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June 25, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:12:50
Homage to George Orwell
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Hello, everyone.
It's this week's Left, Right, and White.
I'm Chris Roberts, and I'm here, of course, with my co-host, Gregory Hood, and today we will be discussing the work of George Orwell.
Somebody who I think is extremely interesting because he is not a man of the right.
Some in Conservatism Inc.
will tell you differently, but he was a democratic socialist.
He never varied from being a democratic socialist.
As he said at one point, everything I have written after a certain point was against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism must I understand it.
I guess the question for us is whether democratic socialism inherently leads to totalitarianism, but we'll get into that.
The thing to know about Orwell is unlike many, I guess, limousine liberals you might call him, I mean, he did put himself out there.
He went and fought in the Spanish Civil War with one of the left Trotskyite militias, although his choice of who he fought with was not Really deliberate.
When he showed up in Catalonia, he said that the state of society he witnessed, because there was a social revolution going on at the time as well as a political revolution, he said it had its drawbacks but it was something worth defending.
And so therefore he basically enlisted in the first people he met.
It wasn't like a deliberate thing.
Well, and in the context of the Spanish Civil War, that was one of the first examples, at least in modern times, of there being a really fractured left, where the right was really unified in that conflict.
Within the left and the opposition to Francisco Franco and his military, there's a lot of squabbles between namely the hardline communists like the Soviet Party line communists and everybody else.
And Orwell really just did not want to be part of the hardline communists.
He was willing to kind of work with Any of the other groups, whether they be Trotskyites or even the anarchists.
Or again, I mean, technically they were fighting on the side of a liberal Republican government.
But Orwell was definitely anti-fascist before anything else.
I mean, I would even say he was more anti-fascist than pro-democratic socialist.
Yeah, yeah.
And I want to pause here and say we're not going to get too much into Animal Farm in 1984 because in some ways I think that's actually Some of the least interesting stuff.
I mean, with 1984, what's really important is the way he talks about language.
Yeah.
But this sort of dystopia he draws where, this is like 1984!
I mean, as we discussed the last week, that's not really true.
And Animal Farm is mostly... it's not properly understood.
It's not about like, oh, the Soviet Union is bad.
It's essentially like an intra-left takedown of Stalin, more than anything else.
Well, and it's overarchingly just anti-totalitarian.
And I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to say that those two novels of his are his least interesting works, but they're his most covered works, so I don't... We have nothing new to say.
Yeah, we really don't.
They're both worth reading, but essentially everybody has read them.
You probably read them in school.
Yeah, and in a lot of ways, everything that needs to be said about them has been said, and on the off chance that that's not the case... Well, we talked about 1984 a little bit in the last episode, but something both Greg and I really strongly agree on is that George Orwell's essays are really, really undervalued.
Absolutely.
And you could, I mean, as good as Animal Farm and 1984 are, you could make a solid case that he was a better essayist than he was a novelist.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, there's something about...
allegory in a novel where you're basically, oh, Napoleon the pig is Stalin and it's like, okay, I mean, you're not
really drawing characters here You're just making metaphors and examples and everything
else but with his essays, I mean he really hits you from
directions that you're not expecting and the great thing about him is that
he doesn't he makes a very clear distinction between Propaganda and journalism as I understand it, which is
something I would contest I'd almost say all journalism is propaganda, but he is very willing to
Criticize his own people and go after the defaults on his own side, which very few people are willing to do.
And he especially does this during the Spanish Civil War.
I mean, when you... Homage to Catalonia, which I think is the most enjoyable book to read from him.
The word that comes out most often when he's talking about the very beginning, the height of idealism, this great new social revolution where everybody no longer calls you Usted, and tipping is banned, and you have the social revolution within the context of the political revolution, and yet the word that he says over and over and over again is pathetic.
When referring to how badly the militias were armed, the supply and distribution chain, the fact that these Spanish guys had no idea how to wage war.
There's definitely a hint of British almost snobbery, which is funny because Orwell is always going on about British snobbery.
But this sort of vague feeling that these people are incompetent and you need like a British guy to know how to wage war properly.
He rips these guys to shreds, and yet, at the end of the day, he says, this was pure.
This was something worth fighting for.
This was something that, where I learned things about myself, I couldn't have learned any other way.
And I think that one of the reasons Orwell is important now is, especially in the last few years, especially in regards to Trump, we've definitely seen journalists as, to be a class unto themselves.
It's no longer just to say, like, the fourth estate is a metaphor.
Like, no, it's a class.
It's a group.
And they really do have class interests and they move in unison.
And when they flip, they flip as one.
And that's why former left-wing heroes like Snowden or Greenwald or people like that have essentially become fascists to many left-wing journalists.
But this is important because even with the understanding of the Spanish Civil War today, a lot of these left-wing heroes like La Paz Inaria, you know, people like that, You have to understand that Orwell went to Spain and put his life on the line because, above all, he was an anti-fascist.
Throughout Homage to Catalonia, he always refers to the enemy as fascists, even though a lot of them probably weren't fascists.
They were probably monarchists or whatever else.
He was being called a fascist by these like Stalinists and everything else and he was being called even worse.
Yeah, Trotskyite wrecker and all these things.
Right, and one of the things that people really need to internalize about that conflict is that the left, the communists who were by far the most organized and the most ruthless and therefore really took over the republic at the end, Stalin did consider the Trotskyites to be the real enemy and they called them straight-up fascists.
It wasn't that you're an ally of the fascists.
It wasn't that you're inadvertently helping them.
It's that you are knowingly part of this fascist conspiracy.
You're knowingly on the same side as Mussolini and Hitler, which of course is hilarious because then Stalin cuts a deal with Hitler a few years later and they all switch.
Well, it was those flips that Orwell saw during the Spanish Civil War that really influenced what you see in 1984, that we have always been at war with.
Oh wait, no, we have always been at war with these other guys.
Because that's how the communists were operating.
Right.
And this is something else I want to really push through, and this is core to understanding his work.
There was a book, The Battle for Spain, and I was surprised at how it's a pretty good history of the Spanish Civil War, albeit very biased toward the anarchists, but it largely aligns with a lot of what Orwell talks about in Homage for Catalonia and a lot of what I've read about the Spanish Civil War and other things, which is that the Communists, the Communist Party, which, as Orwell points out, was essentially just an extension of Soviet foreign policy at this point.
Yes, absolutely.
They took the line, and this is frankly a classical Marxist theory, they took the line that you can't have a social revolution without going through the liberal capitalist stage, right?
Because you have to go feudalism, then liberal capitalism, where the bourgeoisie becomes a revolutionary class, and then you overthrow the bourgeoisie.
And Stalin made the choice that the Spanish government, which was a liberal republican bourgeois government, that was what needed to be defended.
Whereas the anarchists, and especially in Catalonia where they, at least for a while, had power, said no, the social revolution is necessary to win the war.
