In my essay “The Lost Art of Being Yourself”, I write at some point that many people dislike those who are individuals. You, wearing such a T-shirt, might actually trigger something in them. It is easier to be a conformist, and when others are not, the conformist often wants to suppress them so that they will not be reminded their own mediocrity. On top of that, as in your occasion, one might be reminded, even indirectly, of what those whom they support are doing. An acquaintance of mine had a similar occurrence, albeit much milder, by having a sticker on his laptop with the same message.
I do think there's something to sticking out, as you said. Our society is so focused on everyone staying in line that something as simple as a T shirt that expresses a different opinion can cause anger. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say.
A sincere and thought provoking article. I concur that Zionism is not Judaism, but often conflated as such. I believe it's a racist ideology that requires two classes of people in a land which they could be sharing equally, I do pray one day Palestinians can be self governing and live in peace and security alongside israel.
I completely agree. I'm planning on writing a long-form guide to media literacy. Just ways to point out what happens behind the scenes, hidden language, and more. It'll take a lot of work, but I think it's really important.
Adbusters used to distribute a free media literacy kit to teachers years ago so you may want to take a look at that to enhance and inform your project. Please update this thread as you make progress.
Good luck with that project. People need to figure out how they're being manipulated. A guide like that would help. Of course, if they just had a finely tuned bullshit detector...
There must be an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Pope Francis has said what is needed, now he must do what is needed by going to Gaza and standing for peace, justice and freedom.
Let us also support UNRWA. If our governments won’t act in accordance with humanity, then we will. https://www.unrwausa.org/donate Let us do it to honor Aaron Bushnell, or in memory of Hind Rajab.
Let us call for a No Fly-Zone over Gaza!
These are a few small things we can do. If we can do more, let us do more.
Actually, it would be very easy to call you a terrorist lover at the gym and then respond to your “huh” with the following: “Palestinians could have had their own state 75 years ago if they had just been willing to live in peace alongside Jews.”
The ethnic cleansing most certainly happened, but almost entirely took place after the war broke out. Without the initial Arab rejectionism, the new state of Israel would have been tiny, closely divided between Jews and Arabs, and ironically enough might have become majority Arab by now.
I agree. I’m pointing out the fact that Palestinians had agency in 1947 and had they made the opposite choice they would have had a Palestinian state the following year in about 50% of historic Palestine, and perhaps in 100% of historic Palestine today. The Palestinian refugee issue would never have arisen.
You write: "Zionism is an inherently racist ideology, as to create and preserve a Jewish ethnostate, other ethnicities must be suppressed or excluded." This is not so easy, and there have been many versions of Zionism. Pakistan was built on ethnicity, but no one accuses them of racism today. And remember that Israel's neighbouring Arab states have basically zero (0) Jews in their population (which perhaps shows the need for a Jewish state, as for now at least), whereas Israel has 20% Arabs. While I agree that Netanyahu is terrible for Israel, that we need a ceasefire now, and that Palestinians need their own state, I think it doesn't help us get there by trying to simplify what's going on there. There is a lot of racism in Israel, true, but the racism in Arab countries towards Jews is probably even more fierce.
"Objectively not true", well, around half of the Jews in Israel were actually driven out of Arab countries. In the 1940s, the Palestinian mufti al-Houseini was impressed by how Hitler handled "the Jew question". And the extreme killing by Hamas on October 7th actually shows that there is an ideology of killing Jews present in many sects in Palestine and elsewhere. I'm not saying this to diminish the war crimes of Israel, I'm saying this in order to nuance the picture. Many Jews on the left have felt abandoned by the left due to the unwillingness of Pro-Palestinians to admit the crimes performed on Jews. Terrorist attacks and racism will always be a betrayal towards the own population, even though they belong to organisations in oppressed regions.
I'm not denying those things happened, nor that they are horrific. Rather, I'm explaining that the Israel's crimes are so far beyond disproportionate, which is why they get the bulwark of condemnation.
