Neil Bellis on George Orwell

[Erik Narramore]

Some points to note:
(i). I posted this on the Forum way back on 23rd. February 2023.  I have decided to move it now to the public area.  I have deleted one short sentence, a rash remark about Neil Bellis that is not needed.  I have also made a couple of corrections for syntax and one or two minor stylistic emendations, and I may make more if I ever re-read it again.  The rest of it remains, as is. 
(ii). What follows should not be interpreted as a personal attack on Neil Bellis, let me just make that clear. It is harshly worded and maybe reproducing it here now is cathartic at some deeper level, but truly it was just my opinion at the time, and that's just how it is.  I came upon it because I was thinking about the Blue Forum the other day when composing my 'statement' in the other thread.
(iii). While I no longer share George Orwell's Leftist politics and have not done since my misguided youth 25 years ago, I remain fond of him and I will always defend him, even if the defence is more emotional than intellectual.  It is just about possible he would drag me back again, if he were still alive.
(iv). Thinking it over just now, this essay is, sort of, the type of thing George Orwell himself might have written, with all the flaws of Orwell's writing but none of the upsides - though I do not have even a drop of his ability, of course, let me make that clear too!

NEIL BELLIS ON GEORGE ORWELL

Two posts from Neil Bellis to the Blue Forum's 'Russia' thread caught my eye, and I attach them here.  In these posts, Neil Bellis expresses his venom towards George Orwell.

Bellis makes the following allegations against Orwell:

1. That George Orwell falsified his service during the Spanish Civil War.
2. That he (Neil Bellis) knew members of the International Brigades who had fought in the Spanish Civil War.
3. That these veterans had a low opinion of Orwell.
4. That Orwell was an MI5 informant.
5. That since 1945/46, Orwell has been a "darling of the right wing".

All of this is rubbish, Mr Bellis does not know what he is talking about, and I will here explain why.

Before I begin, it is important to give a little bit of background about Neil Bellis.  Mr Bellis is a Stalinist and I believe has held to this political philosophy pretty much his entire adult life, even when practising as a barrister and then working as chairman of a public company.  He associated with the neo-Marxist Left and supported the former Soviet Union.  By contrast, George Orwell was fiercely critical of Stalinism and the Soviet Union.  His most famous political novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were critiques of Stalinism.  Therefore, Bellis' sectarian politics are diametrically opposed to that of Orwell, even if, as a figure of the Left, Orwell's viewpoints may overlap with those of Bellis.

Now a little about me.  If George Orwell were alive today, he would regard me as someone of the "far-Right" and want nothing to do with me.  I mention this to emphasise my objectivity in defending Orwell. 

To me, George Orwell was a chimera: a good writer, perhaps he should be regarded as England's national writer, but I also think that he was very naïve politically and socially.  The 'conservatism' and even racialism that some people attribute to him were really more a sign of the times he lived through and his own middle-class colonial background than a reflection of any change in sentiment from the Left to something else.  Orwell explicitly wanted a socialist revolution in Britain, but democratic socialist and patriotic.  He wasn't in the avant garde of the Left.  He was slightly imperialist and moderately conservative, but that's because a middle-of-the-road Leftist of his time often would be slightly imperialist and moderately conservative and so forth - especially if, like Orwell, the Leftist came from a colonial family and had received a public school education.  It was nothing unusual – for the time.  If Orwell were alive today, he would not be these things, he would instead be whatever is middle-of-the-road for a Leftist today, which means he would be a constant source of annoyance and incredulity to people like me. 

Now let us move on to Neil Bellis' allegations.

That George Orwell falsified his service during the Spanish Civil War.  That he (Neil Bellis) knew members of the International Brigades who had fought in the Spanish Civil War.  That these veterans had a low opinion of Orwell.

You will perhaps forgive me for being sceptical about Mr Bellis' claim that he knew some socialists who had fought in that war.  He grew up in England and has no obvious connection to Spain and veterans of the Spanish Civil War don't typically turn up in England, but we must assume that Mr Bellis has moved in radical political circles and may have attended talks and conferences and so forth, so there may be an element of truth to it. 

I suspect that he met such people once or heard them speak at an event and Orwell was mentioned.  At any rate, let's for the sake of argument assume Bellis has heard Spanish Civil War veterans bad mouth Orwell.  What to make of it?

Mr Bellis is giving us an account of Orwell from socialists, but socialists of a different stripe to Orwell, indeed of the type who may have taken a dislike to him purely for sectarian ideological reasons.  It follows that their account of Orwell cannot be treated as reliable.  Mr Bellis seems not to have considered this.  Nor, it appears, has he asked himself how, if Orwell was exaggerating his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, he came to be shot in the throat.  Was that a hoax? 

Let us suppose I am wrong about all this, and in fact Orwell did exaggerate his experiences in some significant way.  It seems to me that George Orwell was a writer, both fiction and non-fiction.  He was an imaginative person who made up stories for a living, as well as journalising real events.  Is it such a surprise that he may have blended the two worlds and exaggerated?  Suppose he did, is that such a great sin?  Don't professional soldiers exaggerate their experiences of war at times?  Is that such a great sin?  I would say not.  I would even defend it on the basis that if you want to fight in a war, you'd better come back with some entertaining stories.  Isn't it inevitable that somebody who makes his living as a writer will do just that?  Wouldn't it be more surprising if he didn't?