And the communists said, no, we need to win the war above all other things and that means we are defending democracy.
We are not defending socialism.
We are not going after private property.
You actually had communists going out there saying we have no problem with private property.
And you had this kind of hilarious situation where you had landowners in Republican Spain joining the Communist Party because they were the conservatives.
I mean, it's true.
It's not just rhetoric and it's not just propaganda.
Orwell is objectively right when he says that the Communist Party was basically the right when it comes to Republican Spain, other than the bourgeois government itself and what army officers remain loyal.
And one of the reasons that the communists were so influential in the Spanish Civil War is because they were all about discipline.
They were all about having a kind of militaristic organization.
And for people who thought, well, we have to win the war above all other things.
This seems like the way forward.
Orwell, I think, makes a pretty convincing case that they actually kind of drain the revolution of its impetus and a lot of the working class support that was coming up for the Republic, basically these workers thought, well wait a minute, you know, the new boss is the same as the old boss, why should we put our lives on the line?
Here's a very interesting account of When he first arrives, the revolutionary atmosphere, he goes to the front, he goes through hell, and then he comes back and everything's the way it would be in any other country where you have rich people eating in restaurants and beggars on the streets and all the old social classes have been re-established because, you know, the Republic at the end was just fighting for they didn't even know what.
Whereas, say what you will about The Nationalists.
It was consolidated, as you pointed out, pretty quickly.
And I think that wasn't so much because of the ideological unity.
Certainly the Spanish right was just as divided ideologically as the Spanish left.
It's just Franco was always a much better internal politician than he was a general.
Yes.
And he did an excellent job of kind of taking out his rivals on the right.
You could say it's pretty immoral.
I mean, he knew Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera was dead and basically kept it to himself to keep the Falange on side to be like, oh, we're gonna save your leader at the end.
And it's like, no.
He was very good at making sure everybody was behind him and he became the leader of the Spanish state.
So you had, even though you had this nonsensical political party, which was basically, I think some American author said it would be the equivalent of like The Republican, Democratic, League of Women Voters, Socialist, Communist, AFL-CIO party.
It was like that ridiculous in terms of how unnatural a conglomeration it was.
But everybody knew it was just about Franco in the end.
But he did that.
And it worked.
And it worked.
To the victor go the spoils.
Right.
And at the end of the day, you need a guy.
There's no such thing as a nation of laws.
You need to have a guy making the call.
Someone has to be sovereign.
And in the Spanish left, Basically, the communists were working for the interests of Soviet Russia, and I don't think they really cared about Spain one way or the other.
I mean, what was the first thing they did, was get the gold reserves out to Moscow?
And the cynicism of this, and the unwillingness of the Western press to call out what was accurately happening, And to just engage in these silly, stupid, romantic myths that we still live with today, all this dumb stuff about the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, who were just Stalinist stooges of the worst kind.
This is what he saw, and this is what he was willing to talk about, and that's why he's valuable as a critic.
It's also why, frankly, if he could somehow be reincarnated that kind of spirit, he could never work as a journalist today, because what is journalism today except enforcing a party line?
Yeah, well, Orwell has this reputation of being very non-partisan, which is very well-deserved, and the reason for it, honestly, the simplest way to put it is that Orwell is just too observant a man to be a partisan in regards to anything.
Something I've always loved about Orwell's writing that, again, doesn't really shine in his allegorical novels, but really comes out in his essays, is just It's just the keenness of the way he describes just everyday things or how he manages to find the pedestrian in even things that seem extraordinary.
He wrote an essay called Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War and he's got this great passage where he writes, Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending democracy against fascism, fighting a war which is ABOUT something, and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.
Many other things reinforced this impression later.
For instance, the boredom and animal hunger of trench life.
the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which people exhausted by
lack of sleep indulge in, the essential horror of army life, whoever has been a soldier will
know what I mean by the essential horror of army life, is barely affected by the nature of the war
you happen to be fighting in." Yeah, and if you're willing, you know, if you're willing to make,
if you're willing to notice something as sort of obvious as that but then actually do your own side
and sort of every partisan everywhere the discourtesy of saying it out loud, you know,
you're just never going to be easily pigeonholed.
It's funny reading that passage, actually.
Reminded me, obviously, on a much smaller scale of working for American Renaissance, because it is this big cause that I really believe strongly in.
But a lot of the day-to-day stuff is just like working in any other office.
It's like, oh man, the printer broke.
Do I know how to fix this?
Who can I call?
Am I going to have to go to Best Buy and get another printer?
It's not quite the same thing as starving to death in the trenches, but the thing is, as a propagandist, you always want to have this glorious, romantic image, and Orwell is always willing to say, no, it's not like that at all.
You know, he's out at the front with all these English guys and, you know, he'll be writing about something and it'll be, oh, well, so-and-so who I really hated and later got shot in the throat.
And that is the day-to-day existence in any political movement, in any revolutionary army, in life.
And I think a lot of people who Who think that meaning from life or some sort of, I don't know, self-transcendence will be found by just throwing themselves entirely to a party line.
They're going to be disappointed and Orwell experienced that firsthand and he was really disgusted at the journalists behind the line who never suffered the privations who of course were the ones who spoke the most about how glorious everything is and how everything was fine.
People talk about, you know, the stab-in-the-back myth for World War I Germany, where basically, I mean, the argument is that the people thought they were going to win and then basically got the announcement like, whoops, we lost, and so therefore they thought they had been betrayed instead of just losing the war.
Well a lot of Spanish Republicans were like that too because they kept getting this news from the front like things are going well the fascists are on the run and meanwhile at the front it's like no we're getting trounced yeah left to right and a lot of it was simply because the Nationalists had a real army whereas the Spanish Republicans The Spanish Republicans had a real army, but it spent most of its time fighting other Spanish Republicans.
Yeah, well, and something Orwell complains about a lot is that Germany and Italy supported Franco a lot more than the Soviet Union helped the left in that war.
And he has, I mean, you know, Both you and I like Orwell a lot, and there's a lot to be
gained from him, but he does have these very silly left-wing hang-ups.
One of those that really comes out whenever he writes about the Spanish Civil War is he
delves into this kind of weird leftist conspiracizing about why the UK and France didn't help the
Republican side of the Spanish Civil War more.
He basically concludes that, well, it's probably because the elites of France and Britain are
pro-fascist and they just didn't really care if another country went fascist, or if anything,
it was to their benefit, which is obviously not true.
And it was confirmed to be not true very, very quickly.
He ascribes way too much ideology to the ruling class in the West that he despised than was
In a lot of ways, the British and the French didn't help the Spanish Republican side for the same reason they didn't help the Finns against the USSR during the Winter War.
They're just sort of lazy.
They just didn't really think it was their problem.
It just didn't seem like that big a deal.
He gets into the decadence of the ruling class.
