the wasteland baby

It seems obvious to me that George Orwell was furious about the fact that the Soviet Union was not defeated in WWII. Animal Farm was published in 1945. Orwell witnessed the tragedy that Nazism brought to the world. In 1945 most people already knew about the Holocaust. People at that point were already informed about the concentration camps. People already knew what the Nazis had done in Poland and at Auschwitz. George Orwell, in this context, wrote an allegory where WWII and Nazism are depicted as nothing, where Soviet self-defense policies are depicted as sinister intrigues unrelated to liberal and fascist siege. There’s no Churchill cheerleading fascism in Italy or Spain. The gravity of this framing needs to be understood. In 1945 the whole world was shocked by Nazi concentration camps, and Orwell was asking “Sure, that was bad, but what about the Soviet Union?” It seems absurd, but this is exactly what this book describes, under cover of literary metaphor. “Sure, Auschwitz was bad, but what about Stalin?” That is this whole book’s vibe. [...] And this book, Animal Farm, is a deeply reactionary book, displaying aristocratic condescension against the people, a book in which the working class appear as imbeciles. It displays all the marks of the bourgeois genre of elite theory. Its historical metaphors for Soviet history whitewash capitalists and imperialists. The USSR is shown as self-sabotaging, while its enemies are completely absolved. This is George Orwell, and this is why he was so successful. [...] This explains all the hype, all the buzz and promotion it receives from the establishment. This book will remain famous and beloved so long as racist and aristocratic liberalism persists, until we put and end to this profoundly unequal society by waging a revolution of our own.

“I will have an undergraduate class, let’s say a young white male student, politically-correct, who will say: “I am only a bourgeois white male, I can’t speak.” … I say to them: “Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?” Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very determinist position-since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak… From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will have earned the right to criticize, you be heard. When you take the position of not doing your homework- “I will not criticize because of my accident of birth, the historical accident” - that is the much more pernicious position.”