Tag Archives: George Orwell

Say It Plain

Posted on April 13, 2016 | Leave a comment

I came across a video clip the other day.  It was shot inside a Florida Starbucks and showed a woman telling off the Governor there who had come inside the Starbucks with a retinue of aides and guards to, I assume, order a caffeinated drink.  She calls him an “asshole” among other things and when the Governor tries to defend himself she uses his words against him, albeit inartfully.

What struck me about the events depicted in this video is the fact that someone who had something bad to say about the Governor actually said it, not just in private, but to the Governor’s face, unprompted and at the spur of the moment.

This all brought to mind some observations George Orwell made in his book  The Road to Wigan Pier about the differences in behavior between the working class and the middle class.  One such difference, which Orwell described as “disconcerting at first” is the “plain-spokeness [of the working-class] towards anyone they regard as an equal” so that “[i]f you offer a working man something he doesn’t want, he tells you that he doesn’t want it; a middle-class person would accept it to avoid giving offence.”

Orwell doesn’t mention what an upper-class person would do in such a situation but there shouldn’t be much dispute about what that would be: anything he or she damn well pleases, but more often than not, something along the lines of what Orwell says a working-class person would do.

I can’t say for sure that the woman depicted in the video is working-class.  She’s at a Starbucks for one thing.  And she seems to be fiddling around with a laptop, not the tool of choice for most working-class people.  But that doesn’t tell me anything about her background, how and where she was raised, what schools she went to, her family’s wealth or lack of it, etc. etc., — i.e., the most important clues to one’s class affiliation.

And what about the Governor being an “equal” to his critic?  Could it be that the woman — whether because of her class leanings or something else — saw the Governor as her equal so that she felt less inhibited in speaking her mind; less so, at least, than if she had encountered someone she did not see as an equal.  News reports suggest that the woman was at one time a member of the city council and had a reputation for, well, plain-spokenness.

But whatever the actual reasons for the woman’s “plain-spokenness” I suspect that most people would have just clammed up if allowed the opportunity to speak one’s mind to a public official.  I know I would have.  Partially for reasons related to class but also because of fear — fear of being beaten up or thrown in jail, or both.

But isn’t that itself a reason not to stay silent?  Giving into this fear only emboldens those who profit most from it, with the end result being an increasingly oppressive and authoritarian society.  One might argue that the working class should be the ones to speak out against such an injustice since they would have “less to lose” in the event they became the subject of any retaliatory conduct.  After all they are more likely to be unemployed or do less lucrative work than someone in the middle class. But it’s hard to imagine anyone would take this argument seriously.  This is because the middle class have just as much to lose as the working class in a society whose primary means of stifling dissent is the threat of violence.  Indeed, the only winners in a society like that are the ones in power.  Everyone else is for the most part expendable.

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It’s Such a Good Feeling

Posted on July 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

Not too long ago I transcribed for this blog a piece George Orwell wrote for Tribune, a British newspaper to which he was a regular contributor.  Orwell had his own column in the paper which he called As I Please and the piece at issue was one that Tribune thought best captured Orwell’s character and outlook, so much so that it re-printed the piece as its official obituary for Orwell following his death, one that came all too early.

At the end of this piece, Orwell quoted the following passage from The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius:

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present — I am rising to the work of a human being.  Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?  Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?  — But this is more pleasant — Dost thou exist then to take they pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion?  Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to nature?

There is a modern equivalent to this passage, and it comes from everyone’s favorite “neighbor” and TV personality Fred Rogers, more commonly known as Mister Rogers.  Among the many rituals Mister Rogers used to have on his television show was the one where he would sing a little tune while he changed his shoes and jacket as he came into and out of his television home.  The songs signaled to the audience the beginning and the end of another episode of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, and always left the viewers with a sense of anticipation — to see what would be on today’s show, and when that show was over, the one after that.

The song Mister Rogers sang when it came time to leave and to say goodbye to his audience went something like this:

It’s such a good feeling to know you’re alive.
It’s such a happy feeling: You’re growing inside.
And when you wake up ready to say,
“I think I’ll make a snappy new day.”
It’s such a good feeling, a very good feeling,
The feeling you know that
I’ll be back,
When the day is new,
And I’ll have more ideas for you,
And  you’ll have things you’ll want to talk about,
I will too.