For example, you mention 10/7. Israel claims about 1,200 Israelis were killed, 3/4 of which were civilians. Comparatively, over 30,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed. If we value every life the same, which we should, outrage should be 30x for Israel's crimes compared to those committed by Hamas militants. We should (and do) still acknowledge the loss of innocent Israeli life, but it's clear which side is more fundamentally committed to attacking civilians. And Israel's repression and state-terrorism against Palestinians started long before 2023.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but there are two things I want to mention.
1. Yes, the Israeli response has been beyond inhumane. Let's not pretend that Hamas didn't know this. If they were a proper resistance group, they would have organised themselves with the Palestinian population, not shoot rockets from within them. Also, they could have built bomb shelters for all Palestinians for the money they received in aid, but they're simply not interested. That's why it saddens me when people like Norm Finkelstein celebrated the Hamas terrorist attack. It was not an attack of resistance, in any way, it was a provocation.
2. You say that Israelis are more committed to attacking civilians. We certainly can't know this. Hamas wants to get rid of all Jews in the area, and if they had had the opportunity to do so, they would also have done so long ago. Israel could easily have wiped Palestine of the map with all their US-supported military power, but they haven't. We can't draw any conclusions from the fact alone that Israel has killed more Palestinians; if the tables were reversed, I'm sure Hamas would have killed over 100.000 Jews already.
I don't really find unprovable hypotheticals convincing. Claiming Hamas would have killed "100k Jews" isn't a good argument, as that hasn't happened. Israel is the disproportionate aggressor, as measured by reality. If reality were different, so would my analysis. But it is not.
Besides, "we have to do it to them before they do it to us" has been the justification for many genocides, including the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. I don't think that's a proper argument, and I'd suggest not to use it.
Well, we could take 3 months in any war where one side has the military advantage and then say: "Hey, you killed more, so you have more intent of killing the other side." But that's not enough. Hamas has explicitly said it wants to get rid of Jews in the area, and the brutality of the 7th of October attack shows that they mean what they say. They take great pride in killing innocents.
So yeah, if they had the chance, they would most likely want to kill all the Jews in the area. We can see this from their actions and what they explicitly say.
Israel does things differently. They pretend to be on the humanitarian side, but their actions show that they want to dominate Gaza and the West Bank despite huge suffering and loss of human life.
As a leftist, one must understand that you can't side with Hamas, since they have betrayed their own people, again and again. We should stress the rights of Palestinians to act in self-defence, and support a proper resistance movement, but the silence of many on the left regarding the 7th of October atrocities and the excess racism inside the authoritarian terrorist group Hamas is sad and unfortunate.
"Pakistan was built on ethnicity, but no one accuses them of racism today."
Almost all nations are built on some sort of ethnic/cultural line. The difference is, Pakistan is not trying to replace non-Muslim inhabitants with Muslims. If they were, they would be criticized as Israel is. The issue isn't that Zionism wanted a group of Jews to start a state, but for that state to remain 100% in Jewish control. Of course, this requires the suppression of non-Jews, hence the inherent racism of Zionism.
Hasbara masquerading as sympathy. In fact, prior to formation of Israel Jews and Arabs lived in cooperation and peace in the middle east. The 20% of Palestinians who remain in Israel are descendants of those who the Zionists failed to expel during the Nakba, and have steadfastly remain despite suffering in a Jewish-supremicist society that affords them few civil rights.
It's bizarre that a presence of Arabs living in Israel is used to defend Israel, since those people are the descendants of survivors of Israel's original crime - the Nakba. It's like saying, "The United State isn't racist! There are Black people here!"
Israeli Arabs for years have adamantly opposed any plan to move their towns and villages from Israel to a new Palestinian state. Meanwhile, the Bedouins and Druze proudly support the Zionist state.
Depends on the situation. If it is broadly supported and doesn’t require geographic displacement or ethnic cleansing, redrawing boundaries to make states more homogeneous can be a good idea. But the Israeli Arabs, however, seem to really prefer living as a minority in the “Jewish supremacist” state. That says something about Israel, about the other Arab states. and about the Palestinian political leadership in the occupied territories.
The founding of Pakistan as an ethno-state through the British colonial last-hurrah policy of Partition resulted in one of the biggest bloodbaths our species has ever seen because of how immediately (and, as always, arbitrarily) “other ethnicities [had to be] oppressed or excluded.” The region and the world is still reeling from the violence of Partition. It’s…probably a perfect example for how racist and oppressive an ethno-state is.
