned about fellow Christians in other parts of the world. Since Jews are the deified race, the main purpose of American Christians is to serve Jews and worry about Jews, not about other Christians, especially if they are subhuman 'raghead' Arabs.

Because humans are not perfect, all people need to be criticized as well as praised. The lesson of Antisemitism is to criticize Jews reasonably based on the facts and realities of their power and agenda. It is NOT to suppress all criticism of Jews and elevate Jews to flawless god-like superior race who are beyond criticism. Turning Jews into god-men is to repeat the mistake of Antisemitism, for it makes Jews the new Nazis and reduces all non-Jews into less-than-human servants of Jews who must constantly prove their worth to their Jewish masters as running dogs.

The lesson of Antisemitism is then not only to reject something like 'Aryanism' but to reject Semitism. Aryan supremacism deemed the Germanic-Nordic races to be more human than others, and therefore, those people could be allowed anything under the sun. What did it matter if they invaded nations and caused the suffering and deaths of millions of people? They were more human than other peoples, and so they had the right to do as they saw fit.
The logic of Semitist supremacism is no different. Since Jews are god-men, they can do as they please with Wall Street, Hollywood, American law, American education, American foreign policy, and etc. And if it leads to fall of the European peoples and untold suffering of Arabs and Muslims, what does it matter? Just as Winston Smith learned to love Big Brother, we've learned to love Big Jew.
This is all, of course, very ironic.



lukelea
October 19, 2012
11:20 am

Snapperheadsoup makes some good points. My special worry concerns the distance that has opened up between our governing elites and the people they govern. This is a development that has largely occurred in the decades after WWII, which happens to be simultaneous with the period during which Ashkenazi Americans (let's not talk about "Jews") became the dominant ethnic group in our society. Correlation is not causation but it sure raises a flag. In a democracy it is not a healthy sign when the people who are recruited into our elite gateway institutions do not reflect the full ethnic and geographical diversity of the people they lead. It leads to the kind of political divisiveness we are experiencing today.

As for solutiions I propose the principle of affirmative action for all. The Ivy League should recruit a pool of talent (lets not call them the best and the brightest as though the two were the same) which reflects the full geographic and ethnic diversity of America. In the meantime it might help if Ashkenazi Americans took the lead in representing the interests of ordinary Americans the way they did a hundred years ago, back when they still worked in factories. Our trade, immigration, and tax policies need to be fundamentally reworked and more attention needs to be paid to the problems caused automation to insure that all Americans, not just a few, share in the fruits technological progress. This is just my opinion.

PS I'm still a Jew lover.



saksin
October 19, 2012
12:26 pm

Snapperheadsoup appears to labor under some misconceptions, on two key points in particular: He seems to construe anti-Semitism as "any criticism of Jews", whereas in fact it obviously means criticism of Jews motivated by prejudice and bias against Jews, i.e. UNJUST criticism of Jews. An absence of anti-Semitism is therefore perfectly compatible with criticism of Jews, as long as the criticism is just, exactly like snapperheadsoup would like to have it. That some Jews and some non-Jews go beyond this to proscribe ANY criticism of Jews in the name of combatting anti-Semitism is an abuse of the term anti-Semitism, and obviously a disservice to Jews and everyone else as well. That this happens does not, however, mean that it is universal - as snapperhead assumes it is - nor that it is a proper use of the term anti-Semitism. Snapperheadsoup would do well to start using the term in its proper sense, instead of joining those abusing it, and thereby ending up taking sides against the Jews as a group on seeing the undesirable consequences of abusing the term!!!
And snapperheadsoup would to well to examine more closely his notion of Jewish "power". In claiming that "it is immense, especially in finance, high-tech, law, academia, media, entertainment, government, and so on" he seems to be confusing Jewish "power" with Jewish "accomplishment," or does he mean to tell us that Jews have attained their positions in these various pursuits unfairly? If so, perhaps he could give us some details of how this was done. If not, what is his alternative? Does he want to bar Jews specifically from working for success in the areas he enumerates? And why only Jews? What kind of a world is he proposing to create in order to decrease Jewish participation in those areas of life???
Finally: If snapperhead had stopped about half way through his long comment he would have done much better than to lay out for all to see - in the second half - the absurdities of his attempt to explain the various troubles he enumerates as consequences of his assumed "deificaton" of the Jews.




melk
October 19, 2012
2:07 pm

"So, even though Jews don't have absolute power, we are absolutely powerless to criticize Jews, and that means Jews might as well be absolutely powerful."