I miss Mister Rogers, and George Orwell for that matter.

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In Front of Your Nose

Posted on January 12, 2015 | Leave a comment

In 1946 George Orwell wrote a piece called In Front of Your Nose in which he famously said that “[t]o see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”  This is so, Orwell thought, because people have a habit of  “ignoring facts which are obvious and unalterable, and which will have to be faced sooner or later.”  As Orwell explained:

[W]e are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.  Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

We all know what it looks like when false beliefs bump up against solid reality on a battlefield.  Paris is but one example of that.  Others that come to mind are Ferguson and Hong Kong.  In Paris the false belief was that terrorist watch lists and “intelligence” were effective tools in keeping a check on disenchanted, frustrated and angry youths.  In Ferguson, it was that blacks would be content living  in poverty and ignominy for the rest of their lives, under a power structure dominated mostly by non-blacks.  And in Hong Kong, it was that everyone who wasn’t rich wouldn’t also like the chance to become rich or at least level the playing field for those who weren’t rich.

But little seems to change even when the battle between myth and fact makes it way from the sterile confines of the internet and the legislature on to the streets.  If anything, it is the status quo that has  prevailed in most places.  In Paris, as in the United States, post-September 11th, the talk, no doubt, is of bulking up the security state to further marginalize those who “hate the values of the freedom-loving West.  In Ferguson, blacks have gone back to living their miserable lives  hoping that they won’t end up like Michael Brown even though that may be a fate better than what is surely in store for most of them, being  poor and black in the United States.  And in Hong Kong the Chinese Communist party had its way with the protestors, giving not one inch to their demands and barely acknowledging their months-long existence.

It may be that we have not yet reached the battlefield to which Orwell referred in his essay.  That the events in Paris, Ferguson and Hong Kong are simply a preview of what is to come: more hardening up of positions, more violence, and more deaths.  But it may also be that none of what Orwell feared will ever come to pass.  Not because we will have finally come face to face with the brutal facts but because the governing class will have succeeded in eliminating all unpleasant facts; in fact, we are already halfway there given the current size of the surveillance apparatus.  That would be the scariest proposition of all.

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As I Please (George Orwell Birthday Edition)

Posted on June 25, 2014 | 1 comment

George Orwell was born on this date in 1903 in the city of Motihari which was located in what was then British India (now India).  Aside from having written 1984 and Animal Farm, he also produced a great deal of journalism, some of which he fashioned into novels, like Homage to Catalonia.  Orwell also liked the outdoors and for a period of time grew and raised his own food on the desolate island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides.  When he had a brush with death nearly drowning in a whirlpool along with his young son, Richard, one of his first remarks upon returning to the safety of land concerned the remarkable features of a bird he had just seen.  The Tribune is one of the publications to which Orwell contributed articles when he was still working as a journalist.  After Orwell died on January 21, 1950, at the age of 46, the editors of the Tribune published in place of an obituary about his death what they considered to be their favorite piece by Orwell from among the many he wrote for the paper.  The piece was part of a long running column by Orwell entitled As I Please; this one happened to be the 68th installment and was dated January 3, 1947.  Here it is in full:

Nearly a quarter century ago I was traveling on a liner to Burma.  Though not a big ship, it was a comfortable and even a luxurious one, and when one was not asleep or playing deck games one usually seemed to be eating.  The meals were of that stupendous kind that steamship companies used to vie with one another in producing, and in between times there were snacks such as apples, ices, biscuits and cups of soup, lest anyone should find himself fainting from hunger.  Moreover, the bars opened at ten in the morning, and, since we were at sea, alcohol was relatively cheap.

The ships of this line were mostly manned by Indians, but apart from the officers and the stewards they carried four European quartermasters whose job was to take the wheel.  One of these quartermasters, though I suppose he was only aged forty or so, was one of those old sailors on whose back you almost expect to see barnacles growing.  He was a short, powerful, rather ape-like man, with enormous forearms covered by a mat of golden hair.   A blond moustache which might have belonged to Charlemagne completely hid his mouth.  I was only twenty years old and very conscious of my parasitic status as a mere passenger, and I looked up to the quartermasters, especially the fair-haired one, as godlike beings on a par with the officers.  It would not have occurred to me to speak to one of them without being spoken to first.