I'll get into that in a bit, which, you know, the Lion and the Unicorn, which is my favorite of anything he wrote.
It's a good choice.
But one thing that he does argue, and I think he's right about this, and this has relevance to us, you know, especially as a, I don't know if you want to call it like vanguardists of a political movement, that The USSR made the choice to defend Republican Spain and give the party line that they're defending liberal democracy.
And I think they thought that if they were conservative in that way, that would help Britain and France come along to the defense of the Republic, because they would be willing to defend liberal democracy, but they would not be willing to defend a real communist social revolution or an anarchist social revolution.
I think that you're right and he's ascribing way too much ideological sophistication to the ruling class here.
insufficiently and therefore Stalin made the choice, okay, these guys are not worth anything,
therefore I will align with Hitler.
And then the Communist Party of course switched on that, which screwed up the whole anti-fascist
strategy at least until Operation Barbarossa.
I think that you're right and he's ascribing way too much ideological sophistication to
the ruling class here.
I think that a lot of it was just undermined by party politics within Britain and France.
There was a certain amount of sympathy for Franco within some elements of the British
upper class, particularly in the Navy.
But this is also something where Orwell is a little off.
Franco was not a fascist.
He just wasn't.
If you're one of these people who thinks that everybody right of George W. Bush, or maybe including George W. Bush, is a fascist, then I really have nothing to say to you.
Francisco Franco was just not a fascist.
He was basically a traditional 19th century throne and altar conservative who was trying to restore a certain version of France.
Yeah, he was not advocating the kind of classless, syndicalist version that Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera wanted, where basically he said the upper class is rotten as well as these movements of the left, and therefore we need to transform Spain into a social revolution and everything else.
I mean, there's a reason that there was a left-wing element of the flange. Whereas Franco had nothing to do
with those people and there's a reason that and viewed them as a he viewed them as and probably
accurately and of course I mean we are getting a bit into the weeds here but this is important
to know and I assume most of our listeners know you know the broad strokes of what happened
with with Spain in World War II.
Francisco Franco obviously was very cagey and played it very well not aligning with either side.
Spain was completely devastated by the war so he wouldn't have been much of a military ally in any event.
Had he formally aligned with Nazi Germany I don't think it would have made a difference.
Well I think that's the main reason I believe Franco did not take a side was because he knew that Spain just couldn't do anything.
Again, it really shows that he was a nationalist before anything else.
He was really looking out for Spain.
He didn't have this big ideological allegiance.
He was not a fascist any more than Salazar was in Portugal, who also did not.
I mean, Portugal-Britain is like the longest lasting alliance in history, right?
The basis of that alliance was the threat of Spain, which in the 1930s and 40s really was not present.
The British-Portuguese alliance would get really quite antiquated.
Spain, one thing that Franco was opposed to was communism, especially in the Soviet variety, and he did send the Blue Division.
to go fight on the Eastern Front. But a lot of people say one of the reasons he did that was
basically to kind of get rid of these people so they couldn't cause trouble for him domestically.
There's also sort of a geopolitical bone-throwing to Hitler of like,
look I'm not helping you in no way, I'm helping you a little.
Yeah, he doesn't want them to take over the way they took over Northern Italy.
Right, yeah, he doesn't want a Salo regime.
And these kinds of things sound complicated, and these things sound like in the weeds and everything else, but this is the reality for a guy like WoWo, who, you know, he will live or die based on these cynical political choices that people are making hundreds of miles behind the front.
Because it's all about the maneuvering of these different political factions.
And when you get into that, when you get into the real politique of what's going on, all of the revolutionary fantasies, all of the propaganda, all of the slogans, all of the romanticism just fall by the wayside.
And he became incredibly frustrated with people who kept saying this stuff when it was very clear that all the idealism was gone, when it was very clear what was really happening.
And yet you still have these journalists saying this romantic nonsense about, like, oh the grand anti-fascist coalition or how great it is to be fighting for democracy when Orwell could say, like, actually the people you're praising are the ones gunning down The real Democrats.
But to Orwell's credit, he didn't purity spiral.
No, he didn't purity spiral.
Just because he observed all these things.
And as much as you and I are correct about the limits of labeling Franco as a fascist, Franco still unambiguously represented a threat to basically all of the things that Orwell really valued.
And he didn't let any of the Interracine, intraleft stuff get to his head so much that he stopped fighting against Franco.
Which, no matter which way you cut it, did make ideological sense for Orwell.
And he actually went down there.
He got a gun.
He got shot.
He almost died.
He saw people die.
He saw a lot of people die.
And he did what he could, which is really admirable.
You know, in the defense of contemporary leftists, there are not currently really clear-cut ideological wars right now that they can all go and fight in.
But still, it's something that's much more difficult to imagine of a lot of contemporary left-wing So, I mean, you know, you would never imagine, like, Christopher Hitchens, who's always compared with Orwell for some reason, going to Iraq to help, you know, liberate Iraqis, even though he ideologically really believed in that.
He would go, and he would, you know, he went there, and he would write about it, and I guess put himself in a little danger, but it's not like he fought.
Yeah, I mean one of the things that happens quite often in the Spanish Civil War is guys like Hemingway or whoever would show up and they would go to the front and they would like you know fire a gun at the fascist lines like once or twice and then be like oh I did this and it's like no.
I mean the thing about serving the Spanish Civil War was that it was mostly Boring and you're sitting there starving and cold and being eaten by lice and not having any food.
It's not like a romantic getaway.
Sure.
Well, and it's funny that you bring up Hemingway because Hemingway, much more than Orwell, can be credited with really romanticizing the left-wing cause for the English-speaking world with his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Pathetic, frankly.
The book is pathetic or his view is pathetic?
The view is pathetic.
I wouldn't say the book is pathetic.
Yeah, the book is not.
It's not pathetic.
But Hemingway, like Orwell, I mean not as well as Orwell, but there are huge chunks of For Whom the Bell Tolls that are really boring because they are just sitting around.
Waiting for orders.
Hiding out in a cave or some kind of encampment just waiting to hear word about what they're supposed to do next.
And it just takes chapters and chapters and chapters for anything to really get going.
The battle that you think is about to happen right in the beginning of the novel is the last chapter of the book and the book is almost 400 pages or something.
I read it in high school and I remember, for a class, a lot of people were getting Really, really frustrated of like, what is this war book where nothing's going on?
We're just hanging out here, just trying to figure out if the protagonist is really in love with Bilad or not.
Yeah, if you want a good war book, you know, in terms of where things are actually happening, obviously Peter Kemp's Mind War of Trouble, which is one of the very few accounts of an English volunteer fighting for the Nationalists.
And he also, I mean, he fought basically with the royalists as opposed to the fascists.
Okay, I haven't read it.
But Mind War of Trouble is an excellent read and considerably more exciting, so I'd recommend that.
