George Orwell (was To Anh Cong Bang)

[congbang@usa.net]

Hi anh AnHai,

Thank you for all of your recent messages explaining and begging the 
understanding of folks following the thread.
An explanation is just an explanation!
I am looking forward to reading your future more-careful postings.
Kind regards,
Cong Bang.

PS. - I would like to take this occasion to have a question for you. I 
have asked anh Die^?mQuynh to post "Animal Farm" by G. Orwell. Somehow 
like "science fiction", the author created in his novel the "Animalism". 
The decade-lasting discussions following the birth of this novel 
focussed on the "Animalism" versus Capitalism, Socialism.....Can I post one of 
these discussions, entitled "Orwell & Marx: Animalism vs. Marxism" ? or 
we just simply ignore something only because it refers to the Marxism?
       - For those interested in this novel, here is something about 
the author and his masterpiece.
-
George Orwell - The Voice Of The 20th Century

The tone of the 20th century was set long before the first day of its 
first year. The 19th century had begun with a new and profoundly 
different presence on the world stage. Born at the close of the 18th century, 
the United States, with its huge expanse, vast resources and independent 
spirit, would lead the western world into the intense industrialization 
of the 19th century. Thus, the 20th century dawned on a world which had 
become both master and slave of the great mechanized society. And no 
part of 20th century society would seize the power created by this massive 
industrialization more than its politicians and warriors. 

Terror, in both war and peace, had been with mankind since the first 
man realized that a stick or a stone could get you your way not only with 
a woolly bison, but with your fellow cavedwellers as well. But, prior 
to the 20th century, wars were fought by armies which met on a field of 
battle far separated from civilian life. During the 20th century, 
however, from the Somme to Guernica to Coventry to Dresden to Hiroshima, mass 
terror against civilians during wartime had become an instrumentality of 
national will. (Even during the relatively peaceful last half of the 
20th century, the threat of mass terror, that is, psychological terror - 
the mad policy of Mutually Assured Destruction - was employed by the 
American and Soviet superpowers.) And politicians and government leaders, who 
had so willingly employed these new and profoundly inhuman tools of war 
soon realized the effectiveness of terror as an instrument of domestic 
social policy, also. Within the 20th century, the campaigns of terror by 
the Russian Czar and the Soviet and Nazis governments against their own 
citizens and, to the same end, the McCarthite campaign of the United 
States government against the American people are examples of the use of 
such terror. Generally seen as a "socialist" policy, such domestic terror 
is, in fact, a force of "de-socialization", fragmenting the society and 
alienating individuals from each other and from the group as well. 

Orwell's writings and, in fact, his life itself, were concerned with 
the process and mechanism, and, more importantly, with the consequences 
of this alienation. This itself is not wholly different from other 
writers. What separates Orwell and his writings from the others, however, is 
his view of the connection between the form of social interaction and the 
individual's psychological/emotional, and ultimately his spiritual well 
being. 

The Man 

George Orwell was the pen name of an Englishman named Eric Arthur 
Blair. At the time of his birth in India in 1903, Orwell's father served as 
a civil servant in that part of the then vast English empire. Shortly 
after he was born, Orwell's mother brought he and his sister to England, 
where he grew up and went to school. He died of a neglected lung ailment 
in 1950, having lived only forty-seven years, during which he wrote nine 
books and a large number of essays. 

The Philosophy 

Although he saw himself as merely a writer, at best, a political 
writer, George Orwell was, in the end, far more. Culminating in his last two 
novels, Animal Farm and finally Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's entire 
body of work portrays a complete philosophy, encompassing the political, 
social and, on an even deeper level, the psychological interplay between 
the individual and the group. (The idea of the group, as opposed to the 
larger and more generic "society", is compelling in Orwell's work, 
because of its more pervasive and immediate importance to the individual's 
well being.) While on a less fundamental level, Orwell's writing may be 
seen as merely concerned with the struggle between the individual and the 
group, Orwell's deeper view is a more integrated one. It is, at base, 
that the individual's relationship to the particular group in which he 
lives and functions, and, in turn, the group's attitude toward the 
individual will ultimately determine the individual's autonomy, that is, his 
freedom to be himself; to be. As his view of the writings of Charles 
Dickens was simply that "If men would behave decently, the world would be 
decent", Orwell implores that our most basic individual responsibility is 
not merely to stand against the group, but, as individuals within the 
group, to act in such a way as to make the group a viable place in which the 
individual can thrive. As Winston Smith so indelibly and painfully 
illustrates, given our psychological constraints, to ask anything more of 
the individual is to imagine something that cannot be. Thus, Orwell 
believes and Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrates that only when we create groups 
in which the individual is valued will each individual be safe and able 
to survive. And, only then, will the individual be capable of 
supporting the enlightened values of the group itself. 

Copyright © Norman Ershler 1996