Tuesday, February 16, 2021

George Orwell's Essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War"

Timely quotes from England 78 years ago!

"As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned off and on like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.  In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety."  (Page 145.)/(last paragraph of section 1)

"Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present [1942], there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously.  And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday's proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed." (Page 146.)/(second paragraph of section 2.


References
George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts, Narrative Essays, Compiled by George Packer, Harcourt Inc. 2008.