The Spy vs Spy Saga Continues -- As Snowden (Apparently) Awaits His Fate In Moscow

Word has it that Jet-Setting Whistle-blower-cum-Spook Edward Snowden did not get on the plane to Cuba for which he'd booked a seat. Instead, the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister made remarks in Hanoi indicating that Snowden's request for asylum was being analyzed and considered by his government.

Typical delaying tactic. While the wheels turn mercilessly in the background -- Brennan on his way to Moscow, Kerry making remarks and not so veiled threats, who knows what spooks deployed for Emergency Extraction of the Fugitive, or whatever they want to do with him when and if they get the chance -- Snowden has once again disappeared. No one in Moscow is saying where he is -- or even if he is still there. [UPDATE 06/25/13: Or if he was ever there. Apparently no one on the plane from Hong Kong that was supposedly transporting him to Moscow could vouch for his being seen on the plane. He was not seen publicly at the Moscow airport -- though there were several reports of people seeing him, there was no way to verify them. This being a Spy Story and all, it's possible he was never there. Well, isn't this something. I just went over to the Guardian, and the top story was entitled: "Edward Snowden Never Crossed Border Into Russia, says Foreign Minister." Who'd a thunk, right?]

The aura of Cold War Intrigue hangs over this tale like a shroud, and it's disorienting to say the least. Many, many commenters seem to be of the opinion that the Implacable Enemies of the United States include Peking and Moscow and Havana --  ruled as they are by Iron Fisted Communist Totalitarian Police States, Stalin in the Kremlin, the inscrutable Mao in the Forbidden City, Castro the Devil in his rotting colonial palace in Havana. Communist spies and Freedom-loving counterspies are everywhere.

Making Snowden a Defector. Or Double Agent. Or Something.

Just the language surrounding this globe trotting reality show is anachronistic and bizarre. We are not living in the Cold War World of the 1950's and '60's but it surely seems like it when the blowhards on the teevee and on the internets and in print get wound up and commence to opine. To them, nothing has changed. The United States defends the Free World from the Perfidious Commies in Moscow and Peking (it isn't even "Beijing" to them yet) and Havana (oh, and Caracas, too, these days)  and Snowden is running straight into the arms of his Communist protectors.

Right.

Of course, it's all bullshit, but I've tried to fathom some of the nearly hysterical response to skeptics and critics of the Approved Narrative -- regardless of which side is putting it out, and there are distinct sides to the propaganda in this matter -- as practically a revival of Stalinist Era. It's not meant to inform (even if the information is lies.)

It is meant to compel: Obedience. Loyalty. Conformity.

One can only choose sides. One cannot question, speculate, or investigate on one's own. One is told what one is to believe -- by the experts, of course, never mind the fact that they have reverted to Cold Warrior rhetoric. One is required to focus only on one (or less than one) aspect of the story to the exclusion of all others. One is not allowed to speculate or question in public.

The dissonance of being endlessly told "It's not about Greenwald/Snowden!!!" while Greenwald is on every teevee show (yelling "It's not about me!") making it about himself, and Snowden is highly dramatically on the lam and treating with various diplomats and WikiLeaks, is quite deliberate in this form of propaganda. The point is to make it nearly impossible for casual observers to form an objective opinion about what's going on. The point is to obscure and confuse the real issues with dissonant orders so as to enable and require submission and compliance. Cops do this all the time, issuing conflicting commands or making statements that contradict reality, so as to disorient their targets and subjects and obtain their submission and compliance. It's messy, but it usually works.

One of the often-repeated orders is: "Focus on the NSA! That's the Only Story That Matters!" Well, apart from the fact that it isn't true,  that makes perfect sense. The truth is, the NSA is a part of a much vaster surveillance apparatus, it's not the only part, and it may not even be the most important part, and it is surely not the only part to be considered -- unless, that is, you don't want the rest of the story to be seen or told...

Oh. Of course. Propaganda.

"Corporations are bit players!" No they aren't. They are at the root and the core of the Surveillance State. They are fundamentally its creators and operators. "Don't look behind the curtain!" Of course not. Wouldn't dream of it.

"Focus on Government spying only!" No. The Government gets most of its information about you and me (all that domestic surveillance and spying) from the private sector. The private sector sells it; the Government purchases it. It's an example of the Free Market in action. What would you do to prevent this free exchange between a willing buyer and seller from taking place? "Don't confuse me with facts! Focus on the only thing that matters! NSA! NSA! NSA!"

 And so it goes.

This will continue until the Next Big Thing, and the Propaganda Ratchet will be tightened ever further. It's so obvious to me in this case that certain Stalinist Era propaganda tactics are being used to confine and control The Debate over the Surveillance State, and the use of these propaganda tactics is not confined to one side or the other of the issue. After all, the ever reasonable (though Uppity) President has been making appearances and remarks in which he says clearly disorienting (and false) things like, "It is transparent!" in reference to the FISA court, which operates in secret. OK then.

The point is to obscure and confuse the real issues, and both sides are engaging in it. This can lead a skeptic to believe that the "sides" are not really "sides" at all; they represent a factional struggle within the Inner Party and has nothing to do with the interests of the Proles.

Mmmm. Yes.

Repost of "On Appeals to Orwell"

About three years ago, I did a series of posts under the title "On Appeals to Orwell," based in part on what I thought was a serious -- and likely deliberate -- misapprehension of Orwell's thoughts and politics among a cadre of Libertarians and their fellow travelers who had adopted him as One of Their Own. The triggering issue was what I saw as the misuse of the term "tribalism" to refer to "mindless loyalty" which was being justified by reference to Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism" -- which never mentions tribalism, and in my view is not meant in any way to confuse tribalism with nationalism.

However, there is much more to Orwell and his perspectives as expressed in his writing, including his dismay at the march of totalitarian nationalism in his lifetime, including the many elements of it found in supposed western democracies. He was anti-imperial, anti-totalitarian, anti-surveillance, and anti-conformity. Yet he was, he said, politically a Democratic Socialist, far from the Libertarian Hero he's been made out to be.

He came to his highly negative views of totalitarianism and nationalism and their march throughout the western world, including Britain, from his grim personal experience in British Imperial Service in Burmah, and as a propagandist with the BBC during World War II, among many other experiences in his life.

I initially wrote this series of posts in response to what I saw as the misuse of his legacy as a means to promote ideas and an ideology that were quite contrary to his point of view. But looking over them again, I see they may have some utility again as we realize just how comprehensive the American -- and by extension, global -- surveillance state has become, something we might say Orwell was in on the ground floor of developing and implementing, and which he came to reject utterly.

So. Here are links to the series. Make of them what you will. I am quite fond of the early BBC kinescope of "1984" that is embedded in one of them!

On Appeals to Orwell, June 26, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore, June 28, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore II, June 28, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- UpSide Down, InSide Out, Round and Round, June 29, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- Attacking the Weak, Flattering the Strong and Evaluating Every Contact on the Basis of Advancement, June 30, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- The -Isms on the Home Stretch July 1, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- The Wrap Up and a New Day Dawning July 1, 2010

Jobs? What Jobs?

This is a topic I've harped on repeatedly for years, and it's time for another post on the deliberate engineering of unemployment for the benefit, comfort and convenience of the Ruling Class.

Throughout the current economic catastrophe, there has been no let up on the pressure being applied to the working class to force lowered living standards, impoverishment and destitution. This is not a popular topic in most of the blogosphere, and often when it does come up, it is couched in many of the same circumlocutions and euphemisms that are typical of the propaganda media.