Homage for Catalonia, I think, is interesting.
Not so much for the battle scenes, although there are some of that, and it's stuff he lived, but just the political intrigues and what it tells us about the nature of left and right.
And also, you know, the reminder that for all the divisions on the right, there are also plenty of divisions on the left.
But, all that said, I think one of the biggest takeaways from Orwell's work, and this is one of the reasons it kind of annoys me when conservatives try to claim him, Like there really, it really does matter between left and right.
I mean there really is, I don't think there's a way you like get past left and right unless it's with this kind of vision of nationalism where you go after classes and you go after tradition and you say basically that the well-being of this group of people is our northern star as opposed to any political ideology.
If you were talking about a pure battle of like every faction on the left versus every faction on the right, I mean you really can't do better than the Spanish Civil War.
And the thing that reminded me the most is when I was in Eastern Ukraine when maybe like a year or two after the whole thing they had the kind of abortive separatist movement and it's been kind of like a frozen war ever since.
And so I, you know, I heard guns firing, but technically there was a ceasefire.
I wasn't in any danger or anything like that.
I didn't do anything other than walk around and be shown stuff.
But, you know, there were all these random, you'd hear the artillery firing and hear the machine gun fire and be like, oh, it's a ceasefire.
It's like, well, it doesn't sound like a ceasefire.
But the biggest thing is you would just kind of see all these random groups of people who had just sort of like formed themselves into little military units and were wandering around.
And, you know, like, oh, this is the head of, like, the Defense, you know, Bureau or something, and it's just, like, some enlisted Soviet Navy guy from the 80s who clearly is, like, well above his station doing all this stuff.
And that's sort of what happened in Homage for Catalonia.
I mean, one thing Orwell says, and I think he's right about, is that the reason the revolt of the generals, which is really what Franco's rebellion was, I mean, it was basically a failed military coup initially, The reason it didn't succeed all at once is because you had all these anarchist groups and trade unions more or less spontaneously rise up and put a stop to it in certain areas.
But then the Republican government wouldn't give them weapons because if they had done that they would essentially have destroyed their own authority.
Very much so.
So what you essentially have then is sort of this weird situation where it's like you and your pals Form a military unit and have like some kind of civil authority or just sort of like wandering around being like yeah We're kind of doing what we want That was sort of the situation in Donbass and that's basically the kind of situation he describes at the beginning of homage to Catalonia then it becomes more formalized and bureaucratized and sovietized and actually instead of it making it better for the Republicans it gets worse and
And I think that is significant when it comes to Orwell because he does seem to have a pretty You know, for all the talk of him being kind of a cynic and a realist, he really does seem to have a belief that the masses can organize themselves and that people, you know, if left to their own devices... Throughout his essays, he puts an enormous amount of faith in the working class, just constantly.
He says that's the biggest safeguard against fascism.
They are the ones who held the line in the Spanish Civil War.
They're the ones that's going to keep that are going to keep the UK from ever going fascist, they're
the ones that might bring about the revolution, the socialist revolution in Britain, which
he very openly pined for a lot in his essays. As far as Orwell's cynicism, this is a very imprecise
label, but Orwell is kind of this like anti-cynic cynic, where he is very cynical about all
of these partisan people and all of these ideologies and all of this stuff, but at the end he
doesn't really care.
He still can view things in a certain black and white way.
He very cynically describes so much of the Spanish Civil War and very cynically describes so many of the problems on the left during that war, but ultimately he went and fought in that war for the side that he thought was unambiguously morally righteous and against the side that he thought was unambiguously evil.
Right.
And one thing he also has is a really kind of a moving passage where he says that not just when he first showed up, but then when he was in the trenches, you know, And he admits, you know, memory may have made this look rosier in retrospect, but it was the real experience of equality, which for him, someone who's very concerned about class, there was no bowing and scraping before officers.
Everybody was in it together.
There was no sense of Rich people sending poor people out to die for somebody else's war, and he has a very rosy view of that socialism of the trenches.
Now, of course, my obvious counter to that is that people on the right were saying the same thing.
I mean, this is basically where the whole idea of fascism even came from, especially for a guy who's defining everything as anti-fascism.
You know, what was fascism except the socialism of the trenches?
I think even Mussolini might have said that.
So he had, and there's this one part where he talks about, you know, they go over the lines and they take a segment of basically the nationalist positions and so they kind of break in and see what the nationalists have.
And they don't have very much.
It's not like they have better equipment.
It's not like they have, like, all this food or all this stuff that they've been storing up.
It's basically just a bunch of poor guys over there, too.
And he never quite reflects on that.
He just sort of is like, oh, well, they're conscripts, and they don't really know, and blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, well, I mean, I'm pretty sure most of these guys, like, sincerely believe in what they're fighting for.
Otherwise, they all would have deserted, and they did beat you in the end.
And he doesn't really give them much credit for that or really examine, well, why is it that these people who are part of this class, which I think should be on my side, why are they fighting against me so ferociously?
And it was, you know, the Falange, the guys who were like closest to him economically and the most concerned with class, who were the fiercest opponents of the Republic.
But Orwell still couldn't help but humanize his enemies.
There's this, again, this great passage in the essay looking back on the Spanish War, which is basically a rough draft for this book, where he's, the setting is he is in sort of a no man's land between two of the trenches.
And he writes, At this moment, a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view.
He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran.
I refrained from shooting at him.
It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the fascists had their attention fixed on the airplanes.
Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers.
I had come here to shoot at fascists.
But a man who is holding up his trousers isn't a fascist.
He is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.
Right.
That is something that he definitely lacks from a lot of the... I mean, this was...
Something that you note about Che Guevara, this is something you note a lot about Antifa, this is something you note about a lot of left-wing writers who are pretty openly celebrated, is just how often they praise ruthlessness.
And how often, like, it's, it's, we're gonna be re-baptized in blood, this is gonna say, I mean it's almost like...
being saved by the blood of Christ except instead of like you being saved by the sacrifice of somebody else it's like you holding the knife and somehow that saves you.
I mean Shay of course would always talk about like we have to kill and kill and kill and just wouldn't shut up about killing and then you know when he finally get killed he's like oh don't shoot me help me you're I'm worth more to you alive than dead but Orwell was not like that I mean he definitely He knew the necessity of violence, but he didn't revel in it.
And that alone may have made him an enemy to a big part of the left, at least at that time, because a lot of the left was just trying to get people to kill and to look at Stalin's purges and be like, no, either this isn't happening, or what the media does now, this isn't happening and it's a good thing.
And you have to, if you have any kind of Ability for nuance or empathy or even just to accurately report what's going on.
You're just not very effective as a left-wing polemicist because what you're trying to do is basically say these people are not human.
They are simply examples of a certain class and they need to be wiped out.