Also your piece reveals you’re in Colorado too! Are you a member of the Denver chapter of DSA? I haven’t been to an event in a long while, although I’d like to make it out again.
I am! I'm the co-secretary of the Labor Committee. If you follow Denver DSA on instagram, they always put out when there are meetings and events. Hopefully we cross paths soon!
Spot on! With the exception that George Orwell would only have that heart attack because he really was a virulent antisemite who believed in a global Jewish conspiracy.
Surely! The most straightforward bit of evidence is his pre-McCarthy era list of prominent London gay, Jewish, and anti-colonial figures which he compiled and volunteered to submit to British intelligence in 1949:
“Orwell’s bigoted commentaries fill his suspects notebook. Jews are clearly labeled (“Polish Jew,” “English Jew,” “Jewess”) whilst others were mislabeled (“Charlie Chaplin — Jewish?”)“ (quote pulled from the link below)
He also wrote a chillingly problematic review of Mein Kampf which includes: “ I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power — till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter — I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.”
There’s also much to be said about the Jewish caricatures in his literature.
I highly recommend this piece, which, among other things, helped answer a lot of questions for me about why exactly the figure of the Jew has been so enduring for the European right wing. It does have a broader scope than just discussing Orwell and his antisemitism, but it’s also where I first read about Orwell’s list:
Orwell was really all over the place. He fought fascists in Spain but helped the UK combat Soviet communism. He spoke about equality but was entirely bigoted (as you said). Very strange and reactive beliefs.
You’re most welcome! Yes, he was quite reactionary. One of the reasons I appreciated the first piece I linked to is the problems it raises with the frameworks of 1984 and Animal Farm. Far from being incidental to his work, his bigoted worldview undermined much of the intellectual and political (and therefore strategic) value of his writing. I just think the Left deserves (and luckily has!) SO much better material to learn from.
I would love to read a critical biography of him. He's just all over the place, perhaps a historian could draw a through line and show how events (Spain I imagine) changed his views and actions.
Yeah, I felt the same. The handful of critical pieces I found online prompted me to go through many of his primary sources (diary entries and letters and such, all of which are linked in the bibliographies of the pieces in my previous comment). It’s pretty clear that line doesn’t trend from “worse politics/character” to “better politics/character” over time. It’s pretty damning through and through— he pretty much starts off as an attempted rapist, then colonial cop, then journalist with appalling ethics, then fights in the Spanish Civil War for journalistic clout and is widely hated by his comrades, and writes his novels which were likely at least partially plagiarized and which went on to be beloved by the CIA. His bigoted and paranoid gay/Jew/Black snitch list was written right up until his death. If the Spanish Civil War did anything to his politics, it sure didn’t improve his views and actions. If anything, it seemed to give him a personal vendetta against communism, as seen in the subsequent fiction gunning for Stalin and completely ignoring Hitler or Mussolini or Franco. His commander from the war had this to say of him: “Orwell had no understanding of the world-wide significance of the struggle in Spain, he knew little of the national efforts of the Popular Front government to achieve a united front against fascism, he had never seen the Republican flag, he did not agree with the actions of the POUM — he took a rifle in the role of an outsider, a journalist looking for experiences to figure in a future book.” — Bill Alexander, commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, in George Orwell and Spain (1984) link: https://archive.org/details/GeorgeOrwellAndSpain/page/n11/mode/1up
And from his Spanish Civil War comrade Frank Frankford quoted in that “On Orwell” piece: “He really didn’t like the workers… It was his attitude in discussions that I didn’t like, his attitude towards the working class. Two or three of us said that he was on the wrong side, he should be on the other side… I rather think he fancied himself as another Bernard Shaw… There was no depth to his socialism at all.“
It’s interesting and disappointing to me that he figures so heroically in the literary canon, when this is what he offered. As Isaac Assimov’s review of 1984 put it: “In his despair (or anger), Orwell forgets the virtues human beings have.