Unemployment rates, for example, are almost always given as the Bureau of Labor Statistics' undercount in the U3 monthly release, not the more encompassing, but still not necessarily revealing U6 statistics. Thus, the "Unemployment Rate" constantly hovers around 9.5%, sometimes up, sometimes down, but never really improving or getting all that worse. But this is not the rate of unemployed workers; this is the rate at which unemployment is reported as such according to official guidelines. The actual rate of unemployment -- which is to say, the difference between the number of workers and the number of jobs filled (not "jobs available" -- which is a whole other matter) is probably double the official rate of unemployment, but it's hard to find out any accurate statistics. The U6 figure which comes closest includes people who report they have dropped out of the labor pool due to discouragement and those who report they are underemployed and would like more hours, but they cannot find full-time work.

But U6 is almost never reported, even in the blogosphere -- which reports it far more often than the Big Media does.

Whatever the case, whether using the official unemployment rate or the much higher U6 rate or working up your own numbers, the unemployment situation is calamitous for workers and the working class, and it is so by design.

And that's something else that's not reported extensively if at all.

Tens of millions of Americans are unemployed or underemployed by design. The point is to forced down wages and benefits for workers who can manage to get and keep jobs, and to ensure there is always a willing pool of workers who will do the job for less than the current workforce will. This has been obvious for years, as not only have millions upon millions of workers been let go, but the pressure to reduce the income and benefits of the remaining workers -- while getting more work out of them -- has increased constantly. In the current economic calamity, for example, many workers have taken pay cuts, up to 50% in some cases, just to ensure they can continue to work at all.

The unemployed who qualify for benefits -- and remember half or more of the workers let go in this economic catastrophe don't qualify for UI benefits and never did -- also get a cut income of at least 50% and often much more. While their UI benefits are subject to income tax, they are not subject to payroll tax, so there is the added burden for them of paying no FICA taxes while they are unemployed and that will have a serious repercussion on the amount they can claim from Social Security when they retire.

Those workers who still have jobs, albeit at reduced wages, hours, and benefits, pay into Social Security, but at a reduced rate commensurate with their reduced income, so their benefits will also get a haircut when the time comes to retire.

Many older workers find it completely impossible to find any work at all. Age discrimination is rampant (as are other forms of employment discrimination I'll get to eventually) and employers get away with it scot free. Older workers are opting to collect Social Security early if they are close enough to age 62, and that means that their benefits are lower for the remainder of their lives than they would have been if they remained working.

So all this frenzy to cut Social Security retirement payments is sort of silly: Social Security is being cut by the simple expedient of making sure that lots of people can't contribute and so can't collect full benefits in any case. Beauty.

During the height of the layoffs, there were 6 unemployed workers available for each position. Now it's closer to 5 workers per position. But that doesn't really state the case. Many of the positions "available" are not really available at all for a variety of reasons. The most common reason is that the position has already been filled in house, and it is being advertised pro-forma to present the illusion of a fair competition or being open to outsiders. This is typical of many government and corporate positions. So the job isn't really available; it's the illusion of an opening that counts.

Many advertised positions are "phantom openings" in that the position may technically be available, but the employer has no intention of filling it. In other cases, the advertisement is for a job that doesn't exist and never did, but the ad is used as a recruitment tool for other kinds of work, for which there may or may not be current openings.

There are many other recruitment subterfuges and scams perpetrated by HR departments in all kinds of fields, and it has been going on essentially forever. The fact of the matter is that at any given time, there are far fewer actual jobs available than appearances would suggest given the number of positions advertised or statistically "available".

We are constantly propagandized to believe it is "small business" that drives employment in this country. And when that propaganda fails, we are propagandized to believe it is corporations that drive employment in this country. As it happens, both are still shrinking employment, though not at the breathtaking pace we saw in 2008 and 2009.

Small business is shrinking employment for two main reasons: 1) they have no customers; 2) they cannot get operating financing. The absence of customers is due to the fact that so many people are unemployed, impoverished or destitute. They have no money, so they can't buy anything. The absence of operating financing is due to the fact that the banks are hoarding their cash, much of which has been given to them by the government to "encourage lending." Well, that didn't work out so well. Business loans are still very hard to get. Predatory capitalists have found the pickings among desperate small businesses very good indeed, and they are happily scooping up failed and failing small businesses for pennies on the dollar, while their former proprietors wind up among the unemployed, impoverished, and destitute.

May the circle be unbroken.

Corporate hiring -- in this country -- continues to slide downward. Corporations are not hiring in this country and are reducing operations at home while they shift their economic and financial interest abroad, particularly to China, where an enormous potential for the development of a consumer economy grows by the day. Jobs have been moving to China, India, Vietnam and elsewhere for many years; now much corporate focus is on these Asian markets, for that is where they see the Future, not here in the United States.

What happens here doesn't matter when there is money to be made abroad.

We might want to reflect on the condition of the British working class during the heyday of The Empire. Read your Dickens for a glimpse. Tired of that? Ponder how the British behaved toward their next door colony of Ireland during the Famine. Mm. Yes. Pity.

Need more? Check out American history during the Gilded Age. How the Other Half Lives may seem shocking to modern eyes and sensibilities, but let me tell you: in parts of California that I became very familiar with during the heights of the recent booms, many people lived no better, and arguably in some areas were living in worse conditions that Jacob Riis documented more than a century ago in the tenements of New York. People were living in the open or in their cars because there was no housing available at all in some areas to people at their income level; people were crammed 8, 10, 12, 16 to a small apartment for which they were charged indecent rent by exploitative landlords, because there was no other housing available to people at their income level. All these people were working, and working hard I might add, to make other people's lives as comfortable as they wished, to ensure there was abundant food and cheap wine on other people's tables, and to clean up the messes that other people made.

This was the underclass of America during the height of the recent booms, and it is becoming the normalized condition for many, many Americans year in and year out as this Endless Recession continues and the languid indifference of Our Rulers remains undisturbed.

Just review your Steinbeck. He was loathed and despised in Salinas and the Central Valley of California because he told the truth. Watch this series of videos from the Guardian UK on conditions along Route 66 in today's Endless Recession. And it only tells a portion of the story.

All this misery and more is coming around again, and most Americans remain oblivious -- or worse, they know what is going on and self-righteously blame the victims.

There are some gobsmackingly simple solutions that have been known and advocated since the beginning of this economic nightmare, but Our Rulers adamantly refuse to consider them let alone implement them. bobswern, over at dKos (where he and Meteor Blades are among the very few posters who will consistently grapple with the issue of unemployment and the continuing efforts to force down wages and benefits) put together a very simple statement about what to do the other day:

So, let's talk about five simple things that could be done, immediately, to fix our economy that would make a major difference for Democrats in November, and for our entire country, right now and going forward...

1.) Give money to the poor.
"Just Give Money To Poor People, A Surpisingly Effective Solution to Poverty," Melinda Burns at Miller-McCune.com, 7/4/10

2.) Bypass the Wall Street bailout recipients, entirely, and have the Federal Reserve lend money directly to Main Street, without the Wall Street status quo middlemen taking their tithes.
"The Scope of Monetary Policy Actions Authorized Under The Federal Reserve Act," Federal Reserve white paper by David H. Small and James A. Clouse, 7/19/04

3.) Drastically expand highly effective jobs programs, immediately, that have proven themselves to be worthy of massive expansion.
"A Jobs Program That Works," Bob Herbert at the NY Times, 7/3/10

4.) Have the Treasury Department and/or Federal Reserve lend money to the states to enable them to provide a backdoor bailout to Main Street, immediately.
"Let Treasury Rescue the States," Chris Edley, NY Times, 7/8/10

5.) Either before or after we do "number 4," immediately above--and to pay for items 1 through 4, above--we then provide all of the resources necessary for the states' attorneys general to sue the crap out of Wall Street.