I mean, the other thing, of course, the thing we're kind of dancing around is, is Orwell all that relevant when, I don't know, it just doesn't seem like class is as big a thing now as race and identity.
I mean, at this point, we'll get into Orwell's views on nationalism and national differences in a second, but of course, at the end of the day, I mean, except for the Moors, who ironically we were fighting for, the nationalists, I mean, it was basically a bunch of white people fighting a bunch of white people over economic and ideological questions, whereas if you had some sort of a civil conflict in a Western country now, I mean, the indigenous working class, the white working class, they'd all be on the nationalist side.
I mean, that's one of the biggest things that's happened over the last few years and has been noted.
Pretty despairingly by a lot of left-wing commentators is that, you know, the grandsons of all the people who voted for the communists are all voting for the National Front in places like France or National Rally, whatever they call themselves now.
Right.
And that's basically true in almost every European country.
I mean, how relevant is class at this point compared to race and ethnicity and identity, which I would say is more important?
Yeah, well, I mean, we both work for American Renaissance, so we've already implicitly cast our ballot on that of classes very much secondary to race and identity, absolutely.
I mean, he talks a lot about political consciousness being the most advanced in Catalonia, and then it kind of retreats as the war goes, and that leads to...
You know, the rollback of the social revolution and it also, he would argue, leads back the rollback of their military capability and their ability to fight.
So this idea of identity as being socially constructed, I mean, it is implicit in his work because the very idea of building political consciousness means that somebody has to come along and do it.
You have to make people aware of the fact that they're oppressed.
You have to make people aware of the fact that they are a class.
That they have class interests.
And of course, we would be saying the same thing.
Like, look, you're part of a people.
You have interests as part of a people.
You're part of this people whether you want to be or not.
No, I think racial identity is much more innate than any kind of class consciousness.
I really don't think it has to be taught almost at all.
So long as you're living in a multiracial society, it's really obvious really early on in life.
Well, he does ultimately, I think, come around to that.
I mean, one thing he does say is that You know, there's the line in The Unicorn, Socialism and the English Genius, which I think is his best essay.
You know, the first line is quoted ad nauseum just because it's sort of like, oh, one of these clever things I can tweet out.
You know, as I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me.
Now, of course, what's kind of funny about this is these highly civilized human beings that he's referring to are Keep reading though.
The following line is actually better than the first.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them.
They are only doing their duty as the saying goes.
Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted, law-abiding men who would never dream of committing
murder in private life.
Now this is sort of the takedown of like, oh bourgeois morality and everything else,
but what he goes down to say, and this is where, I mean, really the left still hasn't
recovered from this since World War I, when, you know, the working class has voted pretty
decisively in favor of, you know, the fatherland as opposed to class revolution.
One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty.
In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it.
Christianity and international socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it.
I think that's still true.
That actually also can be a bit of a problem for us If there's a case where we have some sort of a foreign policy situation where people are saying rally around the flag and they're trying to get us into another brother's war with Russia or whoever the the next Hitler of the day is and you know just like with the original America first movement a lot of us are gonna be like saying no like this is not not our fight but that impulse to side with your own is always there and
This is something inherent.
It's not something that has to be constructed.
It's always there whether you like it or not.
And he says, you know, a nation changes.
And so you can't really compare England to 1600 to 1900.
But it is still the same thing.
Just as a child of 10 is the same man at 30.
Now some would argue even with that.
But he takes that as self-evident.
And he also says that national unity, including making moments of, I mean, he's arguing about pre-war British foreign policy, where the entire nation, he argues, made foolish decisions, but they did it more or less unanimously, and they worked more or less as a unit, for better or worse, which implies that there is this inherent nation that exists, regardless of what anybody says about it.
Sure, so let me read another passage of his on this topic.
He writes, Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism.
It is a devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-white Bolshevik to Russia.
To be loyal both to Chamberlain's England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon.
Only revolution can save England.
That has been obvious for years.
But now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly, if only we can keep Hitler out.
Within two years, maybe a year, if only we can hang on, we shall see changes that will surprise the idiots who have no foresight.
I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood.
Alright, let them, if it is necessary.
But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz, I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago, and for such different reasons, is somehow persisting.
Yeah.
There's a lot in there, a lot in there.
I should state, initially in Orwell's defense, that was written in 1940.
Just a few years later, he admitted that, like, oh yeah, the socialist revolution is not about to come to the UK, and I was really foolish for thinking that it was.
And then he died in 1950.
So I think It's a very interesting passage, and I think his opinion, his take on patriotism, was probably widely held by a lot of people at the time, like both in England and elsewhere.
But actually, I have my doubts to what extent that's really true of a lot of people now.
It actually reminds me of Enoch Powell, who I'm sure... Yeah, I was just about to say that.
He famously said that he would still fight in the British military even if Britain became a communist country.
And that reduced Margaret Thatcher to speechlessness.
She didn't even know how to respond to that.
I think way fewer people would agree with Orwell and Enoch today than at that time.
I mean, I think even for you and I, if a war broke out between the United States and Iran,
let's do something less cataclysmic than Russia, I would feel very bad for the American soldiers
that have to go and to do that. And I would hope for as few American casualties of any kind
possible.
And I would feel really, ideally, zero, by some miracle.
And that would really be just a lot more about those people than the nation as a whole.
I would only want America to win that conflict if it meant that less Americans would die than if we lost.
It would totally just be about harm reduction.
The extent of my patriotism to the polity of the United States is...
I love American history.
My family's American.
My friends are American.
All these things.
I'm undeniably American in so many different ways.
I don't really wish the best for the country.
I wish the best for the people I know and care about.
This is how I just wrote about this yesterday.
About the flag, you know, I think it was some singer Marcy Gray, I think, had said like, oh, we need like a new American flag.
Basically, we need like brown and black stars and we need off white stripes and we need to basically to make the point that.
The historic American flag doesn't represent us, and we need this new flag to represent what America is today.
And I'm saying this openly, like, yeah, we do.
Because we need to get it through white Americans' heads that the United States, the polity, is not America.
And I think this is an important distinction, and maybe something where Orwell just died too early to really see it.
He argues that basically a nation can't be fundamentally transformed or turned into something other than what it is without almost apocalyptic scenarios.
So, like, think of England.
I mean, you've got the Viking invasion, you've got the Roman retreat, you've got the Viking invasions, the Anglo-Saxon invasions, you've got Cromwell where they executed the king and had a republic for a while, the Restoration, you've got all sorts of, you know, a lot of bloodletting on this island, but there's still England and you can still point to something that's meaningfully England for a very long time.
I would argue that The England of 1900 has almost nothing to do with the England of now.
That's just a century.
And the biggest thing is mass immigration.
Because now, perhaps at no other time in history, people would fight about whether this king or that king had the right claim to the throne, maybe about ideology.
I mean, clearly Orwell was a product of the age of ideology and the age of mass society.