All his characters are, in one way or another, weak or sadistic, or sleazy,
or stupid, or repellent. This may be how most people are, or how Orwell
wants to indicate they will all be under tyranny, but it seems to me that
under even the worst tyrannies, so far, there have been brave men and women
who have withstood the tyrants to the death and whose personal histories are
Zionism is a disease. Speaking TRUTH is the cure! Free Palestine 🇵🇸
Imagine Illegal ZioSettlers attacking you every day and then hiding behind IOF Terrorists! They are true psychopaths. They are the lowest form of life on the planet. I'm glad you upset that deranged ZioTurd. Stay brave. Stay safe!
Israel is Zionist, and the main warhead of the zero sum imperial endgame. Those inside it are programmed to be deeply paranoid and separatist. Non Zionist Jews should follow Neturai Karta and disown it. If they do this unequivocally, they will find a human race delighted to welcome them back.
Your article shows the inherent racism of Zionist thought. You talk about "the Arabs" as if they are an aligned group. An Arab is just someone who speaks Arabic. It doesn't matter what Egypt did in the 60's - Palestinians still deserve rights today.
In my essay “The Lost Art of Being Yourself”, I write at some point that many people dislike those who are individuals. You, wearing such a T-shirt, might actually trigger something in them. It is easier to be a conformist, and when others are not, the conformist often wants to suppress them so that they will not be reminded their own mediocrity. On top of that, as in your occasion, one might be reminded, even indirectly, of what those whom they support are doing. An acquaintance of mine had a similar occurrence, albeit much milder, by having a sticker on his laptop with the same message.
I do think there's something to sticking out, as you said. Our society is so focused on everyone staying in line that something as simple as a T shirt that expresses a different opinion can cause anger. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say.
That sounds like a fascinating essay. Can you share it? I'd like to read it.
Sure! I don't think that you need it, but you might still find it insightful and encouraging!
I made it public. You can find it here: https://iamlazaros.substack.com/p/the-lost-art-of-being-yourself
Thank you!
A sincere and thought provoking article. I concur that Zionism is not Judaism, but often conflated as such. I believe it's a racist ideology that requires two classes of people in a land which they could be sharing equally, I do pray one day Palestinians can be self governing and live in peace and security alongside israel.
Thanks for this wonderful article.
Mo
Thanks Mo! I'm glad you found it compelling and I appreciate your support
We need to teach media studies and critical thinking. It's the only way to defeat propaganda.
Emotional responses to opposing viewpoints. That's what politics has become.
I completely agree. I'm planning on writing a long-form guide to media literacy. Just ways to point out what happens behind the scenes, hidden language, and more. It'll take a lot of work, but I think it's really important.
Adbusters used to distribute a free media literacy kit to teachers years ago so you may want to take a look at that to enhance and inform your project. Please update this thread as you make progress.
Will do! I might go digging for an old version of that. It could be useful.
Good luck with that project. People need to figure out how they're being manipulated. A guide like that would help. Of course, if they just had a finely tuned bullshit detector...
lol I wish we all had that. But thank you!
There must be an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Pope Francis has said what is needed, now he must do what is needed by going to Gaza and standing for peace, justice and freedom.
Please sign the petition and share widely.
https://chng.it/CRQ7qw4Gzn
Code pink
https://www.codepink.org/cnngaza?utm_campaign=12_15_pali_update_alert_3&utm_medium=email&utm_source=codepink
Let us also support UNRWA. If our governments won’t act in accordance with humanity, then we will. https://www.unrwausa.org/donate Let us do it to honor Aaron Bushnell, or in memory of Hind Rajab.
Let us call for a No Fly-Zone over Gaza!
These are a few small things we can do. If we can do more, let us do more.
Thank you for sharing!
Not everyone thinks like you do.
Actually, it would be very easy to call you a terrorist lover at the gym and then respond to your “huh” with the following: “Palestinians could have had their own state 75 years ago if they had just been willing to live in peace alongside Jews.”
Google "Nakba"
The ethnic cleansing most certainly happened, but almost entirely took place after the war broke out. Without the initial Arab rejectionism, the new state of Israel would have been tiny, closely divided between Jews and Arabs, and ironically enough might have become majority Arab by now.
"The ethnic cleansing most certainly happened, but almost entirely took place after the war broke out."
