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George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

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Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#551

Post by typon »

VieEnCode wrote: post #539
culi wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that time in Europe "socialism" basically just meant "good". It was a stand in for a government where you care about each other. Then there's the more "theoretical" definition of socialism. In the US it might seem bewildering why Orwell considered the anarchists of that war to be the "true socialists" (despite Orwell being a communist, he had a lot of support for them). But the truth is that both anarchism and com…

Orwell wasn’t a communist. “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.”

Not sure if this is a joke, but you are equating communism with totalitarianism, which is the opposite

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#552

Post by V-2 »

permo-w wrote: post #550
V-2 wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would be no Hitler without Stalin to begin with, while the opposite isn't true. Besides, the UK has committed acts of (de facto) shameful collaboration with Stalin, such as the forceful and brutal "repatriation" of Cossacks to the USSR where they faced certain death. To quote Wikipedia, "On 1 June 1945 the UK placed 32,000 Cossacks (with their women and children) into trains and trucks and delivered them to the…

while this is clearly good reason for Brits to hate Stalin, I sincerely doubt any significant portion of the general population is even aware of it. Your average Brit has heard of the purges, the terrors of Soviet communism and maybe about Soviet spies infiltrating the British government (Philby, Burgess, Maclean etc), but that's about it. practically no one has any awareness of our government's actions in the era af…

That's probably true (I doubt the premise to begin with, I'm not sure if Stalin is universally perceived as more repellent than Hitler by the general public in the UK, the poll results notwithstanding - although I'm not a Brit, I only lived in the UK for a few years).

However such general sentiments can 'survive' the knowledge that kickstarted them and propagate in the collective consciousness without it.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#553

Post by Nitramp »

typon wrote: post #551
VieEnCode wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orwell wasn’t a communist. “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.”

Not sure if this is a joke, but you are equating communism with totalitarianism, which is the opposite

I think you're referring to Communism-the-abstract-concept, whereas Orwell and OP are referring the Communism-what-actually-happened-everywhere-we-tried-it. The former is a utopic ruler-less society, the latter ends up being a totalitarian terror state brutalizing its impoverished citizens.

The very point of Orwell was recognizing this, and the fundamental similarity across totalitarian ideologies.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#554

Post by permo-w »

V-2 wrote: post #552
permo-w wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while this is clearly good reason for Brits to hate Stalin, I sincerely doubt any significant portion of the general population is even aware of it. Your average Brit has heard of the purges, the terrors of Soviet communism and maybe about Soviet spies infiltrating the British government (Philby, Burgess, Maclean etc), but that's about it. practically no one has any awareness of our government's actions in the era af…

That's probably true (I doubt the premise to begin with, I'm not sure if Stalin is universally perceived as more repellent than Hitler by the general public in the UK, the poll results notwithstanding - although I'm not a Brit, I only lived in the UK for a few years). However such general sentiments can 'survive' the knowledge that kickstarted them and propagate in the collective consciousness without it.

>However such general sentiments can 'survive' the knowledge that kickstarted them and propagate in the collective consciousness without it.

very true, but that would require the general public to have known about it at any point, which is doubtful in itself.

if we do take his lesser contempt to be true, which I agree is not a given, a darker hypothesis could develop from Hitler's view of the British as as or more Aryan than the Germans

perhaps this twisted compliment could have seeped into the public (sub)consciousness. but again, whether people are or were actually aware of it is questionable, and whether it would have an effect is equally uncertain

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#556

Post by helloworld11 »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #480
helloworld11 wrote: post #414

>Probably, in Hitler's own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia's turn will come when England is out of the picture—that, no…

This was not a rare view at the time, was it? IIRC a lot of people saw it coming.

