Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884-1937)

Russian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist, whose famous anti-utopia "We" (1924, We) prefigured Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and inspired George Orwell's 1984 (1949).

"We," completed in 1921, was the only full-length novel Zamyatin wrote.

The story is set in the twenty-sixth century A.D. in a totalitarian, standardized OneState of the future. Its dictator is the all-powerful "Benefactor," who offers the citizens, called Numbers, security and material affluence but not freedom. The narrator, D-503, is an engineer and mathematician who fully accepts the total control and rationality of the centralized state. However, his observations in his diary reveal a huge between the reality and his orthodox view of it: "And the what a sky! Blue, unsullied by a single cloud (what primitive tastes of the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about). I love - and I am sure I am right in saying we love - only such a sky as this one: sterile and immaculate. On days like this the whole world seems to have been cast of the same immovable and everlasting glass as the Green Wall, as all of our structures. On days like this you can see into the deep blue depth of things, you see their hitherto unsuspected, astonishing equations - you see this in the most ordinary, the most everyday things." D-503 falls in love with I-330, a member of a revolutionary group, but their love is doomed. Like in 1984, love is destroyed by the totalitarian system. D-503 becomes again its faithful servant when his imagination is removed in an operation.

Orwell read Russian writer E. I. Zamyatin’s book We from 1923 which would be a major influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four. We takes place in the twenty-sixth century when almost everyone lives in a kind of Single State consisting of cities spread all over the world and separated from the surrounding countryside by fences. This isolation from nature is quite deliberate on part of the rulers. They want to turn humans into machines, to replace the organic by the inorganic, to create synthetic happiness by eradicating all that may evoke natural passions and personal inclinations. In this single state all buildings have walls of glass so that the actions of the occupants are visible. Only during sex are the curtains drawn for a brief moment, sexual behaviour being strictly controlled by the Sexual Bureau. This soulless society is ruled by a dictator, the Benefactor, who is supported and helped by a political police, the Guardians, that hover above the cities with surveillance equipment. Confessions are extracted by torture, and criminals are simply liquidated. Informing, even on family members and friends, is a sacred duty.

George Orwell - socialist, anarchist or what...? On George Orwell's political development. by Claus B. Storgaard

How the Central Intelligence Agency Played Dirty Tricks With Our Culture
By Laurence Zuckerman
URL text

03/18/02 "New York Times" -- -- Many people remember reading George Orwell's "Animal Farm" in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it "impossible to say which was which."

That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film's secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.

The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell's pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to "Animal Farm" from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.

Rewriting the end of "Animal Farm" is just one example of the often absurd lengths to which the C.I.A. went, as recounted in a new book, "The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters" (The New Press) by Frances Stonor Saunders, a British journalist. Published in Britain last summer, the book will appear here next month.

Much of what Ms. Stonor Saunders writes about, including the C.I.A.'s covert sponsorship of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom and the British opinion magazine Encounter, was exposed in the late 1960's, generating a wave of indignation. But by combing through archives and unpublished manuscripts and interviewing several of the principal actors, Ms. Stonor Saunders has uncovered many new details and gives the most comprehensive account yet of the agency's activities between 1947 and 1967.

This picture of the C.I.A.'s secret war of ideas has cameo appearances by scores of intellectual celebrities like the critics Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling, the poets Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott and the novelists James Michener and Mary McCarthy, all of whom directly or indirectly benefited from the C.I.A.'s largesse. There are also bundles of cash that were funneled through C.I.A. fronts and several hilarious schemes that resemble a "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon more than a serious defense against Communism.

Traveling first class all the way, the C.I.A. and its counterparts in other Western European nations sponsored art exhibitions, intellectual conferences, concerts and magazines to press their larger anti-Soviet agenda. Ms. Stonor Saunders provides ample evidence, for example, that the editors at Encounter and other agency-sponsored magazines were ordered not to publish articles directly critical of Washington's foreign policy. She also shows how the C.I.A. bankrolled some of the earliest exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting outside of the United States to counter the Socialist Realism being advanced by Moscow.

In one memorable episode, the British Foreign Office subsidized the distribution of 50,000 copies of "Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler's anti-Communist classic. But at the same time, the French Communist Party ordered its operatives to buy up every copy of the book. Koestler received a windfall in royalties courtesy of his Communist adversaries.

As it turns out, "Animal Farm" was not the only instance of the C.I.A.'s dabbling in Hollywood. Ms. Stonor Saunders reports that one operative who was a producer and talent agent slipped affluent-looking African-Americans into several films as extras to try to counter Soviet criticism of the American race problem.

The agency also changed the ending of the movie version of "1984," disregarding Orwell's specific instructions that the story not be altered. In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. In the very last line, Orwell writes of Winston, "He loved Big Brother." In the movie, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down after Winston defiantly shouts: "Down with Big Brother!"

Such changes came from the agency's obsession with snuffing out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals: that East and West were morally equivalent. But instead of illustrating the differences between the two competing systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of the Soviets.

"If the other side can use ideas that are camouflaged as being local rather than Soviet-supported or -stimulated, then we ought to be able to use ideas camouflaged as local ideas," Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.'s covert cultural division in the early 1950's, explained years later. (In one of the book's many amusing codas, Mr. Braden goes on in the 1980's to become the leftist foil to Patrick Buchanan on the CNN program "Crossfire.")

The cultural cold war began in postwar Europe, with the fraying of the wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow. Officials in the West believed they had to counter Soviet propaganda and undermine the wide sympathy for Communism in France and Italy.


An odd alliance was struck between the C.I.A. leaders, most of them wealthy Ivy League veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services and a corps of largely Jewish ex-Communists who had broken with Moscow to become virulently anti-Communist. Acting as intermediaries between the agency and the intellectual community were three colorful agents who included Vladimir Nabokov's much less talented cousin, Nicholas, a composer.

The C.I.A. recognized from the beginning that it could not openly sponsor artists and intellectuals in Europe because there was so much anti-American feeling there. Instead, it decided to woo intellectuals out of the Soviet orbit by secretly promoting a non-Communist left of democratic socialists disillusioned with Moscow.