One day, for some reason, I came up from lunch early.  The deck was empty except for the fair-haired quartermaster, who was scurrying like a rat along the side of the deck-houses, with something partially concealed between his monstrous hands.  I had just time to see what it was before he shot past me and vanished into a doorway.  It was a pie dish containing a half-eaten baked custard pudding.

At one glance I took in the situation — indeed, the man’s air of guilt made it unmistakable.  The pudding was a left-over from one of the passengers’ tables.  It had been illicitly given to him by a steward, and he was carrying it off to the seamen’s quarters to devour it at leisure.  Across more than twenty years I can still faintly feel the shock of astonishment that I felt at that moment.  It took me some time to see the incident in all its bearings: but do I seem to exaggerate when I say that this sudden revelation of the gap between function and reward – the revelation that a highly-skilled craftsman, who might literally hold all our lives in his hands, was glad to steal scraps of food from our table — taught me more than I could have learned from a half dozen Socialist pamphlets?

A news item to the effect that Yugoslavia is now engaged on a purge of writers and artists left me to look once again at the reports of the recent literary purge in the U.S.S.R., when Zoschenko, Akhmatova and others were expelled from the Writers’ Union.

In England this kind of thing is not happening to us as yet, so that we can view it with a certain detachment, and curiously enough, as I look again at the accounts of what happened, I feel somewhat more sorry for the persecutors than for their victims.  Chief among the persecutors is Andrei Zhdanov, considered by some to be Stalin’s probable successor.  Zhdanov, though he has conducted literary purges before, is a full-time politician with — to judge from his speeches — about as much knowledge of literature as I have of aerodynamics.  He does not give the impression of being, according to his own lights, a wicked or dishonest man.  He is truly shocked by the defection of certain Soviet writers, which appears to him as an incomprehensible piece of treachery, like a military mutiny in the middle of a battle.  The purpose of literature is to glorify the Soviet Union; surely that must be obvious to everyone?  But instead of carrying out their pliant duty, these misguided writers keep straying away from the paths of propaganda, producing non-political works, and even, in the case of Zoschenko, allowing a satirical note to creep into their writings.  It is all very painful and bewildering.  It is as though you set a man to work in an excellent, up-to-date, air-conditioned factory, gave him high wages, short hours, good canteens and playing-grounds, a comfortable flat, a nursery-school for his children, all-round social insurance and music while you work — only to find the ungrateful fellow throwing spanners into the machinery on his very first day.

What makes the whole thing somewhat pathetic is the general admission — an honest admission, seeing that Soviet publicists are not in the habit of decrying their own country — that Russian literature as a whole is not what it ought to be.  Since the U.S.S.R. represents the highest existing form of civilization, it is obvious that it ought to lead the world in literature as in everything else.  “Surely,” says Zhdanov, “our new Socialist system, embodying all that is best in the history of human civilization and culture, is capable of creating the most advanced literate, which will leave far behind the best creations of olden times.”. Izvestia (as quoted by the New York paper, Politics) goes further: “Our culture stands on an immeasurably higher level than bourgeois culture … Is it not clear that our culture has the right not to act as pupil and imitator but , on the contrary, to teach others the general human morals?”. And yet somehow the expected thing never happens.  Directives are issued, resolutions are passed unanimously, recalcitrant writers are silenced: and yet for some reason a vigorous and original literature, unmistakably superior to that of capitalist countries, fails to emerge.

All this has happened before, and more than once.  Freedom of expression has had its ups and downs in the U.S.S.R. , but the general tendency has been towards higher censorship.  The thing that politicians are seemingly unable to understand is that you cannot produce vigorous literature by terrorizing everyone into conformity.  A writer’s inventive faculties will not work unless he is allowed to say approximately what he feels.  You can destroy spontaneity and produce a literature which is orthodox but feeble, or you can let people say what they choose and take the risk that some of them will utter heresies.  There is no way out of that dilemma so long as books have to be written by individuals.

