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Venstrefløjens George Orwell

George Orwell har i mere end 50 år været omdiskuteret på venstrefløjen, hvad der ikke mindst skyldes både venstrefløjens egen svaghed over for Orwells kritik af den russiske revolutions udvikling og stalinismen i bogen Kammerat Napoleon og højrefløjens flittige brug af Orwell som antitotalitær orakel i den kolde krigs periode.

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The George Orwell of the Left

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- Indledning / Introduction
- Venstrefløjens George Orwell (The George Orwell of the Left)

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Se også Tidslinjen (Modkraft.dk/Tidsskriftcentret):
- 8. juni 1949 om romanen 1984. Scroll ned.
- 17. august 1945 om romanen Kammerat Napoleon. Scroll ned.

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Liste med referencer til

- Bøger
- Artikler på dansk
- Articles in English
- Sites
- Orwell-inspirerede sites

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Bøger / Books

Paul Flewers (ed.): George Orwell : Enigmatic Socialist (London, Socialist Platform, 2005, 189 p.).
Essays by Ian Birchall, Paul Flewers, John Molyneux, John Newsinger, Paul O’Flinn and Peter Sedgwick.
Anmelderser/reviews: Keith O’Regan: Orwell and the left (New Socialist, No.53, September-October 2005).

Toni Liversage: George Orwell : en introduktion (Kbh., Gyldendal, 2000, 215 sider).

Paul Flewers: ’I know how, but I don’t know why’ : George Orwell’s conception of totalitarianism (Coventry, New Interventions, 2000, 35 s.). Review by John Newsinger (Revolutionary History, Vol.7, No.3, 2000, p.312-313).

John Newsinger: Orwell’s politics (Basingstoke, MacMillan, 1999, 178 s.).
Review by Paul Flewers: (Revolutionary History, Vol.7, No.3, 2000, p.313-315) + Anna Chen: George Orwell: a literary Trotskyist? (International Socialism, Issue 85, Winter 1999, p.131-144).

Raymond Williams: Orwell (Kbh., Tiderne Skifter, 1984, 113 sider).

Nils Bredsdorff mfl. (red.): Hyldest til George Orwell (Roskilde, Roskilde Universitets Center, 1984, 152 sider).

Artikler på dansk

Dagbladet Information
- Tony Liversage: Forfatteren og det politiske engagement (Kronik, 25. juni 2003).
"Jeg mener, at man er nødt til at fortsætte den politiske kamp, på samme måde som en læge er nødt til at forsøge at redde livet hos en patient, der sandsynligvis står overfor at skulle dø".

Politiken
- Michael Seidelin: Orwells liste (25. juni 2003).
"Men offentliggørelsen har igen skabt debat om Orwells politiske indsats i de sidste år af sit liv."
På baggrund af bl.a. 3 artikler fra The Guardian:
- Blacklisted writer says illness clouded Orwell’s judgement (June 24, 2003).
- Blair’s babe : Did love turn Orwell into a government stooge? (June 21, 2003).
- Among Orwell’s suspects (June 21, 2003). List of the author’s suspects.
Se også denne artikel fra The Guardian:
- Odd clothes and unorthodox views - why MI5 spied on Orwell for a decade (September 4, 2007).

Politisk Revy
- Tema: 1984 (nr.451, 29. december 1983, s.7-12).
- Spanienskæmper med George Orwell (interview med Stafford Cattman), ved Allan Anarchos (nr.452, 20. januar 1984, s.18-20 + nr.453, 3. februar, s.21-22).

Socialistisk Arbejderavis
- Andrew Stone: Orwells århundrede: fra 2003 til 1984 (nr. 217, august 2003).
"George Orwell var en af de mest indflydelsesrige forfattere i det tyvende århundrede. I hundredåret for hans fødsel kan diskussioner omkring hans mest berømte bog ’1984’ stadig være yderst relevante."

Articles in English

On the publishng of the novel 1984, see also our timeline 8 June 1949 (scroll down)

The Guardian (UK) articles, see under chapter Artikler på dansk/skandinavisk > Politiken.