That Orwell was an MI5 informant.

This is the 'Orwell's List' allegation, which is that shortly before he died, Orwell gave a list to a government department of people he considered unsuitable for official propaganda work, in many cases on the basis that they were thought to be sympathetic to Stalinism. 

It appears that George Orwell did indeed prepare such a list, but there are some important points that Neil Bellis fails to mention:

(i).    How the list came to exist.

(ii).    What the list contained.

(iii).    Orwell's motives.

Let me explain.  It was common in those days for politically-engaged intellectual types like Orwell to compose such lists, often as a sort of parlour game.  On this occasion, the list took on a serious purpose. Orwell's motive was anti-Stalinism and British patriotism.  Orwell considered himself both a democratic socialist and a national patriot and compiled the list to ensure that individuals whose beliefs he found repugnant would not be influential in British society and would be stymied (or so he hoped). 

However - and this point is crucial - Orwell did not malign any of these people, did not mean any of them ill, and for the most part, did not show a trace of malice towards them.  To the contrary, in many cases he was full of praise for them and generous in remarks he added to the list before it was handed over. 

A further point to note is that Orwell would have had no control over how the information was used once it left his hands, thus Bellis attributes motives and purposes to Orwell that he simply did not have. 

The reason Neil Bellis does not mention all this is because he has imprisoned himself in a small ideological box and can't see anything outside it.  The result is variegated misunderstandings about all sorts of subjects, this being one of them. 

Mr Bellis' condemnation of Orwell is in fact what in psychology is called projection: denunciation of enemies and secret lists is a Stalinist thing, something Mr Bellis should know all about.  Inevitably, given that he is a Stalinist, he will see Orwell's actions through that jaundiced field of interpretation and ignore the nuances of the incident.

George Orwell became a "darling of the right wing" from 1945/46 (before his death)

It is not clear whether Mr Bellis is referring to the 'right wing of the Left' or political Right in opposition to the Left.  It is true that conservatives often cite and reference Orwell, especially his political literature, but that is not because they think George Orwell was one of them, rather it is because as conservatives they value traditional English liberty and recognise that Orwell, though of the Left, was equally determined to defend traditional England.  This did not make Orwell any less a figure of the Left, any more than advocating traditional liberty turns a conservative into a raving liberal.

Not everybody to the right of Neil Bellis is "right wing" or of the Right.  In Orwell's day, conservatism and traditional liberty were not the exclusive province of the Right, but were also believed in by the mainstream of the Left, who were socially and culturally conservative and, by today's standards, could be quite reactionary. 

I think it is clear that George Orwell was a man of the Left.  All of his writings and utterances show a definite commitment in that direction and the sheer weight of it would be hard to refute.  That doesn't mean he belongs to the Left exclusively, but his political home was amongst those who believe in the fundamental values of the Left: equality and the ultimate liberation of the working class from propertied social relations.  He supported government intervention in society in the sense of a humane democratic socialist and supporter of the Labour Party.  All that said, a good argument could be made that Orwell - who was always ambivalent and vague about the revolutionary character of socialism - moved towards the 'right wing of the Left' as the Atlee Labour government came to power in 1945.  Perhaps this was because he saw the social revolutionary possibilities of a Labour government supported by a landslide parliamentary majority.

To Neil Bellis, that makes Orwell "right wing" or "the darling of the right wing", but that seems purely a matter of relativity and hardly makes Orwell anything other than of the Left.  The real issue for Neil Bellis is sectarian: he supports Stalin, while Orwell supported democratic-socialism and a sort of esoteric English version of Trotskyism, involving mass worker action that raises popular awareness and consciousness of the problems in capitalism and brings about socialism by consent, in harmony with international currents amongst workers abroad.  To this end, Orwell had suggested early in the Second World War that the Home Guard could form the basis of a revolutionary people's militia, and this could have dovetailed with a peaceful resolution of war and conflict internationally, with peace and democracy everywhere.  Note that Orwell's ideas were entirely peaceful (accompanied by a willingness to use violence lawfully, when needed) and intended to be simpatico with English tradition, in which sense he was both deeply conservative and deeply socialist.  This is antithetical to the centralised, planned, top-down, bureaucratic character of Stalinism. 

In summary, Orwell wanted socialism (communism), but peacefully and by consent, and against the setting of a calm, bucolic, traditional England.  In other words, socialism that aligned with the rhythms of English life and the special character of England, blending civic patriotic ideas and internationalism.  Bellis wants socialism (communism) in the classical Stalinist way: top-down, a utopian template imposed by force, all 'for your own good', perhaps with a strong centralised British 'socialist' state.  Presumably, enemies of Bellis will be 'disappeared' and all records of their existence erased, living on only in the memories of the people who knew them - rather like what happens to Winston Smith's parents in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, if I recall, and certainly similar to what happens on the Blue Forum to anybody who crosses Neil Bellis.

Neil Bellis says George Orwell was a fraud.  I will leave others to judge whether it is in fact Neil Bellis who is the fraud.  I will say nothing on that question.