Alison Croggon wrote:

>The point Orwell was making was, if I'm remembering correctly, that no one
>seemed to notice how the photographs of, for example, women being
punished
>for having Nazi lovers, were unsettlingly similar to those of Jews being
>persecuted.

Well, I couldn't remember and was curious, so I went and looked it up, and this
is the passage to which, I think, you're referring:


Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt
after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by
the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats -- police officials, penny-a-lining
journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers -- are hunted down
while almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the fiercest
tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising
appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940. I have
striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and
expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age --
became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now
time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the
American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a
poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him
to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end
by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punish
the people who weakened national morale at critical moments, there are other
culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing.

And, well, I guess as for the difficult knot, it's all implicitly in this passage, the
defense of Wodehouse as a "petty rat" being hunted down while the big rats
escape. And in that last sentence, the "other culprits" who are "better worth
chasing" "if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale,"
and he must have really wanted to punish the people who weakened national
morale, in his view, those 125 names on his list.  So, yes, as you say it's not
surprising.

Hypocrisy? I don't know what the word is. To give a list of names as traitors
"fellow travelers" to the government seems to be that sort of extralegal process,
ratting others out, making accusations in private, depriving those accused of
defense or reply or public enquiry that at least has the possibility of other
evidence being introduced, that is a totalitarian process, even when it serves a
'democratic government,' i.e., it's not so far from what's going on in
Guantanamo now. So it seems that Orwell in his hatred of totalitarian
governments, particularly in the list naming, of communist government  was
able to condone totalitarian process and practice in himself and in fighting that
particular fight.  But what do we call this? what do we call it now?

best,

Rebecca



---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 12:13:48 +1100
>From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: orwell
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>On 24/1/05 11:07 AM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Orwell's argument seems to be larger, not just that Wodehouse wasn't a
>> traitor but sort of a naive dupe, but that scapegoating is a way of hiding
>> various
>> other duplicities, etc.  Well and perhaps I can't get past my sense of the
>> present,
>> how easy and progressively easier, it would be to do this. I am curious how
>> one
>> gets to this point of moral certainty that one would offer to turn over names
>> to
>> the government and perhaps it's just that seems to me beyond the pale.
>
>The point Orwell was making was, if I'm remembering correctly, that no one
>seemed to notice how the photographs of, for example, women being
punished
>for having Nazi lovers, were unsettlingly similar to those of Jews being
>persecuted.  In each case, the human anathema is the same; perhaps even
from
>similar sources (this is why I was thinking of Kristeva, say, Powers of
>Horror, scapegoating as a rejection of inner loathing).  Perhaps it's a
>similar blindness - which Orwell links to what he calls nationalism - that
>leads to the US administration condemning Saddam's torture chambers while
>consciously subverting the Geneva Convention in order to set up their own.
>
>There's a very difficult knot in Orwell, for sure, and untangling it reveals
>a bunch of unresolvable contradictions; but I don't think it's a question of
>hypocrisy.  If it were, his actions might be surprising, rather than merely
>disappointing. Perhaps it's warring logics: realities of warfare vs ideals
>of justice, maybe; he argues for both.  He often attacks pacifists (this in
>essays written during WW2), making the point that there are times when one
>has to fight to protect what one values.  He has no time, for example, for
>Ghandi. His hatred of totalitarianism was such that I can well imagine him
>reaching a particular point of "moral certainty" if he thought British
>freedoms were being compromised by what he regarded as the overriding
threat
>of the 20th century, and justifying his action as part of the necessity of
>warfare.  Which is not to condone his actions, but to say that they seem
>explicable, even transparently so, from any careful reading of his work.
>
>Best
>
>A
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com