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| Communism was here (Photo credit: Lonely_Freak) |
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| English: Plaque commemorating George Orwell (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| The square in Barcelona renamed in Orwell's honour (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Randal Marlin (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| George Orwell. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I have done a lot of reading in my day, but it has been
scattergun stuff, nothing at all systematic about any of it. I worked for four
months or so as an adjunct lecturer in a university, where the appalling lack
of knowledge from which I was working quickly became clear to me. When someone
on the university staff suggested I might stay on and design a course on
environmental journalism I immediately took fright: I would no more have had
the ability to design such a course than to have swum the English channel.
In the first chapter of his
book Propaganda and the Ethics of
Persuasion (published by Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario, pps
368, $32.95.) Randal Marlin gives a lot
of space to what he calls “two major propaganda theorists”, George Orwell and
Jacques Ellul. Mention of Orwell made me
wonder why I had never really taken to the guy. I have read most of his books,
I suppose, and I know he was a great writer, but I was always influenced by the
enthusiasm with which he was taken up and propagated (if I might use the word)
by Time magazine. In my lexicon this
was the kiss of death, even though I know that is not especially rational.
Coming from an elevated
background, Orwell decided to go
slumming to prove his credentials as a socialist, which gave us his first book Down and Out in London and Paris. It’s
true he did go to the Spanish Civil War, which was very much in his favour, in
my eyes, but it made him a lifelong anti-Communist, and when I was younger that
was no great recommendation to me. Being someone who had renounced Communism,
he was tailor-made for Time magazine
adulation --- like Nabokov, Koestler and others. Whatever deficiencies there
may have been in the Stalinist approach to the Spanish war, it seemed to me to
be better than the support given to the Fascists by the Western powers, whose leaders stood by as Hitler tried out
his mass bombing techniques on the poor Spanish people.
With this background, it stood
to reason that Orwell’s anti-Communist novels Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty Four would receive the Time magazine
adulatory treatment. So, automatically, he became the darling of the chattering
classes, as they later came to be called. (Incidentally, the adulation given to
these books kind of ignores the fact that 1984 passed without Orwell’s
nightmarish world having been created, a failure of imagination on his part to
which none of his supporters ever refer.)
I only once came across Orwell
in the course of my working life, and then it was second hand. In 1961 I interviewed
an old man he had once denounced, the writer Charles Hamilton, who, under the pen-name
Frank Richards created Billy Bunter, the fat owl of the Remove, a character who
starred in endless books and articles. Richards was at his peak from 1908 to
1940, and was once credited in the Guinness Book of Records as being the
world’s most prolific author, with some 100,000,000 words published. His works were
severely criticized by Orwell in 1940 in
an essay on Boys’ Weeklies in Horizon.
Cyril Connolly, editor of the magazine, thought
that Frank Richards was long since dead. But, still very much alive, he
replied to Orwell’s strictures with a sharp and vigorous riposte. I asked him
about this when I interviewed him twenty years later. “Oh, Orwell?” he replied
airily. “Oh, yes, silly blighter. I soon put him in his place.”
I suppose it is not surprising
that, growing up in a country in which the democratic socialist government was
held in such contempt by the newspapers for which I worked, I should have
tended, as I did, to feel myself a supporter of all left-wing parties. I was
never a communist, and took note of such testimonies to their brutality and scant regard for the
truth as were provided by Koestler and others, but growing up also as a staunch supporter of
unionism, I was brought up against the
undoubted fact that Communists working within unions provided the strongest opposition
we had to the political status quo. Communists were also subject to persecution
by the state organs of repression, and I sympathized with them for that.
It is not that I object to what Randal writes
about Orwell: he did warn us against fuzzy language, deceptive euphemisms and
so on. Randal notes that he distinguished between patriotism, which he
favored, and nationalism, which he
opposed. But this acceptance was backwards from my own. I have from time to
time forced myself to accept some elements of nationalism, which Orwell described as the “habit of identifying
oneself with a single nation or other unit placing it beyond good and evil and
recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests, with a wish to
force others to adopt it.” I have never
accepted any nationalism defined in that
way, but when I arrived in Canada in 1954 I was startled to discover the
equanimity with which Canadians accepted the domination of their society by the
United States economy. To the extent that I
favored at that time the nationalist policies designed to regain
Canadian control over the Canadian economy, I accepted nationalism.