There is never any excuse for ethnic cleansing.
I agree. I’m pointing out the fact that Palestinians had agency in 1947 and had they made the opposite choice they would have had a Palestinian state the following year in about 50% of historic Palestine, and perhaps in 100% of historic Palestine today. The Palestinian refugee issue would never have arisen.
The Palestinians had no agency. They were driven or fled the Zionist cleansing.
Stop doing Nakba denialism. It's gross.
Why couldn’t they have accepted the 1947 partition plan?
You write: "Zionism is an inherently racist ideology, as to create and preserve a Jewish ethnostate, other ethnicities must be suppressed or excluded." This is not so easy, and there have been many versions of Zionism. Pakistan was built on ethnicity, but no one accuses them of racism today. And remember that Israel's neighbouring Arab states have basically zero (0) Jews in their population (which perhaps shows the need for a Jewish state, as for now at least), whereas Israel has 20% Arabs. While I agree that Netanyahu is terrible for Israel, that we need a ceasefire now, and that Palestinians need their own state, I think it doesn't help us get there by trying to simplify what's going on there. There is a lot of racism in Israel, true, but the racism in Arab countries towards Jews is probably even more fierce.
"There is a lot of racism in Israel, true, but the racism in Arab countries towards Jews is probably even more fierce."
1) Two wrongs don't make a right.
2) That's objectively not true, considering no country is imposing the settler-colonial regime on Jews that Israel is imposing on Arabs.
"Objectively not true", well, around half of the Jews in Israel were actually driven out of Arab countries. In the 1940s, the Palestinian mufti al-Houseini was impressed by how Hitler handled "the Jew question". And the extreme killing by Hamas on October 7th actually shows that there is an ideology of killing Jews present in many sects in Palestine and elsewhere. I'm not saying this to diminish the war crimes of Israel, I'm saying this in order to nuance the picture. Many Jews on the left have felt abandoned by the left due to the unwillingness of Pro-Palestinians to admit the crimes performed on Jews. Terrorist attacks and racism will always be a betrayal towards the own population, even though they belong to organisations in oppressed regions.
I'm not denying those things happened, nor that they are horrific. Rather, I'm explaining that the Israel's crimes are so far beyond disproportionate, which is why they get the bulwark of condemnation.
For example, you mention 10/7. Israel claims about 1,200 Israelis were killed, 3/4 of which were civilians. Comparatively, over 30,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed. If we value every life the same, which we should, outrage should be 30x for Israel's crimes compared to those committed by Hamas militants. We should (and do) still acknowledge the loss of innocent Israeli life, but it's clear which side is more fundamentally committed to attacking civilians. And Israel's repression and state-terrorism against Palestinians started long before 2023.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but there are two things I want to mention.
1. Yes, the Israeli response has been beyond inhumane. Let's not pretend that Hamas didn't know this. If they were a proper resistance group, they would have organised themselves with the Palestinian population, not shoot rockets from within them. Also, they could have built bomb shelters for all Palestinians for the money they received in aid, but they're simply not interested. That's why it saddens me when people like Norm Finkelstein celebrated the Hamas terrorist attack. It was not an attack of resistance, in any way, it was a provocation.
2. You say that Israelis are more committed to attacking civilians. We certainly can't know this. Hamas wants to get rid of all Jews in the area, and if they had had the opportunity to do so, they would also have done so long ago. Israel could easily have wiped Palestine of the map with all their US-supported military power, but they haven't. We can't draw any conclusions from the fact alone that Israel has killed more Palestinians; if the tables were reversed, I'm sure Hamas would have killed over 100.000 Jews already.
I don't really find unprovable hypotheticals convincing. Claiming Hamas would have killed "100k Jews" isn't a good argument, as that hasn't happened. Israel is the disproportionate aggressor, as measured by reality. If reality were different, so would my analysis. But it is not.
Besides, "we have to do it to them before they do it to us" has been the justification for many genocides, including the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. I don't think that's a proper argument, and I'd suggest not to use it.
Thank you for your answer.
Well, we could take 3 months in any war where one side has the military advantage and then say: "Hey, you killed more, so you have more intent of killing the other side." But that's not enough. Hamas has explicitly said it wants to get rid of Jews in the area, and the brutality of the 7th of October attack shows that they mean what they say. They take great pride in killing innocents.