That is why, in a way, I feel sorrier for the persecutors than for the victims.  It is probable that Zoschenko and the others at least have the satisfaction of understanding what is happening to them: the politicians who harry them are merely attempting the impossible.  For Zhdanov and his kind to say, “the Soviet Union can exist without literature,” would be reasonable.  But that is just what they can’t say.  They don’t’ know what literature is, but they know that it is important, that is has prestige value, and that it is necessary for propaganda purposes, and they would like to encourage it, if they only knew how.  So they continue with their purges and directives, like a fish bashing its nose against the wall of an aquarium again and again, too dim-witted to realize that glass and water are not the same thing.

From The Thoughts of Emperor Marcus Aurelius:

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present — I am rising to the work of a human being.  Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?  Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?  — But this is more pleasant — Dost thou exist then to take they pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion?  Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to nature?

It is a good idea to print this well-known exhortation in large letters and hang it on the wall opposite your bed.  And if that fails, as I am told it sometimes does, another good plan is to buy the loudest alarm clock you can get and place it in such a position that you have to get out of bed and go around several pieces of furniture in order to silence it.

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Almost a “One Man Terror”

Posted on February 16, 2014 | Leave a comment

In my library is a compilation of Hemingway’s works as a journalist, entitled “By-Line: Ernest Hemingway” (Scribners 1967).  I came across it in a used bookstore in lower Manhattan years ago, although I suspect the bookstore is no longer there, as is the case with most independent book proprietors nowadays.  The compilation cost $8.50 and bore the following inscription circa 1967: “love and kisses always”, from Ann to Dad.

I pulled the book off the shelf the other day and flipped to no article in particular.  The one on which I landed turned out to be a dispatch from Hemingway’s days covering  the Spanish Civil War.  The piece is illuminating not only because of what it says but also how it is said.  It gives the reader the feeling that Hemingway conveyed to him or her what was in his mind at the moment, and that he did not have to, or at least chose not to, censor his thoughts out of fear, an exercise that is almost non-existent with most of today’s journalists.  The article, in substance, is classic Hemingway: a how-to for those who want to be real, i.e., manly, do-right, wartime correspondents, bubbling with an undercurrent of violence.  Whether Hemingway’s own journalism in this piece, by which he describes what he claims to be the true state of affairs in Madrid as of Sept. 1938, is credible or just a way for him to make his point against the weasel-y journalist and subject of his ire is another story that is beyond the scope of this post.  Suffice it to say that Orwell, through his own encounter with Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War, had his doubts about Hemingway’s tough-guy image with which he is famously associated.

The piece is entitled Fresh Air on an Inside Story, published in Ken magazine on September 23, 1938.  Here it is in full:

I met this citizen in the Florida Hotel in Madrid in the end of April of last year.  It was a late afternoon and he had arrived from Valencia the evening before.  He had spent the day in his room writing an article.  This man was tall, with watery eyes, and strips of blond hair pasted carefully across a flat-topped bald head.

“How does Madrid seem?” I asked him.

“There is a terror here,” said this journalist.  “There is evidence of it wherever you go.  Thousands of bodies are being found.”

“When did you get here?” I asked him.

“Last night.”

“Where did you see the bodies?”

“They are around everywhere,” he said.  “You see them in the early morning.”

“Were you out early this morning?”

“No.”

“Did you see any bodies?”

“No,” he said.  “But I know they are there.”

“What evidence of terror have you seen?”

“Oh, it’s there,” he said.  “You can’t deny it’s there.”

“What evidence have you seen yourself?”

“I haven’t had time to see it myself but I know it is there.”

“Listen,” I said.  “You get in here last night.  You haven’t even been out in the town and you tell us who are living here and working here that there is terror.”

“You can’t deny there is a terror,” said this expert.  “Everywhere you see evidence of it.”

“I thought you said you hadn’t seen any evidence.”

“They are everywhere,” said the great man.

I then told him that there were half a dozen of us newspaper men who were living and working in Madrid whose business it was, if there was a terror, to discover it and report it.  That I had friends in Seguridad that I had known from the old days and could trust, and that I knew that three people had been shot for espionage that month.  I had been invited to witness an execution but had been away at the front and had waited four weeks for there to be another.  That people had been shot during the early days of the rebellion by the so-called “uncontrollables” but that for months Madrid had been as safe and well policed and free from any terror as any capital in Europe.  Any people shot or taken for rides were turned in at the morgue and he could check for himself as all journalists had done.

