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
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