Ms. Stonor Saunders describes how the C.I.A. cleverly skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan to finance its activities, funneling the money through fake philanthropies it created or real ones like the Ford Foundation.

"We couldn't spend it all," Gilbert Greenway, a former C.I.A. agent, recalled. "There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing."

When some of the C.I.A.'s activities were exposed in the late 1960's, many artists and intellectuals claimed ignorance. But Ms. Stonor Saunders makes a strong case that several people, including the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Stephen Spender, who was co-editor of Encounter, knew about the C.I.A.'s role.

"She has made it very difficult now to deny that some of these things happened," said Norman Birnbaum, a professor at the Georgetown University Law School who was a university professor in Europe in the 1950's and early 1960's. "And she has placed a lot of people living and dead in embarrassing situations."

Still unresolved is what impact the campaign had and whether it was worth it. Some of the participants, like Arthur M.

Schlesinger Jr., who was in the O.S.S. and knew about some of the C.I.A.'s cultural activities, argue that the agency's role was benign, even necessary. Compared with the coups the C.I.A. sponsored in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, he said, its support of the arts was some of its best work. "It enabled people to publish what they already believed," he added. "It didn't change anyone's course of action or thought."

But Diana Josselson, whose husband, Michael, ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, told Ms. Stonor Saunders that there were real human costs among those around the world who innocently cooperated with the agency's front organizations only to be tarred with a C.I.A. affiliation when the truth came out. The author and other critics argue that by using government money covertly to promote such American ideals as democracy and freedom of expression, the agency ultimately stepped on its own message.

"Obviously it was an error, and a rather serious error, to allow intellectuals to be subsidized by the government," said Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia University. "And when it was revealed, it did undermine their credibility seriously."

'How many fingers, Winston?'
Bob Patterson
SmirkingChimp
March 13 ,2006

Have all the smug pundits, who suggest that folks read George Orwell's 1984 to understand the Bush Junta, actually read it themselves, recently? Perhaps it is time for them to follow their own advice?

Of course it's ironic to point out passages such as: "And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered." (page 175-6. [All notes will refer to the New American Library paperback edition]).

Have they forgotten the lesson of the fingers? When Winston is being asked to answer the question "How many fingers, Winston" and is coerced into saying "five" instead of "four," O'Brien, the inquisitor, isn't satisfied: "No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?" (page 206)

Winston's responds: "Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain." (Ibid.)

We have observed that some pundits have taken it upon themselves to pass judgment on a commitment the Bush team has made to the United Arab Emirates. We find it immensely amusing that some ink-slingers have annointed themselves capable of rendering a verdict on a matter on which they are not qualified to comment. What's worse, they have stirred up the citizens to an alarming degree. Such insolence will not be tolerated.

Lately some of commentators have been reverting to a weird obsession with freedom. "Do you remember," he went on, "writing in your diary, ŒFreedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four'?" (Ibid.) We have also observed that some of you are feeling "uncomfortable" with the DP World deal. When I ask the question this time, Winston, I want you to use one word as the answer ˆ and I want to see that you firmly believe your own answer ˆ and that word is: "Halliburton," so, now, please tell me: "How many fingers, Winston?"

Louder please, I want to hear you scream your answer with conviction and enthusiasm!

"Halliburton!"

If you are given the freedom to say "Jesus" or "Barabus," what will you say?

"Halliburton!"

The Chancellor for Life, motivated by his infinite kindness and wisdom, has ordered the Ministry of Smirk to take a 45 day pause before returning to consider certain pressing issues. During this "time out" pundits who have never read 1984 should read every word of it and think about it before being given the chance to answer some important questions again.

Those who have never read this remarkable novel, should do so immediately because "What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself." (page 158)

Remember " . . . there is need for an unwavering, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The key word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claming that black is white, in contradiction of plain facts Applied to a Party member, it means a loyaly willingness to say that black is white, when Party discipline demands it. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary." (page 175)

"The aim of the Low, when they have an aim ˆ for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives ˆ is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal." (page 166)

By all means, promote the reading of 1984. "When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. . . . we make the brain perfect before we blow it out." (page 210)

"It is not enough to obey him; you must love him." (page 232) "Everyone knows what is in Room 101." (page 215) "Do it to Julia!" (page 236)

When the 45 day "time out" is concluded, pundits will again be asked "Dubai or not Dubai, that is the question." Other questions, such as "How many fingers, Winston?" will also be included in the test. There is one word, "Halliburton," which answers all questions. Learn it. Love it. Strong Daddy will be waiting for the results of the semester final to see if you've learned the single most important answer. The test will also include this bonus question: "Should the Lord High Commissioner of Smirk be given a third term?"

You can save yourself some pain and agony by turning directly to the last sentences on the last page of the aforementioned work by Orwell: "But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." (page 245)

Truly, 1984 was ahead of its time. Buy it. Read it. Memorize it.

Eric Blair has written: "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting." (Bloomsbury Treasury of Quotations edited by John Daintith page 515) Apparently, if you like sports, you will love war because it has all that and shooting, too.

Now, if the disk jockey will play the Eurythmics song, Doubleplusgood, from the soundtrack album for 1984, we will return to our desk at the Ministry of Love. Have a blackwhite week.

As I Please, by George Orwell, Tribune, 1946 November 29

I think one must continue the political struggle, just as a doctor must try to save the life of a patient who is probably going to die. But I do suggest that we shall get nowhere unless we start by recognizing that political behaviour is largely non-rational, that the world is suffering from some kind of mental disease which must be diagnosed before it can be cured. The significant point is that nearly all the calamities that happen to us are quite unnecessary. It is commonly assumed that what human beings want is to be comfortable. Well, we now have it in our power to be comfortable, as our ancestors had not. Nature may occasionally hit back with an earthquake or a cyclone, but by and large she is beaten. And yet exactly at the moment when there is, or could be, plenty of everything for everybody, nearly our whole energies have to be taken up in trying to grab territories, markets and raw materials from one another. Exactly at the moment when wealth might be so generally diffused that no government need fear serious opposition, political liberty is declared to be impossible and half the world is ruled by secret police forces. Exactly at the moment when superstition crumbles and a rational attitude towards the universe becomes feasible, the right to think one’s own thoughts is denied as never before. The fact is that human beings only started fighting one another in earnest when there was no longer anything to fight about.