From Kossack and Democratic Party candidate for Texas Attorney General Barbara Ann Radnofsky, an elegantly simple way to not get mad, but to get even: "Suing Wall Street: 'Brilliant, Simple and Clear'," Barbara Ann Radnofsky, Daily Kos, 6/28/10

More on this from Zero Hedge: "Texas AG Candidate Sues Goldman et al For Causing "Recession, Unemployment" And Everything Else That's Bad, Zero Hedge, 7/4/10"

# # #

See, wasn't that easy? And completely self-funded, too! Our economic problems resolved!

Indeed, any solution at all -- not just the glaringly simple ones -- are ignored by Our Rulers, who continue, with utter indifference, to insist that 1)"nothing can be done," and 2) it's the lazy unemployed worker's fault anyway.

And yet still, there are no pitchforks, no torches, and the guillotines remain rusting in storage along with the Democrats' supply of dry powder.

I'm not a Doomblogger, and I don't believe the People are innately stupid. The insight from Orwell was that the Proles had the power to change things

They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.

... if they only knew they could, but they were kept in darkness and ignorance, by design, exploited by design.

It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus in on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. He [Winston Smith] wrote:

Until they become conscious they will never rebel,
and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

And that, quite simply, is where we -- Proles -- are stuck today. I hate to say it, but it is a prime condition for the rise of a rightist/fascist demagogue to fashion that unformed and unfocused discontent into a furious, murderous, and further calamitous "movement."

The unfortunate thing is the Democratic Socialism that Orwell advocated and that I and many other Americans favor, has nearly always required a stable and relatively prosperous society in which to voluntarily be adopted, or contrariwise (cf: Post WWII Germany) utter defeat and near annihilation in order to be imposed from without.

Fascist demagogues? They're a dime a dozen, almost always internal developments of peoples' unfocused rage at deteriorating conditions they believe they can do nothing about. Weimar anyone?

On Appeals to Orwell -- The Wrap Up and a New Day Dawning

Finally.

Lawrence Malkin is a hard boiled writer and reporter from the old school. When he wrote "Half Way to 1984" for Horizon magazine in 1970, he was contributing to an issue devoted to the counterculture developing in this country and to countercultural visions from history.

One of them, of course, was George Orwell's dystopian vision of 1984.

The threat of totalitarianism was still very real to people at that time; the Soviet Union was resurgent, Red China was starting to finish up its Cultural Revolutionary phase which had sent shock waves through leftist/Maoist communities, and memories of the Nazis were still raw for many who had lived through World War II.

In Nineteen Eighty Four Orwell was postulating a fantastic totalitarian near future in Britain and through his allegory described much of what was wrong with totalitarianism.

Malkin used his opportunity with Horizon not just to explore Orwell's themes and visions in Nineteen Eighty Four but to probe Orwell's life and letters, and to dig as deep as he could into Orwell's actual political philosophy.

By 1970, it was clear, despite indulgence and mockery, that the Counterculture was real; rebellious youth was not just rebelling but was literally leaving the socio-political construct of their parents and grandparents world, forming distinctive new communities and developing alternative ways of living in the not-so material world.

We forget what was being rebelled against. The 1950s and early '60s was an age of rigid conformity, and sometimes draconian punishment for getting out of line. It was a time of McCarthyite anti-Communism, of loyalty oaths, of suburban homogeneity, of very narrow and directed political paths. The class structure seemed to be rooted in permanence. Though most Americans had a reasonably comfortable living standard, there were many pockets of intractable poverty, race-hatred, and oppression. The American Dream was not fulfillable for many millions, and for the rest, their status was practically immutable. Barring the unforseen, the upper classes would remain so, the working classes likewise, and the middle class of professionals would stay in their place as well.

In that context Nineteen Eighty Four might have seemed an allegory to some, but to many others, especially among the young, it was living truth. Our society was already a totalitarian nightmare. We didn't have to wait. It was here.

Yes, there were other totalitarian nightmare societies on the face of the earth, and they might or might not be "worse" -- we didn't know and we couldn't know. The only information we had about the Soviet Union or Red China, for example, was the propaganda we were fed by the media and our various Ministries of Truth. Travel was forbidden except under very strictly controlled circumstances which no one could meet.

Propaganda from the other side circulated essentially underground, and it was clearly as fraudulent as anything on our side. Lies about our "enemies" were constant, as was the fear of what we might do if we learned the truth.

Of course there was a military draft throughout the era and that enabled the conduct of various wars, such as the bloody nightmare on the Korean peninsula and Vietnam engagement which commenced almost immediately after hostilities in Korea came to a close. There were many anti-colonial resistance movements in the disintegrating empires of the European powers, and almost always, the United States backed the Imperial powers against the Natives. Vietnam, for example, became an American enterprise when the French were finally expelled from their colonies in Southeast Asia, but the United States had already been involved on behalf of the French.

Africa was seething with anti-colonial movements, and the position of the United States was that most of it was due to Communist agitation. Nevertheless, the colonial powers mostly gave up their overseas possessions by the early 1960s, leaving their former subjects to sink or to swim.

And then there was rebellion at home, rebellion that could not be put down. It was hell out there.

This was the context of Lawrence Malkin's piece about Orwell in Horizon in 1970. It's important to keep that context in mind as we try to make sense of what he had to say in his hard boiled journalist style.

The principle was that 1984 wasn't the Future, it was the Present which was being rebelled against.

And Orwell was an Honored Elder (now deceased) of the Rebels.

Very difficult concepts to understand now, when clearly the State is so much more oppressive today than it ever was back then. Isn't it?

In certain details, yes. But on an overall objective scale? Not at all. Not even close. "Liberation" has become the standard in the decades since the Counterculture rebellion of the 1960's and 1970's. "Liberation" is taken for granted, so much so that resistance to such things as Marriage Equality -- a concept that hardly existed in the early years of the Counterculture -- seems quaint and anachronistic.

Liberationist movements were countered by Communitarian and Utopian ideals that were being acted on extensively. What we may remember of the era are the Liberationist activists, but there was a whole other Counterculture momentum toward community and unification that is still around, while Liberationism has morphed into something barely recognizable -- for example, the Corporate Liberation Act passed by a one vote majority on the Supreme Court with its Citizens United ruling, or the continuing calls for the "liberation" of the financiers and the big oil companies from the onerous restraints of the Government, no matter what horrors ensue.

Malkin makes much of who Orwell was -- an Eton schoolboy, a British Imperial functionary in Burma, an intellectual and a writer of essays and novels of various things, a propagandist for the BBC, a disillusioned polemicist. He was neither British Upper Class nor Lower Class, nor really was he integrated into the British Middle Class. He was an outlier, and as an outlier, he noticed things that others, socialized to their place and lot in life, did not. (Malkin doesn't point out that Orwell -- Eric Blair -- was born in India, that his mother was French, though she had been raised in Burma, and that he spent a good deal of time in the 1930's in France and Europe rather than in Britain).

Malkin's thesis is that Orwell is anti-Utopian. Given the Utopian countercultures that are the theme of the volume, Malkin is proposing that Orwell dissents from those who would use his works to foster Utopianism: the "Orwell Cultists."

And yet... Malkin also proposes that Orwell believed that there had been an abject failure of "liberal rationalism," and what he means, exactly, is not so easy to parse from his text. In some sense, "liberal rationalism" refers to the Enlightenment which -- though faltering in the face of growing absolutism -- can hardly be argued to have failed in the larger context. "Progressivism" -- in its old line guise, not that of today's internet "progressives" -- is often referred to as "liberal rationalism," as in technocracy, meritocracy, and rule by experts. That was in contrast to the corrupted crony capitalism and its purchased handmaiden "democracy" of the pre-Progressive Era. In Orwell's time that sort of "liberal rationalism" had not failed in the domestic context (it wouldn't do so for another generation or more), but the turmoil internationally from all the wars and revolutions occurring during the Progressive Era is certainly enough to give one pause.