So yeah, if they had the chance, they would most likely want to kill all the Jews in the area. We can see this from their actions and what they explicitly say.
Israel does things differently. They pretend to be on the humanitarian side, but their actions show that they want to dominate Gaza and the West Bank despite huge suffering and loss of human life.
As a leftist, one must understand that you can't side with Hamas, since they have betrayed their own people, again and again. We should stress the rights of Palestinians to act in self-defence, and support a proper resistance movement, but the silence of many on the left regarding the 7th of October atrocities and the excess racism inside the authoritarian terrorist group Hamas is sad and unfortunate.
"Pakistan was built on ethnicity, but no one accuses them of racism today."
Almost all nations are built on some sort of ethnic/cultural line. The difference is, Pakistan is not trying to replace non-Muslim inhabitants with Muslims. If they were, they would be criticized as Israel is. The issue isn't that Zionism wanted a group of Jews to start a state, but for that state to remain 100% in Jewish control. Of course, this requires the suppression of non-Jews, hence the inherent racism of Zionism.
Hasbara masquerading as sympathy. In fact, prior to formation of Israel Jews and Arabs lived in cooperation and peace in the middle east. The 20% of Palestinians who remain in Israel are descendants of those who the Zionists failed to expel during the Nakba, and have steadfastly remain despite suffering in a Jewish-supremicist society that affords them few civil rights.
It's bizarre that a presence of Arabs living in Israel is used to defend Israel, since those people are the descendants of survivors of Israel's original crime - the Nakba. It's like saying, "The United State isn't racist! There are Black people here!"
Israeli Arabs for years have adamantly opposed any plan to move their towns and villages from Israel to a new Palestinian state. Meanwhile, the Bedouins and Druze proudly support the Zionist state.
"Israeli Arabs for years have adamantly opposed any plan to move their towns and villages from Israel to a new Palestinian state."
Do you think states should be based on racial or ethnic lines? As in, Jews should live in one state, Arabs in another?
Depends on the situation. If it is broadly supported and doesn’t require geographic displacement or ethnic cleansing, redrawing boundaries to make states more homogeneous can be a good idea. But the Israeli Arabs, however, seem to really prefer living as a minority in the “Jewish supremacist” state. That says something about Israel, about the other Arab states. and about the Palestinian political leadership in the occupied territories.
The founding of Pakistan as an ethno-state through the British colonial last-hurrah policy of Partition resulted in one of the biggest bloodbaths our species has ever seen because of how immediately (and, as always, arbitrarily) “other ethnicities [had to be] oppressed or excluded.” The region and the world is still reeling from the violence of Partition. It’s…probably a perfect example for how racist and oppressive an ethno-state is.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrymple
I was unaware of this. Thanks for sharing!
You’re welcome!
Also your piece reveals you’re in Colorado too! Are you a member of the Denver chapter of DSA? I haven’t been to an event in a long while, although I’d like to make it out again.
I am! I'm the co-secretary of the Labor Committee. If you follow Denver DSA on instagram, they always put out when there are meetings and events. Hopefully we cross paths soon!
Wicked! I hope so
Spot on! With the exception that George Orwell would only have that heart attack because he really was a virulent antisemite who believed in a global Jewish conspiracy.
I've never heard that before. Can you link a source for me to learn more?
Surely! The most straightforward bit of evidence is his pre-McCarthy era list of prominent London gay, Jewish, and anti-colonial figures which he compiled and volunteered to submit to British intelligence in 1949:
“Orwell’s bigoted commentaries fill his suspects notebook. Jews are clearly labeled (“Polish Jew,” “English Jew,” “Jewess”) whilst others were mislabeled (“Charlie Chaplin — Jewish?”)“ (quote pulled from the link below)
He also wrote a chillingly problematic review of Mein Kampf which includes: “ I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power — till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter — I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.”
There’s also much to be said about the Jewish caricatures in his literature.