It is not easy to find a direct economic explanation of the behaviour of the people who now rule the world. The desire for pure power seems to be much more dominant than the desire for wealth. This has often been pointed out, but curiously enough the desire for power seems to be taken for granted as a natural instinct, equally prevalent in all ages, like the desire for food. Actually it is no more natural, in the sense of being biologically necessary, than drunkenness or gambling. And if it has reached new levels of lunacy in our own age, as I think it has, then the question becomes: What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others? If we could answer that question—seldom asked, never followed up—there might occasionally be a bit of good news on the front page of your morning paper.

The Spanish Civil War, 70 Years On: The Deafening Silence on Franco’s Genocide
How Spain's Church Still Pushes Fascist Agenda
By VICENTE NAVARRO
http://www.counterpunch.org/
July 19, 2006

Editors’ note: 70 Years ago this week, General Franco launched his attack on the Spanish Republic, backed by Hitler, Mussolini and, tacitly, by the US and other Western powers. Across the next few days and weeks we will be publishing articles on this pivotal struggle, and the imperishable gallantry of the Republic’s defenders. We start with a overview by Vicente Navarro of the enduring significance of the Fascist onslaught and the malign tenacity of Franco's admirers to this day in burying his crimes while seeking to renew his objectives. AC / JSC.

Barcelona, Catalonia

The Spanish Civil War , launched by the military Fascist coup, on July 18, 1936 was the first act of World War II. The cast of characters that shaped and appeared in World War II first came together in Spain. The Civil War, like World War II, was a war between progressive forces and the axis of evil of that day--fascism, Nazism, and reaction. Interestingly, though, in the Spanish war the Western democracies stood to one side or, even worse, indirectly assisted on the fascist side. Why?

To answer this question, we need to understand what happened in Spain before the coup led by General Franco, which took place on July 18, 1936. That coup interrupted the most progressive and modernizing government seen in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century. The II Republic, established in 1931, put in place some of the most important reforms that Spanish society has ever seen: It established reforms of the public school system, which were opposed by the Church, until that time in control of most of the educational system. It introduced much-needed land reforms, which went against the interests of the large landowners and the oligarchy (including the Church). It instituted social security reforms, which were opposed by the banking and private insurance companies (Juan March, Spain’s foremost banker and leader of the Liberal Party, financed the military coup). It established women’s suffrage, years before many other western European countries. It introduced labor rights, which were opposed by large industrialists, such as Cambo, a leader of the Catalan nationalist and liberal forces. It established the divorce law and the right to abortion, actions that further antagonized the Church. And it put in place many other reforms that made Spain a major point of reference for progressive forces throughout Europe.

Then, in 1936, an alliance of left-wing and center parties (the Popular Front) was elected to the Spanish Parliament, with a program that expanded and solidified the reforms carried out by the first government of the II Republic (1931-1933). Just months later, all those forces that had kept Spain one of the most backward countries in Europe, and whose privileges had been curtailed by the Republic’s reforms, came together to instigate a military coup, led by General Franco. The coup was actively supported by Hitler and Mussolini, who provided Franco with all manner of military equipment and support. Even though Franco presented himself as the defender of Spain, and the fascist forces called themselves the “nationalists,” most of Franco’s troops that invaded the south of Spain were actually foreign fighters, including Foreign Legion and Moorish troops, mercenaries from Morocco. As the British historian Herbert Graham has noted, it is paradoxical that “the Spanish crusade to defend Christian civilization--were led by Islamic mercenaries.” The Moorish general, Mohamed Mizzian, who led these forces, known for their enormous cruelty, was recently paid homage in Morocco at an event attended by the Spanish ambassador, Luis Planas, and by two generals of the Spanish Army.

American journalist John Whittaker wrote of an encounter with General Mizzian: “I met this general near Navalcarrero when his troops threw two girls of less than 20 years to his feet. He discovered in the pocket of one of them a trade union card. He took her to the public school of the village where forty Moorish soldiers were resting. He threw her to them.” A huge cry resonated in the building, writes Whittaker, horrified by what he saw. General Mizzian smiled and dismissed Whittaker’s protest by saying, “She will not survive more than four hours.” Neither the Spanish ambassador nor the two Spanish generals who paid homage to such an assassin were dismissed by the current Spanish socialist government.

The huge military support that Franco received from Hitler and Mussolini was in stark contrast to the lack of support from the Western democracies for the first democratic regime in Spain in the twentieth century. They did not move a finger to help. Their inaction in the face of the massive military support for the fascist troops from Hitler and Mussolini should have been offensive to any person with democratic sensibilities. What explains this failure to act? It was class interests. None other than Winston Churchill put it clearly when he said (as related in Helen Graham’s A Brief History of the Spanish Civil War) that the Western democracies put their class interests--their fear that the left-wing reforms carried out by the Republican government would be attractive to their own popular classes, contaminating them with a desire to change their own societies--ahead of their national and geopolitical interests: opposing Nazism and fascism in Spain. The reality is that the dominant classes of the Western democracies were more comfortable with a fascist regime in Spain (a strong defender of reaction and the status quo) than with the reform policies of a democratic Spanish government.