More apropos of Malkin's point, however, is the Libertarian notion that through argument and rational consideration alone can appropriate actions and sensibilities be discovered. Malkin says that Orwell believed human nature did not allow the overly rational to dominate and completely control the emotional, and it was a Utopian belief to think that rationality could ever be successfully supreme.

In today's world, though not so much in Orwell's time, Libertarians assert the supremacy of rational argument in all things, and thus, they are today's "liberal rationality" Utopians.

There is no doubt that Orwell was not a believer in Utopia by any human agency. Yet Malkin refers to him as a "libertarian Socialist," which doesn't make any sense in today's context. What I think he meant was that Orwell was a Democratic Socialist, but the language to describe what that was didn't exist in American political discourse.

If anything, many Americans were more viscerally opposed to Socialism then than they are today.

Describing Orwell as a "libertarian Socialist" may seem dissonant, but the point was that Orwell saw the necessity of balancing personal autonomy and liberty with the needs of society, and he saw that balance being found in part through democratic processes -- which are not always rational.

Malkin quotes Orwell from a 1941 letter to H. G. Wells:

Sensible men have no power. The energy which actually shapes the world springs from emotions -- racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war -- which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action."

Malkin goes on to say:

Orwell's most important discovery was that the managers of our society [which at the time were almost all Progressives of the old school], far from being sensible men, share the irrational drives of their fellows, and these include power.

Indeed.

And in Orwell's conception, the rational idea cannot be made into effective rule.

Malkin again:

For Orwell [the allegory of Animal Farm and 1984] became the vehicle for explaining the major intellectual event of the first half of [the 20th] century, the failed Utopia -- in Russia and elsewhere. The raw material consists of the curiously dated sectarian quarrels of the left in the 1930's, which Orwell freezes forever in the brilliant amber of Homage to Catalonia. But the issue described there is still real: freedom vs. power.

And quoting Orwell again from "As I Please", 1943:

The real answer is to dissociate Socialism from Utopianism.... The answer which ought to be uttered more loudly than it usually is, is that Socialism is not perfectionist, perhaps not even hedonistic. Socialists don't claim to be able to make the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it better. And any thinking Socialist will concede to the Catholic that when economic injustice has been righted, the fundamental problem of man’s place in the universe will still remain. But what the Socialist does claim is that that problem cannot be dealt with while the average human being’s preoccupations are necessarily economic. It is all summed up in Marx’s saying that after Socialism has arrived, human history can begin.

In June of 1949, shortly after the publication of 1984, Orwell's British publisher, Frederic Warburg, issued a memo -- which Orwell approved -- to settle some of the dust raised by the novel:

... Allowing for the book being, after all, parody, something like 1984 could happen. This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the political, social, and economic foundations of the contemporary world situation. Specifically, the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and Liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the USSR and the new weapons, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and the most publicized. But the danger lies also in the acceptance of the totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colors. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: "Don't let it happen to you. It depends on you."

What a strangely and disturbingly prescient statement. But there is more:

The superstates will naturally be in opposition to each other or (a novel point) will pretend to be much more in opposition than they in fact are....

And so it goes.

Malkin asserts that Britain and Europe have escaped the bogey man of 1984 -- which may have been true enough in 1970, but it is hardly the case today -- but he claims that (even in 1970) the bogey man threat of 1984 "has roosted like a vulture in a tree, most firmly in the American consciousness." Even in 1970, he said, Orwell's dystopian vision was already coming true in the United States. Think how much farther along that path we are today.

As Malkin sums up:

It simply will not do to try to turn Orwell into a prophet of anti-Communism or some kind of New Conservatism. He simply refuses to get into bed with the left or the right, or any programmatic apostle. Just before leaving Spain in 1937 he wrote to Cyril Connolly:

I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism which I never did before."

If his words mean anything, Orwell remained a socialist to his death. But to him, socialism was not a programmatic ideology of social and economic change. It dwelt more deeply in the transcendent values of justice, liberty, equality, and the community of feeling (the brotherhood perverted into Big Brother) in which material values play their role alongside human ones. Its primary motives are neither rational nor public. Life is held together by family, community and the shared values that constitute culture. For the rest of his life, Orwell stressed the human and individual quality of this type of socialism.

And that to me is a nearly perfect definition of the "tribalism" that Libertarians and Glenn Greenwald have been so quick to mindlessly slur and denounce.

On Appeals to Orwell -- The -Isms on the Home Stretch

Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism" has become something of a touchstone among some folks of the Libertarian persuasion for criticizing the blind loyalties among all those people out there who have been brainwashed by the State or who have been inculcated by propaganda to believe routine falsehoods about the exceptionalism of "my side" and denunciations of the "other."

I took issue with Glenn's calling such beliefs and mindless loyalties tribalism, and challenged him to defend his lazy slur on tribal peoples and their societies and cultures. Response to the challenge made clear that it was an issue rarely thought of among the coterie of quasi-intellectuals that has assembled around Glenn.

The notion that "tribalism" = "mindless loyalty"/"mindless loyalty" = "tribalism" is one that Glenn has mindlessly put forth for years. I imagine it's something he picked up thoughtlessly at a Cato seminar years ago and he never considered that it might be inappropriate. After all, "everyone knows" that "tribalism" is less highly evolved than the "clear-thinking rationalism" of your average Libertarian intellectual. It stands to reason.

Thus using "tribalism" to denounce the political positions and mindless loyalties of others with whom you disagree isn't a slur so much as it is a recognition of the truth that the mindless loyalties of others suck. Whereas one's own highly evolved self is made of Star Stuff and Glorious, by definition. It's the classic Mud People vs the Gods. How can such obvious truth be a slur?

Besides, Orwell, in his "Notes on Nationalism" defined precisely what is wrong with other people's "tribalism" compared to his own highly evolved self -- immune as he was to the mindless loyalties and ridiculously inadequate political positions of his contemporaries.

Of course the text itself demonstrates that Orwell never addressed the issue of tribalism or tribal peoples in his "Notes on Nationalism," and what he was dealing with in this essay had nothing to do with tribalism and/or tribal peoples. It was about how various forms of nationalism -- which he defines broadly -- came to be, how they are sustained, and the damage they do.

If he had been inclined to introduce tribalism into the equation, either as a form of Nationalism or as a contrast to it, more than likely he would have done so, as -- so far as I can tell from the rest of his works -- he did not mince words or concepts. He said what he meant and meant what he said, whether he said it directly or through allegory.

And in his works, Orwell demonstrates a remarkable level of respect, if not regard, for the peoples his own British Empire and nation had been oppressing and exploiting -- with great indignity and violence -- for his entire life. Some of those peoples were most certainly of a "tribal" cultural and social orientation. And if he had wished to criticize them he would have done so.

If he wanted to compare the mindless loyalties of nationalists with typical behaviors of tribalists he would have done so, but he did not do that. Instead, his compared the mindless loyalties of one group of nationalists with those of the others and found them far more similar than different, and all just as destructive.

So, "Notes on Nationalism" ultimately fails as a defense of lazy slurs on tribalism.

I go so far as to argue that nationalism is difficult or impossible to inculcate in a tribal society, that in fact nationalism all but requires detribalization and individualization in order to be successful. One must be separated from the tribe, in other words, to become more than a casual nationalist.

But individuals, specifically individuals under stress, are easily inculcated into nationalist loyalties. Mindless nationalist loyalties.

