Reflections on Chomsky & the Responsibility of Intellectuals in public spaces by Brian Bamford

ON Saturday, 13 March 2021 Andy Wastling wrote in a post entitled 'We ain't got no swing; Except for the ring of the truncheon thing':

'Local Public Space in Rochdale & the homeless: At the local level readers might want to ask their prospective ward councillors standing for public office in May what their personal views are on the anti-democratic measures lurking in the small print of Rochdale Councils Public Space Protection Order? ...' and he concluded 'It would be interesting to see how many councillors have actually even read the locally drafted legislation they voted for which can also be readily deployed against union members on a legitimate picket line or require campaigners to ask permission before handing out leaflets on a street stall or holding a demonstration in the town centre?'

This post allows us to recall what Neil Smith and Amahl Smith observed intheir easay entitled 'Reflections on Chomsky's "The Responsibility of Intellectuals".': 'In "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" Chomsky focused on the responsibility of individual intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. But if they they are to be able to do that in a way that has impact, there are perhaps prior responsibilities that need exploring.' In particular they refer to ' "CIVIL SPACE" and the infringement of liberties".' and they point out that 'Above we touched on changes to the academic environment that may discourage at least one set of intellectuals from speaking out', but they conclude that '"Civic space" is the set of conditions that enable citizens to organise, participate and communicate without hinderance' and that 'Civic space is only secure when a state protects its citizens and "respects and facilitates their fundemental rights to associate, assemble peacefully and freely express views and opitions".'

At the time of publication of the essay in 2019 by University College London the authors remind us: 'As the organisation Civicus demonstrates, there is ample evidence that civic space is under attack around the world, and that vulnerable groups are discouraged from speaking out, often under the pretect that this is a necessary part of the counter-terrorism agenda.'

'To take a simple example' the authors say: 'as part of its attempt to stop "radicalisation", the UK government instituted the "Prevebt" strategy. Among provision requires that social services, faith leaders, teachers, doctors and others refer those at risk of radicalisation to a local Prevent body, which then decides what to do.. Among the signs that someone may warrant referral is "having a sense of grievance that is triggered by personal experience or discrimination or aspects of government policy".'

To conclude the authors write: 'The changes in the powers of the UK government [already] touched on above reflect ideologically motivated infringement of liberties more generally. This can be illustrated with a motion brought at the 2017 annual general meeting of the civil liberties and human rights charity Liberty, attcking aspects of the UK government's regressive legislation.'

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A New Class War: Democracy & Managerial Elites

HOW do we interpret the recent 'STORMING of the US CAPITOL'? How does it compare with, for example, The Storming of the Bastille in 1789 in Paris in 1789 or The Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1920? Perhaps it's too early to tell!

DO ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS?

My departmental supervisor at Manchester Poly, John Phillips (Oxford), claimed when I did my thesis on conversational analysis argued that J.L.Austin, who had developed a theory of speech acts, that he had overlooked the alternative arguement that there was a case that there were also acts that could say some thing: 'words' may be able to do some things but 'acts' may be able to say some things. John Phillips gave as an example an episode in 'Shane' in which Shane played by Alan Ladd accounters a dirt farmer in the first scene, and without a word being uttered a conversation of actions take place in which the actor's recognise what is require and what is understood by the participants.

At the time I think we'd been studying language and conversational analysis in particular John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960), who was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts.

John Phillips was at the time in the 1970s keen to stress that actions can speak louder than words. In this context perhaps the storming of the US Capitol on the 6th, Janauary 2021, may well serve to speak volumes hisorically just as the earlier storming of the Bastille and Winter Palace did.

CHOMSKY on 'The FRAGILITY of AMERICAN DEMOCRACY'

To help us grasp what's going on in the US perhaps we should consider an interview on the 26 November 2020 with Noam Chomsky: 'Trump Has Revealed the Extreme Fragility of American Democracy' in what was presented as an exchange with C. J. Polychroniou Chomsky stated:

'Speculation of course, but I’ll indulge in a bad dream — which could become reality if we are not on guard, and if we fail to recognize that elections should be a brief interlude in a life of engaged activism, not a time to go home and leave matters in the hands of the victors.

'I suspect that Trump and associates regard their legal challenges as a success in what seems a plausible strategy: keep the pot boiling and keep the loyal base at fever pitch, furious about the “stolen” election and the efforts of the insidious elites and the “deep state” to remove their savior from office.

'That strategy seems to be working well. According to recent polls, “Three-quarters (77%) of Trump backers say Biden’s win was due to fraud” and “The anger among Trump’s base is tied to a belief that the election was stolen.” Rejection of the legal challenges with ridicule may please liberal circles, but for the base, it may be simply more proof of the Trump thesis: the hated elites will stop at nothing in their machinations.'

This conclusion by Chomsky that the 'Trump thesis: the hated elites will stop at nothing in their machinations' fits in with the concept that Trumpism is conceived as challenging the established liberal managerial elites. Chomsky himself has long complained that the politics in the US has been simply a choice between Coka Cola and Pepsi Cola.

Now we have Trump and Trumpism, did this break the mould of the managerial elite or not? Were the Clintons corrupt as many of the invaders of the Capitol complained? Does democracy need to be rescued from the managers, and is even Professor Chomsky part of the managerial elite as a dominant figure in the US community of scholars?

The Managerial Elite & American Politics

Perhaps we should examine these considerationa further by examining a review in October 2020 on the Chronicle's website, in which Pedro Gonzalez commenting on 'The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite' by Michael Lind, writes:

'As Lind sees it, the country’s political institutions are a façade for the corporate state, while our government is merely an instrument for the rootless transnational elite and avaricious politicians, both of whom are aided by a vast army of bureaucrats teeming with resentment for those whose lives they manage. The managed—that is, the rest of us—are lumped into a racially divided, proletarianesque working-class, with a largely native-born, white core.'

Gillian Tett in her column in this weekend's Financial Times has argued that Western elites tend to assume that their way of thinking is the only valid mode of thought'. She quotes from Joseph Henrich, the evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, who in his book 'The Weidest People in the World' comparing to the mentality of Western, Educated, Industrialised. Rich and Democratic people against other more tribalistic groups.