Perhaps the most absurd statement of the Turtle's ridiculous rant, a rant which says far more about himself(herself) that he might realise. What exactly are Jews going to do to those who criticize them? Be really,really mean? Not listen to them? Throw a bagel? I mean, compared to what Muslims might do or have done? There are serious discussions about our modifying the First Amendment to accommodate Muslim sensitivities regarding cartoons or videos. THAT'S real power.
They might kill us!

Our Zionist-driven policy on Iraq? Turtle, you are the posterchild for everything you claim to be disparaging. And I don't think you even realise it. How on earth do these Jews enforce this power? What do they do to non-obeyers? Think it through. The Jews tell Bush to invade Iraq. He says no. They say. OK, next election we won't vote for you. We'll vote for Obama. And next time you want to send that aid to Israel, we'll say no. That'll show you.

But I think that I know what you will say. Those clever Jews don't operate in such obvious ways. What they do is to turn anti-Semitism into the Crime of Crimes. The worst thing anybody can do. And anything negative about the Jews and Israel is regarded as anti-Semitism. Those crafty bastards. So we are all cowed by this. We can't bring ourselves to say anything, to avoid being accused of this terrrible crime. All of us, that is, except the brave Turtle, who rises above the cowards to call it how it is. Using, of course, a pseudonym..




costernocht
October 19, 2012
2:51 pm

Antisemitism is evil, but not all antisemites are. Orwell is a case in point. So is Zofia Kossak-Szczucka (1889-1968), a founder of the Polish resistance organization Zegota. She regarded the Jews as "political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland", but considered it her duty as a Pole and a Catholic to save as many as possible. She survived Auschwitz and was honored poshumously by Israel as one of the Righteous Among Nations.




snapperheadsoup
October 19, 2012
2:56 pm

"Snapperheadsoup appears to labor under some misconceptions, on two key points in particular: He seems to construe anti-Semitism as 'any criticism of Jews', whereas in fact it obviously means criticism of Jews motivated by prejudice and bias against Jews, i.e. UNJUST criticism of Jews."

Actually, the term 'antisemitism' has changed over the yrs. In the 19th century and early 20th century, it was often used as a positive term by people who didn't like Jews. They were proudly antisemitic, i.e. opposed to Jewish power that was seen as essentially devious, subversive, and alien.

But then, the term took on negative connotations, and after WWII and the Holocaust, it was pure poison. To be labeled an 'anti-Semite' meant something like NAZI!!

In a perfect world, the term 'antisemitism' should mean as Saksin defines it, but we are not living in that world. Terms gain meaning not only by technical definition but by PRACTICE. In practice, the term 'antisemitism' applies to just about anyone who dares to take critical notice of Jewish power. Why is there almost no politician who will criticize Israel though Israel has committed horrible crimes? Why is there no discussion of the Lavon Affair and USS Liberty? Why was there total silence when Israel bombed Gaza and killed 1000s of women and children? Obama said Gaddafi had to be brought down to end the slaughter in Libya, but when Jews began to massacre tons of Palestinians, Obama was as silent as Bush when Israel bombed the hell out of Lebanon. Israel destroyed an entire nation because of two abducted soldiers.

Why is it that a Jewish director like William Friedkin gets to make a movie as foul as RULES OF ENGAGEMENT which says no Muslim is to be trusted—even a young Muslim girl is a would-be-terrorist—and blown away with machine guns, while there have been no movies critical of Zionist oppression of Palestinians? name just one Hollywood movie about Jewish involvement in communist mass murder and Zionist ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies against Palestinians.