Nationalism is a mindless substitute for mindful tribal loyalties, and it is only possible in the context of detribalization and individualization.

Nationalism was such a problem in Orwell's time that it led to the destruction of his world, the world of the "higher order" peoples of Europe, twice in his lifetime. He recognized that many "isms" were at root "nationalist" in nature, including such now-quaint-sounding "isms" as

Neo-toryism

Celtic Nationalism

Zionism

Communism

Political Catholicism

Colour Feeling

Class Feeling

Pacifism

Anglo-phobia

Anti-semitism

and Trotskyism.

Orwell was not alone in his recognition of the dangers of Nationalism; curbing nationalist tendencies and providing a peaceful outlet for nationalist rivalries was part of the justification for the establishment of the United Nations and a whole raft of regional organizations and alliances. Limiting the role of Nationalism in Europe is one of the main functions of the European Union.

We can go on with other examples of how Nationalism has been widely -- though not completely -- suppressed since World War II through the establishment and institutionalization of all kinds of transnational political organizations that didn't exist in Orwell's time, and especially through the economic globalization that is such a feature, and a burden, of the 21st Century.

Many "nations" were created by the break up of the great European Empires after World War II, some of them pulled together through the amalgamation of various tribal regions, and we can evaluate them as... somewhat less than successful. This was so on the one hand because nationalism was being actively suppressed in Europe and elsewhere, and on the other because tribal peoples resist being fused into larger political units. The effort to force tribal peoples into becoming nationalists often leads to civil war and genocide, much as we've seen in Africa for generations. It is not that Africans are instinctively bloodthirsty and uncivilized, it is more that so many African "nations" are artificial creations of colonial powers that have no justifiable reason to be, and the efforts from their capitals to force their disparate tribal peoples to become "nationalists" inevitably cause immense social, economic and political strains that lead to violent reactions.

Were the tribal peoples left alone -- rather than trying to force them into rival nation states -- more than likely the endless wars and genocides of the region would cease forthwith. But the idea of leaving these uncivilized wretches alone is almost impossible to conceive among the higher orders of humanity where nation-states are natural, and the goal is to prevent nationalism from overwhelming... well, common sense.

You see.

I have long claimed that the "-isms" of the 19th Century are anachronisms in the modern world, and the sooner we get rid of them, the better. Zionism is a particularly insidious 19th Century "-ism" in today's world, and it is the basic cause of the constant conflicts in the Middle East. It is not tribalism, contra Glenn and others. Zionism is a form, a very twisted form, of nationalism, as Orwell clearly understood and stated in his "Notes on Nationalism."

The expression of and the mindless support of Zionism has put the whole of humanity on the brink of annihilation. This is not tribalism, not even remotely. It is the natural outcome of mindless nationalist loyalty. Even on as tiny as scale as that of Zionist Israel -- one of the most egregious hyper-nationalist entities in the world today -- it is a dangerous and destructive delusion.

When Zionism is quarantined and confined to a rump -- and no doubt rebellious -- fringe belief, much as totalitarian Communism or Nazism is today, then the prospects for peace in the Middle East will grow. Until then, the danger will mount, for all of us.

Orwell's specific remedy to overweening nationalism was Democratic Socialism, a political, social, and economic system I have raised approvingly here many times, and Cuchulain2007 has very eloquently advocated and defended here and elsewhere.

But isn't Democratic Socialism just another one of those 19th Century anachronisms? Given the submission of so many of the European Social Democrats to the prevailing Neo-Con/Neo-Liberal/Neo-Feudalism rampant in the world today, the argument can certainly be made that Democratic Socialism has become as infirm with old age and irrelevance as any other political system that came out of the ferment of the era of "-isms".

On the other hand, I see it as the political, social and economic rationalization of something much deeper in human nature than the various other "-isms" of times gone by. Democratic Socialism is, in my view, an Enlightenment version of the tribalism that is so easily slurred and denounced by those who know nothing about it.

If there is a future for humanity, that's where it will be found. Something I think our friend George Orwell understood very well.

On Appeals to Orwell -- Attacking the Weak, Flattering the Strong and Evaluating Every Contact on the Basis of Advancement

In "Why I Write" (1946), George Orwell put together a remarkably honest dictum on the topic of his ongoing literary activities.

Writers, after all, have plenty of motivations -- much like actors and circus clowns -- with the upshot, for many, that they want to Do Good. Somehow. And writing is the way they have found to do it.

Let's let Orwell speak for himself:

[After a lengthy and humorous description of his background and how he came to writing, he states his personal (and generalized) motivations...]

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It's hard to argue with Orwell on those four broad motivational points; every writer I've known has shared them to one degree or another, and these motivations are shared by many other professionals as well. I mention actors and circus clowns in part because of my own long association with such people through the Show Business (one of my previous careers), and by and large, they share many of the same motivations as writers and so many others who seek to have some kind of impact on people.

Egoism is the main point. Orwell, to his everlasting credit, is fully aware of his own egoism in becoming a writer. Makes no bones about it. His insight that the mass of humanity is not particularly egocentric, selfish or self-obsessed is interesting. From the indications of his writing in this essay and other works, he came to this insight through his contacts with the lower classes of Britain, the servile masses of Burma, and his experiences in Europe between the Wars -- particularly during the Spanish Civil War. "They" -- the unselfish masses -- are not like "us:" The egoists. The self-obsessed. The Writers.

Further to his credit, Orwell does not judge the unselfish mass of humanity to be lesser than himself and his kind. For his time and his culture, that is amazing.

But in other works, such as "Notes on Nationalism," he proposes that the British intelligentsia -- of which he is of course a part, though he insisted on his own independence of mind -- is largely captivated with the notion that the Oppressed Peoples of the Empire and the World are actually better than their Betters who rule over them with guns, an iron rod and the lash.

How is an Empire established and how is it maintained and ruled? There were only ever a handful of British colonial officers ruling over vast seas of Natives around the globe, and how it was done is of some interest today as American and British Ruling Class interests conspire to put Our Brown Brothers under the gun, the iron rod and the lash once again in a sort of cracked reimposition of the Empire in those areas where the Lessons of Democracy obviously didn't take.

How could a handful of British soldiers and colonial officers have managed it?

Given that the reimposition is being handled by relatively even fewer Americans and Britons -- leaving out the other nations' few and proud -- than the deed was first done, we may wish to reflect on how it was managed to begin with and that may differ from the way it is being done now.

Attacks on the weak was one of the most obvious means the Empire was established and maintained. Flattery of the strong didn't hurt. And evaluating every contact in the field of interest on the basis of how it could be used to advance the aims of the Companies and the Crown was fundamental.

We see much the same going on now in the attacks launched against the weakest states and peoples: Iraq and Afghanistan most prominently, but including Somalia and the few enclaves of the Palestinians and other Lesser Peoples of the Middle East. Probing for weaknesses in the Other is ongoing, and more and more states and peoples will be added to the list of territories to conquer as time goes by. Iran, of course, is in the gunsights as we speak, and there will be more weak and weakened states to be gathered in to the New Empire.

Flattery of the strong was one of the keys to British success in building its Empire in the 19th Century. While weak Native states and tribes would be attacked brutally and mercilessly, strong ones would be flattered and persuaded with gifts and the preservation of status, revenues and control. By this means, loyalty was purchased or otherwise obtained. Thus, for example, India could be ruled effectively through Native agents, simply by convincing a sufficient number of Native princes to submit to the Crown and be rewarded. It worked well enough so long as the Natives did not rebel, but as is the way of these people, rebellion was commonplace, and each one became harder and harder to suppress.