Hendrich believes most societies throughout history have used different mental approaches: they see morality as context-based, presuming that someone's identity is set by family and, adopting a "holistic reasoning" rather than "analytical reasoning". "Analytic thinkers see in straight lines," Hendrich writes "Holistic thinkers focus not on the parts but the whole... and expect time trends to be non-linear, if not cyclical."

Gillian Tett concludes Trump has captured the tribal 'non-linear' approach of those who resent what they see as the elite managerial class and she writes:

'Here lies the epistemological split - and the futility of elites invoking "reason" to persuade Trump voters to rethink their convictions. Words alone will not heal America. Neither will the law, nor logical analysis of the constitution. What is desperately required is empathy... You can only counter the legacy of Trump if you first grasp why he was so potent to start with.'

Was Trumpism really a threat to what Chomsky use to call the Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola tradition of American politics? Whatever was the case, Professor Chomsky recently urged the public to vote for Joe Biden. Perhaps he prefers the Status Quo after all?

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PEACE NEWS & THE TRUMP COUP?

Where was the activist army when it was needed, Milan?

MILAN RAI in PEACE NEWS (December 2020 - January 2021) wrote an editorial entitled 'Countering Trump's Coup':

'As we went to press, Donald Trump had just sent a tweet which was the closest thing to conceeding that he lost the US presidential election that we're probably going to get.'

There had been speculation for some time that Trump would not accept the election result, and well before the US election Milan Rai's friend, Noam Chomsky, had been predicting that Trump supporters would stage a 'Coup' in the event that he lost the election.

Thus in last month's editorial Mr. Rai suggested investigative journalist Alan Nairn put it well on Democracy Now!:

'...in the crucial hours after late election night, when Trump went into his tent and started sulking like a bully who had been thwarted, I think he may have missed his moment, because that was the key moment to call his people on to the streets and start stopping and trashing the votes, and he failed to do that.'

Milan Rai then felt it necessary to claim: 'If Trump had seized his moment for creating chaos, his forces would have been met by a national nonviolent mobilisation against the coup attempt. Tens of thousands of US activists had been preparing for that exact situation. They had been organised by dozens of groups specifically to opose a Trump coup.'

Indeed Mr Rai argued: 'Choose Democracy, one of the new groups, held online anti-coup trainings with over 1,000 participants at a time' and that '(o)ver 37,000 people signed the Choose Democracy pledge of resistance, committing themselves to civil disobedience in event of an attempted coup.'

However, when the coup attempt actually came on Wednesday I may have overlooked their manifestaion of resistance, but I didn't see much of the non-violent resistance in evidence on Capitol Hill. Perhaps despite all their earlier forcasts and predictions, they were genuinely taken by surprise?

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‘Cancel culture’ Condemned by Noam Chomsky &

Salman Rushdie et al. in Harper’s Magazine

“HARRY POTTER” writer J.K Rowling, “Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood and “Midnight’s Children” writer Salman Rushdie are amongst 150 public figures to have signed a letter condemning the practice of public shaming, or ‘cancel culture’ as it is known popularly.

‘Cancel culture’ is a term used to describe individuals who have shared an unpopular opinion or have past behavior that’s deemed offensive, who are ‘canceled’ on social media. Rowling is one such example, due to her views on the trans community.

Atwood received considerable backlash in late 2016 after supporting an open letter calling on Canada’s University of British Columbia to provide its reasons for suspending and firing novelist and instructor Steven Galloway after sexual assault allegations emerged.  Meanwhile, Rushdie’s 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” has also drawn criticism over the years for its depiction of Islamic beliefs.

Other signatories of the letter include authors Martin Amis and Jeffrey Eugenides, public intellectuals Malcolm Gladwell and Noam Chomsky, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, psychologist Steven Pinker, feminist Gloria Steinem, chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov and CNN and Washington Post journalist Fareed Zakaria.

The letter, published Tuesday in Harper’s Magazine, states:  “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.  While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.”

“Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal,” the letter argues.  “We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.”
“We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us,” the letter concludes.

The letter has provoked a deluge of online responses.  Author and transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, who signed the letter, recanted her position within hours.  “I did not know who else had signed that letter,” Boylan tweeted. “I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against Internet shaming.   I did know Chomsky, Steinem and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.  The consequences are mine to bear.  I am so sorry.”
 

Similarly, historian Kerri K. Greenidge, an original signatory, was removed from the list after she tweeted that she does “not endorse” the Harpers letter, and had contacted the publication about a retraction.

Surgeon and scientist David Gorski tweeted: “I read the letter. It’s the same old whiny BS about ‘cancel culture’ from privileged people with large audiences complaining about facing criticism and consequences for their speech.  I am unimpressed.”

Meanwhile, John Boyne, author of “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,” tweeted:  “I agree with this letter completely.  Self-appointed witch-finders hounding people for perceived moral slip-ups while trashing reputations, destroying careers, shouting down women & pursuing cancel culture is the opposite of free speech & reasoned debate.”

PUBLISHED TODAY IN VARIETY MAGAZINE

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Democracy for Realists

by Brian Bamford

NICHOLAS ALLOTT. is a senior lecturer in English language at the University of Oslo and co-author of Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (2017): his research interests include pragmatics, semantics of natural language and interpretation, and philosophy of linguistics.  He argues that it is not enough for intellectuals to do as Noam Chomsky recommends to 'speak the truth and to expose lies.' 

Mr. Allott warns that intellectuals have not just the obligation to tell the truth to power but 'to do so in ways that - in their best judgement are most likely to be understood and to be effective'.

Chomsky himself has admitted:  'I don't have faith that the truth will prevail if it becomes known, but we have no alternative to proceeding on that assumption', and Mr. Allott has said Chomsky has often endorsed Gramsci's 'optimism of the will' as a necessary corollary to pessimism of the intellect.

Allott quotes from a study by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels who have argued that 'voting is not well explained as a selection of a party with policies that match the voter's preferences', and that 'Evidence includes the startling fact that votes are strongly affected by natural events.'

The political scientists, Achen and Bartels have found that 'voters punish politicians for outcomes that are clearly not under their control, including natural events such as shark attacks, droughts and floods.'

Also, Allott writes 'voters are not good at keeping track of changes, even those that impact upon their own welfare'.  

Achen and Bartels argue that 'most voters pay little attention to politics, and at elections their choices depend largely on recent developments in the economy and on political group loyalties that are typically held from childhood.' (Achen & Bartels Democracy for Realists). 

