Beatriz Baptista > Recent Status Updates

i’m so sorry dolores……

we failed as a society for making this book famous…..

STFU

OMG CRINGE

“Stalinism has gone but there are a lot of messages out there and our world is not short of lies being peddled as truths, of icons being presented as arguments, of barbarism masquerading as freedom. Orwell once said that the hardest thing of all is to see what is in front of your nose.”

“Thus, insofar as the Soviet Union was seen as the 'dynamo of world Socialism' (his words) it had to be defended,) or 'the working class everywhere would lose heart. At the same time, and in exactly the same way, insofar as the Soviet Union was seen as the dynamo of world socialism, it had to be attacked, or people would never be able to see it for what it really was.”

“(…) he did not want to see the Soviet Union destroyed, 'so long as people believe in it'. It was the believing in it that Orwell wanted to correct, not the course of Russian history.”

“Asking whether Orwell was a patriot is like asking whether Julius Caesar was assassinated. The patrician right could never forgive him for his populism; the patrician left the same. The Marxist left - Old or New - never forgave (have never forgiven) his remorseless hostility to the Soviet Union.”

“Work with what's on offer, not what's ideal. See what you see, not what you've been told you see. Stay close to the ground. Trust the people. Weigh the options.”

“Orwell had gone to Spain eager to kill fascists. He left Spain on the run from Communists who wanted to kill him. Sometimes you have to look twice at what you believe in.”

“Animal Farm is essentially about the difference between being spoken for and being lied to. The pigs speak for freedom and equality on behalf of all animals while doing the opposite.”

“We are led to believe he may have been a better alternative to Napoleon but there again he might not. Once a pig always a pig.”

“We are told that the reading land writing classes are a success but they're not. (…) But in the end most animals are loyal to the regime because they are loyal to each other and to the land they are building at such a cost, while Napoleon is treacherous because he cares only about power.”

“Far from wanting to be animals, they want to be humans. Far from wanting to do something great, they want to do something greedy. Far from wanting the good, they want the greater good, which they interpret and which comes to include wholesale exploit-ation, systematic lying and summary execution.”

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly and indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it . . . Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose with artistic purpose into one whole.”

“I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”

“On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages.”

“Indeed, in my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.”

“Up to 1939, and even later, the majority of English people were incapable of assessing the true nature of the Nazi régime in Germany, and now, with the Soviet régime, they are still to a large extent under the same sort of illusion.”

“In such an atmosphere the man in the street has no real understanding of things like concentration camps, mass deportations, arrests without trial, press censorship, etc.”

“It is partly that they do not want to understand (i.e. they want to believe that, somewhere, a really Socialist country does actually exist), and partly that, being accustomed to comparative freedom and moderation in public life, totalitarianism is completely incomprehensible to them.”

“Since 1930 I had seen little evidence that the USSR was progressing towards anything that one could truly call Socialism.
On the contrary, I was struck by clear signs of its transformation into a hierarchical society, in which the rulers have no more reason to give up their power than any other ruling class.”

“I would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there.”

“To experience all this was a valuable object lesson: it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries.”

“Up to 1930 I did not on the whole look upon myself as a Socialist. In fact I had as yet no clearly defined political views. I became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.”

“For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won.”

“For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”