But now, I mean, it's really about peoples.
And I think the fundamental question that confronts us is, is this polity, the United States, or for that matter, the United Kingdom, does it have anything to do with the nation?
And I would say not only is the answer no, But the current polities that exist in the West, they're defined explicitly in opposition to the existing nation.
And in America, I mean, it's not quite there yet, but it's getting there.
I mean, what is the point of critical race theory?
What is the point of Juneteenth as a second Independence Day?
What is the point of all these new things they're pushing?
Why the Tulsa blood libel?
Why do all these things?
The point is to say, The purpose of the United States is to overcome everything America did over the last three centuries.
There's precedence for this if you just look at like modern South Africa and how it defines itself in opposition to what South Africa was before.
And so you have to ask yourself... Is the South Africa of today the same South Africa that existed 30 years ago?
It's idiotic and you can be like well this like institution still exists and here's this white guy in the army who's still in the white in the army now and it's like that doesn't mean anything.
It's not the same nation.
It's just not and that's because I mean this is just one of the things that where I think American political vocabulary is just flawed.
We use terms like state, nation, country interchangeably and they're not the same thing.
I mean the nation is the people and the nation is eternal to some extent.
Whereas the polity, the government, it's just a thing.
An enemy thing?
Yeah, and you have to ask yourself, is this just an occupation government?
That's something Orwell sort of takes on here because at the time, if you're a left-winger and you're committed to class politics, the line is the working class has no country.
Right?
I mean this is one of the reasons that he was controversial on the left for a long time.
The whole idea is that, and they still go with this even though it's obviously nonsense at this point, that patriotism and national feeling in history, this is like some sort of a capitalist plot to like trick the working class into fighting against their own interests.
Even though the biggest enemies of, like, patriotism and identity and everything else now seem to be the Chamber of Commerce and, like, the richest people in the world.
Right.
But you still see leftists making this, you know, century-old argument, which I'm not even sure Marx believed in it by the end.
But Orwell, to his credit, says, okay, this is nonsense, no, there's this thing, there's this nation, we're a part of it, you can't help but notice national feeling wherever you go.
He goes further and says, you won't ever really be happy Unless you're in your own country, which I think is a pretty remarkable statement.
But is that really speaking to what we face now, where you're essentially alienated within your own country, or you're sort of a people without a country?
Yeah.
Well, patriotism, I mean, the senses of patriotism in America peaked around 2004, 2005, and started
to go down and basically plateaued at a relatively low level.
And it's been declining for the first time among white Republicans, which is something
I mean, it's always been declining for a long time, but you never really saw the decline among white Republicans until quite recently.
And part of that could just be the same social breakdown you see everywhere else.
But I think at least part of it is because a lot of white Republicans are looking around and being like, you know, oh, I don't recognize my own country.
I mean, that's one thing.
I think it's more a question of, This isn't my country.
Yeah.
And this is not that crazy or unique in, like, American history.
Even for, like, a lot of the values that white Republicans hold dearest, like, measuring America by those standards, you know, abortion, pornography, gay marriage, America is obviously not a super great place.
There are plenty of places.
I mean, every other country has less porn than America.
And there are lots of countries out there in Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc., where abortion and gay marriage are illegal.
If those are your enormous moral precepts, like...
Not only does America endorse all those things, America really aggressively spreads it across the world.
How proud can you really be of that?
If you are a committed Christian and you think these are the most important things, I mean, America's the great Satan.
Yeah, and I think that's starting to dawn on more and more people, honestly.
I mean, even as we record this, I mean, there's this big thing right now where they're pushing against Hungary and saying like, oh no, you're not sufficiently celebratory of these things and everything else.
I mean, that flag, you know, the off-white stripes and the brown and black star flag, I mean, the real flag of America now, it's not even the rainbow flag, it's that, like, stupid intersectional flag where you have brown and black stripes and... Right, it's the one at the bottom of that essay you just read.
Yeah, and it's basically what that flag tells you is that this is for everybody except the people who built the country that existed before.
But it's, again, it's really hard for Americans to kind of come to terms with that white americans but it's not unprecedented if you look at american identity right before the war between the states the guys who were the big nationalists were basically the southerners in like the 1840s 1850s if you want to go further back
In the War of 1812, it was basically the West and the South that was saying, we're going to go to war.
It was New England that almost seceded.
And New England might have seceded had the Battle of New Orleans not gone the way it did or had the war not ended the way it did.
I mean, if there had been military defeat, I think that would have been taken a lot more seriously.
And this idea of being a super patriot and then suddenly flipping and turning into something Totally opposed or something that wants to be completely separate from the existing polity.
I mean, that's a lot of the story of American history.
That's also arguably true of the American Revolution.
I mean, George Washington was one of the pivotal figures in starting the French and Indian War.
And then, you know, fast forward a few years, I'm sure his younger self would have been horrified at the idea of revolting against the British Empire, but That's what it came to.
And he thought it was his duty and everybody was like, yes, this is what we need to do.
And it was not the lower classes that did that.
I mean, it was chiefly the guys in charge and the lower classes and the colonies mostly supported them, as far as what I can see from evidence at the time.
Wasn't a lot of loyalism among, you know, merchants and small scale shop owners and things like that, except in places like New York.
Orwell, I think he's important in the sense of how we look at class and how we look at journalism and how we look at the way left and right function.
I just think he might be a bit outdated in terms of the questions he was analyzing in terms of the questions today.
And there really hasn't been a figure from the left that has really grappled with this as effectively as he grappled with the issues of his time.
There's certainly nobody out there who puts himself In danger, or to like actually report on what's happening.
As opposed to, like, I saw a meme on the internet and I'm sad.
I mean, no, there are a handful of people, especially on what's called the Dirtbag Left, or some of the Bernie Bros.
I mean, one even famously did actually go to Syria to try and help fight ISIS.
Well, you do have a lot of, yeah, the Kurdish... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And some of these people, like, around, what are they called, like, the Grey Zone with Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, like, they do actually go to the Middle East to cover these things.
They don't fight, but they do cover it.
Sure, sure.
Orwell is actually similar to Fukuyama in that when I read him it forces me to get better at my own arguments, because I think Orwell and Fukuyama are both wrong about a lot of things, but they argue so convincingly as to why they're right that you force yourself to become smarter to read it, because Orwell was a freaking absolute genius.
Oh yeah, and again I think- In terms of prose and everything.
His most well-known works are, I think, the ones that aren't his best.
That tells you something.
I mean, again, I think his essays, you'll get a lot more out of it than Animal Farm or 1984, and they are shamefully neglected.
And I think they're shamefully neglected because...
They are nuanced and you're not just going to get like one, you know, what is the thesis of animal farm?
Like totalitarianism is bad.
Like, great.
Thank you.
But you know, if you're, if you're getting into something like the lion and the unicorn, you're talking about like, what is the nation?
