Orwell and Hitler

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1. Hmm.

   So Orwell said, of the Nazis, that they aimed to create a “horrible, brainless empire” where “nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of cannon fodder.”

   This is not only a lethally accurate summation of what the Nazis wanted to achieve; it also happens to be a very good description of the aims – and, at many points in time in many places, the actual results, on the ground – of Islam.

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2. Orwell was savagely attacked by revealing the truth of the Stalinist suppression of its anarchist, socialist and POUM rivals.. See the Film land and Freedom.
   2354
   The distinguished British historian of Spain, Raymond Carr, had this to say of Orwell’s experience and the Stalinist Left’s distortion of the truth:
   “The Spanish Civil War produced a spate of bad literature. Homage to Catalonia is one of the few exceptions and the rea- son is simple. Orwell was determined to set down the truth as he saw it. This was something that many writers of the Left in 1936-39 could not bring themselves to do. Orwell comes back time and time again in his writings on Spain to those political conditions in the late thirties which fostered intellectual dishonesty: the subservience of the intellectuals of the European Left to the Communist ‘line’, especially in the case of the Popular Front in Spain” where, in his view, the party line could not conceivably be supported by an honest man. “Only a few strong souls, ….. and Orwell among them, could summon up the courage to fight the whole tone of the literary establishment and the influence of Communists within it.”
   Arthur Koestler quoted to a mixed audience of Communist sympathizers and independents, Thomas Mann’s phrase, ‘In the long run a harmful truth is better than a useful lie’. The non-Communists applauded; the Communists and their sympathizers remained icily silent….It is precisely the immediacy of Orwell’s reaction that gives the early sections of his book Homage to Catalonia its value for the historian.”

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3. Ah, the Cockburns. First, there was Claude, now Alex, Patrick, and Andrew, descendants all of Admiral Sir George who burned Baltimore and Washington in the 1812 brouhaha. The Cockburns are living proof that piro-politics might be genetic at worst or generational at best. Orwell is forever the villain on the Left for exposing communism as just another euphemism for totalitarian. Apostasy is always a capital offense amongst the doctrinaire and Utopian.

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