One of the things I used to most enjoy over at the Scottish Newsgroup were the interminable (often learned, sometimes silly, but nearly always fun) squabbles over Orwell's ideas. I see no reason to drop the tradition, and I also see that Martha has provided a useful entry into such a discussion with her post about GO over at Harry's Place:
For one thing, he didn't like or understand the kind of nonviolent civil disobedience invented by Gandhi. He repeatedly classed Gandhi with totalitarian demagogues in a way that seems strange now, and the "Reflections on Gandhi" essay itself is mainly critical. I honestly don't know what he would have written about MLKing and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. I'd almost rather not know.
Now, Martha and I have had this out before, but I still think she's missing the point about Orwell and nonviolent civil disobedience (hereafter NCD). The first thing to recognize is that Orwell's views on this subject were not static. Certainly, he didn't take Gandhi very seriously during the 1930s, and as late as 1944 he was still following the line that "[Gandhi's] methods have never seriously embarrassed the British". It is not until the 1949 post-independence Reflections that he seems to have finally, and somewhat grudgingly, acknowledged the significance of NCD tactics in India. (Whether Orwell ever grew to like Gandhi personally or not is, of course, a very different question).
By the way, an overlooked historical footnote: the resistance to British rule in India was frequently violent, and weighting the long-term significance of civil to uncivil disobedience is tricky. Gandhi's cause was often more of a frustrated vision than a practical reality.
But the crucial point about NCD so far as Orwell was concerned was its applicability within totalitarian regimes, a constant theme of 1940s pacifism. And it was this claim - that NCD could act as a replacement to violent resistance, external or internal, to Hitler, et al. - that he questioned.
"There is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle with the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forebearingly as that he was always able to command publicity ... he believed in 'arousing the world', which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at the moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practice civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference."
Martha asks what Orwell would have thought of Martin Luther King, with the implication that she wouldn't like the answer much. I don't believe in the WWGD? game, but I doubt that Orwell would have found anything in the history of the US Civil Rights movement to contradict what he had said about NCD a decade earlier. America in the 1950s and 1960s was, in many respects, a country of violent injustice - not unlike the Raj of the 1930s. But, also like British India, it was a country in which there were basic civic rights (at least for a privileged segment of the population) that could not be permanently ignored without repercussion, and it was these rights which activists used to take their case to the country and the world. If the Jim Crow South had operated like Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, then Martin Luther King Jr. would have remained an apolitical pastor all his life, would have taken up violent resistance, or (if he had persisted in NCD tactics) would have quickly and quietly disappeared from history. But I cannot see any realistic scenario in which he would have been able to pursue the kind of successful Gandhiesque campaign that he did.
In what way did Orwell not "get" NCD?
Posted by Alan Allport at June 28, 2004 08:27 AMAlan -- I'll need time to assemble a proper answer but wanted in the meantime to thank you for posting this. As Orwell himself -- and, among others, one of the posters at Harry's -- pointed out, there were a number of strange and distasteful things about Gandhi himself.
Briefly, the useful lesson from Gandhi that I think Orwell never did get was the notion that his cherished martial virtues could be employed in passive resistance of the lunch-counter sit-in variety. I think he still, even at the end, saw pacifism as contrary to his own Edwardian ideas of manliness. But that's without actually rereading "Reflections on Gandhi," which I'll try and do tonight.
BTW I was just looking at the Schlesinger RFK biography for a writing project & there is a section about a Freedom Ride, I think in 1962, in which the mixed-race group of travelers peacefully challenging transportation segregation on a bus into Mississippi said afterwards that they had truly expected to die -- and possibly would have done so if the Kennedy Administration had not ordered federal protection for them.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at June 28, 2004 11:56 AMI remember Reflections as largely disagreeing with any sort of equation between Western pacifism and Gandhi's satyagraha. Orwell correctly viewed Gandhi's method as warfare conducted by nonviolent means, and subject to constraints of effectiveness dictated by the methods of its opponent. I gathered by reading the essay that he'd have completely approved of MLK's use in lunch counters, while perhaps pointing out that such methods could only work in a democracy with a free press.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at June 28, 2004 12:38 PMNaturally I picture Orwell as more sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement than was, for example, the National Review of the 1950s. I can't find the reference now, but Orwell wrote something in the '40s questioning, on his way to another point, whether people elsewhere in the United States had any power to stop the appalling race-based injustices in Alabama -- implicitly taking it as obvious that the Alabama situation was wrong.
I do wish Orwell had lived to talk about it with James Baldwin. If they'd gotten past superficial differences those two might have talked up a storm -- as Baldwin actually did do in a published dialogue with Margaret Mead, which partly addressed the very Orwell subject of the role-playing forced on individuals by colonial situations.
About the political currents around the Civil Rights Movement, though, I'd guess Orwell might have focused on the use of federal authority to enforce integration and protect protesters rather than the prior efforts, by nonviolent civilian activists, that actually changed public opinion to the point where federal authority could be used as it was. But who knows? I'm not Madame Blavatsky.
Going back to "Reflections on Gandhi," maybe I was wrong about Orwell not appreciating the courage required for civil disobedience. He makes a point of praising Gandhi's "physical courage."
What he's mainly against, yes, is the "otherworldly, anti-humanist tendency of [Gandhi's] doctrines." And this part has some lovely words that I'd partly forgotten were Orwell's:
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals...
But from that point Orwell finds his way into, "Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement." And there I do wonder. Was Varian Fry an appeaser, for example?
But then there's this -- prophetically -- "It seems doubtful whether civilization can stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence." He should have lived to see '89: Nelson Mandela on triumphant tour, and the Berlin Wall down at last, and not by force.
Finally he has this: "...if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air?" There really was something recently -- I forget if sociological study or political commentary -- saying that in the U.S., the nonviolent nature of the Civil Rights Movement was *the* thing that made it possible for the families of former civil rights activists and their former local opponents to live on a reasonably civil basis a generation later: deep grievances and angry vicious circles hadn't been created.
Dunno if this conversation helps or proves anything but it leads to a lot of interesting thought-experiments anyway.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at June 28, 2004 11:06 PMAbout the political currents around the Civil Rights Movement, though, I'd guess Orwell might have focused on the use of federal authority to enforce integration and protect protesters rather than the prior efforts, by nonviolent civilian activists, that actually changed public opinion to the point where federal authority could be used as it was.
I don't know if Orwell would have come to this conclusion (though I suspect he might), but surely these forces were complementary and mutually necessary rather than individually sufficient conditions for success. No civil rights movement, no use of federal power; but no federal power lurking in the background to begin with, no effective civil rights movement. Which is really a restatement of his point that NCD can only work in circumstances where the opposition is acting under some kind of restraint, self-imposed or external.
Posted by: Alan Allport at June 28, 2004 11:18 PMI don't know enough about Orwell to discuss this intelligently, but at any rate, since Gandhi and MLK were mentioned here, it might be helpful to visit the one person whose one essay they both said had a profound influence on their thinking and methods (they didn't say exactly that, but something along those lines).
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/civil/