George Orwell Statue

A STATUE of the writer and social critic George Orrwell is to be unveiled at the BBC HQ in London this coming Tuesday.  Orwell worked for the BBC from August 1941 to September 1943.  He was placed in the BBC's Overseas Service as a talks assistant, with other outsiders such as the anarchist art critic Herbert Read.

When the Freedom anarchist, George Woodcock, in Partisan Review in 1942 criticised Orwell, while Orwell was working for the BBC, for being 'the preacher of a doctrine of Physical Courage as an Asset to the Left-wing intellectual...' and 'conducting British propaganda to fox the Indian spendemasses'.

To which Orwell pointed out that 'Most of our broadcasters are Indian left-wing intellectuals, from Liberals to Trotskyists, some of them bitterly anti-British'.

He mentions as an example Herbert Read as a broadcaster, and others included T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Reginald Renolds, Stephen Spender, J.B.S. Haldane, Tom Wintringham.

 

 John Sutherland, Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature,writes:

'The stimulating arguments are not the best thing that came out of Orwell’s brief work at the BBC. They’re the only thing. I hope there’s a faint sneer on the statue’s face.'

******

Marie-Louise Berneri on Wikipedia

Marie-Louise Berneri

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Marie Louise Berneri (March 1, 1918 – April 13, 1949) was an anarchist activist and author. She was involved with the short-lived publication, Revision, with Luis Mercier Vega and was a member of the group that edited Revolt, War Commentary, and the Freedom newspaper, which is still being published by the Freedom Bookstore in London. She was a continuous contributor to Spain and the World. She also wrote a survey of utopias, Journey Through Utopia, first published in 1950. Neither East Nor West is a selection of her writings (1952).
She was born in Arezzo, Italy, the elder daughter of Camillo & Giovanna Berneri. The family went into exile in 1926 for resisting Mussolini. In 1936 her father went to Spain, to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He was assassinated by communists in 1937. Marie visited Barcelona twice, the second time after her father's murder. Around this time she was living in France and studying psychology at the Sorbonne.
She married Vernon Richards, also an active anarchist with many of the same groups and publications as she. In April 1945 she was one of the four editors of War Commentary which she had helped to found, who were tried for incitement to disaffection. Because her husband was a co-defendant she was acquitted on a legal technicality that allows that a wife cannot conspire with her husband. When her three comrades were imprisoned she took on the main responsibility for maintaining the paper into the postwar period.
She attended the first post-war international anarchist conference in Paris, 1948 as a member of the British delegation. Her mother and sister Giliane Berneri also attended as members of the Italian and French delegations. She received much praise for her Freedom press pamphlet, the anti-Stalinist Workers in Stalin's Russia (1944). ^[1] Berneri was also one of the first people in Britain to promote the ideas of Wilhelm Reich. ^[2]
Marie-Louise Berneri died, along with her baby, during childbirth, 13 April 1949 in London at the age of 31.
George Woodcock and Ivan Avacumovic dedicated their biography of Peter Kropotkin, The Anarchist Prince (1950) to Marie-Louise Berneri, "a true disciple of Kropotkin."

References[edit]

1. Jump up ^ Orwell:Collected Works, Smohtered Under Journalism p.368, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, David Goodway. Liverpool University Press, 2006 (pgs. 126-7).
2. Jump up ^ Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements by George Woodcock, (2nd Edition) Pelican books, 1986 (pgs. 383

Postmortem on one of the oldest papers in England

WHAT follows on the next post on this Blog is a postmortem assessment or examination of FREEDOM newspaper by the cultural and arts correspondent for Northern Voices, Christopher Draper.  Mr. Draper has produced a remarkable and insightful autopsy on the corpse of FREEDOM, which at the time of its death last year was one of the oldest political newspapers England, if not the world.  Many distinguished figures wrote in it including Augustus John, George Orwell, Herbert Read, John Arden, Colin Ward, Nicolas Walter, Peter Turner, Bill Christopher, John Hewetson, Geoffrey Ostergaard, Philip Sansom, George Woodcock, and Vernon Richards.  Northern Voices believes Mr. Draper has done us a great service by his investigative research into who killed FREEDOM.  What follows here is merely the first installment of a series of articles uncovering what happened to FREEDOM over the decades of its existence.  We believe this will now be the historic documented record of what happened at Freedom Press.