With the victory of fascism in 1939, a nightmare of repression began. In just five years, nearly 200,000 people were assassinated (according to the Minister of Justice in Franco’s government, assassinations were recorded as executions or deaths in concentration camps). The fascists knew that the majority of the Spanish people opposed them and openly called for what they called “healthy terrorism.” Indeed, it took three years for the heavily armed fascist forces to defeat the popular resistance led by the Republican government, which had few armaments at its disposal. (On some fronts, the Republicans had just one rifle for every two soldiers.) The fascist generals spoke openly of the need to terrorize a population that they knew opposed them. According to Edward Malefakis, professor of European history at Columbia University, for every assassination committed by Mussolini, Franco committed 10,000. The terror was even greater than that carried out in Chile by Pinochet, a student of Franco at the Spanish military academy. (Even today, Franco’s statue presides over the entrance to the academy.)

The cruelty reached unheard-of dimensions, such as the killing of parents so that the assassins could adopt their young children. The brutality and bestiality of the fascist forces was well illustrated by the response of the head of the Spanish Foreign Legion, General Millan Astray, to a critical speech by Miguel de Unamuno, President of Salamanca University (the oldest university in Europe), in a meeting that Astray attended. Unamuno was a liberal intellectual who had supported the fascist coup because he was afraid of the working-class mobilizations. The brutal repression by the fascist forces, however, had shocked and disillusioned him. He denounced the repression by Franco’s forces, with the famous statement, “You will win but you will not convince because even though you have the brutal force, you don’t have the reason.” General Astray responded by yelling at him, “Long live death! Down with intelligence!” This became the slogan of a fascist regime that was responsible for genocide of overwhelming brutality.

And all this was done with the active involvement of the Catholic Church. In every village, town, and city, it was the Spanish Church hierarchy (which had called for a military coup during the Republican government) and the priests who prepared the lists of people to be executed. A primary target of the repression was teachers, considered major enemies by the Church. Its active opposition to the popular reforms by the Spanish republican governments, and its calling on the Army to rebel against the popularly elected government, explains the fury felt by large sectors of the working class, led by anarcho-syndicalists, toward the Church. The day after Franco’s coup, large numbers of people decided to take justice into their own hands, burning churches and killing priests. These violations took place against the wishes of the democratic state, which actively opposed such actions. Terror was never a policy of the Republic. It was, however, part and parcel of the fascist state.

And the terror of the fascist regime never ended. Political assassinations took place regularly. Just a few months before his death in 1975, Franco signed orders for five executions that were politically motivated.

The Franco Dictatorship and the Transition to Democracy
The Western democracies that had remained silent during Franco’s coup openly supported his government, regarding Franco as their ally against the Soviet Union. The Cold War was the excuse used by the Western democracies (led by the U.S. government and the Vatican) to support horrible dictatorships--like Franco’s--that imposed economic, cultural, and political backwardness on their countries. When Spain’s dictator died in 1975, 85% of the country’s adult population had no more than a primary school education. Public social expenditures were the lowest, by far, in Europe--even lower than in Greece and Portugal, which also suffered under ultra-right regimes.

When Franco died, the Army, the Church, and the land-owning oligarchy wanted to maintain fascism without Franco. The business and banking communities would have liked this, too, since they benefited enormously from the dictatorship, but they did not think it was possible. Their economic interests lay in the European Market, and Europe would not welcome a fascist regime in the community. Moreover, the working class had been mobilizing against a regime that denied them the most elementary rights of association (in 1975, Spain had the largest number of strikes in Europe). So, something needed to be done, and some changes had to be permitted to save the class power relations that existed during the dictatorship. But any political change had to take place--and indeed it did--under the dominion and hegemony of the right. The monarchy was established as the grantor of privileges that ensured the existing power relations would be maintained. The Church and the Army, for example, were granted special privileges under the new Constitution. Church-owned and Church-administered private schools were given the same weight in the school system as public schools, receiving a heavy subsidy from the state. And the Army was given the right to police the state, as guarantor of the social order and of “Spanish unity,” a code name under fascism for dominance by a highly centralized and Jacobin state. Moreover, private property was granted a sacred status in the Constitution.

The Legacy of the Fascist Past in Today’s Spain
The dominant sentiment about the past among Spain’s conservative and Christian Democratic forces is that the military coup was needed to stop Communism. This vision of the past is promoted by President Bush’s main ally in continental Europe, Aznar, and his party, the Popular Party (PP), whose Honorary President is Fraga Iribarne, Minister of the Interior during the Franco regime and responsible for the hated political police. The Church, usually referred to as the religious branch of the PP, has been even more vocal than the leadership of the PP in supporting Franco’s coup and dictatorship. Even today, many churches in Spain still have monuments celebrating the coup.

The liberals have agreed with this reading of fascism as a bulwark against Communism--although they considered the dictatorship as perhaps too cruel and perhaps lasting too long. They would have preferred a short, clean coup. Even though they despised fascism, they thought it was necessary to stop an even worse enemy, Communism. The only difference between conservatives and Christian Democrats, on the one side, and liberals, on the other, is that the first group admired fascism and the second despised it. But they all needed it and justified it. It is interesting to note that the liberal branch of the right wing, which has had no ethical problem with defending the need for fascism, usually uses the works of Trotskyites and anarcho-syndicalists (such as George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Ken Loach’s Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom) to show that Communism was indeed the main enemy in Spain. These works greatly exaggerate the role and influence of the Communist Party in Spain and its dependence on the Soviet Union, portraying the Civil War as “a revolution betraed by Communism and the Soviet Union.” The reality was quite different. The Communist Party influence in Catalonia was relatively small, although it increased as a consequence of the Soviet Union being the only European country to provide military equipment to the Republic (with the result that most Spanish people never expressed anti-Soviet Union feelings). The International Brigades, with their 30,000 foreign soldiers, in all, during Civil War (1936-1939), played an important and heroic role, but their numbers at any given time (12,000) were small. In contrast, Mussolini sent 74,000 soldiers on the fascist side. The legitimate and democratically elected Catalan government (of which the Communist Party was a minor component) wanted to regain control of the major government communications agency controlled by the anarcho-syndicalists and Trotskyites, who resisted passing back control to the government. This generated conflict within the Republican forces that considerably weakened the military effort. Orwell, who did not know Catalonia (and did not speak Catalan or Spanish), became an “authority” on Catalonia--mistaking names and places while writing his book. Today, Orwell is the hero of those who, indulging in anti-Communism, ignore the real class struggle that took place in Spain.