I highly recommend this piece, which, among other things, helped answer a lot of questions for me about why exactly the figure of the Jew has been so enduring for the European right wing. It does have a broader scope than just discussing Orwell and his antisemitism, but it’s also where I first read about Orwell’s list:
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/#fnref16
This piece on Orwell specifically from the same site links to significant further reading in the bibliography section:
https://redsails.org/on-orwell/
This is great, thanks for sharing!
Orwell was really all over the place. He fought fascists in Spain but helped the UK combat Soviet communism. He spoke about equality but was entirely bigoted (as you said). Very strange and reactive beliefs.
You’re most welcome! Yes, he was quite reactionary. One of the reasons I appreciated the first piece I linked to is the problems it raises with the frameworks of 1984 and Animal Farm. Far from being incidental to his work, his bigoted worldview undermined much of the intellectual and political (and therefore strategic) value of his writing. I just think the Left deserves (and luckily has!) SO much better material to learn from.
I would love to read a critical biography of him. He's just all over the place, perhaps a historian could draw a through line and show how events (Spain I imagine) changed his views and actions.
Yeah, I felt the same. The handful of critical pieces I found online prompted me to go through many of his primary sources (diary entries and letters and such, all of which are linked in the bibliographies of the pieces in my previous comment). It’s pretty clear that line doesn’t trend from “worse politics/character” to “better politics/character” over time. It’s pretty damning through and through— he pretty much starts off as an attempted rapist, then colonial cop, then journalist with appalling ethics, then fights in the Spanish Civil War for journalistic clout and is widely hated by his comrades, and writes his novels which were likely at least partially plagiarized and which went on to be beloved by the CIA. His bigoted and paranoid gay/Jew/Black snitch list was written right up until his death. If the Spanish Civil War did anything to his politics, it sure didn’t improve his views and actions. If anything, it seemed to give him a personal vendetta against communism, as seen in the subsequent fiction gunning for Stalin and completely ignoring Hitler or Mussolini or Franco. His commander from the war had this to say of him: “Orwell had no understanding of the world-wide significance of the struggle in Spain, he knew little of the national efforts of the Popular Front government to achieve a united front against fascism, he had never seen the Republican flag, he did not agree with the actions of the POUM — he took a rifle in the role of an outsider, a journalist looking for experiences to figure in a future book.” — Bill Alexander, commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, in George Orwell and Spain (1984) link: https://archive.org/details/GeorgeOrwellAndSpain/page/n11/mode/1up
And from his Spanish Civil War comrade Frank Frankford quoted in that “On Orwell” piece: “He really didn’t like the workers… It was his attitude in discussions that I didn’t like, his attitude towards the working class. Two or three of us said that he was on the wrong side, he should be on the other side… I rather think he fancied himself as another Bernard Shaw… There was no depth to his socialism at all.“
It’s interesting and disappointing to me that he figures so heroically in the literary canon, when this is what he offered. As Isaac Assimov’s review of 1984 put it: “In his despair (or anger), Orwell forgets the virtues human beings have.
All his characters are, in one way or another, weak or sadistic, or sleazy,
or stupid, or repellent. This may be how most people are, or how Orwell
wants to indicate they will all be under tyranny, but it seems to me that
under even the worst tyrannies, so far, there have been brave men and women
who have withstood the tyrants to the death and whose personal histories are
luminous flames in the surrounding darkness.” http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
I think we’d do well to learn from those many luminous flames instead!
Zionism is a disease. Speaking TRUTH is the cure! Free Palestine 🇵🇸
Imagine Illegal ZioSettlers attacking you every day and then hiding behind IOF Terrorists! They are true psychopaths. They are the lowest form of life on the planet. I'm glad you upset that deranged ZioTurd. Stay brave. Stay safe!
Israel is Zionist, and the main warhead of the zero sum imperial endgame. Those inside it are programmed to be deeply paranoid and separatist. Non Zionist Jews should follow Neturai Karta and disown it. If they do this unequivocally, they will find a human race delighted to welcome them back.
Your article shows the inherent racism of Zionist thought. You talk about "the Arabs" as if they are an aligned group. An Arab is just someone who speaks Arabic. It doesn't matter what Egypt did in the 60's - Palestinians still deserve rights today.
You're a racist and a bad person. I've banned you from commenting on my posts.