Finally, as Britain trolled the earth for new conquests, their agents evaluated every contact they made with the Natives on the basis of how those contacts could be used to advance their aims and ambitions. They became very adept at recognizing who could be used to their advantage, who could be ignored, and who would have to be taken on and defeated.

All of these factors and more are once again in play as Anglo-American Imperial might asserts itself.

Yet the lesson from the failures of the British Empire was never really learned either in Westminster or in DC. No, in those realms, the Empire was a success, and withdrawal from Imperial control was only made necessary by other events. For example, the two world wars.

Just look at India today if you need an example of the success of the Empire. It is free, self-governing, democratic and an economic powerhouse. Any former colonial officer would say it is so because of the example of the British. Had India not been put under the Crown, think what a mess and what a failed state -- or states -- it would be today.

So God Bless the Queen, and don't you forget it.

But the Imperial Road is the wrong road according to Orwell. The road of liberation and Democratic Socialism is the right road.

How you get from one to the other is the problem.

On Appeals to Orwell -- UpSide Down, InSide Out, Round and Round

Nineteen Eighty Four is a dystopian allegory that clearly illustrates Orwell's distaste for totalitarianism. It's a cartoon, in many ways. Thus, it is ever popular.

It helps the continuing popularity of the work that at least some of what Orwell thought might be in store for the future of Britain in a post apocalyptic dystopian wasteland actually has come to pass, particularly the constant intrusive state apparatus to spy on the populace. While civil liberties extremists in the United States decry the intrusiveness of post 9/11 "security" measures, the United States government is a piker compared to that of Britain.

The protagonist of Nineteen Eighty Four is Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party and a functionary in the Ministry of Truth. The Inner Party is where decisions are made -- for the Good of All, of course -- whereas, outside the party structure altogether, indeed seemingly outside the very conception of humanity itself, are the mass of Proles whose simple, stupid lives don't matter a bit and hardly enter into the consciousness of the Party membership.

Periodic and seemingly random rocket bombs are exploded in the Prole sectors to suppress the constant Rebellion, and to thin the herd of inconsequentials.

All is well, all is as it should be. Big Brother is watching you.

Winston Smith takes a stroll in the Prole sector outside the Ministry of Truth and he makes discoveries. The Proles have lives, simple though they may be, and they live with emotions, with love, with rivalries, and even with laughter, all punishable offenses for Party members, Inside or Out.

The Prole world is a world turned upside down where nothing is as it is supposed to be. And yet something much deeper than the vapid technocracy of the Party endures among the Proles, a connection with real humanity which the Party has lost.

Outer Party members can aspire to become Inner Party members, but that is about it. Otherwise, their lives are constricted and narrowed to mere rote and repetition of nonsense and deception and chastity. For the Good of All, of course.

Glenn has made much of his insight that the real political division in this country is not between left and right but between inside and outside. So far as I know, he hasn't really developed that idea very much, but it is a fairly common understanding in the upper reaches of the A-List Lefty Blogosphere. The adepts have figured out that the left/right political dichotomy is phony, and they want everyone to know. Of course, at the same time, the left/right dichotomy is useful. So it is maintained. But it is phony.

Nevertheless in the insider/outsider world view, the Insiders make the decisions, the Outsiders try to penetrate the seals around the Insiders by finding out about and revealing their secrets. Exactly what this is supposed to accomplish, we never quite hear. But from appearances, the goal of tossing these grenades of "secrets revealed" from the Outside is to get inside the gate -- as Markos had it long ago -- and from Inside... do what?

Become a Player. Become and Inner Party member and thus participate in the decision making of the Inner Party and direct the actions of those Outside.

The act of Real Revolution is that which unmasks the Truth of the Inner Party.

Thus, someone like Julian Assange is hailed the hero for acquiring and distributing various "secrets" of the Inner Party, and the Inner Party in turn makes Julian into a cartoon character like Emmanuel Goldstein. In other words, it is a mutually rewarding enterprise. Julian gets the attention -- and apparently money -- he craves, and the State and/or the Party gets an Enemy to hound and denounce. No real secrets are ever revealed, or at least none that would seriously damage the Party and its apparat, and yet the semblance of Revolution is maintained.

But there is no Revolution. It's all a show.

Why would one believe that Unmasking the Truth of the Inner Party would result in anything beyond a momentary shrug among the masses? Knowing the Secrets of the Nomenklatura is to be privy to gossip, and what's the point of that?

Knowing the Secrets led to the impeachments of Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, but did those acts result in a freer, fairer and more open government today? Hardly.

To what object do members of the Ruling Classes ever contend among themselves? And make no mistake, Inner and Outer Party are both part of the Ruling Class. They don't struggle on the Proles' behalf.

No, it is a struggle for Power, Influence, and Status, within the Ruling Class, on behalf of no one outside it.

And when those outside the Ruling Class recognize the System itself is the problem, the question of who is operating the levers of Power at any given time is of marginal interest at best. If the System is the problem and the System is to endure no matter who is in charge of it -- the situation we face today quite clearly -- then the only real interest in it we might have is to ensure that the least insane operators are at the controls, if we have any choice in the matter at all.

Orwell seemed to understand this state of affairs thoroughly.

Change, if it is to come at all, has to come from Outside, not from one faction on the Inside contending with another.

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore II

While there's a significant body of work by George Orwell to select from, two works in particular -- his short novel 1984 (published in 1949) and his long essay, "Notes on Nationalism" (published in 1945) -- have become the clearest statements of Orwell's socio-political point of view and philosophy.

The video above is a 1954 BBC version of Nineteen Eighty Four. Its early date and thoroughly British provenance helps us to understand where Orwell was coming from with his deeply cynical dystopian vision of the future.

Of course his vision of the future is based in part on his own experience as a propaganda worker at the BBC during World War II, a position he left -- in disgust -- in 1943 during the height of the War.

The media was fully engaged in propaganda activities during World War II, in Britain and everywhere else. This was no mystery. Everyone knew it was the case, and most everyone agreed it was necessary for Home Front Morale.

Those who, like Orwell, conducted propaganda activities may have had reservations about what they were doing, but most, certainly, felt it was their patriotic duty to put the best spin (a word that wasn't used then) on the events of the day -- even if that meant falsifying the information.

Looking back on news from WWII these days, it's fairly easy to identify the propaganda elements. And yet strangely, the news -- despite the propaganda -- has a ring of truth to it that today's news often lacks. There may have been a "positive" thrust to every story of the War and the Home Front, and yet, the truth was often right there, told honestly, as well. Quite different from the constant and overt falsity of so much of today's news, particularly if it originates in the military. They simply lie today, always, even when they don't have to. During World War II, they would sometimes lie, to be sure, but most often they would more simply embellish or reach conclusions not necessarily justified by the facts, while -- surprisingly often -- providing the facts. Or, seemingly as often, they would not tell the public some particularly appalling story of some wartime event at all.

Even that level of propaganda was too much for Orwell, in part, it seems, because it wasn't being very well done. The Ministry of Truth -- BBC -- was being run by hacks and time servers. How could one expect any originality or consistency under the circumstances?

In Nineteen Eighty Four the Ministry of Truth is being run by timeservers and hacks who really believe themselves to be doing the equivalent of God's Work, and only Winston Smith -- for reasons he himself cannot comprehend -- disagrees.

I could relate.

How is it that one sees -- and knows -- what cannot be?

Yes. Well. That is always the difficult thing, isn't it?

Worse, what do you do about it?

This was Orwell's problem living in the material world, and it was WinSmith's problem living in his fictional world of the Future.