“Don’t try to deny there is a terror,” he said.  “You know there is a terror.”

Now he was a correspondent for a truly great newspaper and I had a lot of respect for it so I did not sock him.  Besides if one should take a poke at a guy like that it would only furnish evidence that there was a terror.  Also the meeting was in the room of an American woman journalist and I think, but cannot be positive on this, that he was wearing glasses.

The American woman journalist was leaving the country and, that same day, he gave her a sealed envelope to take out.  You do not give people sealed envelopes to take out of a country in wartime, but this stout fellow assured the American girl the envelope contained only a carbon of an already censored dispatch of his from the Teruel front which he was mailing to his office as a duplicate in order to make sure of its safe arrival.

Next day the American girl mentioned that she was taking out this letter for him.

“It isn’t sealed, is it?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

“Better let me take it over to  Censorship for you as I go by, then, so you won’t get in any trouble over it.”

“What trouble could I get into?  It’s only a carbon of a dispatch that’s already censored.”

“Did he show it to you?”

“No.  But he told me.”

“Never trust a man who slicks hair over a bald head,” I said.

“The Nazis have a price of 20,000 [pounds] on his head,” she said.  “He must be all right.”

Well, at Censorship it tuned out that the alleged carbon of a dispatch from Teruel was not a carbon of a dispatch but an article which stated, “There is terror here in Madrid.  Thousands of bodies are found, etc.”. It was a dandy.  It made liars out of every honest correspondent in Madrid.  And this guy had written it without stirring from his hotel the first day he arrived.  The only ugly thing was that the girl to whom he had entrusted it could, under the rules of war, have been shot as a spy if it had been found among her papers when she was leaving the country.  The dispatch was a lie and he had given it to a girl who trusted him to take out of the country.

That night at the Gran Via restaurant I told the story  to a number of hard-working, non-political, straight-shooting correspondents who risked their lives daily working in Madrid and who had been denying there was terror in Madrid ever since the government had taken control of the situation and stopped all terror.

They were pretty sore about this outsider who was going to come into Madrid, make liars out of all of them, and expose one of the most popular correspondents to an espionage charge for carrying out his faked dispatch.

“Let’s go over and ask him if the Nazis really put a price of 20,000 [pounds] on his head,” someone said.  “Somebody should denounce him for what he has done.  He ought to be shot and if we knew where to send the head it could be shipped in dry ice.”

“It wouldn’t be a nice looking head but I’d be glad to carry it myself in a rucksack,” I offered.  “I haven’t seen 20,000 [pounds] since 1929.”

“I’ll ask him,” said a well-known Chicago reporter.

He went over to the man’s table, spoke to him very quietly and then came back.

We all kept looking at the man.  He was white as the under half of an unsold flounder at 11 o’clock in the morning just before the fish market shuts.

“He says there isn’t any reward for his head,” said the Chicago reporter in his faintly rhythmical voice.  “He says that was just something one of his editors made up.”

So that is how one journalist escaped starting a one man terror in Madrid.

If a censorship does not permit a newspaper man to write the truth, the correspondent can try to beat the censorship under penalty of expulsion if caught.  Or he can go outside the country and write uncensored dispatches.  But this citizen on a flying trip was going to let someone else take all his risk while he received credit as a fearless exposer.  The remarkable story at that time was that there was no terror in Madrid.  But that was too dull for him.

It would have interested his newspaper though because oddly enough it happened to be a newspaper that has been interested for a long time in the truth.

 

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Happy Birthday, George Orwell!

Posted on June 25, 2013 | Leave a comment

Today is George Orwell’s birthday.  He was born on June 25, 1903 and would be 110 today if he had octogenarian genes in him.  Unfortunately, it was quite the opposite, as Orwell succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 46.

The following is a passage from a book by George Woodcock who was a good friend and colleague of Orwell’s, entitled The Crystal Spirit: a study of George Orwell.  It tells the story of Orwell in his post-Animal Farm days, when he was finally able to live a life unrestricted by the burdens and stresses of poverty and financial insecurity that came with being a writer.  It is the story of a man who was compassionate, humble and principled up until the very end.  And, it involves absinthe.  Happy Birthday, George Orwell!