At the end of Franco’s dictatorship and the beginning of the democratic period, an amnesty was granted to the assassins who had killed, tortured, and robbed the democratic forces in Spain. Moreover, a “pact of silence” was agreed upon, a complete silence about the past, including the horrendous crimes of the Franco regime--a pact to forget what had happened in Spain. No other country in Europe has been as silent about its past as has Spain. The deaths of tens of thousands of anti-fascists remain unrecognized; 30,000 people simply disappeared, no one knowing where they were buried or discarded.

But that pact of silence was one-sided. The right wing has continued to pay homage to General Franco and his fascist forces. In many Spanish towns (except, again, in Catalonia and the Basque countries) there are still fascist monuments. Even left-wing municipal and regional governments are afraid to destroy them. And across Spain, there are frequent celebrations honoring the assassins. Recently, the PP opposed a declaration by the European Parliament condemning the Spanish dictatorship, as did some ultra-rightists in Poland’s government.

One of the major celebrators of the Franco regime is the Church, which unabashedly remains a strong supporter. The Spanish Church, supported by the Vatican, is the main adversary of the current socialist government under Zapatero, even calling for insurrection and asking Catholics to disobey Spanish laws passed by Parliament, such as the legalization of gay marriage and the adoption of children by homosexual couples, introduction of “fast track divorce,” abolition of compulsory religious education in public schools, and authorization of stem cell research. All these laws have driven the Church to renew its crusade against the socialist government. The Church has also joined with top military figures in calling for maintaining “Spanish unity.” And the Church and the Army opposed Zapatero’s negotiations with ETA, the Basque separatist group. The recent visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Valencia to attend the International Conference of the Family was planned by the Spanish Catholic hierarchy as an open act of provocation and defiance toward the Spanish government. The regional government of Valencia, controlled by the PP, organized a lavish and very expensive reception for the Pope, in contrast to its lack of attention to maintaining the city’s subway, responsible for the crash that killed 44 persons (most of them working class) one week before the Pope’s visit.

Religious fundamentalism is isolating the Church in Spain. According to a recent poll, 80% of young people in Spain distrust the Church, even more than they distrust NATO or the business community. The proportion of youngsters who define themselves as Catholics has declined from 77% ten years ago to 49% today. Meanwhile, the Spanish Church, Opus Dei, and the Legionnaires of Christ (whose founder was a child abuser) are funding a statue of the Pope in Madrid--which is being created, incidentally, by the same sculptor--Juan de Avalos--who made the fascist monument, the Valley of the Fallen, outside Madrid.

Spain’s socialist government committed itself, in its electoral program, to correct this silence, to recognize and pay homage to the victims of fascism, and to eliminate the laws that still refer to the freedom fighters, fighting against Franco’s forces, as criminals. But the socialist government has not yet done this, and it seems to be postponing such actions, failing to keep its promises. So, the deafening silence on those terrible crimes remains. As indicated by Judge Juan Guzman (who brought General Pinochet to trial) and Judge Hugo Canon (the Argentinean judge who brought military authorities to court) at a recent conference in Barcelona, the silence in Spain on the horrors of the Franco state is an insult to democratic forces throughout the world; it is a scandal that needs to be denounced. None of the Spanish media, incidentally, reported on the judges’ declarations. Meanwhile, Spain’s Judge Garzon, acclaimed worldwide for trying to get Pinochet extradited from Great Britain to stand trial in a Spanish court, remains silent about the amnesty that allows assassins to go free in Spain. Throughout Spain, and outside Spain, the deafening silence continues.

Vicente Navarro is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the Pompeu Fabra University, Spain, and The Johns Hopkins University, USA. In 2002 he was awarded the Anagrama Prize (Spain’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize in the USA) for his denunciation of the way in which the transition from dictatorship to democracy has been engineered, in his book Bienestar Insuficiente Democracia Incompleta, De lo que no se hable en nuestro pais (Insufficient Welfare, Incomplete Democracy; a book about what is being silenced in Spain).

1984, Chapter 5, George Orwell

" ’Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. [...] Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. [...] In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’ " [1984 pp. 45-6]

Florida's Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking
by Robert Jensen
Commondreams.org

One way to measure the fears of people in power is by the intensity of their quest for certainty and control over knowledge.

By that standard, the members of the Florida Legislature marked themselves as the folks most terrified of history in the United States when last month they took bold action to become the first state to outlaw historical interpretation in public schools. In other words, Florida has officially replaced the study of history with the imposition of dogma and effectively outlawed critical thinking.

Although U.S. students are typically taught a sanitized version of history in which the inherent superiority and benevolence of the United States is rarely challenged, the social and political changes unleashed in the 1960s have opened up some space for a more honest accounting of our past. But even these few small steps taken by some teachers toward collective critical self-reflection are too much for many Americans to bear.

So, as part of an education bill signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida has declared that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.” That factual history, the law states, shall be viewed as “knowable, teachable, and testable.”

Florida’s lawmakers are not only prescribing a specific view of US history that must be taught (my favorite among the specific commands in the law is the one about instructing students on “the nature and importance of free enterprise to the United States economy”), but are trying to legislate out of existence any ideas to the contrary. They are not just saying that their history is the best history, but that it is beyond interpretation. In fact, the law attempts to suppress discussion of the very idea that history is interpretation.

The fundamental fallacy of the law is in the underlying assumption that “factual” and “constructed” are mutually exclusive in the study of history. There certainly are many facts about history that are widely, and sometimes even unanimously, agreed upon. But how we arrange those facts into a narrative to describe and explain history is clearly a construction, an interpretation. That’s the task of historians -- to assess factual assertions about the past, weave them together in a coherent narrative, and construct an explanation of how and why things happened.

For example, it’s a fact that Europeans began coming in significant numbers to North America in the 17th century. Were they peaceful settlers or aggressive invaders? That’s interpretation, a construction of the facts into a narrative with an argument for one particular way to understand those facts.

