Why Orwell’s Example Matters for Today’s Middle East By David Pryce-Jones
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/418588/print
“Orwell changed the intellectual climate by demonstrating that a free spirit would oppose fascism without becoming a Communist. Is it any different in today’s intellectual climate? The media are full of lies about what’s going on in the Middle East. Censorship, more usually self-censorship, is common. A free spirit who opposes Islamism and the vile things done in its name does not become a racist, or an “Islamophobe” in that meaningless phrase. Repair that trench, then!”
Left and Right in Spain do not forget or forgive the Civil War. A so-called Law of Historical Memory banned statues and tributes to General Franco, and set up funds for identifying the victims buried in mass graves. Franco’s mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen is pure kitsch and its loss might not be regretted. The trenches where George Orwell fought are another matter — they are in disrepair and the Right would not regret their disappearance. Huesca is the site where Orwell survived a bullet through the neck, something he prophesied “will happen to us all in the near future.” Orwell’s son, Richard, 71, now a retired businessman, is trying to enlist the Left in a campaign of restoration and preservation.
Places where historic events have occurred do have a mysteriously evocative aura. Orwell’s experience in the Civil War was something everyone can identify with. In Barcelona on his way to the trenches in May 1937, he wrote to his publisher, Victor Gollancz, “I hope I shall get the chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies.”
What he had seen was the murderous brutality of the Communists, the mendacity of the claims they made for themselves, and the naivety of the useful idiots supporting them.
More life-threatening to him than the fascist bullet in the neck were the Communists liquidating everyone with ideological differences.
Having joined some Trotskyites, Orwell only just managed to escape in time across the Spanish border. Homage to Catalonia was the book he wrote, and a classic it is too, but he had to find another publisher because, as he told a friend, “Gollancz is of course part of the Communist racket.”
Orwell changed the intellectual climate by demonstrating that a free spirit would oppose fascism without becoming a Communist. Is it any different in today’s intellectual climate? The media are full of lies about what’s going on in the Middle East. Censorship, more usually self-censorship, is common. A free spirit who opposes Islamism and the vile things done in its name does not become a racist, or an “Islamophobe” in that meaningless phrase. Repair that trench, then!
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