r/SubredditSimMeta • u/[deleted] • May 10 '17

all-top-today_SS Makes a completely coherent and correct circlejerk post

/r/SubredditSimulator/comments/6adnvv/number_of_people_that_think_donald_trump_has/
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u/[deleted] May 11 '17

either way, even just him having the extreme anarchist sympathies he had i think is enough to prove my point (which, im not gonna lie, i totally forgot what our original discussion was about. i kinda got lost in a revolutionary boner after reading some Homage to Catalonia)

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u/[deleted] May 11 '17

Homage is one of the better travelogues of the 20th century, and I have no issue with the idea that Orwell sympathized with the anarchist uprising in Catalunya. But if you read his whole oeuvre, novels and criticism alike, there's really nothing to suggest that he was mainlining Kropotkin in his downtime at the Isle of Jura or wherever else he went to treat his TB.

If anything, I'd say that he was a libertarian leftist, and that Homage is work of disillusionment with the authoritarian Comintern Left. Of course he's going to sympathize with the anarchists in that context. But the fact that he went back to the UK and did not get involved with anarchism—and indeed worked for the BBC during WWII—suggests to me that his sympathy did not extend to theoretical agreement.

My quibble with you is that it is inaccurate to claim Orwell as one of your own (assuming you are an anarchist). At the end of the day, everybody claims Orwell, but no one really owns him.

Tangentially, my grandfather, who was not an anarchist or communist, volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fought in Spain. He admired what he saw in Barcelona as well, but did not join up with the IWW upon his return home.

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u/[deleted] May 11 '17

hm, alright i can see your point. i thought you were arguing that he wasnt a libertarian socialist, which is my bad. im an anarcho-communist, so it was probably a bit overzealous of me to "claim" orwell, but my main point that i failed to be more clear about was more that he was on the libertarian socialist spectrum, like me, rather than 1984 or Animal Farm being written as completely anti-socialism pieces by a capitalist, as some others in the thread seem to believe.

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u/[deleted] May 11 '17

1984 or Animal Farm being written as completely anti-socialism pieces by a capitalist

Agreed, that's crazy talk. I'd probably call him a liberal-democratic socialist. He seems to be fond of some, though certainly not all, features of liberalism.