Nicholas Allott writes:  'What is more, political change does not come about only, or even mainly, through choices at elections, and supporters of RI (responsible intellectuals) can argue that the responsibilty to tell the truth is such as by improving the political culture.'

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RUSSIA: WHEN THE NEEDLES GOT STUCK?

  International Brigade deplores EU Remembrance Resolution

 YOU'VE certainly got to hand it to those few people on the British left who still stick with the idea that Russia offers some form of hope for human civilisation.  It is an idea that somehow a remnant of a golden age ideal rooted in historical Marxist-Leninism, will emerge through the person of  Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; (a former student of law at Leningrad University and later a KGB foreign intelligence officer going on to be Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor agency). 

In this country the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) is seemingly one of those bodies dedicated to upholding the myth of this new Russian Saint Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.   As evidence of this on the 5th,  October 2019, at the LONDON AGM of the Chair Jim Jump moved a motion expressing dismay at the decision of the European Parliament to approve a remembrance resolution. 

The actual text of the EU resolution,  of which the IBMT so violently disapproves, reads as follows:

'This strand supports activities inviting reflection on European cultural diversity and on common values. It aims to finance projects reflecting on causes of totalitarian regimes in Europe's modern history (especially, but not exclusively, Nazism that led to the Holocaust, Fascism, Stalinism and totalitarian communist regimes) and to commemorate the victims of their crimes.

'This strand also concerns other defining moments and reference points in recent European history. Preference will be given to projects encouraging tolerance, mutual understanding, intercultural dialogue and reconciliation.'

Now the International Brigade resolution, which was agreed unanimously,  begins sa follows:  

'The European Parliament’s recent decision to equate communism with Nazism and to ignore British appeasement of fascism as one of the key factors leading to the Second World War has been roundly condemned by the IBMT.'   

This is the opening wording with which the International Brigade AGM motion begins condemns European Parliament’s remembrance resolution as an ‘insult’ to anti-fascists!   What this IBMT motion blatantly ignores is the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact,^[a] officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,^[b] was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by Foreign Ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.^[8]

In the end it was the Germans that broke with this pact not the Soviets.  The British International Brigade.  However, it would good if we could conclude the crimes of the Soviet Union with a dodgy pact taken out with a neighbouring regime in the difficult circumstances of the1930s.  Any disinterested observer of 20th century history must know this cannot be the case.  As I write this I am reviewing a book 'THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS: Reflections by Noam Chomsky & others after 50 years' which which deals with what honest journalists and academics ought to be doing to tell truth to the powerful.  In this book Craig Murray* writes about 'The abdication of responsibility':  'It is worth noting the clear-eyed recognition in Chamsky's work that the Soviet Union was also a rival empire.  Even while deporing Russophobia and continual threat posture of encirclement - which Chomsky also note in his essay - I always find it is worth reminding people that Russia itself still is an empire.  Much of its current land - and I mean Russia itself, not the former Soviet Republics - was acquired in the nineteenth century by imperial conquest precisely contempororary with British acquisitions in India or indeed the westward expansion of the USA.  These territories are majority Muslim.  Russian imperialism is quite real.'  

This is indeed an inconvenient truth which the IBMT and those who sell the Morning Star may wish to forget.  It's harder to forget the mountains of  corpses in the  Ukrainian Famine of 1933-4 or Stalin's Show Trials and purges in the later 1930s, but George Orwell described in December 1945 in a penetrating essay entitled 'Through a Glass, Rosily', an attack on a Tribune's Vienna correspondent for revealing 100,000 rape cases owing to the inappropriate misbehavior of the Russian occupying troops with the local citizenship.  At that time Orwell argued that some readers of  Tribune seemed to imply that (even if true) the '100,000 rape cases in Vienna are not a good advertisement for the Soviet regime:  therefore, even if they happened, don't mention them.  Anglo-Russian relations are more likely to prosper if inconvenient facts are kept dark.'

What the wrong-headed motion, which originates from the International Brigade Memorial Trust, and is now being promoted by the Morning Star salesmen, is doing is to throw historical facts down the Orwellian 'Memory Hole'.  What these people are saying is 'don't reveal inconvenient facts' like the Ukrainian Famine in 1933-4 or mass rapes by Russian troops of citizens in occupied wartime Vienna or the purges, simply it because it will play into the hands of the enemy.

 But the trouble with this kind of cover-up is that when it gets out that it is false then people tend not to believe you even when you are telling the truth.  The Morning Star itself has few readers and it little credibility in intellectual circles.  By contrast the International Brigade has retained some degree of integrity over the years, but now by associating itself with the motion it risks bring its own organisation into disrepute:  any body who is willing to weigh the management of the Russia's Soviet gulags more favourably than the gas-chambers of Nazi Germany has surely an unenviable task?

Orwell introduced the term 'Inverted Nationalism', to explain how some people came to embrace either Germany or Russia in contrast to their own countries in the 1930s.  With some people on the left somehow the needle got stuck, and despite Russian regime now being committed to the Orthodox Church and passionate Slav nationalism these same people still cling emotionally to this Oriental despotism.  It's as if there is some deep physological need for these attachments.

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*  Craig Murray is author of Murder in Samarkand (Mainstream Publishing, 2006).  Became well known when he resigned as British ambassador to Uzbekistan in protest against British collusion with the Uzbek dictatorship during the 'war on terror'.  He received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in 2006.

Bookfair 2020: Trans Totalitarian Anarchism?

Editorial Note:

IN January 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled 'The Prevention of Literature' in which he addressed the indifference of the public to the promotion of free expression and what Orwell calls 'the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers'.

 The reader will observe the humility here in Orwell's tone and will no doubt contrast it with the self confidence and even arrogance of much contemporary  commentary.  

'If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.  In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.'

This lack of guts, this fear to challenge the latest orthodoxy still prevails in the anglo-saxon countries today.  But it's not the general public that are setting the agenda for acceptable opinions, it is a kind of fashionable elite view which bullies and bamboozles dissidents who either refuse, or are slow to swallow the latest flavour of the month.

