Reinhard wrote:ASMarques wrote:The quotation in itself is great from the literary standpoint and indeed very accurate, but in our context it leaves an undertaste suggestive of a struggle for the same kind of power, i.e. as if we wished we -- not the other guys -- were the ones controlling the present in order to control the future through our version of the past etc.
Yes, but I think such a misunderstanding - given the fact that the revisionists are the complete powerless outlaws of today's western societies - could be avoided by making the connection to Orwell's
1984 by mentioning the author of the quotation and where it is taken from and by Halo's great pictures of the Big Brother, the telescreen, Winston in the prison cell, etc.
Okay, but I would still prefer THE TRUTH MATTERS. It's concise and it says everything there really is to say -- indeed all it's possible to say without redundancy -- to the newcomer that may feel put off by what may look to him like a collection of politically-driven obsessions.
Reinhard wrote:I think it would be interesting to read a study - perhaps by Prof. Faurisson (he was professor for literature) - on Eric Arthur Blair aka "George Orwell".
During the war he was, as far as I know, working for British war propaganda efforts, but he refused to continue after the war:
→ Essay by George Orwell in the Tribune, Nov. 9th, 1945
Orwell was a natural revisionist, i.e. a rational person with a strong penchant for the truth, even when it went against the grain of his ideological options. Already you'll find some of this in journalistic pieces written in 1945. For instance:
From: Future Of A Ruined Germany (April 1945):
http://www.readprint.com/work-1258/George-OrwellAs the advance into Germany continues and more and more of the devastation wrought by the Allied bombing planes is laid bare, there are three comments that almost every observer finds himself making. The first is: 'The people at home have no conception of this.' The second is, 'It's a miracle that they've gone on fighting.' And the third is, 'Just think of the work of building this all up again!'
It is quite true that the scale of the Allied blitzing of Germany is even now not realised in this country, and its share in the breaking-down of German resistance is probably much underrated. It is difficult to give actuality to reports of air warfare and the man in the street can be forgiven if he imagines that what we have done to Germany over the past four years is merely the same kind of thing they did to us in 1940.
From: Revenge is Sour (November 1945), the piece you linked to:
http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/r ... sh/e_revsoI wondered whether the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was exercising. I concluded that he wasn't really enjoying it, and that he was merely — like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing round a picture gallery — telling himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days he was helpless.
It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler regime. But what this scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
From: Notes on Nationalism (May 1945):
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/nat ... lish/e_natThere can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944?
Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion.
Reinhard wrote:Isn't it possible that he didn't have in mind the Soviet Union or the Third Reich, when writing his most famous book 1984, but the establishing of the Ho£o€au$t™-myth after WW II by his former psychological warfare comrades?:
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. »Who controls the past« ran the Party slogan, »controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.«
George Orwell, 1984
I have little doubt that George Orwell, like Bertrand Russell -- who had been an English pacifist who spoke German and had actually managed to have himself arrested for a few months during the Great War on suspicion of spying for the Kaiser and signaling to enemy submarines!... -- would have been revisionists if they had had access to the same sort of data we have today.
However, I am also convinced that Orwell's main disillusionment was with collectivist politics, not with the Jewish role in the war, or the "Holocaust" itself in any strong conscious way. Remember the names he gave, as late as 1948, to the fictional Party ("Ingsoc") and the image of the Party's public enemy #1 for public consumption ("Emmanuel Goldstein").
But also keep in mind that he wrote
1984 in 1948 and died two years later. Yes, I believe it's clear he would have sided with "Holocaust" revisionism had he lived long enough to have a few more facts within his reach.
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P.S.: Also probably not above assuming the role of a silent denouncer, something that may be considered to take intellectual courage or the exact opposite, depending on the circumstances that only he may have known. Some opinions and speculations on the subject:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... _n8799443/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16550
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/opinion/ ... ory=recent
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jun/2 ... humanities
