Just have to admit to being impressed by how succinct and clear yet deep this writing was. Easy to read and understand, and certainly gets the point across.
Reading the comments below the article (generally a bad idea) show that a paragraph of the article seems to have been ‘redacted’. Sources are quoted but I don’t see a reason for the change.
“I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power - till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter - I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity.”
he is not alone in this feeling. the numbers are no longer on the site, but I remember YouGov [a British polling company] indicated that British people hold Stalin in far more contempt than they do Hitler, even in spite of the far closer proximity and impact of Hitler's crimes.
whether that polling can be trusted I do not know, but I do get the feeling that despite genuine hatred for his actions, a lot of people harbour a soft spot for his persona.
I suspect this is as or more likely a result of his abundant comic depictions as it is the characterisation as a hero-like figure manfully struggling against inevitability.
There would be no Hitler without Stalin to begin with, while the opposite isn't true.
Besides, the UK has committed acts of (de facto) shameful collaboration with Stalin, such as the forceful and brutal "repatriation" of Cossacks to the USSR where they faced certain death.
To quote Wikipedia, "On 1 June 1945 the UK placed 32,000 Cossacks (with their women and children) into trains and trucks and delivered them to the Red Army for repatriation to the Soviets [...] most Cossacks were sent to the gulags in far northern Russia and Siberia, and many died").
This was an enormous tragedy and human rights violation, comparable to what deporting thousands of North Korean refugees back to North Korea today would be.
The Cossacks knew it was a death sentence, and they resisted, but obviously in vain. In the words of Julius Epstein (after Wikipedia again): "The first to commit suicide, by hanging, was the Cossack editor Evgenij Tarruski. The second was General Silkin, who shot himself...The Cossacks refused to board the trucks. British soldiers [armed] with pistols and clubs began using their clubs, aiming at the heads of the prisoners. They first dragged the men out of the crowd, and threw them into the trucks. The men jumped out. They beat them again, and threw them onto the floor of the trucks. Again, they jumped out. The British then hit them with rifle butts until they lay unconscious, and threw them, like sacks of potatoes, in the trucks."
No British Jews have ever been deported to the Third Reich. And this certainly may add to the sense of contempt for Stalin, as the Soviet dictator sort of corrupted British politics making the UK an accomplice in a way Hitler never managed to.
> I suspect this is as or more likely a result of his [Hitler's] abundant comic depictions as it is the characterisation as a hero-like figure manfully struggling against inevitability.
That's an alternative explanation, sure (although personally I tend to doubt it)
while this is clearly good reason for Brits to hate Stalin, I sincerely doubt any significant portion of the general population is even aware of it. Your average Brit has heard of the purges, the terrors of Soviet communism and maybe about Soviet spies infiltrating the British government (Philby, Burgess, Maclean etc), but that's about it. practically no one has any awareness of our government's actions in the era after WW2
I think this is highly unlikely to be the explanation
That's probably true (I doubt the premise to begin with, I'm not sure if Stalin is universally perceived as more repellent than Hitler by the general public in the UK, the poll results notwithstanding - although I'm not a Brit, I only lived in the UK for a few years).
However such general sentiments can 'survive' the knowledge that kickstarted them and propagate in the collective consciousness without it.
>However such general sentiments can 'survive' the knowledge that kickstarted them and propagate in the collective consciousness without it.
very true, but that would require the general public to have known about it at any point, which is doubtful in itself.
if we do take his lesser contempt to be true, which I agree is not a given, a darker hypothesis could develop from Hitler's view of the British as as or more Aryan than the Germans
perhaps this twisted compliment could have seeped into the public (sub)consciousness. but again, whether people are or were actually aware of it is questionable, and whether it would have an effect is equally uncertain
Contempt is different from personal animosity. I don't know how you can have soft spot or feel personal animus for a long dead historical figure in another country.
This is pretty much independent of whether you would attempt to kill him on meeting, knowing everything about him.
Maybe they thought it looked bad… But it was only 1940 when he wrote the essay, so at that point a lot of Hitler’s crimes would not yet have been known in Britain, and a lot of them were not yet even in full swing. So he’s looking from a very different perspective to us who know about the holocaust and the other shocking things the Nazis did.
>>Sources are quoted but I don’t see a reason for the change.
Redacted [by who?] If this was removed by Orwell then it isn't for you to see a reason or not. If removed by the editors of the abve site, then I'd agree that that's a questionable choice; at any rate an ellipsis would be called for.
given the phrasing - "I should like it put on record" - I would not be particularly sympathetic even towards Orwell choosing to have it redacted from future publications
That's too charitable. It's a rhetorical tool that Orwell uses to invoke a sort of comradery with the reader because it lends itself to the largely anti-establishment points he tried to get across. It's the old Etonian going "I'm one of you guys" which has a long tradition in British political rhetoric.
Orwell was tremendously skilled at clear, elegant, vivid writing. Is that somehow bad? I will read something he has written just for that. There are books with interesting ideas that I won't read because they bore or even annoy me. Brave New World was somewhat boring and Babbitt I had to stop reading, the author was so unable to say anything well.
it's a bad thing to mistake rhetorical skill for profundity. The same is true for pg. Most of what he writes is trite but he's popular because he's mastered the skill of talking to his audience in a tone that has convinced them they're all secret geniuses with access to forbidden knowledge. If Orwell was alive today, he'd probably have a thriving substack.
In reality much of Orwell's output was the result of his personal feud with Stalinism, deeply conventional and elitist, and not that deep, and it's not surprising that he is today probably the most mindlessly-quoted writer around.
1984 is a particularly shallow book. It borders on being so simplistic as to cater to a teen equivalent crowd intellectually. It'd be deep for a 12 year old reading it for the first time, maybe. It's a cartoonish dystopia, laughably absurd in structure; although it gets his points across, which is obviously important. Orwell paints the kind of fantasy dystopia one might envision if one knew absolutely nothing about totalitarianism firsthand. Its popularity over the decades owes primarily to being shallow, simplistic. People that otherwise can't or won't approach complex ideas can read 1984 and get it. It's also not very original, even Ayn Rand took a shot at the premise a decade before Orwell with her book Anthem (1984 is a better book however).
This is what's so good about hacker news, morons that enjoyed the book can learn how deficient their minds are at grasping complex ideas in comparison to intellectual heavyweights such as yourself.