Jews have long complained of Nazi antisemitic propaganda, but then, why does Jewish Hollywood make movies where Muslims are nothing but subhuman terrorists? Why does Hollywood regularly dehumanize Russians as gangster thugs when many 'Russian' gangster bosses have actually been Jewish and closely tied to Israel. And what about the 'comfort women' industry in Israel that uses Slavic women as sex slaves? Why do we care more about what Japanese did to Asian women in WWII than what Zionist Jews are NOW doing to Slavic women who serve as sex slaves in Israel? Indeed, if anyone pointed out such matters, he or she would not only be denied promotion but be fired and blacklisted in the Jewish-controlled media industry. And any politician who dares to bring up the subject will be targeted by Jewish money in politics. THIS is why there is so little criticism of Jewish power in the government, colleges, and media(most of which is owned by Jews).

I mean the issue of Jewish power has turned into an open joke:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...4676183.column

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jews-...rol-the-media/

Both Jewish writers admit that Jews control the media(and many other powerful institutions), but many gentiles dare not speak the truth out of fear of being called an 'anti-Semite'., which is a kiss of death in American society where a loathsome creatures like Abe Foxman gets to lord over all of us as the new McCarthy—but this time, with the full blessing of ACLU and Jewish lobby.
Why do goyim fear the term 'antisemitic' so much? Because of Jewish control of media, law firms, courts, and etc.

Jews are rank hypocrites. Jewish professors tell Asian-American students that 'white privilege' —meaning white GENTILE privilege—is a great evil that 'minorities' should fight 'evil racist white power', and so, many Asian-American students have become anti-white puppets of Jewish academics. But on the other hand, Jews in the big media tell white gentiles that Yellow Peril is the big threat. So, Jewish Hollywood is remaking RED DAWN as YELLOW DAWN with Chinese disguised as North Koreans invading and killing Americans. (Imagine if an non-Jew made a film about evil Zionist globalists invading and taking over US? Maybe such film should just be called Mission Accomplished.) And Jewish Hollywood have dehumanized Muslims even worse. So, even as Jews bitch about scapegoating and antisemitism, they just love to scapegoat other people. They love pitting Christians vs Muslims, whites vs Asians, white liberals vs white conservatives. Jewish Hollywood depicts most Southern white conservatives as subhuman rednecks with no redeeming facet. Many Arab-Americans have said the only job they can get in Hollywood is as Terrorists. And in movies like TAKEN and TAKEN II—and Mamet's SPARTAN—white Americans are told that Muslims are sexual slavers who are kidnapping and raping white women. (These are the same Jews who tell us that BIRTH OF A NATION and THE SEARCHERS are 'racist'.) But in fact, most white European women abducted into sex slavery are victims of Zionist gangsters. Israel is one of the biggest centers of sexual slavery, most of it white meat sold to perverts from all over the world. Yet, even feminists don't speak out against this evil. Not only are many feminists Jewish Zionists but non-Jewish feminists fear Jewish power like anyone else. So, Zionists enslave white women in Israel, BUT Jewish Hollywood fearmongers white America by making movies that show all those swarthy 'Muzzie' men enslaving white women.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/1,7...062297,00.html

Now, if a Muslim-American or Wasp-American film director made a movie like TAKEN with Jewish sex slavers, wouldn't you guys bitch and whine about 'antisemitism'? So, why are you silent when Jewish Hollywood defames Muslims as a bunch of sex slavers and yellows as the neo-Mongol horde just itching to invade American and kill people?
————————————

"And snapperheadsoup would to well to examine more closely his notion of Jewish 'power'. In claiming that "it is immense, especially in finance, high-tech, law, academia, media, entertainment, government, and so on" he seems to be confusing Jewish 'power' with Jewish 'accomplishment,' or does he mean to tell us that Jews have attained their positions in these various pursuits unfairly?"

This is semantics of Jewish lawyer trickery. Okay, so you wanna be the new Alan Dershowitz.

Accomplishment and power can often be the same. If someone is an accomplished businessmen and becomes rich, he gains power. If someone becomes a Harvard University president, he or she becomes powerful. Regardless of whether the power was justly earned or not, power is power. Should the US go around the world and say, '"We are not powerful, we are just accomplished." That would be so lame, not to mention laughable.

Is Jewish power justly earned? In many cases, yes. Jews, especially Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQ, and so they're bound to succeed more in science, law, business, technology, academia, finance, and etc. Similarly, blacks have risen very high in sports due to their natural biological advantages. They are naturally tougher, faster, and better coordinated. So, almost all of the 100 m sprint finalists have been of West African descent in the last 30 yrs. And blacks totally own certain positions like running back and most defensive linemen positions in football.