2020 BOOKFAIR

The charming Tweets below from the proponents of the 2020 BOOKFAIR in London beautifully illustrate a naive mentality which is all too prevalent today.  In a way I feel sorry for the poor souls who churn out such stuff.  Do they really believe that they can silence criticism of Trans mania by such crude bans at Bookfairs?  All they have accomplished so far is to close down successful bookfairs as in London or to be forced to do deals as at the recent Manchester People's History Museum Bookfair.  Their every ban or censorious step tottering with the 'cocks in frocks' creates more opposition.

George Orwell, in the preface intended to accompany his book Animal Farm, which was not published in the first edition and remained undiscovered until 1971, wrote:
If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

The 2020 Bookfair organisers are desperately trying to keep the debate over the business of the Cocks in Frocks off the agenda.   It seems they can't cope with having to defend their curiosities of their position.  

Freedom & Professor Chomsky

When we had to take on Professor Chomsky in 2001, with our publication of the Alternative Raven, entitled 'Language, Mind & Society: Chomsky & His Critics' (2001)*, we were met with a more serious and subtle resistance.  In that case pressure was applied slyly through Milan Rai to get Freedom Press to block publication, after the great man Chomsky became aware that we were going to publish some essays challenging to his linguistic ideas on the universal grammar in what was then The Raven.  Milan Rai had been for a time closely associated with Chomsky and now edits Peace News. 
Milan worked behind the scenes on Professor Chomsky's behalf to get the then editor of Freedom to prevent the agreed publication of The Raven critical of his theory on language.   In the end a group of northern anarchists and academics brought out an Alternative Raven, which included the articles challenging Chomsky's theories.  Later Freedom even refused to review the Alternative Raven. when Donald Rooum over-ruled the then editor Toby Crowe.  Later in a letter to me, Chomsky came to admit that he had throughout been in touch with with Milan Rai over that issue, but in mitigation said he only contacted him as a friend.

None of the people involved in trying to suppress the criticism of Chomsky's linguistics at Freedom covered themselves with glory over this matter, and Freedom lost some of its integrity by first agreeing to publish The Raven on Chomsky's linguistics, and to later when Milan Rai got involved to withdraw its offer.  

Self-censorship & 'uncomfortable truths'

When Orwell writes about the 'discomfort' of intellectual honesty, he meant that even during the Second World War, with the Ministry of Information’s often ham-fisted attempts at press censorship, 'the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.'   Self-censorship came down to matters of decorum, Orwell argues—or as we would put it today, 'civility.'   Obedience to 'an orthodoxy' meant that while 'it is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other… it is "not done" to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was "not done" to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.  Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness,' not by government agents, but by a critical backlash aimed at preserving a sense of 'normalcy' at all costs.


At stake for Orwell in the 1940s was no less than the fundamental liberal principle of free speech, in defense of which he invokes the famous quote from Voltaire as well as Rosa Luxembourg’s definition of freedom as 'freedom for the other fellow'.  'Liberty of speech and of the press,' Orwell writes, does not demand 'absolute liberty'—though he stops short of defining its limits.  But it does demand the courage to tell uncomfortable truths, even such truths as are, perhaps, politically inexpedient or detrimental to the prospects of a lucrative career.  'If liberty means anything at all,' Orwell concludes, 'it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'

Unlike in the 1940s, when Orwell was around trying to get Animal Farm published, we are not being nudged into a vulgar Marxist or pro-Soviet totalitarianism.  The kind of totalitarianism of the Trans mania we are now expected to civilly swallow is the decorum of the Cocks in Frocks.

*  http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/class_text_117.pdf

 

Steve Bell's cartoons now being censored by the Guardian!

Cartoon by Steve Bell - Is This Anti-Semitic?

C. P. Scott who served almost 50-years as the editor of the Manchester Guardian newspaper, wrote an essay in 1921 in which he expressed his opinion on the role of a newspaper. He said the "primary office" of a newspaper is accurate news reporting, saying "Comment is free, but facts are sacred." In recent weeks, under the editorship of Kathryn Viner, the Guardian has been criticized for having published a letter from over 100 prominent Jews including Noam Chomsky, supporting the Labour MP Chris Williamson and then withdrawing it, after receiving a letter of complaint from the British Board of Jewish Deputies. We are publishing below an email that was sent from the Guardian Cartoonist Steve Bell to Kathryn Viner after one of his cartoons was recently censored by the newspaper on Thursday 18th July. The cartoon featured Israel's racist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In his email, Steve Bell also refers to the spiked letter sent by supporters of Chris Williamson and the letter that was published in the Guardian from over 60 Labour peers calling on Jeremy Corbyn to resign. We understand that the £18,000 that was paid to the Guardian to publish the letter, may have come from the Jewish entrepreneur, Alan Sugar.

Guardian newspaper pulls letter following complaint from Board of Deputies of British Jews!

On 8th July, the Guardian newspaper published a letter from over 100 prominent members of the Jewish community including Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. Following a complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the letter was withdrawn by the Guardian 'pending investigation'. Tony Greenstein, one of the signatories, said: "The Zionists complained we weren't prominent and that some of us had been expelled for 'anti-Semitism'! That was the whole point! Antisemitism has been weaponised." We are publishing below the letter and other material that has been published on social media.

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Prominent members of the Jewish community, in the UK and abroad, write to defend the Labour MP Chris Williamson amid allegations of antisemitism.

"We the undersigned, all Jews, are writing in support of Chris Williamson and to register our dismay at the recent letter organised by Tom Watson, and signed by parliamentary Labour party and House of Lords members, calling for his suspension (Anger over return of MP who said Labour was ‘too apologetic’ over antisemitism, 28 June).

Chris Williamson did not say that the party had been “too apologetic about antisemitism”, as has been widely misreported. He correctly stated that the Labour party has done more than any other party to combat the scourge of antisemitism and that, therefore, its stance should be less apologetic. Such attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters aim to undermine not only the Labour party’s leadership but also all pro-Palestinian members.

The mass media have ignored the huge support for Chris both within and beyond the Labour party. Support that includes many Jews. The party needs people like him, with the energy and determination to fight for social justice. As anti-racist Jews, we regard Chris as our ally: he stands as we do with the oppressed rather than the oppressor. It should also be noted that he has a longer record of campaigning against racism and fascism than most of his detractors.

