On Tuesday, March 21, 2000 8:12 PM Michael S. Lorrey retroman@turbont.net
wrote:
> > > Orwell never spent any time in a communist
> > > nation, he only knew what he heard by hanging out with the Cambridge
> > > bred aristo-communists popular in Britain in the 30's. Ask Sasha
> > > Chislenko what he thinks...
> >
> > Orwell also spent some time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War
> > (1936-1939). He even joined a militia there. He did get to see how
> > Communists, especially Stalinists, operate up close and personal. In
fact,
> > he wrote a book on it, _Homage to Catalonia_ in 1938. This is a far cry
> > from just hanging out in Cambridge.
>
> Yes, I heard about that the other day on the anarchist newsgroup.
How come it took Michael so long?:) I've known about this because I've read
some of Orwell's works -- and, well, because he's kind of a name in
literature. Not knowing about Orwell's time in Spain is almost akin to not
knowing Stephen King lives in Maine.:) If I were told to list, say, 100
20th century writers I knew, he [Orwell and, yeah, King too:)] would
probably be on it. Also, if I were told to attack someone's character, I
would do a little research about the person... It's not like Orwell hid his
life story.:)
> His
> animosity towards Stalin was because Josef supposedly didn't keep his
> promises to the spanish communists. However, Spain was hardly a
> communist country at that point, it was merely a rather ravaged country.
I never claimed it was a communist country, but the point is Michael's above
quoted comments make it seem like Orwell lived a sheltered life. (Ditto for
other artists. What of A. Solzhenitsyn (just about any book by him) or Ayn
Rand (_Anthem_ and _We the Living_; the former should be compared with
_Nineteen Eighty-Four_, especially in the area of Newspeak) -- two writers
who wrote about communist countries who had an inside view of things?)
L8R!
Daniel Ust
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/
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