It's a world that is Britain, most assuredly, but as if it had been absorbed by a Soviet, more or less as if it were ruled by a Stalin with technology. It is not a pretty picture, but as Orwell conceives it, it's rather simple. Oceania, the encompassing hemispheric "nation" that England is now a part of is ruled by The Party, headed by Big Brother -- who may not actually exist. It doesn't matter. He is symbolically present always and watches over all. From him (and the Party) comes all that is Good, to him is given all social love and respect. Simple. Nothing like that occurs now, nor did it occur in Western society when Orwell was alive, and despite the Stalin's despotism and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, nothing quite like this complete Leader Worship and abandonment of reality took place in the Soviet Union, either. Mindless loyalty was inculcated to be sure, but (at least from my interviews with former Soviet citizens who lived during Stalin's time), it was never completely achieved. It wasn't just a matter of dissent and disbelief, it was the nature of Russian society and the Russian people not to accept without question that which they were being told, or rather to accept it, with the understanding that it probably wasn't true. People could see with their own eyes, for example, and if they were being lied to -- as they often were -- they knew it, though they might profess the Party Line and Official Belief. As I was told by so many former Soviet citizens, "Nobody really believed the lies, and eventually nobody believed anything."

It makes it very hard for some of these people to believe Government in this country, too. They assume they are being lied to. Very often they're right.

The character of Emmanuel Goldstein -- the Arch Rebel of 1984, and the central figure in the universal Oceania practice of the Two Minute Hate -- is often said to be based on Leon Trotsky, and the actor playing the role in the BBC video above is doing an imitation of Trotsky in newsreels that I've seen of him before his murder in Mexico City by Stalinist agents in 1940. Indeed, Trotsky's point was that Stalin had stolen and ruined the Revolution (much as Goldstein accuses Big Brother), and it is by restoring the Revolution that peace and freedom can be achieved. The response, of course, to this heresy is the famous chants of "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength."

It's said that in Moscow during the 1930's there were electric signs scattered around the city with the motto: "2 + 2 = 5" which made sense to Soviet citizens, though outsiders might be perplexed, and someone like Orwell might use reports of such things to come up with his notions of NewSpeak. But when you understand that the signs were exhortations to the people to complete the objectives of the Five Year Plan in four years, you can easily see where the apparent false arithmetic comes from, and suddenly it isn't NewSpeak at all and it isn't even false. At least not in that case.

Not that there weren't plenty of examples of the twisting of language for political objectives, and not just in the Soviet Union or Mussolini's Italy or in Nazi Germany. The practice was nigh [o]unto universal.

And given the consistency of our own Storm Troopers to lie or distort everything that happens with the full complicity of the embedded American media, it's a practice that continues unabated.

Orwell's "IngSoc," English Socialism, was largely based on a very jaundiced view of Stalinist totalitarianism. Since English Socialism as practiced by the Labour Party (which was in power when Orwell wrote 1984) was never even remotely like Stalinist totalitarianism, and in fact no European Socialist party was even remotely like Stalinism, and Orwell himself was a strong believer in Democratic Socialism, the idea that Orwell was somehow indicating his opposition to Socialism and his fondness for rightist Libertarianism in his works is just absurd.

He is against totalitarianism. He is for Democratic Socialism. In his own words:

"The Spanish War and other events in 1936–37, turned the scale. Thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism as I understand it." -- from "Why I Write," 1946

It literally cannot be said more clearly and directly than that, yet for generations now, certain right wing and libertarian "thinkers" have distorted his anti-totalitarianism into some crackpot version of right wing hooliganism.

Greenwald is forever whining that his arguments are misconstrued and his plain statements are consistently misunderstood. And yet here's a case where a prominent 20th Century writer's plain words and concepts are still being shot down the Memory Hole -- or are being twisted and re-worked by historical revisionists, modern day MiniTrue drones and hacks -- to fit a preconception of what Orwell "meant."

That it would be done during the McCarthy Era is one thing; that it is still being done is truly grotesque.

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore

I think it is fair to assert that George Orwell (né Eric Blair) was one of the strongest influences on English-speaking anti-Establishmentarians and contrarians in the 20th Century. His influence became even more profound after his death in 1950, growing significantly the closer we came to the iconic year of 1984, and then growing still more, it seems, the farther beyond that year global affairs continued.

To read him now is to delve into a world view that is in many respects quaint and anachronistic, in other respects frighteningly prescient.

Yes, the world today is the direct descendant of the world Orwell knew and wrote about so extensively between the world wars, during World War II, and for a few years in its aftermath. The physical, social, economic, psychological, artistic, technological, philosophical and political shocks and upheavals of the era seem to be neverending in retrospect. It was a world turned upside down over and over and over again, with hundreds of millions put to the screws by the various nationalist, imperialist and liberationist ideals, goals, and objectives of the ruling classes and multiple tens of millions sent to their graves by wars and suffering or to the ash pits of anonymous extermination in the various genocides of the era.

Looking backwards, it's amazing anyone had anything but a dystopian view of the first half of the 20th Century, and more amazing still that anyone could keep their sanity through the rest of the century.

And yet here we are. To yak about it, to yak about some of the leading lights of the times, and to consider what went wrong, what went right, and where to go from here.

The recent G8/G20 meeting in Toronto -- for good and ill -- is an example of the direct globalist development that can trace its origins to governmental reaction to the horrors unleashed during the first half of the 20th Century by the Powers That Be (whatever and whomever they might have been) acting out of, let's say, fervor for their own nationalist interests in contrast to all other interests.

The periodic "G" summits, and the commonalities of the ruling classes world wide that are found and developed within the context of these social and political fora, are the chief characteristic of elite rule today, in strong contrast to the way these things were not done in Orwell's time. The constancy of struggles -- the constancy of nationalist struggles between more-or-less giant polities and overweening political philosophies that characterized Orwell's time simply don't have a parallel today, in part because the global ruling elites have found far more common purpose with one another than they have found benefit in continuing ancient rivalries pitting peoples against peoples.

I for one would like to think that Orwell's influence was at least as strong on the ruling classes as it was on the Proles who took to his works and his cynical, almost hopeless, voice so strongly, especially after World War II.

Eric Blair was born in 1903 in British India where his father was an Imperial functionary (in the Opium Department wouldn't you know); his mother had grown up in Burma where her French father had... business... interests. Yes.

Blair was removed from India in 1904 by his mother who returned with him to Britain while his father stayed on in Imperial service for the British Raj in India.

(As a side note, and not to make too much of it, my father was born in the same era as Blair, into the American counterpart of Blair's "lower-upper-middle-class," and though there was no counterpart to the Imperial Service and the British Raj for most Americans to aspire or gravitate to, there were plenty of class and generational commonalities of interest and focus nevertheless.)

Despite Blair's class and the Imperial Service of his father, the family was not wealthy enough to send him to public school or university without scholarships. Ultimately, he went to Eton, but not to university; instead, he joined the Imperial Indian Police (for service in Burma, where his grandmother still lived.) He was in Burma from 1922 to 1927, returning to England after he contracted Dengue fever. He left the Imperial Service upon his return to his home in Britain.

To put it charitably, he was disgusted with the British Raj and the monumental levels of oppression of the Natives that was absolutely necessary to maintain the British Lords of the Empire in the style, comfort and convenience to which they were so thoroughly accustomed. He hated what he had to do as a representative of the Authority of that Empire, he hated what it did to the British people, and most of all, he hated what it did to the servile masses of Burma and the Empire in general.

It was a disgust widely shared among the British intelligentsia which Blair/Orwell soon joined as a writer -- with a specific eye on the condition and plight of the Lower Orders, a long and storied genre of British literature.

I've spent a little time on Orwell's background because his perspectives and insights cannot be divorced from his nationality, class and experience, and his predictions, prescriptions and conclusions grow out of what he knew. That's the fundamental truth of who he was, what he wrote about, and how he came to understand the Ways of the World the way he did.