Against the Current
- Jane Slaughter: Remembering Spain’s Revolution (No.143, November-December 2009).
"Orwell’s portrait of revolutionary Spain gives us a glimpse of human beings’ revolutionary and egalitarian potential and their capacity for bravery. That is why, 70 years later, Homage to Catalonia is worth reading for the first time and again."

Critique
- John Newsinger: Destroying the myth: George Orwell and Soviet communism (No.27, 1995, p.55-80).
"For Orwell, his socialist commitment necesarrily involved hostility to Soviet Communism."

The Guardian
- Stephen Bates: Odd clothes and unorthodox views - why MI5 spied on Orwell for a decade (4 September 2007).
"1984 author suspected of being a communist. Newly released files reveal Special Branch blunders."

International Socialism
- John Newsinger: Not all farmers were bad... (Issue Issue 119, Summer 2008, p.177-178). Review of Daniel J Leab, Orwell subverted: The CIA and the filming of Animal Farm (2007).
"Orwell’s anti-Stalinism was, to be blunt, made use of for counter-revolutionary and pro-imperialist purposes. How much of the responsibility for this was his?"
See also about the 1954 CIA-financed animated production at Wikipedia.org, and the film online at Louis Proyect’s site: Animal Farm, with commentaries by Proyect (August 18, 2008).
- John Newsinger: Orwell and the Spanish Revolution (Issue 62, Spring 1994, p.71-90).
"[Orwell] is the author of one of the most important celebrations of revolution in English literature, Homage to Catalonia. In this account of his experiences with the POUM (United Marxist Workers Party) militia in Spain, he makes clear his commitment to both working class struggle and to socialism, and at the same time his steadfast opposition to Stalinism and its apologists."
- John Molyneux:Animal Farm revisited (Issue 44, Autumn 1989, p.99-112).
"George Orwell has always been a paradoxical figure on the left. How could the author of the inspiring account of the Spanish Revolution also write every right winger’s favourite example of why revolution can never work?"
- Paul O’Flinn: Re-reading ’Nineteen Eighty-Four’ in 1984 (Issue 23, Spring 1984, p.76-98).
"It seems to me undeniable that in various ways - in the way it is structured, in the values it enacts and in its significant silences - Nineteen Eighty Four is in the main a reactionary book."
- Peter Sedgwick: George Orwell : International Socialist? : 1: The Development of Orwell’s Socialism (Issue 37, June-July 1969, p.28-34).
"A basic account of the development of George Orwell’s political beliefs, from the beginning of his literary vocation down to his death in January 1950."
2. del udkom aldrig. / Second part apparently never published.

International Socialist Review
- Lee Wengraf: The Orwell we never knew (Issue 32, November–December 2003).
"Orwell’s writing has come to epitomize lessons taught in schools everywhere: Resistance is impossible, and Orwell’s Big Brother–the Soviet Union – is the unavoidable result of fighting for a better society … But George Orwell had a different vision than these conservatives, and for that, his life and works have something to offer the left today. Orwell became a self-described socialist as a result of lessons learned early in life".

Labour History Review
- John Newsinger: The American connection: George Orwell, ’literary Trotskyism’ and the New York intellectuals (No.1, 1999).

Links
- Alex Miller: Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: Critiques of Stalinism ’from the left’? (2008).
"This essay is the result of a re-reading of George Orwell’s two most famous novels. Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have acquired the status of textbooks, and are routinely used in schools to demonstrate to children the inherent dangers of social revolution. It is time for a reappraisal."

Lobster
- John Newsinger: George Orwell and the IRD (Foreign Office’s hemmelige propagandaafdeling: Information Research Department). (Issue 38, 1999, p.9-12). Artiklen er p.t. ikke online uden log-in.
- Robin Ramsay: The influence of intelligent services on the British left (1996).
En bredere baggrundsartikel, som ikke omhandler Orwell.

Foto fra MI5’s File ref KV 2/2699
- See: 4 September 2007 releases: Communists and suspected Communists.