The Chakrabarti report recommended that the party’s disciplinary procedures respect due process, favour education over expulsion and promote a culture of free speech, yet this has been abandoned in practice. We ask the Labour party to reinstate Chris Williamson and cease persecuting such members on false allegations of antisemitism.
Noam Chomsky MIT, Norman Finkelstein Lecturer and writer, Ed AsnerActor, Prof Richard Falk Princeton University, Leah Lavene and Jenny Manson Jewish Voice for Labour and more than 100 others." Full list at tinyurl.com/y4mr4lwb

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George Orwell's Politics on libcom: Socialism

by Brian Bamford

A FEW days ago someone put a thread on the anarchist website libcom* entitled 'The Orwell quotes right-wingers never mention'.  It tries to show the breadth of George Orwell's ideas goes beyond his books '1984' and 'Animal Farm', in so far as they are perceived as attacks on state socialism and revolution.  The thread correctly attempts to show that Orwell was in fact a socialist who participated in a revolution in Spain.  There is a mountain of evidence that demonstrates this in his essays and letters, not to mention his book 'Homage to Catalonia', which Noam Chomsky describes as his best book.

In an essay reviewing Charles Dickens book Tale of Two Cities on the French revolution, Orwell chastises him for his exaggerations:

'The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors; Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them — and from a historical point of view he has certainly exaggerated.  Even the Reign of Terror was a much smaller thing than he makes it appear.  Though he quotes no figures, he gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives and the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of readers.  Thanks to Dickens, the very word ‘tumbril’ has a murderous sound; one forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart.  To this day, to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads.  It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen of his time, should have played a part in creating this impression.'

Now the approach of the libcom thread is sound in that it tries to stress the authentic Orwell, who clearly favoured a form of socialism, and who sides with the working class based on his experiences in Spain.

Sitting in the trenches in Aragon in 1937 at the time of what some call the Spanish Revolution, Orwell wrote:
'...those first three or four months that I spent in the line...formed a kind of interregnum in my life, quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to come, they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.

'... I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality.  In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it.  There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the the mental atmosphere was one of Socialism.  Many of the normal motives of civilized life - snobbishness, money-grubbing fear of the boss, etc. - had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone one as his master; ' (Homage to Catalonia; pages 101 and 102 of the Penguin edition)

It seems to me that Orwell's time on the Aragon front brought about a transformation in his thinking that led to him shifting to a belief in the possibility of socialism.  And yet, equally it established in his mind a mental state which also blended with what he had to say in his own critique of Dickens when describes him thus:  ' [as] the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry - in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.' 

Those who despise Orwell today would have us drop this liberal aspect of both Orwell and Dickens, and have us embrace a form of modern totalitarianism which seeks to stiffle what Orwell calls the free intelligence of the old fashioned 19th century liberal.

Read more:  

https://libcom.org/

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NOAM CHOMSKY & ANTIFA

Back in 2010 Noam Chomsky discussed the parallels between the Tea-Party and the pre-Nazi period in Germany.  Chomsky noted that after the Weimar Republic failed to handle the nation's economic woes, mainstream political parties lost support and the Nazis emerged.  Chomsky warned that the Left would need to take this as a sign that much better organizing was in order to combat the likes of the Tea-Party.  Mocking and threatening the far-right group to Chomsky served no real purpose and was a severe error in principle, tactics, and philosophy.

Chomsky added that, “If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.”

Don’t get me wrong, many of my friends on the Left admire Antifa’s resistance of neo-Nazis.  And like me they express deep concerns about our persistently fascist leaning country that has devolved in terms of climate, the economy, as well as a variety of social issues.  I am not however, a “soft-fascist,” or “typical liberal,” for supporting Chomsky’s views.  Nor are Chomsky critics all members of a Stalinist cult because they may support Antifa through and through.

Believe me, I’d love to punch Nazis and you can count me in to be an eternal member of resistance to both fringe and mainstream hate, but I’m not sure it would yield any positive result to use my progressive thought as a literal battering ram.  Despite the horrors of this nation’s past and present on so many issues, resorting to violence against a group that thrives on violence seems counterproductive.

Could it be that Chomsky is wrong and his detractors are right?  Could it be that there’s no time for supplicant MLK type resolve in 2017?  I think the broader Left has history on their side.

President Trump made dangerous and inaccurate remarks concerning the “many sides” of Charlottesville.  At the same time, Chomsky correctly asserted that Antifa’s actions served as “a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who [are] exuberant.”

He asserted that Antifa "generally [proves] self-destructive."  Furthermore, Chomsky remarked that Antifa indicates “a minuscule fringe of the Left,” and that "[W]hat they do is often wrong in principle — like blocking talks."

This positioning is very consistent with most of his career.  After taking off as a world-renowned linguist Chomsky first gained prominence as a political writer during the Vietnam Era and one of his main sources of inspiration was the famed revolutionary pacifist A.J. Muste.

Muste is famous for articulating,  “There is no way to peace for peace is the way. Peace is the starting place, and you can not end with it if you do not begin with it.”  This helps to explain why Chomsky says that the "toughest and most brutal" always win, which are of course the white supremacists, militarized police forces, government forces, and fascists.

When Chomsky recognizes that there are “opportunity costs [and a] loss of the opportunity for education, organizing, and serious and constructive activism,” it doesn’t mean he is a pure pacifist either.  He holds that force is only an option after you fully exhaust peaceful means, and one must try every peaceable mean.  Any use of violence on the Left must follow this trajectory since violence in combatting fascist elements and their support networks require massive organizing efforts and highly trained insurgency techniques.  At the moment however Chomsky holds that Antifa is not even remotely related to anarchism.

He is not mistaken to ask Antifa to think through their actions along with the consequences.  This does not equate to showing any patience for the racist right. Chris Hedges, who took even more heat for his commentary, is simply asking for the same amount of introspection regarding tactics.
Tony DiMaggio has managed to stay out of the Left’s crosshairs unlike Chomsky and Hedges, but I believe he too is correct in his assertions.  DiMaggio knows that violence is a part of the real world but remarks that “violence is never something one should actively seek out.”

Fascists, neo-Nazis and right wing terrorists do indeed try to fuse first amendment assembly rights of know-nothings to justifications for violence.  In many ways the mainstream Alt-Right acts much like ISIS, another by-product of failed policies.  Of course, the Left and Antifa is not the same as the Alt-Right, for there is no such thing as an “Alt-Left.”  But this is however precisely why it’s harmful to entertain violence and the fascist playbook. Similar to Osama bin Laden wanting Bush 43 to engage in a crusade, the Alt-Right wants the Left in a violent war to destroy constructive engagement within the Left internally.