Patriotism, on the other hand, Orwell
said, “involves devotion to a place and way of life,” and therefore was acceptable
to him. It strikes me that is a remarkably moderated view of patriotism and all
its evils. I tend to the view that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.
I remember when I was a high school student reading H. G. Wells, during World
War II, who wrote that if we swopped all of the babies of the English and
German nations, they would grow up to fight on wars for the nations in which
they grew up. I found that a startling
and accurate criticism of patriotism, and took to refusing to stand for the
national anthem in the cinemas of the day, much to my mother’s embarrassment. I
am still dead against patriotism, and abhor flags and anthems. I once
embarrassed a parliamentary committee --- the only one to which I have ever
spoken --- by telling them that what I liked about Canada when I arrived in
1954 was that it had no flag and no anthem. The only patriotism I have ever
admitted to is a patriotism for the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, a
marvellous 1,l00 acre open space in the middle of the city that is regularly
under attack from the surrounding hordes of developers and wealth-owners. But
would I ever go to war to defend it? I
don’t think so. I am not much in favour of nationalism, only to the extent that
it would result in resistance, wherever it might arise, to the American empire.
When Randal gets on to Jacques
Ellul I find myself in a more sympathetic
framework than so far in his book. He provides a long description of Ellul’s
thinking, but personally, when I looked him up on Wikipedia, I found their
simplified version of the man to be more easily comprehensible. There, it says
the burden of Ellul’s message is “the
threat to human freedom and religion created by modern technology.” The web
site also quotes Ellul from a book he wrote on propaganda to the effect “that
excessive data do not enlighten the reader or the listener; they drown him. He
cannot remember them all, or coordinate them, or understand them.”
I have often noted that we are all suffering
from information overload, and from that simple observation I have worked out a
scandalous idea that we have too much education. (I don’t actually mean it as
baldly stated, I just produce it to shock people into argument. But I was impressed recently when reading that
in Finland only 30 per cent of the age-group is allowed to go to university:
the rest are directed into a strong, comprehensive and skills-oriented system
of apprenticeship, an excellent idea, I would think, so long as it is not
attached to a British-style class structure, and it is an idea that has made
Finland a leader among small nations in this technological world).
I do not wish to dispute
anything Randal has written about Ellul (who was quite unknown to me before).
But it does remind me of something that was said by an academic whom I really
very much admired, the late Bruce Trigger, professor of anthropology at McGill
university, who, when he died some years ago, had become recognized as the
world’s pre-eminent expert on the history of archaeology.
Trigger told me once that he
was hoping to write a book on where and when human beings acquired the desire
to control others. Years later I asked him how it had gone. He said he had
tried but had been unable to find anything relevant in the archeological
record. But he did, as a result, write a book called Understanding Early Civilizations, in which he compared the
earliest human societies. In this study he discovered that already before any
civilization was formed, the priests were in charge of human affairs. And,
if we look at the world today, we could say that they still are.
Earlier, Trigger had given a
lecture in which he used his knowledge of the archaeological record to ruminate
about the future. He said history’s
current phase was one in which technology was in charge, and the major human problem
was how to get our technology under human control and keep it there. He
was convinced that the qualities most
needed for human survival in the modern world are foresight, personal restraint
and cooperation, and he said these were, in fact, the essential qualities in paleolithic
times when man was a hunter-gatherer. These qualities, of course, are incompatible
with capitalism as it is presently practised. Trigger also looked forward to
the need for a higher level of planning which would require an all-encompassing
political organization if we are to overcome the environmental challenges that
loom larger with every day. This is a solution --- essential to human survival,
according to Trigger --- that I would imagine most of the authorities quoted by
Randal in his book would denounce as opening the way to people who could not be
trusted with power.
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