‘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. 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. |
The great irony -- as I have often commented -- is that Orwell has been stuffed down his own Memory Hole. And this piece is a great example of it.
Speaking of the Memory Hole and "fascifism", this is the book you need to buy if you want to remember all that's been stuffed down it. I had already linked over right in my "Classics" to David Ramsay Steele's "The Mystery of Fascism". It's a must read. But Goldberg has done us the long overdue service of nearly dredging out its entire contents whole. You won't be able to put it down...
Speaking of the Memory Hole and "fascifism", this is the book you need to buy if you want to remember all that's been stuffed down it. I had already linked over right in my "Classics" to David Ramsay Steele's "The Mystery of Fascism". It's a must read. But Goldberg has done us the long overdue service of nearly dredging out its entire contents whole. You won't be able to put it down...
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