But power is never gained purely meritocratically. Every group—Irish, black, Mexican, Asian, gay, etc—has its form of 'tribal networking'. Why should this be any different for the Jews? Anglos has the Old Anglo-Boys' Network, and Jews have the New Jewish-Boys' Network. So, when Jews on Wall Street really messed up royally, they had Jews in the media to protect them. And Jews in government—Obama was 'made' by Jews from day one—bailed out Wall Street, and virtually no Wall Street Jew has been prosecuted. Imagine if Wall Street were owned by Asian-Indians. Jewish media and Jews in government would have gone after it with full force. But the New Jewish Boys' Network covered it all up. No one got in trouble like the goy boys at Enron did. Power corrupts. It always has and always will. To say that Jews are not tempted by corruptions of power as other peoples are is to say Jews are morally superior, even to suggest Jews are perfect and worthy of worship. I don't worship any man or any group.

There was Bernie Madoff, but why had he been able to get away with his BS for so long? He had lots of powerful Jewish friends in high places, and he was making them fabulous money. And even when his crime became too big to cover up, the Jewish media's spin was that the main victims of Madoff were poor helpless Jews, which was a total lie.



snapperheadsoup
October 19, 2012
2:59 pm

Hey, I have an idea. How about we open up the private journals of all the Jewish politicians, artists, writers, etc, etc. and see what they said about non-Jews. But of course, Jews were full of nothing but love and compassion for goyim. I mean that's why the Talmud calls gentiles dogs.

But then, we don't have to look to private Jewish diaries. Just look at Hollywood movies. We know lots of Jews are anti-Muslimite, anti-Christianite, anti-Souther-white-male-ite, anti-Asianite, anti-Russianite, and etc.


Just look at the kinds of racial and ethnic stereotypes Hollywood peddles in this day and age.




Jacob arnon
October 19, 2012
4:32 pm

j P Allen says:

"A person in the past who didn't perfectly share the mores of contemporary people? Shocking. It's amazing, how people in the past did not exactly align themselves with our conceptions of proper etiqitte, correct thought, and allowable emotion. I never cease to be amazed."

Being anti-Semitic used to be the default position. It took no courage in the "good old days" to hate Jews.

Orwell comes off as less than courageous when he embraced Jew hatred.





Jacob arnon
October 19, 2012
4:39 pm

"Why is it that a Jewish director like William Friedkin gets to make a movie as foul as RULES OF ENGAGEMENT which says no Muslim is to be trusted—even a young Muslim girl is a would-be-terrorist—and blown away with machine guns, while there have been no movies critical of Zionist oppression of Palestinians? name just one Hollywood movie about Jewish involvement in communist mass murder and Zionist ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies against Palestinians."

Say what you will, but the above comment by snapperheadsoup is antisemitic no matter how one defines it.

That Jews are vilified every day of the week in the media, especially in Arab countries and in Europe.

Attacks and killing of Jews goes on today in places like France and Sweden.

Their excuse is always "Palestine" but the reality is that their aim is the murder of Jews, including little girls as happened recently in France.

This poster is either out to lunch, or more probably a pro Arab Jew hater.




rextilleon
October 19, 2012
6:14 pm

I read snapper's diatribe several times because I wasn't sure whether he was a true anti-semite. This line sort of tipped the scales though:

This is semantics of Jewish lawyer trickery. Okay, so you wanna be the new Alan Dershowitz.

Jewish lawyer trickery? As opposed to Christian lawyer trickery? What about Muslim lawyer tricker? As I grow older I am more and more convinced that the vast majority of rabid anti-Zionists are actually virulent anti-semities. Israel has provided them a way to keep their hands clean, but they never fail to eventually reveal what their true motives are.