Page 1
Pages 2 and 3
Pages 4 and 5

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Debating Government Surveillance

Posted on June 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

Recently, we learned that our  government is engaged in secret data mining, telephone metadata collection programs.  News of these programs were provided by a former private government contractor to the Guardian and also to the Washington Post, although only reporters from the Guardian had direct and personal access to their news source.  Why the Guardian, you might ask?  Because Snowden, like many other Americans, just don’t trust their country’s news outlets, even the most respected ones like the New York Times.  The commercialization of news in this country and its emphasis on the bottom line have transformed many reporters to nothing more than mouthpieces for the government and large corporations.  But don’t just take my word for it, read about it for yourself in the Pew Research Center’s 2013 report on American Journalism.  Because of this, we can also expect that any debate that might be had on the morality, necessity and legality of the NSA’s data collection programs will end before it even begins.  How else can you explain the following leed to this recent New York Times article published only 2 days after the Guardian first broke news of the NSA’s telephone metadata program:

In early September 2009, an e-mail passed through an Internet address in Peshawar, Pakistan, that was being monitored by the vast computers controlled by American intelligence analysts. It set off alarms. The address, linked to senior Qaeda operatives, had been dormant for months.

Investigators worked their way backward and traced the e-mail to an address in Aurora, Colo., outside Denver. It took them to Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old former coffee cart operator, who was asking a Qaeda facilitator about how to mix ingredients for a flour-based explosive, according to law enforcement officials. A later e-mail read: “The marriage is ready” — code that a major attack was planned.

What followed in the next few days was a cross-country pursuit in which the police stopped Mr. Zazi on the George Washington Bridge, let him go, and after several false starts, arrested him in New York. He eventually pleaded guilty to plotting to carry out backpack bombings in the city’s subway system.

It is that kind of success that President Obama seemed to be referring to on Friday in California when he defended the National Security Agency’s stockpiling of telephone call logs of Americans and gaining access to foreigners’ e-mail and other data from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and other companies.

The government itself could not have put it better.

Or consider the headline to yet another post-NSA leak story by the Times: “Debate on Secret Data Unlikely, Partly Because of Secrecy”.  But what incentive would a reporter from say the Times or NPR even have in digging deeper?  Very little.  Emotionally, they may feel betrayed that Snowden went with a British-based news outlet rather than one inside the U.S. to publish his leaked documents.  So screw him, he’s nothing but a traitor and should be prosecuted as such, is perhaps the sentiment across many U.S.-based newsrooms.  Practically, these reporters have little to gain and much to lose if they were to try and corroborate or even expand on the leaked materials.  This is because the government sources who will be the focus of such efforts are also the same ones on whom the reporters increasingly rely for their own stories — through unofficial or official “leaks” — and hence livelihood.

As for the NSA-Snowden story itself, I noticed that sales of George Orwell’s “1984” have skyrocketed since the government’s Big Brother-esque ways were first revealed in the press.  The comparison is of course immediate and not altogether unjustified.  But I do not think Orwell himself would have rejected the kind of surveillance that the government has since admitted to practicing — at least not in a scenario that would  in fact require such prophylactic measures.  But  situations that would actually require such sweeping and secretive data collection efforts — that is, one where there is a real, imminent and extremely lethal threat to the security of the nation as a whole  — are few and far between.  And those on which governments often rely to justify their intrusive actions are, for the most part, contrived; used by the powerful to remain so.  As James Madison once said:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

(Thanks to Stephen Walt, who referenced this quote in a recent blog post.)

So we begin where we first started: debating the morality, legality and necessity of the NSA’s data mining/telephone metadata programs and perhaps the NSA itself.  Make no mistake.  The status quo is by no means inevitable, and it certainly should not be accepted as such.  I recently finished reading Tony Judt’s “Ill Fares the Land” in which he makes precisely this point, albeit in the context of the economy and less so in terms of national security.  But his observations and exhortations to action are no less relevant.

We have entered an age of insecurity — economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity.  The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed.  Insecurity breeds fear.  And fear — fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world — is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.

All change is disruptive.  We have seen that the specter of terrorism is enough to cast stable democracies into turmoil.  Climate change will have even more dramatic consequences.  Men and women will be thrown back upon the resources of the state.  They will look to their political leaders and representatives to protect them: open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for ‘security.’  The choice will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two sorts of state.  It is thus incumbent upon us to re-conceive the role of government.  If we do not. others will.