Todd Gitlin is correct when he asserts that, “In truth, there is no symmetry between the “alt-right” and “antifa.”  Antifa is the backlash to the backlash, a defensive response to the growing presence of right-wing extremism.”  Gitlin goes on to add however that, “many antifa activists do not think strategically about whom they alienate.”

John Halle is another person who took principled positions on Antifa. He agrees with the politics of the Left but sees a problem with tactics.  Halle simply states that violence, for instance on a university campus in the protest of a speaker, has boiled over when a moderator is assaulted and sustains injuries.
Chomsky told me that although he received some support for his comments on Antifa, he mostly received furious opposition.  Anarchism is of course not some vague, ill-organized and unclassifiable group like Antifa demonstrated.  Chomsky stated that Antifa might be operating on a romanticized vision of muscularity.  It’s certainly possible.

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NOAM CHOMSKY ON FREE SPEECH

“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”

― Noam Chomsky

ZOFIA BROM, SIMON SAUNDERS, AND FREEDOM PRESS, PLEASE TAKE NOTE! 

Free Speech and Cheap Bigots

 by Christopher Draper

ANARCHIST beat-poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti warned us that, “Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality” and last week (5.3.2018) a gang of masked, black-clad thugs calling themselves London Antifa smashed their way into a meeting at Kings College London in a coordinated, violent, attack on “Free Speech”.  

With perverse irony, “FREEDOM” an erstwhile anarchist website celebrated this exhibition of “fascist mentality”; “Well done to London Antifa for taking action against one of (sic) major universities assisting an alt-right speaker in spreading hateful propaganda.”

The New Authoritarians

Fascist-minded “No-Platformers” claim a unilateral ability and right to distinguish “Free speech from Hate-speech” but there is no distinction to be made. 

As George Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” - regardless of how hate-filled the speaker may be. Noam Chomsky advises, “If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all.”

“Hate Speech” is the modern equivalent of “Blasphemy”.  In 1697 Thomas Aikenhead was the last man in Britain executed for Blasphemy.  In the 19^th century the editor, printer and publisher of The Freethinker were all imprisoned for Blasphemy and as late as 1977, according to the trial judge, “It was touch and go” whether Dennis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, would be imprisoned for Blasphemy (he was fined £1000 and given a suspended prison sentence). 

 

When the British State finally abolished the crime of Blasphemy in 2008 “direct-action” bigots eagerly adopted the abandoned role of punishing those deemed to “speak the unspeakable”.  All around us Commissars now claim the right to control what is expressed even in university halls and anarchist bookfairs.  Where the State formerly identified accusers and offered the prosecuted an opportunity of “due process” and an argued defence the new authoritarians operate in the dark, anonymous, masked and unreasoned. These new arbiters of the new Blasphemy don’t debate they assert and attack.

Free Speech - the Bedrock of Liberty

Northern Voices considers dissent inevitable, healthy and to be welcomed. We are happy to debate FREE SPEECH with anyone in any public forum but the authoritarians don’t respect reason.  Bans, censorship, blacklisting and physical attacks are their modus operandi.  Indulging in such antics lost the organisers of the Manchester Anarchist Bookfair their former booking at the “Peoples’ History Museum” and seems likely to lose their current venue, “The Partisan”, the financial support of local trade unions. 

 

Violent suppression of Free Speech caused the organisers of the 2017 London Anarchist Bookfair to abandon plans for a 2018 event.  The vandals have kicked open the gates and are rampaging amongst us.  Whilst FREEDOM applauds Antifa attacks on Free Speech and publishes books like “BEATING THE FASCISTS” its Board of Management (David Goodway, Peter Marshall, Ernest Rodker et al) timorously cower behind the barricades.  It’s time for all decent minded folk to come out of the closet and stand up for FREE SPEECH.

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PEACE NEWS DEFENDS FREE SPEECH!

ACTIVISTS need to find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each other, argues Milan Rai

'People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist attack, but I’m not worried about them out there.  I worry about what we might do to each other in here.’ – one of the organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, [said] on 28 October.
A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans women.  A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship. About 30 trans rights activists then surrounded Helen Steel and shouted at her for having stood up for the leafleters.
The confrontation went on for a long time.  Some people (including members of the bookfair collective) surrounded Helen Steel to protect her from possible assault.  An unknown person then tripped the fire alarm, leading to an evacuation of the building.

After the bookfair, there was sharp criticism of the organisers.  The collective have decided not to organise the London Anarchist Bookfair next year.  We’ve published lots of relevant documents in this issue, in full or (in one case) nearly in full, to give PN readers the chance to make up your own minds about what’s happened at one of the most important radical gatherings in Britain.

We believe this conflict has wider significance for grassroots movements for change, not just in Britain,

Steel by name

Our starting point is that standing up for free speech is necessary and important.  It is appalling that 30 activists gathered to threaten someone for standing up for the right to leaflet. It is shocking that people in the crowd shouted ‘ugly TERF’, ‘fucking TERF scum’, ‘bitch’, and ‘fascist’ at her because she refused to accept their harassment of two women leafleters.  This kind of bullying is completely unacceptable. (The word ‘TERF’ is now mostly used as a derogatory term meaning ‘someone with transphobic views’.   It originally stood for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’.)   It’s shameful that groups have issued statements of solidarity with the trans rights activists without criticising this intimidation.

When Helen Steel stood up for freedom of speech, when organisers of the bookfair helped to protect her, these were courageous and principled acts.

We shouldn’t allow anyone, whether the government or any activist group, the right to dictate what ideas should be allowed to circulate.  Freedom of speech is deeply connected to freedom of thought. Most of us discover what we really think by talking with others, by expressing ourselves, and then hearing other people’s responses.  Everyone should have the chance to find their own political truths, to make mistakes, to grow and to stand on their own feet intellectually.

There is an old slogan: the answer to bad speech is more speech. In 1969, US anarchist Noam Chomsky wrote: ‘a movement of the left condemns itself to failure and irrelevance if it does not create an intellectual culture that becomes dominant by virtue of its excellence and that is meaningful to the masses of people who, in an advanced industrial society, can participate in creating and deepening it’.