USprofessor
October 20, 2012
12:57 am

Dear Jack Shafer,
Thank you for providing a brief introduction to these long articles by professional antisemites. Thank you, Bookforum. If that wasn't your plan, why not limit "comments" to genuine comments on an article? Limit length and ban links? Since Arts and Letters Daily picked up what they thought was an article by Shafer about Orwell, you have ended up publishing unrelated antisemitic essays, complete with links, all over the English speaking world. Fifteen years ago "snapper" would have had to xerox his stuff and try to hand it out from a soap box in Union Square. You've made him an international author. Mr. Shafer, Bookforum, why let yourselves be used this way? Revise the comment policy.





steveslr
October 20, 2012
3:14 am

Dear Mr. Shafer:

Isn't there also evidence of anti-Irishism in Orwell's diaries? If so, why isn't Orwell's anti-Irishism worth mentioning? Granted, "anti-Irishism" isn't a word, but, then, who did more to explain to us the political utility of the non-existence of certain words than Orwell?




PatrickIrish
October 20, 2012
3:18 am

J.p.allen is correct. I have recently read the letters of Renoir and he refers to "the Jew Pissarro" and states that he is tired of painting for Jews because they never pay.
As for USprofessor - the article by Mr Shafer is a very selective hatchet job on one of the leading minds of the 20th century - despite mr Arnon's comment. Orwell was shot through the neck, literally, for defending his beliefs,
and metaphorically stabbed in the back by Victor Gollancz, his publisher, for writing about them. Although intellectually he was prophetic he was still of his time.
And he wrote that it was important that he wrote what he believed while he could, because he feared that soon he would not be able to.
USprofessor is evidence of that!




Jacob arnon
October 20, 2012
1:29 pm

Patrickirish has posted another antisemitic comment.

"Orwell was shot through the neck, literally, for defending his beliefs,
and metaphorically stabbed in the back by Victor Gollancz, his publisher, for writing about them."

Golancz was a Jew and a socialist.

"Sir Victor Gollancz (9 April 1893 – 8 February 1967) was a British publisher, socialist and supporter of left-wing causes."

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/019_03/10013#reply

antisemites like Patrickirish will always point to some Jew as an evil presence in whatever it is they are discussing.




Jacob arnon
October 20, 2012
1:31 pm

Patrickirish has posted another antisemitic comment.

"Orwell was shot through the neck, literally, for defending his beliefs,
and metaphorically stabbed in the back by Victor Gollancz, his publisher, for writing about them."

Golancz was a Jew and a socialist.

"Sir Victor Gollancz (9 April 1893 – 8 February 1967) was a British publisher, socialist and supporter of left-wing causes."

Victor_Gollancz Victor_Gollancz

antisemites like Patrickirish will always point to some Jew as an evil presence in whatever it is they are discussing.




researchok
October 20, 2012
8:04 pm

I read snapperhead's comments with great amusement.

Is he seriously giving justification to bigotry?

It is also true that bigotry never has a single target. What other bigotry some snapperhead subscribe to?

Further, posting links to what amount to no more than opinion pieces (which can easily be construed as deliberately taken out of context) is hardly the mark of a someone with a disciplined and educated mind.

It isn't as if these there has been a presentation of serious academic discussion of bigotry nor has there been any evidence of a plethora of serious academics who would agree with Snapperhead's assertion that somehow, bigotry directed against Jews is understandable if not inappropriate.

Finally, the notion Jews 'control' anything is quite absurd.

The United States has a population of 308 plus million people.

There are about 6,500,000 Jews. Let's assume they vote as a single bloc (which of course they don't).

About 25% of Americans identify themselves as evangelical. Let's assume they too vote as a single bloc in support of Israel (which they don't).

That leaves slightly less than 75% of Americans whose vote is up for grabs, so to speak.

So why do poll after poll indicate a high level of American support for Israel? Maybe because that is a moral and ethical stance.

If Americans wanted to change their support of Israel in favor of nations who call for genocide (and let's be clear- there is no such as a disproportionate response to calls for genocide) any political candidate from any political party would have no trouble at the ballot box.

For some reason, that hasn't happened.

Have you ever noticed how those who deny or justify the Holocaust are the same people who would love to see another?




lukelea
October 21, 2012
12:34 am

I agree with PatrickIrish that "the article by Mr Shafer is a very selective hatchet job on one of the leading minds of the 20th century." The truth of course is that all ethnic stereotypes have their kernels of truth. This is no less true of Ashkenazis than any other group, as Ashkenazis themselves are perfectly aware. That Orwell should be "exposed" and condemned half a century later for what were likely honest impressions recorded in his diary, serves no useful purpose. Unless you think fanning the flames of bigotry is useful.



