The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The Lion and the Unicorn as they appear in A Nursery Rhyme Picture Book by L. Leslie Brooke. The lion and the unicorn Were fighting for the crown The lion beat the unicorn All around the town. Some gave them white bread, And some gave them brown; Some gave them plum cake and drummed them out of town. [1] In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesman and the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process. Sometimes, on top of a cupboard or at the bottom of a drawer, you come on a pre-war newspaper, and when you have got over your astonishment at its enormous size, you find yourself marvelling at its almost unbelievable stupidity (ibid: 145). Even small characteristics can be telling of common mentality. Cruelty to animals is a distinct difference between nations that Orwell downplays, but probably seems more significant to the modern reader. His point about the English as hobbyists is true – crosswords specifically are still very popular. We resist regimentation, unlike the French and Germans (although the common dilemma of the acceptability of murder ‘for your country’ still applies to us). ‘Gentleness’ gets a mention, and I think this is a valid point. We still don’t learn foreign languages, and lean towards the old comfort of ‘splendid isolation’. I think that, as Orwell says on p.12, it’s fine and warranted to identify general differences between countries – we are very distinct, especially in Europe. However, Orwell’s view makes Englishmen at large seem simple-minded, which is not the case – even where we’re overly concerned with the trivial over the practical, it’s still better to be engaged than idle, and doesn’t match up with our merits and achievements on paper.

One of the most important developments in England during the past twenty years has been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It has happened on such a scale as to make the old classification of society into capitalists, proletarians and petit bourgeois (small property-owners) almost obsolete. England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do. Paul Mason, part of Newsnight’s Special Prize win and shortlisted for the Blog Prize in 2011 and 2009, chooses his top ten books on China… Orwell genel büyüleyici genel bakış açısı yerine bu kez sosyoloji ve siyaset içeren uzunca bir makale yazmış. Hakkındaki türlü dedikodulara karşın Sosyalizme ne kadar inandığını, katıksız bir anti-faşist olduğunu net olarak görebilirsiniz. Politics and the Press, 4pm, Sunday 1 April: Gaby Hinsliff, Martin Moore, Lance Price, chaired by Jean Seaton

Orwell on stage

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army. The Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely under German control, and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans. The Vichy government, if it survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground discipline into what is left of the French army. In the British army the drill is rigid and complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but without definite swagger; the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard. Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people’, would have been better applied to the English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being called a sleep-walker. Leading on to the relationship between the economy and the war effort, there’s much focus on weapons manufacturing and how to stimulate it: however, I feel like Orwell slightly twists the narrative again for his own argument. We were undeniably old-fashioned in our tactics in 1914, especially in the use of horses, bayonets, and the like, but by the end of the war we’d progressed remarkably, inventing tracer bullets, aircraft carries, and the tank. (This is not to mention perhaps the most significant invention, radar, which was not conceived until the Second World War.) There was a big difference between 1914 and 1918: we learned our lesson, although we would have to learn it again in the Second World War. Orwell’s criticism is fair, but I feel he was neglectful on the point of adaptation. It’s all a bit stodgy because half of what he says is right and the other half either wrong or so localised to 1941 England that you can’t tell.

But who are the pro-Fascists? The idea of a Hitler victory appeals to the very rich, to the Communists, to Mosley's followers, to the pacifists, and to certain sections among the Catholics. Also, if things went badly enough on the Home Front, the whole of the poorer section of the working class might swing round to a position that was defeatist though not actively pro-Hitler. Richard Lance Keeble was chair of The Orwell Society, 2013-2020. His book of recent essays, Orwell’s Moustache , is to be published by Abramis, of Bury St Edmunds, later this year We cannot look to this or to any similar government to put through the necessary changes of its own accord. The initiative will have to come from below. That means that there will have to arise something that has never existed in England, a Socialist movement that actually has the mass of the people behind it. But one must start by recognizing why it is that English Socialism has failed. Previous winner Peter Beaumont and previously longlisted Lindsey Hilsum both pay tribute to Marie Colvin, killed in Syria this week Orwell is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945) — they have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author. His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture, have been widely acclaimed.As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” Beat that for an opening line. The history of the past seven years has made it perfectly clear that Communism has no chance in western Europe. The appeal of Fascism is enormously greater. In one country after another the Communists have been rooted out by their more up-to-date enemies, the Nazis. In the English-speaking countries they never had a serious footing. The creed they were spreading could appeal only to a rather rare type of person, found chiefly in the middle-class intelligentsia, the type who has ceased to love his own country but still feels the need of patriotism, and therefore develops patriotic sentiments towards Russia. By 1940, after working for twenty years and spending a great deal a money, the British Communists had barely 20,000 members, actually a smaller number than they had started out with in 1920. The other Marxist parties were of even less importance. They had not the Russian money and prestige behind them, and even more than the Communists they were tied to the nineteenth-century doctrine of the class war. They continued year after year to preach this out-of-date gospel, and never drew any inference from the fact that it got them no followers. Homage to Catalonia : the Spanish Civil War, 2pm, Friday 30 March: Helen Graham, Paul Preston, Francisco Romero Salvado, chaired by Jean Seaton However, Orwell sees the classes as static, which I feel may be an oversimplification that favours his own view of the classes ‘at war’: the working class become middle-class over time, in habits and economically, so they don’t take political action as one might expect – they either work for the prospect of a better life, or don’t care enough to do so – but that isn’t in line with most socialist discourse.

In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy shipowner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus. And considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and considering that they were buying their way into a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such way. The legend of the two animals may have been intensified by the Acts of Union 1707 and it was one year later that William King (1663–1712) recorded a verse very similar to the first stanza of the modern rhyme. [1] This seems to have grown to include several other verses. Apart from those above only one survives: Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.Orwell’s contempt for the Daily Mirror is to persist. At the end of Animal Farm, the pigs take out subscriptions to John Bull, Tit-Bits and the Mirror – symbolically marking their ultimate betrayal of the revolution! (Orwell 1976 [1945]: 63). The Road to Wigan Pier : 75 years on, 6.30pm, Saturday 31 March: Stephen Armstrong, Beatrix Campbell, Juliet Gardiner, Paul Mason, chaired by D. J. Taylor Some people might blanch at the idea that Orwell was influenced by communist texts, but his debt to the CPGB’s intellectuals is not as surprising as it may seem. The communists were among the only people in inter-war Britain seeking to analyse culture from a socialist perspective. As one of the few other writers whose understanding of culture was shaped by socialist ideas, Orwell naturally paid close attention to what they said. Many of his non-fiction writings either restate, develop or refute the communist position. It is just another example of Orwell’s admirably broad-minded capacity to learn from his enemies. Llevaba mucho tiempo sin leer un libro completo de ensayos. Aunque el género me agrada, estaba destinando mi tiempo libre para abordar algunos textos filosóficos y literarios (me refiero a ficción y poesía) que me llamaban la atención. Ahora, aprovechando la oportunidad de dictar un curso de Ensayos de opinión en la universidad en la que trabajo, decidí abordar algunos textos que había comprado hace tiempo. DV8 physical theatre company at the National Theatre Uses part of our event, ‘What can’t you speak about in the 21st Ce ntury?’