Rare view? Maybe not, but neither was it widely assumed or a sure thing in the eyes of many contemporaries. Even inside Germany, inside Hitler's own government, quite a few well-placed people thought that the alliance with Stalin might be made to last quite a while as a pragmatic, mutually useful thing. There was even good logic for the notion: Stalin's own government almost certainly had no intention of actually attacking and trying to invade the Reich. What Stalin wanted most from the pact was enough time to fortify soviet defenses against a possible eventual German attack while grabbing up as much territory under the pact's leeway points as he could. Hitler's fear was in letting that go on for too long, to the point that the USSR would be much more difficult to invade.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#557

Post by V-2 »

permo-w wrote: post #554
V-2 wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably true (I doubt the premise to begin with, I'm not sure if Stalin is universally perceived as more repellent than Hitler by the general public in the UK, the poll results notwithstanding - although I'm not a Brit, I only lived in the UK for a few years). However such general sentiments can 'survive' the knowledge that kickstarted them and propagate in the collective consciousness without it.

>However such general sentiments can 'survive' the knowledge that kickstarted them and propagate in the collective consciousness without it. very true, but that would require the general public to have known about it at any point, which is doubtful in itself. if we do take his lesser contempt to be true, which I agree is not a given, a darker hypothesis could develop from Hitler's view of the British as as or more Ar…

Certainly way more people know about the bombing campaigns of 1940-41, whereas at the end of the day, Stalin never dropped bombs on the UK

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#558

Post by zeendo »

notRobot wrote: post #216
rossdavidh wrote: post #186

So, there's a lot to be said about Hitler and fascism and propaganda and all the other fascinating topics Orwell brings up here, but I'd just like to point out how routinely excellent Orwell's analysis is. Of course I mostly see the best bits brought out and dusted off, no doubt he did mediocre stuff as well, but it is worth noticing how often it turns out that Orwell, nearly a century on, still has plenty in his wri…

Any recommendations for other writings and analyses by Orwell?

"Facing Unpleasant Facts" is a fantastic collection of his essays. Highly recommended.

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#559

Post by masswerk »

sudosysgen wrote: post #443
masswerk wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is often forgotten, by the early 1930s, the split between SPD and KPD (which dates back to Marx and Engels and the condemnation of the "Bernsteinian revisionism" on the one hand and the SPD not being a revolutionary party after 1903) had become an abyss: to the KPD the SPD was a "social-fascist movement" and the SPD had adopted the three-arrows symbol, which symbolized an equidistance to fascism, communism and m…

The rift dates to WW1, not the 1930s, and considering the three arrows to be a better marking of the rift than the SPD literally giving the order to murder KPD is nonsensical. There was no split in 1903 - the SPD simply had both a revolutionary and electoral faction. And Bernsteinian revisionism wasn't about taking power through elections or through revolution (which is what the SPD took position on in 1903), it was…

> The rift dates to WW1, not the 1930s (…)

What I wrote is that the rift dates back to the late 19th century and had become rather an abyss by the early 1930s (considering things like the Iron Front).

Re: George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

#560

Post by smolder »

cherrycherry98 wrote: post #505
tasty_freeze wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is we are facing a deep crisis that will require sacrifice and huge effort, but 50% of the country claims it's a hoax and the other 50% accept the problem but are whistling past the graveyard. I speak, of course, about climate change. We have had a century of millions of people worldwide working ferociously and spending tens of billions of dollars every year to extract coal and oil for profit. To fix…

The insistence that climate solutions involve self sacrifice I believe is a misguided one. I view the transformation to a low carbon future as happening primarily through the existence of natural economic incentives to do so. People aren't buying electric cars and installing solar panels on their homes out of self sacrifice. Electric vehicles have many desirable features like being very performant, lower maintenance,…

> People aren't buying electric cars and installing solar panels on their homes out of self sacrifice.

This idea is simply wrong. Many of them are doing exactly that, they are using their brains and making sacrifices in their daily life in hopes that collective action in reducing impact will at least give us the time to course correct or reduce the impact of our collective failure with respect to climate change. If you don't know anyone doing this, that's because of who you know.

> I view the transformation to a low carbon future as happening primarily through the existence of natural economic incentives to do so.

Yes, we will need economic pressures to get everyone overall to conform to a sustainable lifestyle, mainly because we cannot coordinate global human action any other way. No, those pressures are not "natural" ones unless you mean as a result of destroying Earth's climate to the point change is necessary for even day to day survival. We have to choose our future, however hard it may be.

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