PatrickIrish
October 21, 2012
1:07 am

I am sorry you are offended Mr Arnon, I thought the juxtaposition of the literal and metaphorical rather droll! I have read most of what Orwell wrote and he actually took the shafting by Mr Gollancz rather well and certainly did not ascribe Gollancz's embrace of Totalitarianism to his Jewishness, nor his disappointing behaviour. Orwell was not an anti-Semite and I am surprised that those who choose to besmirch him should react so violently to his defenders! Very interesting, and of course, instructive. Irrational abuse doesn't intimidate any more Mr Arnon. Those who read this site are interested in the use and abuse of language - as was Orwell. Please try to stick to what is being discussed, calmly and thoughtfully - or limit your posting to those violent anti-Christian sites that people like you infest.
researchok
October 21, 2012
4:32 am



Lukelea

Your remark, "The truth of course is that all ethnic stereotypes have their kernels of truth." is interesting, to be sure.

That said, the Irish, Poles and Black communities (just to name a few) might not share your profound insights.




Fritz
October 21, 2012
10:17 am

My, my. PatrickIrish sees violence popping up all over the place.

"I am surprised that those who choose to besmirch him should react so violently to his defenders!"
"...limit your posting to those violent anti-Christian sites...."
(In other words, don't post where I might see it.)

It seems the definition of a violent person = someone who disagrees with PatrickIrish.

The fact also remains that Orwell's private language regarding Jews is vile stuff, regardless of whether written yesterday or a half-century ago. If PatrickIrish and lukelea are upset that their hero is being knocked off his pedestal, too bad for them.



Markangelo
October 21, 2012
1:12 pm

Once you scratch the surface the amount of anti semites in modernism is alarming, who did not meet Ezra Pound, from Marianne Moore to Robert Frost, . Perhaps it has to do with the orthodoxy & rigidity of the Old Testament ??




Larkers
October 21, 2012
1:23 pm

I was brought to this article from Daily Arts & Letters who flagged it as "Orwell the anti-Semite". No room for doubt there.

Reading Mr Schafer I sense his mind is equally made up. George Orwell, whatever he wrote was anti-Jew. That is plain fact for Mr Schafer.

However, there is more to this than Orwell's known disgust at certain behaviour's and personalities. Malcolm Muggeridge thought Orwell was anti-Semitic and said so in a televison documentary in conversation with Cyril Connelly, one of Orwell's oldest friends from school days. Connelly did not demure. However, Rayner Heppenstall and Arthur Koestler and other Jewish friends and associates believed otherwise; this despite Heppenstall for one having had epic private rows with Orwell.

One reason for this contradiction - for it was I think this consciousness of this about himself that made him a great writer - is that George Orwell did not exist. He has no existence except as a fictional alter ego of Eric Blair. It is this fictional Blair becoming Orwell that should be a serious consideration in viewing Orwell's achievement. Orwell was late arriving; only after Paris, Wigan and especially, Spain did this invented self appear. The previously existing E. A. Blair exemplified the pre-First World War (1914-18) world that Blair knew dimly from his childhood. Reflections of this 'different age' pepper his work. In it he grew up in an Imperialist country in a class determined from birth to serve it. He writes that at that time, his early teens, Ruyard Kipling, the great poet of Empire, was "a sort of household God", one later ejected, but somehow never forgot for his impact on Orwell's political outlook. Kipling he later reasoned, had understood the world better than the 'parlour socialists' who sniggered at him because Kipling understood that in the end brute force wins against pieties.

Orwell never served in the Indian Imperial police in Burma. That was Blair. It was Blair that went afterwards to Paris having seen through the imperialist racket (that employed and nurtured Blair's family); it was Blair who recoiled in disgust at the world of tramping, casual labour, begging and so on, drawn by a fascination with dirt that leads many to misunderstand this essentially literary device that placed the emerging Orwell outside the disinterested observers such as Mass Observation. Hence his frank remarks about the working class people he encountered in the north of England, every bit as difficult to read as that Mr Schafer quotes on the young Jew in the passage on hop picking. Blair spared no one.