What does it consist of?
What is the relationship between the working class and the nation?
Can the working class be patriotic?
I mean, these are important questions at that time.
They're still important now, especially because, I mean, you do see sort of a, Maybe a little bit of a revival of sort of the old school communist movement.
I mean, I kind of roll my eyes at the, oh, it's actually like communism coming back.
But I mean, there are some people who are trying to get the old band back together.
I just don't think it works because Racial and national and ethnic questions have just become so much more important than questions of class.
Yeah, it is really unfortunate that Orwell died before his time.
Yeah, he did.
It's sad when anybody dies before their time, but slowly dying from tuberculosis over the course of nearly a decade is really not... Especially right before tuberculosis almost became not a thing.
Right, right, right.
It would have been really interesting to see what he had to say about all of the social upheaval of the 1960s, when things like race and identity become really forefront, when cultural Marxism starts to kind of replace classical Marxism, at least in the West, as the sort of in-vogue elite ideology.
And when you can actually start to argue that the nation ceases to exist.
The idea of being part of something eternal, being part of... even if we take the most bare-bones, like I said in the recent essay, even if we take the most bare-bones, stupid, academic thing, like, oh, it's an imagined community, you don't even have that now.
And it's not just that, oh, people are disagreeing about what America is.
It's just like, here you have this group of people who just have nothing to do, nothing whatsoever to do.
And there are big questions here.
I mean, you're seeing this with a number of conservative thinkers where they'll say something like, well, and you're seeing this, I think Chris Ruffo was saying this, arguing against like critical race theory, where he says like, well, this is, it's very important that we go against this, but it's also very, very important.
That we don't say that this is anti-white.
Because at the end of the day, I have more in common with this black person from Detroit than I do with somebody from Finland.
And it's like, no you don't.
Yeah, it's just not true.
If somebody shoves a mic in my face and says, do you really believe that you have more in common with some Hungarian peasant that you've never met and couldn't communicate five words with?
than you do with a guy who might live in your same city.
The answer is yes, obviously. It's not even a question. This is one of those axiomatic
differences where, yeah, when people lie to me about how to answer that question or have
convincingly like lied to themselves, it's I don't really know what to say.
It's like, would you rather live in Finland or Gary, Indiana?
I mean, I don't get it.
Or it's the same thing I used to always ask libertarians, which is, do you want social, you know, what would be better?
Capitalism in Haiti or socialism in Finland?
Socialism in Sweden.
And you know, every once in a while you would actually have somebody who would be like, well, capitalism in Haiti.
What do you even say to that?
And this is really important, guys, because what Orwell says about conservatism having nothing to do with patriotism, I think it might be a bit more nuanced than that, but it's something to internalize as basically true and something that is core to us.
And maybe there just is no authentic American conservative movement, but right now, The party line, to use something that like Orwell would be against, the party line of American conservatism is that America is defined by ideas.
And this is the exact same thing that Biden is saying.
And it's defined, there's just sort of some quibbling about what those ideas are.
And we're defined by the Declaration of Independence, and we're defined by the Constitution, and we're defined by certain legal norms, and our response to that has to be, no, absolutely not!
Because we can point to other places in the world where they've more or less put these exact same things in, and you have dramatically different results.
Liberia was basically set up to be a copy of America.
I mean, for God's sake, until recently, I think the guys who were running the show were called, like, The Wig Party or something like that.
Oh, really?
Yeah, like, until not that long ago.
And, like, oh, well, these guys are clearly the ideological heirs of Henry Clay.
I mean, no, forget it.
I mean we have to be honest with ourselves and cutting through the nuance and cutting, not cutting through the nuance, but cutting through the ideology and cutting through the slogans and cutting through just all like the pretty lies.
I think that's what Orwell was better at than just about anybody else on the left or right.
And that's why it's worth reading him because it really does show you how to just cut through the nonsense and get to what's real.
And basically the way to get to what's real is to talk about personal experience and what's going on on the ground.
You know, the guy running around holding his pants up.
I mean, that's the face of war.
And one of the things I love about a lot of Orwell's essays and one of his early novels, Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
Greg and I were looking up how to pronounce this before the show so we wouldn't sound too dumb, but I'd never even heard of it.
Now that you've announced it.
Well, sorry, I was looking it up.
Greg knew, but he just didn't want to tell me because he thought it'd be better if I learned it for my own sake.
That's my line, I'm sticking to it.
But I'd never even heard of this plant until I read this book.
But that novel and a number of his essays as well are There's like no non-cliche way of putting this, but Orwell writes so beautifully about being broke and smart and just directionless and just kind of bumming around the world and not having money for cigarettes and reading a lot and wanting to write but not getting published and all of this stuff.
I mean, he captures human relationships and emotions really well.
Two, he has this huge essay called Such Were the Joys, which was actually only published after he died because it was considered libelous, which is all about his time at a preppy boarding school where he was just the poorest kid there and had this miserable time.
He talks about how when he first got there he started chronically wetting the bed because he missed home so much and how he's always in trouble for it and he felt so ashamed and so embarrassed but he couldn't stop it.
It was involuntarily happening while he was asleep.
What was he supposed to do about it?
It was something he felt so powerless to stop and he writes about this.
All of this just so poetically.
He's got another great essay about what it's like to work at a bookstore and how it made him enjoy books less because the job was actually quite miserable.
He's got another book called Down and Out in London Paris, which is really similar.
Something I think a lot of us grew up with is teachers and And parents and stuff always recommend to you the big countercultural classics of the 1960s.
Oh yeah.
You know, like I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac in school.
It was a high school assignment to read it.
This is the counterculture and you have to read it from your state institution.
Yeah, and same with Hunter S. Thompson and everything.
And something that always really struck me about all of those books is just how obviously wealthy the United States was and how many opportunities there were.
Because the protagonists are always these kind of hardscrabble losers who just, you know, can just
hitchhike across the United States with no money and do it fine. Be safe and do whatever. Huntress
Thompson, you know, can buy a pack of cigarettes for 25 cents and then, you know, just smoke in
his hotel room or at the police station or while he's in prison. All this stuff. There's just all
of these liberties and there's just so much opportunity and generosity of just that post-war
United States that was just so wealthy and was just this big open society.
This wasn't true at all when I was growing up as a teenager, like especially after the 08 crash.
And Orwell, who was writing about being broke and smart and directionalist, was writing about that in the 1920s and 1930s when there was way less wealth and way less opportunity It resonates a lot more with people living today, with the gig economy and rent being exorbitantly high no matter where you go.
We need to become a nation of renters.
The dream of homeownership is over, but that's a good thing.
And this is coming from the people who they say are actually supporting the nationalists.
So I would recommend a lot of just his autobiographical and autobiographically fictional writings.
Just on that as well.
millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter and everything else.