Our arguments should become dominant by virtue of their excellence, not because we have shouted down the other side.

Shutting down debate – by shouting people down or blockading a talk or triggering a fire alarm – can be seen as a lack of confidence, a lack of belief that you have the arguments to win the argument.

Free speech

Defending someone’s freedom of expression is not the same as approving of what they are saying. Chomsky points out:  ‘If you’re in favour of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.  Otherwise you’re not in favour of freedom of speech.’

When should free speech be limited?  Chomsky stands with the US supreme court ruling of 1969 which said that speech should always be protected from legal punishment except when people are trying to incite, and likely to produce, ‘imminent lawless action’ with their words.  According to this standard, the law should not be used to stop or punish speech that justifies or advocates oppressive violence in general.  The law should only be used against speech when those words are being used to try to start an actual violent attack right here, right now (‘imminently’).

Whatever else you might say about them, none of the gender-related leaflets passed out at the bookfair either justified or tried to incite anti-trans violence.  The nearest the bookfair came to imminent violence was when 30 people surrounded Helen Steel.

It has been claimed that what was written in these leaflets was a form of violence.  This is to bend the meaning of words completely out of shape.  Offensive or oppressive speech is not violence.

If you choose to define oppressive speech as violence, and if you accept the right of violent self-defence, then it is justified to carry out violence against pretty much everyone, because we all say things that are oppressive or that can be seen as oppressive.

Yes, hate speech can help create a climate of intolerance and hatred which encourages violent attacks. That doesn’t mean hate speech is violence or that it should be subject to legal punishment. (We’re not saying the leaflets were hate speech.)

How to destroy ourselves

In our last editorial, we described how conservatives, liberals, socialists and communists all helped to create an authoritarian climate in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, paving the way for Nazism (PN 2610–2611).

The socialist SPD banned meetings, newspapers and demos.  The communist KPD broke up meetings.  Together, they undermined democratic habits and independent thinking within German working-class movements, leaving them paralysed when the Nazis came to power.

When we stop public discussions, either through the law or through some kind of force (like a fire alarm), we move politics away from debate and persuasion, what pagan activist Starhawk calls ‘power with’, towards the world of force and compulsion, what Starhawk calls ‘power over' others.  If politics turns into a ‘power over’ game, the winners will be those who are most brutal.  That outcome won’t favour any kind of feminist.

Every time disruption or threats make it impossible to hold a public meeting – whoever is speaking, whatever their views – we undermine free speech and we weaken our already weak movements for change.

We need to find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each other, to disagree deeply while continuing to work together where we can.  We need to create bigger, stronger activist organisations, independent media, radical publishers and bookfairs.  We need to support the London Anarchist Bookfair, not destroy it.  We should be inspired how it makes freedom work.

Editorial note: In five articles ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]), Peace News is documenting the free speech conflict at this year’s (2017) London Anarchist Bookfair. The origins of the Anarchist Bookfair are briefly recounted here, and the issues concerning free speech are the subject of this issue's editorial above.

GEORGE ORWELL's SOCIALISM

Wakefield Socialist History Group:

Brian Bamford's contribution to the event at the Red Shed

yesterday discussing George Orwell & Socialism 

(a more extensive report on the other four speakers will follow):

BECAUSE the subject of this talk is specifically about Orwell's socialism I ought to say what I won't be dealing with.  Orwell is such a vast subject, and he featured on Radio 4 only this week.

I’ll only be touching on Raymond Williams's differences with regard to Orwell. With regard to the philosophical issues, and what has been called the 'Plato Problem', the 'Chomsky Problem', and the 'Orwell Problem', I do not intend to tackle these unless someone should ask a question relevant to this.

Here I'm going to try to explain how Orwell was transformed into becoming a socialist.

In 2011, I gave some talks in Newcastle, London and Bristol dedicated to the 75^th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.  About that time at a meeting of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the historian Professor Preston had described George Orwell’s book 'Homage to Catalonia' by saying: 

'George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is a book which I would rank alongside Spike Milligan's “Adolf Hitler: My part in His Downfall”, another interesting book by a footsoldier who played a small part in a much wider conflict'.

Since then Professor Preston has cheerfully repeated this claim from time to time.  He did it at a lecture at the Imperial War Museum; on 'Start the Week' with Andrew Marr; and on Radio 3 on 'Night Waves'.

At that time in 2011, as an ethnomethodologist, I was keen to show that Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' was an eye-witness account in the tradition of an ethnography rather than an attempt at historical analysis.

In December 1936, George Orwell left England for Spain, but he was STILL unsure  whether he would participate as a soldier or as a journalist.

Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden in his book 'Orwell - an Authorised Biography' writes:

‘...[Orwell] doubted whether he had the stamina or the skill to be a good soldier. And because of the chronic weakness of his lungs, he suspected// he would be turned down for health reasons if he tried to enlist. Yet he did not rule out joining one of the Spanish political militias if they could use him.

‘But he decided that the best way to serve the cause was to observe the war and write about it for the New Statesman or some other English paper that was sympathetic to the Republican government.’

We know now that in the end Orwell opted to join the POUM Militia.  And we know that Orwell kept a journal and wrote notes in the trenches.  It is now on record that this journal was seized by the communist police from his hotel room while he was on the run sleeping on building sites in Barcelona in May 1937.

When I made reference to doing an ethnography in my Bristol talk in 2011, I was invited to explain was an ethnography was.

The definition taken from the Glossary of terms written by Simon Coleman and Bob Simpson is that:
'Ethnography is the recording and analysis of a culture or society usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, a place or an institution.'

Before I go on to consider its limitations and the methodological problems of what Orwell is doing here and perhaps elsewhere, let me say something to my current talk:
Timothy Garton Ash, who reported on the wars in the Balkans described Orwell's book 'Homage to Catalonia' as a gold standard in war reporting, and the journalist Paul Foot in his Guardian review of the book claimed it made him into socialist.

Yet Orwell eludes to the fact that his Spanish experiences and the good fortune to be among Spaniards turned him into a socialist.  Before that he had been described as a Tory anarchist.
About half way through the book, on page 101 of my own Penguin edition, Orwell wrote:
'I had dropped into by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.'
And he goes on:
'Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly but not all, of working-class origins, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality.'
He speaks of the sense of near perfect equality that he found up there on the Aragon front., and he says he felt he was 'experiencing a foretaste of socialism adding that he found 'ordinary class-divisions had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England.'
He writes that:
'No one was there except for us and the peasants, no one owned anyone else as his master.'

