That crazy winger over at Renew America is at it again,
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell
If there was anyone who should know about deceit, it was George Orwell. Orwell — the pen-name for Eric Arthur Blair — was quite an idealistic man. Unfortunately for idealistic people, they are also often naïve, and susceptible to being deceived. Many are unaware of this, but George Orwell — despite the popularity of his antitotalitarian book 1984 — was a socialist. And as a good socialist in the mid-1930s, he went to Spain, to “fight against fascism,” as he put it. What he found out after he had been there for a while, however, was that his erstwhile Stalinist allies in the Spanish Communist Party were not so much interested in rescuing Spain from the fascist clutches of Francisco Franco (which they signally failed to do anyhow) as they were in coercing all the other leftists — including Orwell’s Marxist-but-not-Stalinist group — into seeing things the Stalinist way, or arresting them if they wouldn’t. Orwell — and a lot of other idealists like him — got snookered, but fortunately for him, he was able to get out of Spain without ending up on the wrong end of a firing squad.
He shouldn’t have been surprised, however, but the deceptions of his “allies” and “compatriots.” After all, the first half of the 20th century was a high-water mark for the radical Left. In Russia you had a genuine successful Communist revolution that put the forces of ultrabig government firmly in control of the largest piece of property in the world. Meanwhile, fascism (also a Left-statist philosophy) was rolling to victory in Italy, Germany, and in a host of smaller eastern European countries. The Left — those people who wanted to use the power of government to stamp out traditional society and replace it with devotion to the all-powerful State — were on the march, and could afford a little backstabbing against their useful idiots.
Given all the propaganda flying around in those days, it’s no surprise that Orwell would have thought himself living in a time of universal deceit. The Communists, the Socialists, the Fascists — everyone on the Left was constantly engaged in trying to dupe people into believing falsehoods that would make their particular version of Statism seem acceptable, or at least palatable. This was so even in the USA — let’s not forget the whitewash of the Soviet-engineered famine which killed several million Ukrainians, conveniently covered up by Walter Duranty of the New York Times.
Unfortunately, we here and now in the United States find ourselves living in a similar time of universal deceit.
Revolutionaries? Sounds subversive. Better go read the rest of it, just to find out for sure!
