This past weekend I happened to read a piece in the Globe and Mail by John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine. In the piece, he points out that right-wing American commentators are using an article written by George Orwell in 1944 to justify civilian casualties in Dubya’s current campaign against terrorism. He then goes on to criticize Orwell as a writer, commenting that he admires Albert Camus and Graham Greene much more than Orwell.
Frankly, Mr. MacArthur is an idiot. He must be if he can be duped by the likes of U.S. News and World Report and Fox (!) News (?!?). Has he even read the work in question? I know he quotes from it, but has he actually read it? Taken from Orwell’s weekly "As I Please" column in the May 19, 1944 issue of Tribune, Orwell is not saying that the bombing of civilians is a good thing. He says that war is nasty and horrible and any attempts to make it more humane always fail because in the end it is victory that counts.
Remember, only the losers are tried as war criminals.
Orwell points to is the hypocrisy with which the public tends to view war. They think it’s bad when a bomb dropped over a civilian target kills a young woman, but they think nothing of the millions of young men who die on the front. A death is a death, and Orwell makes the point that the publicly accepted elimination of a whole generation of young men by those who aren’t fighting is wrong.
Aside from attacking my favourite writer, Mr. MacArthur made another cardinal sin in my book. He judged a past action without any awareness of the historical circumstances. This is common in all parts of today’s society and we must stop it. It is just like people listening to the Beatles now and suggesting that they were not all that great. No, but they were great then and meant something to people then. Regardless of how much I love the Beatles, at least the 1962–1965 purple patch when they were creating much of the vernacular of contemporary pop music, my love of their music could never match my dad’s, a teenager during their reign.
As mentioned above, Orwell’s essay was written in response to those attempting to discourage the continued bombing of German cities and towns. Throughout the brief piece he points out that every attempt, be it banning of gas attacks or bombings of civilian populations, is ignored only when convenient.
Instead of giving up on Orwell because he has been embraced by the right-something I think would amuse old George were he not dead since 1950-Mr. MacArthur should have pointed out that the American right is distorting the man’s message just like it did when it embraced Animal Farm in the post-war period. Or maybe he, like them, is not smart enough to see that.
Before I go, I think I’ll give Mr. MacArthur’s favourite writers a bit of a dig. I’ve only read one book by Camus, and while I did enjoy it, I found it cold and heartless. I’ve read many books by Greene, so I feel more confident criticizing him. The setting is generally known as "Greeneland," a fictional tropical locale with a large British expatriate population, lots of cockroaches and plenty of gin and scotch. In every Greene book, the main character is a Catholic or lapse Catholic male. He has some sort of moral dilemma, and all the residual Catholic guilt eventually kicks in. He falls in bed with a woman, not his wife, but often someone else’s. Eventually, someone dies and we learn that the Catholic God is hard at work in this horrible world of ours.
And Mr. MacArthur considers this brilliant writing?