As for the parameters in which such a debate should take place, I would quote from the following diary entry (from 4/27/1942) of George Orwell, who discussed the sorry state of commentary and analysis with respect to war-related news (then, World War II):

We are all drowning in filth.  When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have simply disappeared from the face of the earth.  Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any suffering except self-ptiy and hatred of Britain and utterly indifferent to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.  […]  Everyone is dishonest, and everyone is utterly heartless towards people who are outside the immediate range of his own interests.  What is most striking of all is the way sympathy can be turned on and off like a tap according to political expediency.  But is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook?  Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless.  All power is in the hands of paranoiacs.

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Orwell on Immigration

Posted on February 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

I have written extensively over the past year or so about the effects of a seminal Supreme Court decision in Padilla v. Kentucky, which, aside from its constitutional underpinnings, deals directly with another matter of great import: immigration. I recently came across a thoughtful passage from George Orwell — perhaps my favorite writer of all time — in which he offers his thoughts as to the origins of anti-immigrant feelings. It isn’t a particularly novel observation; in fact, the exact opposite might be true. However, it is worth recounting here; if anything, because, as Padilla itself makes clear, immigration continues to be a topic of public interest and also because Orwell continues to impress me, and hopefully others, in his perceptiveness and prescience.

[Orwell begins by recounting a conversation that he had overheard between two relatively well-off Scots in which they attribute a number of Scotland’s problems to the influx of the Poles. Among other things, the Poles are blamed for unemployment; the housing shortage, declining morals, etc. Orwell then proceeds to offer the following thoughts on this discussion:]

One cannot, of course, do very much about this kind of thing. It is the contemporary equivalent of anti-semitism. By 1947, people of the kind I am describing would have caught up with the fact that anti-semitism is discreditable, and so the scapegoat is sought elsewhere. But the race hatred and mass delusions which are part of the pattern of our time might be somewhat less bad in their effects if they were not reinforced by ignorance. If in the years before the war, for instance, the facts about the persecution of Jews in Germany had been better known, the subjective popular feeling against Jews would probably not have been less, but the actual treatment of Jewish refugees might have been better. The refusal to allow refugees in significant numbers into this country would have been branded as disgraceful. The average man would still have felt a grudge against the refugees, but in practice more lives would have been saved.

So also with the Poles. The thing that most depressed me in the above-mentioned conversation was the recurrent phrase, “let them go back to their own country.” If I had said to the two business-men, “Most of these people have no country to go back to,” they would have gaped. Not one of the relevant facts would have been known to them. They would never had heard of the various things that have happened to Poland since 1939, any more than they would have known that the over-population of Britain is a fallacy or that local unemployment can co-exist with a general shortage of labor. I think it is a mistake to give such people the excuse of ignorance. You can’t actually change their feelings, but you can make them understand what they are saying when they demand that homeless refugees shall be driven from our shores, and the knowledge may make them a little less actively malignant.

[UPDATE: I neglected to identify the source of this passage by Orwell; it formed a part of Orwell’s regular column in Tribune, a left-leaning British periodical, and which carried the common title, “As I Please.”  This was from As I Please 70, January 24, 1947]

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Tony Judt, Historian and Public Intellectual, Dead at 62

Posted on August 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

Photo courtesy of Pulsemedia.org

Tony Judt, the historian, intellectual and teacher, died on Friday.  Mr. Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease, in September 2008 but continued to teach, write and lecture up until the time of his death.  Mr. Judt considered himself lucky that much of his work required not the use of his hands, as is the case with many other who have been afflicted with the disease, but his mind, which was left relatively untouched by the ravages of ALS.  Although I have never met Mr. Judt (we exchanged emails once), he often comes to mind as one of few  intellectuals today who most closely embodies that traits of another intellectual giant of our times, George Orwell.  Courageous, honest and introspective, Mr. Judt belongs to the rare breed of intellectual who is not only competent and intelligent enough to reconstruct and examine the foundation of our society in all its flaws and imperfections but  is also bold enough to publicly confront those defects head on without pretension or self-aggrandizement.  Mr. Judt was 62.

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