In creating Orwell, Blair tried to find some persona that could shake off the habits of his class and social world view, a decent (Orwell's almost favourite word it seems at times when reading him, a shorthand for moral courage) humane person who could look at the world honestly and not flinch. To see through all the 'smelly orthodoxy's' that clamoured for attention. But behind this mask Blair lived on. He refused to go away and people were surprised to find Orwell in the first person was less easy going and more challenging than his words might have led them to expect. "A gloomy sort of chap" was P.G. Wodehouse's verdict.

Mr Schafer takes Blair as the real Orwell. Orwell emerged from the tension as between the Old Etonian, ex-colonial policeman Blair and the wounded Spanish Civil War veteran that left traces on his ruined face that Raymond Williams for one, disagreeing with him on almost every major political point, said we could never do without.



chevyclutchfoot
October 21, 2012
4:16 pm

It's amazing how quickly snapperhead transitions from
1. NOT making sweeping (therefore dehumanizing) judgments about certain races, to
2. Justifying his own remarks about "Jewish POWER" as if some powerful Jews meant that the whole race had some kind of upper-case "POWER", and finally to
3. "Jewish Hollywood", "semantics of Jewish Lawyer Trickery", "Jewish sex slavers", "Wall Street Jew", and on and on.

If you don't mean to attack, insult and dehumanize a race of people, you usually don't write this way. Substitute "Chinese", "White", "Black" or "Latino" for every reference he makes to "Jews" and it's obvious that:
1. He's a guy with a racist chip on his shoulder the size of Nebraska, and
2. He's gottten good at writing introductory paragraphs that obfuscate his true position and goal; but that his stock in trade is selling -yes, dare I say it- antisemitic fantasies of Jewish power (complete with the obligatory "they're genetically smarter than us" BS, which has been proven false), while parroting a few nice little politically correct slogans in the first couple paragraphs to suck intelligent people into having an actual debate with him.

Like someone said, what he should be doing is standing on a soap box in Union Square.

Lukelea, by the way, is a frequenter of all blogs and fora linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, and is a rabid "lover of the Jews", by which I mean someone who thinks they're all children of the devil who could still be saved at Judgment day. He/she/it is the ultimate antisemite whackjob of the internet, save Brother whats-his-face the itinerant street preacher/nazi.



lukelea
October 21, 2012
9:37 pm

@ chevyclutchfoot -
"Lukelea, by the way, is a frequenter of all blogs and fora linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, and is a rabid "lover of the Jews", by which I mean someone who thinks they're all children of the devil who could still be saved at Judgment day. He/she/it is the ultimate antisemite whackjob of the internet, save Brother whats-his-face the itinerant street preacher/nazi."

Pure libel and untruth from beginning to end as a simple Google search will show. I am a long-time and steadfast supporter of the state of Israel and of the Jewish people, being a convert to reform Judaism.
steveslr
October 21, 2012
10:35 pm

Here's a somewhat over-the-top but still interesting attack on Orwell from an Irish-American writer:

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail....9&IBLOCK_ID=35

I think Dolan's Irish perspective has identified a major aspect of Orwell's personality — he was basically an English patriot, which has its upsides but also has its downsides if you are a loyal Irishman.

Of course, Orwell's anti-Irishism is not something widely discussed. After all, anti-Irishite isn't even a word, so it's easy not to think in that category, while it's easy to think in categories for which we have words.




PatrickIrish
October 21, 2012
11:50 pm

Also surprising that Fritz takes issue with the concept of language as violence but I do think the use of that word was wrong. It has the potential to encourage arguments about the need to limit speech, something I disagree with. Disappointing that he stoops to personal abuse also, but it is as it is. I do disagree with Larkers - I don't think there is any need to separate Blair from Orwell, there is no marked inconsistency in attitude or viewpoint. But Larkers is interesting and worth reading. Orwell lived in a different age. Animal Farm is a given now, then it was almost unpublishable. The same with much of what was in his diary. Who obsesses about the number of eggs their hens lay today?
Angry Pancho
October 22, 2012
1:31 am

I thought I'd be long gone before reading anything like snapperheadsoup's comments. I now want to go back and read this article and all of its comments, and I'm not going to be surprised if the comments are the better read.




salomon
October 29, 2012
8:06 am

There's something hinky about people, Jewish or not, who obviously spend A LOT of time obsessing about what used to be called "the Jewish question."