Logos
- Ian Williams: Orwell and the British left (Vol.9, No.1, 2010).
"This chapter briefly traces Orwell’s political development in the context of the British socialist politics of his era and shows how at an early stage he defined himself specifically as a ’democratic socialist’, thus intending to distance himself, and indeed socialism itself, from the various totalitarian tendencies that claimed, spuriously in his view, to be socialist."
- Ian Williams: Afterlife of an Atheist (Vol.6, Issue 1-2, Winter/Spring 2007). Review of John Rodden, Scenes from an Afterlife (2003).
"Rodden’s examples show how the advertising industry, whose copywriters surely represent one of the most shamelessly Ingsoc professions, lying for money, can devalue some of the key concepts of Orwell’s work."

New International
- Irwing Hove: 1984 – Utopia reversed: Orwell’s penetrating examination of totalitarian society (Vol.16, No.6, November-December 1950, p.360-368).
"That George Orwell’s 1984 is a work of major significance, as a political document if not as a novel, and that it is probably the best delineation of totalitarian society we have, is by now clear to anyone who has read the book."

New Interventions
- John Newsinger: George Orwell and the revolutionary left (No.4, 1998, p.9-19).

New York Review of Books
- Timothy Garton Ash: Orwell’s List (Vol.50, No.14, September 25, 2003).
"So there it was at last, the copy of George Orwell’s notorious list of ’crypto-communists’ that went into the files of a semisecret department of the Foreign Office on May 4, 1949. It lay before me in a buff folder on the office table of a senior Foreign Office archivist. Despite all the controversy around it, no unofficial person had been allowed to see the list for more than fifty-four years ... So there is the text. What is the context?"

Reds - Die Roten
- Paul O’Flinn: Animal Farm, 1984 and socialist revolution. Chapter 2 in: Paul O’Flinn: Them and us in literature (London, Pluto Press, 1975, p.14-20).
"So what are we to make of this socialist who for the past generation has supplied the Right with a whole armoury of blunt instruments with which to attack the Left? More important, what’s useful in Orwell’s ideas and Orwell’s warnings for the present generation of socialists?"

Socialism Today
- Peter Taaffe: Revisiting the Road to Wigan Pier (Issue 137, April 2010).
"It was 75 years ago that the publisher Victor Gollancz commissioned George Orwell to write a book about the effects of mass unemployment in the depression-era north of England. Peter Taaffe revisits one of Orwell’s less familiar, but now again very relevant, signature works."

The Socialist
- Michael Calderbank: George Orwell: Facing up to the contradictions (30 June 2003).
"Orwell was responding to debates within the left, about how to keep the idea of a genuine socialist transformation alive." And scroll down the article to: Books that inspired me: Homage to Catalonia (30 June 2003)

Socialist Review
Special Feature: An Orwellian Nightmare? (Issue 276, July-August 2003):
"George Orwell was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth we examine the controversy around his work and his legacy for today."
- Orwell Centenary: George Orwell, 1903-1950: The facts of Orwell’s life.
- Andrew Stone: From 2003 to 1984: An assessment of Orwell’s most famous novel.
- Paul Foot: The Cold War controversy: Why does much of the left reject Orwell?
- Andy Durgan: No Pasaran: Orwell and revolutionary Spain.
- John Newsinger: Orwell centenary: The biographies.
- Gareth Jenkins: Culture, class and communism: Orwell has become part of the everyday culture he so powerfully described.

Socialist Worker (US)
- Lee Wengraf: The legacy of George Orwell : A wittness to revolution and counterrevolution (July 4, 2003).
"The life and writing of George Orwell on the 100th anniversary of his birth."