So, up there in the trenches South of the Pyrenees, Orwell concluded that for most people 'socialism means a classless society or it means nothing.'
Orwell also talks about the fashion to deny that socialism had anything to do with equality and he writes;
'In every country in the world a huge tribe of party hacks and sleek little professors are busy "proving" that socialism means no more than planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact.'
Orwell claims that 'the mystique of socialism is equality and it's this idea that attracts ordinary folk to socialism.'

That's what Orwell maintained in the 1930!
So for Orwell it was equality that mattered not left-wing Keynsianism or half-baked Fabianism.

I think it was over this distaste for 'planned state-capitalism' that Orwell and Raymond Williams differed.

So what is wrong with Orwell's book on Spain?

According to Professor Preston in the Guardian this year:
'However, limited to the time and place of Orwell's presence in Spain, Orwell situated on a quiet sector of a quiet front, his book would certainly not be there as a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war, particularly of its international determinants.'
He clearly, says Preston, 'knew nothing of its origins or of the social crisis behind the Barcelona clashes.'
To grasp the bigger picture 'the broader politics of the war', Preston seems to be saying that to get the analysis right we will have to turn to proper historians who have the benefit of hindsight.
Perhaps the kind of historians like Gabriel Jackson, that Noam Chomsky describes and critiques in his essay 'OBJECTIVITY AND LIBERAL SCHOLARSHIP'.
In that essay, Chomsky argues that what these academic historians like Jackson tend to do is ignore the views of the workers in a struggle such as that in Spain. 

Look at what Professor Preston says about Spike Milligan's book, belittling 'footsoldiers'.  Or where he writes:
'Homage to Catalonia is a book about the Spanish war written from a narrow perspective, by someone who left out much that the professional historian could now encompass, supported as he is, by the enriched body of scholarship which has been published in Spanish, Catalan, and English... since 1996.'

With the greatest respect to Professor Preston and the rest of the community of scholars, I think we should remind ourselves of what Isaiah Berlin had to say and history and the historians.   To remind ourselves that no-one, not even Marx, managed in their powerful attempt to turn history into a science.

As an ethnomethodologist, it seems to me that history often verges on the art of advocacy.  Professor Preston's main gripe is that Orwell's book is the only book most people read about the Spanish war.

Why is Orwell's book so popular?  Why is it so widely read?

In the last few months I have just finished interviewing Joan Christopher about her husband Bill Christopher, who was a socialist and anarcho-syndicalist in the ILP, and she told me that Bill Christopher became politically transformed to socialism while serving in the Second World War.

Similarly, I have just discovered that the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was writing 'The Tractatus', while fighting in the Austrian army on the Russian front in the First World War experienced a similar transformation.  Before the war Wittgenstein had considered that he was preparing a book on logic, but after his experiences in the war he decided that he had written a book that was fundamentally ethical.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised then, that Orwell describes his transformation following his Spanish encounters thus:
'I was hardly conscious of the changes occurring in my own mind'.
Or where says on page 103 of the Penguin edition:
'I hope I can convey to you the atmosphere of the time.  The good luck of being among Spaniards with their innate decency, there ever present anarchist tinge.'
And when he writes this, unlike the 'sleek professors' and the historians, he's not trying to tell us something, he's not lecturing us as his readers, he's conveying something - he's showing us something of what it was like.  He's giving us a picture!

Orwell's memory broods over 'incidents that might seem too petty to be worth recalling':
'I am in the dug-out at Monte Pocero on the limestone ledge that serves as a bed.'
'I am... struggling to keep my balance and to tug a root of wild rosemary out of the ground.  High overhead meaningless bullets are singing.'

What Orwell is doing is showing us a picture of the underlying nature of the war.

Professor Preston feeds us facts and figures, while Orwell shows us something of the true nature of war.  Hence, 'Homage to Catalonia' is the most widely read book on the Spanish Civil War precisely because of this.

At my talk in Newcastle a lad there claimed that he'd stood where Orwell had stood on guard in Barcelona on guard on the Ramblas just opposite the Cafe Moka.  And he said that he didn't believe Orwell's account because he wouldn't have been able to see the Civil Guards across the street he was supposed to fire at.

Not being able to see everything symbolises the problem of Orwell's limitations.  The limitations of the eye-witness account; the limitation of the foot-soldier.

If we consider Tolstoy's Epilogue to 'War & Peace', we find that it was Napoleon not the foot-soldier who couldn't see the battle from where he was standing.  He couldn't see for all the smoke and dust produced in the battle.  Consequently, Napoleon had to depend on the dispatch riders whose messages were unreliable and useless, because the situation had changed in the time it had taken to reach their Emperor to get his orders.

Yet we find that at the Battle of Borodino, according to Tolstoy,  it was precisely the foot-soldiers and their morale that mattered, rather than the commands of the great man.

Regarding Orwell's lack of prior understanding of the Spanish conflict I want to say something.

I knew Vernon Richards the old editor of FREEDOM, the anarchist newspaper.  Vernon was close to Orwell in the 1930s and 40s, and he told me that Orwell didn't have much background knowledge of Spanish politics or indeed really deep understanding of the nature of the Spanish conflict before he went to Spain.

Orwell was really in the same situation as David in the Ken Loach film 'Land and Freedom'.  David was a bit of a scous bumpkin in the film, and he had to mature during the course of a two-hour film.  Yet precisely by being naive, both David, Orwell and the viewer, can begin eventually to see things as  we shall say, 'anthropologically strange'.  

Martha Gellhorn, who travelled around Spain during the Spanish Civil War reporting on events, shows us the importance of the on the spot account when she says:  'I wrote very fast, as I had to, afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place.'

Philp French in his Observer review of 'Land and Freedom' writes:

'David has a painful lesson that leads from naivety to maturity without making him a cynic.  He retains his belief in the essential decency of working people and their right to control their own destinies, individually and as a community.'

Hence, I believe it was an advantage from the point of view of an anthropological account that George Orwell didn't have any apriori made-up opinions when he first went to Spain.

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