I keep waiting for the Saddam connection to surface in this. According to a story by William Safire about a year ago, Saddam was buying rocket propellant from China and having it transshipped through France into Syria. Saddam was also working with other terrorist states in the area, why not also with Col. Kadahfy. Saddam was certainly stealing enough money from the "Oil for Food" fiasco to front the money and he couldn't build it in Iraq with the American flyovers and Satellite coverage. Plans for a 10 kiloton bomb, that would certainly give the AP a story wouldn't it if they had their camera's all set up for a "demonstration" say in New York. Wonder if they would tip off the police or would that also be against their ethics of being neutral?That would be correct -- absolutely against their ethics... And you won't find them quoting Orwell on the topic of themselves either:
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism."[A] bourgeois illusion bred of money and security" pretty much nails the problem the West faces, doesn't it?
The AP's excuse for avoiding this sort of proper historical context provided by the true greats is that that would be too intellectual for you. No, I don't think that's it somehow. Orwell had a general ripost to that as well:
‘Mr Orwell is intellectual-hunting again’ (Mr Comfort). I have never attacked ‘the intellectuals’ or ‘the intelligentsia’ en bloc. I have used a lot of ink and done myself a lot of harm by attacking the successive literary cliques which have infested this country, not because they were intellectuals but precisely because they were not what I mean by true intellectuals. The life of a clique is about five years and I have been writing long enough to see three of them come and two go — the Catholic gang, the Stalinist gang, and the present pacifist or, as they are sometimes nicknamed, Fascifist gang. My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking. But even with these various schools I would differentiate between individuals. I would never think of coupling Christopher Dawson with Arnold Lunn, or Malraux with Palme Dutt, or Max Plowman with the Duke of Bedford. And even the work of one individual can exist at very different levels. For instance Mr Comfort himself wrote one poem I value greatly (‘The Atoll in the Mind’), and I wish he would write more of them instead of lifeless propaganda tracts dressed up as novels. But his letter he has chosen to send you is a different matter. Instead of answering what I have said he tries to prejudice an audience to whom I am little known by a misrepresentation of my general line and sneers about my ‘status’ in England. (A writer isn’t judged by his ‘status’, he is judged by his work.) That is on a par with ‘peace’ propaganda which has to avoid mention of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, and it is not what I mean by intellectual honesty. It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.Rather I suspect the AP are quite glad to keep the word Fascifist from coming back into style at all costs lest it inevitably find its proper mark. Perhaps today Orwell would have noticed that "sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching" has some application to AP's brand of "journalism", no?
Did I forget to mention that Orwell's "Pacifism and the War" is over right in my "Classics" section? I've cajoled you to read it before -- it's short. And timely for being written over sixty years ago...
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