Solidarity (UK)
- Sean Matgamna: George Orwell and today’s left: The man who told unpalatable truths (3/33, 26 June 2003).
"When he was alive, Orwell, who died in 1950, was regarded by the dominant forces ’on the left’ of the 1930s and 40s as a ’right-winger’, a crank, an ’anti-Soviet renegade’, an agent or a ’dupe’ of fascism, and an all-round enemy."
- Chris Hickey: Documenting the Spanish Civil War (3/33, 26 June 2003).
"Born 100 years ago and dying in 1950, it is difficult to think of an English writer in the last 100 years who has aroused stronger feelings and been the subject of more political dispute than George Orwell. Yet the fame and controversy that surround Orwell’s name essentially derive from just two books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, produced in the last 6 or 7 years of his life."
- Chris Hickey: George Orwell: Imagining the totalitarians (3/34, 10 July 2003).
"Written on the cusp of the Cold War Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four launched Orwell’s international reputation and made him the most politically fought over English writer of the 20th century."

What Next?
- Ed George: Orwell and ’The English Genius’ (No.28, 2004).
" …fundamental to understanding the nature of the continuity in Orwell’s thought is comprehending his interpretation and reception of British (or English) nationalism."

World Socialist Web Site
- Richard Mynick: A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010 (12 June 2010)
"George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most influential English-language novels of the mid-twentieth century, was published in 1949. The term ’Orwellian’ has long conjured up a vision of the prototypical ’totalitarian state’." See also: Letters on ’Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010’ (19 June 2010)
- Andy Reiss: Animal Farm: a new version on US television (12 November 1999).
"The US cable network TNT recently broadcast a well-publicised remake of George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm, directed by John Stevens."
- Fred Mazelis: George Orwell and the British Foreign Office (9 September 1998).
"When a new 20-volume edition of the collected works of George Orwell appeared about two months ago, included among the books, essays and voluminous correspondence of the famed British writer and journalist who died nearly 50 years ago was a list of some 130 prominent figures he compiled in 1949."

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- George Orwell
- Orwell’s list

Orwell Sites

George Orwell (1903 - 1950): a web guide to George Orwell from literaryhistory.com
LiteraryHistory.com: Indexing the Internet. "The most comprehensive and authoritative bibliography for full-text literary criticism on the internet."

George Orwell (1903-1950) (Project Gutenberg of Australia : a treasure-trove of literature)
"Read and/or download these George Orwell works". Online versions of most of Orwell’s novels.
- Section: Fifty Orwell Essays (1931-1949)

George Orwell: Complete works, Biography, Quotes, Essays = George-Orwell.org
Fiction - Non-Fiction - Essayes.
Non-Fiction:
- Homage to Catalonia
- The Road to Wigan Pier

George Orwell Picture Gallery
By Andy MacDonald (Zardoz.net)
Photos of places related to George Orwell’s life, including residences and workplaces in London, and his gravesite in Sutton Courteney, UK.

George Orwell 1903-1950
Her er, udover Orwell-tekster, bla. et par længere artikler: Claus B. Storgaard: George Orwell, socialist, anarchist or what …? og Rhodri Williams: Orwells political messages in Animal Farm, Homages to Catalonia and 1984. Se Essays.

George Orwell Resources
Her er bla. en biografi, Orwell-tekster og temaer om "Nineteen Eigthy Four" og "Animal Farm".

Charles’ George Orwell Links
Består af en større emneopdelt linkssamling.

George Orwell (1903-1950)
Section Biography (Orwell Chronology; The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937; Orwell’s photo gallery; Orwell’s grave (photos)
Section Library: George Orwell’s novels (’his 9 basic works’), essays/articles, reviews, poems and other writers.

Marxists Internet Archive
- George Orwell (Writers Archive). With biography + two article about the war.

Remembering George Orwell: Eric Arthur Blair 1903 - 1950
The Twelve Books; Biographies; Articles about Orwell; Links + Cronology.
The site is a bibliography with comments and illustrations, no Orwell texts online.

Orwell-inspirerede sites

1984.dk : Et site mod overvågning og registrering
"Dette site er oprettet som en protest mod et nyt lovforslag fra regeringen, som væsentligt vil forringe vores retssikkerhed og give mulighed for øget overvågning af borgere".

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Emneindex: Kultur / Culture
Placering: Modkraft.dk/Tidsskriftcentret/Personer
Kort URL: linkweb.dk/orwell
Emneord: totalitarianism, big brother,
Variantord: orvel, orwel, oswel, gorge orwel,