It’s also a fact that once those Europeans came, the indigenous people died in large numbers. Was that an act of genocide? Whatever one’s answer, it will be an interpretation, a construction of the facts to support or reject that conclusion.

In contemporary history, has U.S. intervention in the Middle East been aimed at supporting democracy or controlling the region’s crucial energy resources? Would anyone in a free society want students to be taught that there is only one way to construct an answer to that question?

Speaking of contemporary history, what about the fact that before the 2000 presidential election, Florida’s Republican secretary of state removed 57,700 names from the voter rolls, supposedly because they were convicted felons and not eligible to vote. It’s a fact that at least 90 percent were not criminals -- but were African American. It’s a fact that black people vote overwhelmingly Democratic. What conclusion will historians construct from those facts about how and why that happened?
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2

In other words, history is always constructed, no matter how much Florida’s elected representatives might resist the notion. The real question is: How effectively can one defend one’s construction? If Florida legislators felt the need to write a law to eliminate the possibility of that question even being asked, perhaps it says something about their faith in their own view and ability to defend it.

One of the bedrock claims of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment -- two movements that, to date, have not been repealed by the Florida Legislature -- is that no interpretation or theory is beyond challenge. The evidence and logic on which all knowledge claims are based must be transparent, open to examination. We must be able to understand and critique the basis for any particular construction of knowledge, which requires that we understand how knowledge is constructed.

Except in Florida.

But as tempting as it is to ridicule, we should not spend too much time poking fun at this one state, because the law represents a yearning one can find across the United States. Americans look out at a wider world in which more and more people reject the idea of the United States as always right, always better, always moral. As the gap between how Americans see themselves and how the world sees us grows, the instinct for many is to eliminate intellectual challenges at home: “We can’t control what the rest of the world thinks, but we can make sure our kids aren’t exposed to such nonsense.”

The irony is that such a law is precisely what one would expect in a totalitarian society, where governments claim the right to declare certain things to be true, no matter what the debates over evidence and interpretation. The preferred adjective in the United States for this is “Stalinist,” a system to which U.S. policymakers were opposed during the Cold War. At least, that’s what I learned in history class.

People assume that these kinds of buffoonish actions are rooted in the arrogance and ignorance of Americans, and there certainly are excesses of both in the United States.

But the Florida law -- and the more widespread political mindset it reflects -- also has its roots in fear. A track record of relatively successful domination around the world seems to have produced in Americans a fear of any lessening of that dominance. Although U.S. military power is unparalleled in world history, we can’t completely dictate the shape of the world or the course of events. Rather than examining the complexity of the world and expanding the scope of one’s inquiry, the instinct of some is to narrow the inquiry and assert as much control as possible to avoid difficult and potentially painful challenges to orthodoxy.

Is history “knowable, teachable, and testable?" Certainly people can work hard to know -- to develop interpretations of processes and events in history and to understand competing interpretations. We can teach about those views. And students can be tested on their understanding of conflicting constructions of history.

But the real test is whether Americans can come to terms with not only the grand triumphs but also the profound failures of our history. At stake in that test is not just a grade in a class, but our collective future.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org/.

The fact is that I report for the most prestigious television news show on the planet -- BBC television's Newsnight -- and I write for prestigious newspapers, the Guardian and Observer. I have George Orwell's old post, and yet somehow I'm treated like the Unabomber. "He's gonna take some hostages and demand his stuff get printed!" The only thing I can hope for is the miracle of the Internet. Which is why the establishment keeps saying, "Look out for the Internet; it's so scary out there! You can't rely on that information." Like you can rely on the information on the Los Angeles Times, although I should be careful, because the L.A. Times did a glowing profile of me. But, on the other hand, I went through the Times with the reporter who did that story and said, "Look at this crap!" [Laughs.] It's true! I mean, I'm happy to get a lovely profile, but the information is missing. They even had a story that said there was unanimous praise for the appointment of Paul Bremer as the viceroy of Iraq. Unanimous? Having the former business partner of Henry Kissinger take over Iraq? There wasn't anyone out there who had a problem with that idea? They looked all over the newsroom and even called the White House but couldn't find anyone who thought it wasn't a brilliant idea. [Laughs.] So what can you do? I won't watch TV here, and I certainly won't let my kids. I glance at the newspaper to see what the latest lie is, and about the only exception, because it follows the money, is the Wall Street Journal. But I do read Hustler, because I'm the latest issue! [Laughs.] The only American outlets for my writing are Harper's and Hustler. I've got the H's down.
morphizm.com "A Policy Poisoned by Money: An Interview With Greg Palast"

In a Perfect World
Yevgeny Zamyatin's far-out science fiction dystopia, `We,' showed the way for George Orwell and countless others.

By Joshua Glenn | July 23, 2006

IT IS WITH REGRET that I see, instead of an orderly and strict mathematical epic poem in honor of the One State-I see some kind of fantastic adventure novel emerging from me." So laments D-503, mathematician and rocket designer, halfway through Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel ``We." Completed in 1921, but not published in Russia until 1988, half a century after Zamyatin's death, it appears this month from the Modern Library in a new English translation by Natasha Randall.

Zamyatin's vision of a totally controlled society, one in which unresisting citizens eat, sleep, work, and make love like clockwork-and in which thinkers and writers sing the glories of ``the morning buzz of electric toothbrushes and . . . the intimate peal of the crystal-sparkling latrine"-was considered too dangerously satirical by the early Soviet state, and it was smuggled abroad in samizdat form. Written a decade before Aldous Huxley's ``Brave New World," its influence can be seen in George Orwell's ``1984," and it has been hailed as a warning of the totalitarian dangers inherent in every utopian scheme. (Orwell, who believed Huxley had read ``We," wrote in 1946, three years before ``1984" was published, that Zamyatin's ``intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism-human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself" made the novel ``superior to Huxley's.")