So I would recommend a lot of just his autobiographical and autobiographically fictional writings.
Just on that as well, I mean especially for our young listeners.
There's a lot of stuff and again that just keen, observant eye that Orwell had for everything
I think is actually often best pointed at just day-to-day life as opposed to a lot of
these grandiose political things that he did.
He'll teach you how to write, he'll teach you how to think, and most importantly, he'll teach you how to turn that critical eye on your own movement and yourself.
As Saul Alinsky said, something along the lines of that, any activist has to be a bit of a political schizophrenic in the sense that you have to, and Orwell did this to his credit, you have to totally believe in the ideal and you have to be willing to give Your life for it, but at the same time you can't be such a true believer that you're just blinded by propaganda Or willing to just spout off cliches or not notice what's going on, right?
I mean, what are we defined?
We notice what we're not supposed to yeah, that's what the movement is and Orwell noticed things and that's why he was unpopular among the left in his time and And he was useful to the right, which of course was unforgivable to the left.
I mean, I think the left hates left-wing journalists who produce things that then the right uses.
I mean, those are the worst enemies.
They hate them more than they hate us.
But he never betrayed the left.
He never ceased to be a democratic socialist.
There's a broader question, which we didn't get a chance to get into today, but I think we'll get into it at another time, maybe when we talk about the book, The Demon in Democracy, about whether democracy inherently leads to totalitarianism.
That's for another thing, but one thing I want to kind of close on, especially talking about class, is, now again, Orwell, as you just pointed out, he not just, he didn't just dislike the ruling class.
I mean, he lived it.
He dealt with these people and basically thought of them as scum, essentially.
Yeah, totally.
And this is also what he loved about Catalonia, even with all the misery and the militia and what he, again, he says pathetic, pathetic, pathetic over and over again about all these like stupid things they do and just obvious problems that they can't solve because you know and and there's definitely a bit of like British xenophobia here where it's like ugh just put me in charge and I'll fix all this stuff but he does recognize that there was something to the English ruling class that has been lost
He says, quote, probably the battle of Waterloo was one on the playing fields of Eden, but the
opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
One of the dominant facts in English life during the past three quarters of a century has been
the decay of ability in the ruling class.
And then he goes all the way and he basically says, after 1832, the old land-owning aristocracy
steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil, they simply intermarried
with the merchants, manufacturers, and financiers who had replaced them,
and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves.
The wealthy ship owner, Ockhat Miller, set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms of public schools which had been designed for just that purpose.
England was ruled by an aristocracy, constantly recruited from parvenus.
And considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and considering that they were buying their way into a class that at any rate had a tradition of public service, one might have expected that able rulers could have produced in some such way.
And yet, Somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent.
I mean that's almost like something out of Evola or something.
The decline of the traditional landed aristocracy, the merger into the bourgeoisie, and the loss of the great heroic virtues.
I mean, Jonathan Bowden, speaking on on Evola, he says, you know, the biggest problem with the English aristocracy is that, you know, they had lost their And, you know, these were men who identified with symbols of heritage like, you know, eagles and, you know, ruthlessness and daring and combat.
These were the things that made you what you were.
I mean, the reason you got to be a lord is because your ancestors fought in the Crusades or did something incredible.
And you're sitting there and you're, you know, marrying the daughter of some media mogul so you can It's hard.
lordship or pay the expenses on your decaying castle. I mean you want to talk
about the decline of the ruling class and the decline of the aristocracy. I
mean Prince Harry. What would Orwell make of that? And then sadly he's not
even the worst at least he's served. Yeah true true. It's hard. I mean it's
it's a permanent frustration that it's it's difficult.
I mean, I would, I would pay so much money to be able to read an essay by George Orwell about what he made of the riots in Paris in May of 1968.
Oh yeah.
You know, or what he may would have, you know, if he'd been an on the ground reporter of the Chicago DNC in 1968.
Yeah, the days of rage and all that.
Yeah.
There's just, there's so many important things that happened.
I mean, so much of, so much of what Orwell saw and commented on then dramatically changed.
In the two decades after his death, and the fact that he was this nationalistic democratic socialist, that he had some level of nostalgia for this crumbling elite, that he served as an imperial policeman in a colony and became anti-imperialist.
He recognized that there was a ruling class.
But then didn't even really get to see the complete collapse of the British Empire.
It's just really unfortunate.
What he would have made of the collapse of the empire because, you know, here's this critic of the empire and then you look at what came after it.
It's like, okay, did you know, did the social revolution come to Britain as a result?
I mean, and this was sort of what you're talking about with a lot of these counterculture writers, like on the road and everything else.
I mean, With World War you're reading his struggles and you're sympathizing with them.
With these books they make you read in school, you really hate these people.
It's like these people had every opportunity they could have created like a paradise, instead they threw it away to get drunk and die.
The best example of that is the movie Easy Rider, where all of the main characters are just these despicable, self-centered losers.
We're just biking around for the hell of it and dropping acid and feeling superior to everything.
The rednecks did nothing wrong.
It's just all so dumb.
Orwell.
This is heroism.
This is what you should aspire to.
And that's part of the reason you and I sympathize so much with Orwell.
Contrast the heroism of Easy Rider versus actually going to Spain without really knowing Spanish.
Being like, yeah, I'm going to pick up a rifle and we're going to try and do this.
We're going to try and win.
I mean, of course, the funny thing now is Homage to Catalonia would probably be called racist because he keeps complaining about the tendency of the Spanish to always say, manana, manana, when it's time to do something.
It's like, no, let's do it now.
It's like, ah, manana.
Oh, he makes all kinds of racial comments throughout his essays.
The little subgroups of Spain, too, yeah.
He talks quite a bit in The Lion, the Unicorn about the reality of national differences, how you come to notice these things, basically making sweeping judgments, what we today would call stereotypes about different countries, but like, no, this is the way different peoples operate.
And it tells us something about them.
Even the things that you wouldn't notice.
I mean, he goes on this long digression about the English love of flowers and like how important that is.
That's right.
But by the end of it, you're like, oh, this actually does tell us something about like the English character, at least as it once existed.
And I think that, you know, beyond what we talked about the value of him as a writer and as a thinker and what it can give you guys, in terms of what it means for us, other than the core thing of being honest about the movement and ourselves and our own motivations, I think it's that Our situation is fundamentally different from his because we are now at a point where the thing that even he could take for granted, even a guy who talks about total social revolution could take for granted, which is the continuity of the nation and the people, now that's up in the air.
Now literally everything is at stake and it goes beyond class, it goes beyond tradition, it goes beyond any legal form, it even goes beyond the nation-state or the government.
It's something about as primal and as important as it can possibly be.
And it's both a blessing and a curse to live at this moment because whether Western civilization lives or dies is going to come down to us.
So...
Well, on that cheery note, we'll probably close.
We'll leave you with that.
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