Specifics next time...

On Appeals to Orwell

I haven't read Animal Farm or 1984 since high school, and I first encountered George Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism" in college. It was a long time ago.

I've only recently re-read "Notes on Nationalism" due to the embroglio over at Glenn's Place on the issue of "tribalism" -- which Glenn and others seem to believe is the same as Orwell's description of Nationalism. Which I dispute. Vigorously.

In fact, when I was in college, "Notes on Nationalism" was a powerful document that justified in my mind -- and the minds of many of my peers -- our fierce anti-war, anti-draft, anti-military, anti-authority and anti-establishment rage. After all, we were not like those who were so succeptible to the nationalist manipulations that underpinned the rulers who made the wars that destroyed the people at home and abroad.

Not us. We were better than that.

And at the time, I am reminded, I was a fierce individualist as well, for a time rebelling against practically everything and everyone, occasionally making more than a spectacle of my ostensibly independent self.

I think "notorious" is probably the correct word to describe my behavior in those days.

"Outrageous!" according to the straights and the fuddy-duddies.

"Provocative," I was deemed more than once.

"Hilarious!" from time to time.

"Get a job! Idiot!" well, there alway has to be a nay-sayer.

But that was then. Now, things are much calmer, quieter, far more conservative -- at least in the way I live my life. I never ceased fighting the straightjacket of middle class and Middle American expectations though, and I never entirely fit in to any large institutional environment, though I've been employed by or associated with -- or fought -- many of them.

When I read Orwell back in the day, and when I do now, I saw and see echoes of my own beliefs and perspectives. "How did he know?" Of course, he didn't. He was his own man who saw things the way he did, shared it as well as he could.

He's called a Socialist Libertarian, and which aspect of his politics you glom on to depends on your own special needs and desires. The combination of the two, however, is dissonant.

Socialism has taken a bad rap during the last generation, and it is widely considered the equivalent of Stalinism. On the other hand, libertarianism remains the same puerile nonsense and self-indulgence it's always been, but many, many libertarian economic and social ideals have become standard practice (while others, such as liberalized drug laws, have not.)

But Orwell's libertarianism was not the puerile nonsense that is bruited about today. It was, simply, personal liberty from overweening state control. Not license or self-indulgence, but privacy and autonomy. In other words, freedom to withdraw from the sociopolitical systems and be left alone.

That's quite a different thing than the common libertarian approach of constantly trying to impose one's own self-obsession on everyone else. As I have often put it, and will do so again, the Libertarian Motto is: "I demand the Liberty to impose My Authority on You."

The freedom to withdraw and be left alone that Orwell valued is nothing like that.

And the fact that he also admired Socialist values of common interest, purpose, and service -- just not the forced imposition of them -- is often ignored in the hagiographies of the libertarian cultists who see him as an accurate Foreshadower of the Future, and thus a Great Man. And a Libertarian.

So what I will try to do in future posts is explore some of the aspects of Orwell that have become distorted, explore some of his Future Vision, and I'll try to explore alternatives.

On the Road Again

Heading back to California either today or tomorrow. Through Arizona again, this time without reservation; of course I expect to find border guards at all the highway entrances and exits of Arizona before too long, as the frenzy there reaches a peak of secessionist fever. Once on that path, it is very hard to retreat. And Arizona seems intent to defy and ultimately to leave the Union. At some point, I'll try to write more fully on how I see these things devolving over time, but not just now.

New Mexico, by contrast, has been almost preternaturally calm. Unfortunately, I injured myself the second day I was here, and so could not complete all the tasks I had in mind to accomplish this trip. I was moving a large branch that had fallen from a tree and as I did, the branchlet I was holding on to broke off and I hit myself in the face. Hard. The blood was abundant, the swelling and bruising was ugly, and while I more or less recovered within a day or so, my head was ringing and I have suffered from attacks of migraine and vertigo through the rest of my time here.

So I spent a lot more time fooling around on the Interwebs than I ordinarily would on one of my excursions to New Mexico. And yesterday, that included an astonishing discussion at Glenn's Place on the issue of Tribalism -- and Glenn's consistent use of the term as a convenient and lazy slur of people he politically opposes.

That was my approach anyway.

I asserted that his lazy slur was ignorant and offensive, citing my own long history within a tribal context (ie: "adopted" within a Native American family which has extensive and deep-seated clan and tribal connections that I won't go into here, except to say that the clan and the tribe/nation are relatively well-known both within and without Indian Country.)

The response was fascinating to say the least, but not altogether unexpected. Glenn uses "tribal" and "tribalism" as a slur, whereas tribal peoples in my experience celebrate and honor their tribal societies and cultures. Only someone deeply ignorant of experiential tribalism would even think of using the term as a slur, which I pointed out many times. Those who responded tended to dismiss the points I was raising, to question my motives, to attack me with ad hominem namecalling, and to defend Glenn's slurs by simply redefining his denunciations of others as "not" what they clearly were.

I also pointed out how "tribalism" as a slur is a dogwhistle in libertarian circles by which the libertarian tribe recognizes its own and identifies recruits. I honestly expected that point to raise far more hackles than it did. Since it is a dogwhistle grounded in overt racism, I pointed that out, too. Neither point was really disputed at all.

What was fiercely disputed was the notion that using "tribalism" as a slur was in any way inappropriate, and conversely that Glenn was actually doing that.

And of course my notion that the issue mattered at all was disputed vigorously.

What struck me was the utter lack of self-awareness, what I call "irony impairment," among those who were participating in the discussion. It didn't, and I'm convinced it couldn't, occur to most of them that they were actually modeling many of the behaviors and attitudes toward the issue I was trying to bring into consciousness. Most of those who responded at all didn't have anything to say about the issue; they were intent on denouncing me, just as Glenn denounces others, for simply raising the topic.

There were exceptions to be sure, jojo_jojo being the one I felt was most insightful, though I'm not sure I agree with all the points s/he made. In fact, I'm pretty sure I don't. But the main point, as I saw it, was that we are all often unconscious of the greater context of our words and actions, and none of us necessarily think them through. Thus, someone like Glenn could unthinkingly use "tribalism" as a slur without imagining he was doing so, and I could confront him over it without necessarily recognizing that he had no such intent.

It's the conflation of intentional and structural bias; and I was -- perhaps -- guilty, just as Glenn was -- perhaps -- guilty of conflation of "mindlessness" with "tribalism." Valuable insight. I appreciated it and appreciate it now. We are often unconscious of the waters we swim in.

Too true.

George Orwell was -- I thought grossly inappropriately -- cited as an authority in Glenn's defense, and it was Glenn's citation of Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism" and his extension of "nationalism" as described by Orwell to "tribalism" as conceived by Glenn in his Update III yesterday, that triggered my objection. Glenn has been doing this for years, and I stayed silent about it up till yesterday. But it is simply a gross distortion of Orwell's essay on nationalism to assert that nationalism as described by Orwell and tribalism as it exists in the world are the same thing.

They are not. They are nearly the antitheses of one another. The overweening nationalism that Orwell describes and deplores -- after all, it was responsible for destroying his world twice in his lifetime -- simply cannot arise let alone persist in a tribalist context. The nationalism he rightly deplores is a factor of de-tribalized individualism seeking some social/cultural "meaning."

Tribalism is the specific remedy to the nationalism Orwell deplores, but Glenn and many of his followers see them as the same thing. That, to me, is so deep in ignorance and error it almost beggars belief.

It's clear to me that they do not understand Orwell at all. And I really wonder how that came about. It is something I intend to look into more fully when I get the time. But right now, I need to take care of packing and get ready to shut down the house.