A Bolshevik student activist in the years before the 1917 revolution, Zamyatin went on to become an engineer and ship designer, and only started writing to pass the time when the Tsarist police exiled him from St. Petersburg. Yet despite his youthful Bolshevism, Zamyatin-like Boris Pasternak, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Anna Akhmatova, and other independent Russian writers of the Soviet era-despised authoritarian communism. In an essay written at the same time as ``We," he castigated critics who demanded that writers be subservient to the Party. ``There shall be no more polyphony or dissonances," he warned. ``There shall only be majestic, monumental, all-encompassing unanimity."

Without a doubt, Zamyatin's far-out narrative, set in a city-state cut off from a depopulated Earth by an impenetrable glass dome, is anti-totalitarian. Extrapolating from the over-heated rhetoric of Communist planners who believed that mankind would profit if American scientific-management techniques (like those of Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Ford) were extended into every sphere of daily life, Zamyatin has D-503 rhapsodize about ``the mathematically perfect life of the One State," where nothing spontaneous is permitted.

But is ``We" really an anti-utopian novel? From today's perspective, it looks as though ``We," like Huxley's ``Brave New World," is less a rejection of utopianism than a jeremiad against the creeping of industrial standardization into politics, culture, and every other aspect of modern life.


In his 2005 book ``Picture Imperfect," social critic Russell Jacoby describes a group of writers he calls ``blueprint utopians"-idealists such as Thomas More, Condorcet, Enfantin, Edward Bellamy, and others who devised solutions to the social problems of their own eras by mapping out the future in inches and minutes, giving precise instructions for how men and women should work and live, and not hesitating to prescribe force against dissenters.

The One State described by Zamyatin does bear a close resemblance to these imagined social orders. ``We" describes a rigid world of efficiency and perfection, one in which individuals (called ``ciphers") are issued numbers instead of names and are nurtured by Taylorist systems from childhood. The One State is ruled by a Benefactor, who is automatically voted in every year, and watched over by spying Guardians, who ensure that nothing unexpected ever happens; those ciphers who do fall out of step (literally) are whisked away to the Gas Bell Jar.

This state of ``mathematically infallible happiness" (as the One State's official newspaper describes it) is considered by its citizens to be a revolutionary improvement on the chaotic condition of freedom humankind once knew. War has been banished along with quarreling nation-states; hunger and poverty have been eradicated through collectivism; and even sexual jealousy has been vanquished via an equitable system of distribution in which ``each cipher has the right to any other cipher as sexual product."

D-503, who has started a journal intended for use as propaganda on newly colonized planets, is full of enthusiasm. He soliloquizes about the mandatory afternoon walk, when uniformed workers march along in rows of four, ``rapturously keeping step." He even boasts of a pioneering new medical procedure, the excision of the imagination via brain surgery (in his case, this is unnecessary).

But then D-503 falls in love-seduced by a beautiful revolutionary, I-330, who wants to hijack his rocket ship and overthrow the government. I-330's effect on D-503 is explosive. A personality so tightly wound that he remembers being frightened of irrational numbers as a child, D-503 suddenly finds himself in ``a world of square roots of minus one." Alas, the plot fails, I-330 ends up in the Gas Bell Jar, and D-503 is subjected to the imagination-cauterizing operation.

But not before I-330 succeeds in converting him, if only momentarily, into a champion of spontaneity and freedom of individual choice. She does so by arguing against the received wisdom that the utopian revolution that resulted in the founding of the One State was necessarily the final revolution. Speaking in D-503's own language of mathematical philosophy, she asks him, ``What is the final number?" When he responds that the number of numbers is infinite, she argues that revolutions should be infinite, too-not exactly an anti-utopian sentiment. She leaves open the possibility of ever-improving worlds to come.

I-330 agrees with D-503 that their ancestors were right to invent a more equitable social order. ``They made only one mistake," she says. ``Afterward they believed that they were the final number-which doesn't exist in the natural world, it just doesn't."

MI5 confused by Orwell's politics
4 September 2007,

MI5 monitored socialist writer George Orwell for more than two decades, but did not believe he was a mainstream communist, records have revealed.

A Scotland Yard Special Branch report in January 1942 said the author of 1984 had "advanced communist views".

However, an MI5 officer responded that Orwell "does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him".

A file from the National Archives also shows MI5 did not object to him having a wartime job at a military base.

Orwell was vetted for the post as a correspondent for the Sunday Observer at Allied Forces Headquarters in North Africa.

'Bohemian dress'

The Special Branch report said: "This man has advanced communist views and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at communist meetings.

"He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours."

The MI5 officer rang the inspector in charge of the sergeant who wrote the report, to question what it meant.

From the call it emerged that Orwell - referred to in the documents by his real name Eric Blair - was thought to be an "unorthodox communist" who did not agree fully with Communist Party views.

The officer from the security service wrote: "I gathered that the good sergeant was rather at a loss as to how he could describe this rather individual line hence the expression 'advanced communist views'.

"It is evident from his recent writings - The Lion and the Unicorn - and his contribution to Gollancz's symposium The Betrayal Of The Left that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him."

'Bit of an anarchist'

Orwell is best known for books including 1984 and Animal Farm, which criticise totalitarianism, and other works attacking inequality, including Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

The records show Orwell first came to the attention of intelligence service MI6 in 1929 when he was in France and offered to become Paris correspondent for the Workers Life.

In 1942, a record described him as "a bit of an anarchist in his day and in touch with extremist elements".

He had "undoubtedly strong left-wing views, but he is a long way from orthodox communism", it added.

1984, George Orwell
Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:

'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

Student gets detention for hugging.
Tim Vizer / Associated Press

Eighth-grader Megan Coulter gets a family hug at the Coulters’ home in Mascoutha, Ill.
From the Associated Press
November 7, 2007
MASCOUTAH, Ill. -- Two hugs equals two days of detention for 13-year-old Megan Coulter. The eighth-grader was punished for violating a school policy banning public displays of affection when she hugged two friends Friday.

"I feel it is crazy," said Megan, who was to serve her second detention Tuesday after classes at Mascoutah Middle School.

"I was just giving them a hug goodbye for the weekend," she said.

Megan's mother, Melissa Coulter, said the embraces weren't even real hugs -- just an arm around the shoulder and slight squeeze.

"It's hilarious to the point of ridicule," Coulter said. "I'm still dumbfounded that she's having to do this."

District Superintendent Sam McGowen said that he thinks the penalty is fair and that administrators in the school east of St. Louis were following policy in the student handbook.

It states: "Displays of affection should not occur on the school campus at any time. It is in poor taste, reflects poor judgment, and brings discredit to the school and to the persons involved."

Coulter said she and her husband told their daughter to go ahead and serve her detentions because the only other option was a day of suspension for each skipped detention.

"We don't agree with it, but I certainly don't want her to get in more trouble," Coulter said.

The couple plan to attend the next school board meeting to ask board members to consider rewording the policy or be more specific in what is considered a display of affection.

"I'm just hoping the school board will open their eyes and just realize that maybe they shouldn't be punishing us for hugs," Megan said.

Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

...Another briefing slide states that after U.S. commanders ordered that the atrocities of Saddam Hussein's government be publicized, U.S. psychological operations soldiers produced a video disc that not only was widely disseminated inside Iraq, but also was "seen on Fox News."

U.S. military policy is not to aim psychological operations at Americans, said Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003. "It is ingrained in U.S.: You don't psyop Americans. We just don't do it," said Treadwell. He said he left Iraq before the Zarqawi program began but was later told about it.

U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.

The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.

One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."

Kimmitt is now the senior planner on the staff of the Central Command that directs operations in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

1984, chapter 1, George Orwell
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1984, Chapter 13, George Orwell
During the Two Minutes Hate she [Julia] always excelled all others in shouting insults at Goldstein...In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda....She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing.

As I Please,by George Orwell,Tribune,1945

SOME time back a correspondent wrote to ask whether I had seen the exhibition of waxworks, showing German atrocities, which has been on show in London for a year or more. It is advertised outside with such captions as: HORRORS OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP. COME INSIDE AND SEE REAL NAZI TORTURES. FLOGGING, CRUCIFIXION, GASCHAMBERS, ETC. CHILDREN’S AMUSEMENT SECTION NO EXTRA CHARGE.

I did go and see this exhibition a long time ago, and I would like to warn prospective visitors that it is most disappointing. To begin with many of the figures are not life-size, and I suspect that some of them are not even real waxworks, but merely dressmakers’ dummies with new heads attached. And secondly, the tortures are not nearly so fearful as you are led to expect by the posters outside. The whole exhibition is grubby, unlifelike and depressing. But the exhibitors are, I suppose, doing their best, and the captions are interesting in the complete frankness of their appeal to sadism and masochism. Before the war, if you were a devotee of all-in wrestling, or wrote letters to your M.P. to protest against the abolition of flogging, or haunted second-hand bookshops in search of such books as The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber, you laid yourself open to very unpleasant suspicions. Moreover, you were probably aware of your own motives and somewhat ashamed of them. Now, however, you can wallow in the most disgusting descriptions of torture and massacre, not only without any sensation of guilt, but with the feeling that you are performing a praiseworthy political action.

I am not suggesting that the stories about Nazi atrocities are untrue. To a great extent I think they are true. These horrors certainly happened in German concentration camps before the war, and there is no reason why they should have stopped since. But they are played up largely because they give the newspapers a pretext for pornography. This morning’s papers are splashing the official British Army Report on Nazi atrocities. They are careful to inform you that naked women were flogged, sometimes spotlighting this detail by means of a headline. The journalists responsible know very well what they are doing. They know that innumerable people get a sadistic kick out of thinking about torture, especially the torture of women, and they are cashing in on this widespread neurosis. No qualms need be felt, because these deeds are committed by the enemy, and the enjoyment that one gets out of them can be disguised as disapproval. And one can get a very similar kick out of barbarous actions committed by one’s own side so long as they are thought of as the just punishment of evil-doers.

We have not actually got to the point of Roman gladiatorial shows yet, but we could do so if the necessary pretext were supplied. If, for instance, it were announced that the leading war criminals were to be eaten by lions or trampled to death by elephants in the Wembley Stadium, I fancy that the spectacle would be quite well attended.

George Orwell, in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941):

But what then is Fascism?

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and — this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism — generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.

But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognise any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have “proved” over and over again that only nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea that non-nordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery.

too... much... to... digest...

need... intellectual... digestive... enzymes...

brain swelling - need relief!

I'm almost an Orwell scholar and I'd have to say that those are some of the best posts and extracts I've read to date.

The As I Please article about sado-masochism cant be underestimated and the thinking is prominent in Eric Fromm's Fear of Freedom too.

Fromm and Ardono expanded upon Orwell by suggesting that structurally and culturally society is producing or reinforcing authoritarian personality traits, including sado-maschocism, you oppress and despise your subordinates, pay homage to and admire your superiors, even Hitler did that.

Have you heard of Bernard Crick, probably the best biographer and writer on all things Orwell. Wrote about how 1984 was actually a satire of actual existing conditions after the war and actual personalities he'd known who combined control, cruelty and care, its also meant to be an alternative to Brave New World which is supposed to be a population molly coddled and satisfied into an oppressive social order, Orwell thought it was more likely that violence, totally senseless, disproportionate, irrational, rather than coddling would be the tactics of totalitarianism.

While Orwell had a speculative and personal sympathy with anarchism I dont think he can be described as an anarchist, he prided himself on realism and as a result I think he was very much a democratic socialist, at least while in england, he did have a lot ot say on the topic of how he felt anarchism could become totalitarian too, using examples from Johnathan Swift's Gullivars Travels.

In The Road to Wigan Pier from 1936 Orwell writes:

In the end I worked out an anarchist theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone. [RWP, pp. 128-29]

I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants. [RWP p.130]

Often, in my opinion, he [the worker] is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency. [RWP p. 154]