Orwell would never have supported Antifa
Last month, Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson was attacked on Twitter for the tweet: “The most hateful group in America. Orwell rolls in his grave.” The post included a photograph of a line of balaclava clad Antifa protesters holding riot shields with “No Hate” brightly stencilled on them. Responses between the alt-right, then extreme left were predictably nuance-free and expletive laden, as each tried desperately to claim Orwell as one of their own. Pro-Trump, Infowarers cited Orwell’s hatred of authoritarianism, the value he placed on freedom of speech at any cost. In response Antifa'ers referenced Homage to Catalonia, his trip to Spain during the Civil where he literally fought with the anarchist POUM against fascists.
As the raging devolved into name calling (“Read a history book you dumb fuck”), they skimmed over a valuable historical discussion about what George Orwell would think of Antifa if he were alive today. It is not a simple question. Orwell’s opinions evolved against the most politically volatile block in human history: the interwar, world war 2 and cold war periods. Indeed over this time the entire democratic West considered the rise of the Stalinist Russia as a threat, then an ally and then a threat again.
To begin to make sense, perhaps it is worth separating the temperament of the man, Eric Blair, from the temperaments of the writer George Orwell. Accounts of those close to Blair have in common that he was reserved, preoccupied and socially awkward. He was quintessentially both British, of the lower-upper middle class and a democratic socialist. His move to compartmentalise Orwell along the fault-lines of temperament was itself an instinct to protect social harmony, picked so as not embarrass his conservative parents with inflammatory publications.
Blair would have found Antifa with their willingness to engage in violence, their desire to operate outside a functioning democratic process and their attempts to stifle ‘offsenive’ speech at odds with his core value of basic human decency.
On the other hand the writer, George Orwell, operated at a far higher temperature. He was quick to ruthlessly attack viable targets whenever he found them and he found them everywhere, from the British public school system to the crassness of American comic books. The middle period of Orwell, that lead up to the second world war, was a time when fascism was on the rise at home and dominated the entire European continent. It was a period, more akin to today, when almost everything was politicised and polarised; to be alive meant to have to pick a side.
And pick a side he did. In the most literal sense Orwell was an Anti-fascist. In 1936 when the Spanish Civil War broke out between Royalist fascist forces of General Franco and the anarchist forces of Republican Spain, Orwell relinquished his anti-war stance, set down his pen, took up the sword and with his young wife in tow, went to Spain to fight. He is unflinching in his account of a war that renders men dumb with fear then numb with boredom. It was to Orwell a colossal waste of man, machinery and (most Britishly) landscape. Yet while the Anarchist forces are poorly supplied, trained and lead, he never questions the nobility of the venture. For Orwell, war against Fascism was inherently just.
He was similarly impressed by the enthusiasm and youthful naivete of the anarchist forces. When Orwell arrives in the young Catalan republic his socialist leanings are deeply satisfied by a place “where the working class was in the saddle”. Yet this implicit approval of Antifa’s agenda is only skin deep.
At the front Orwell fights and fights bravely. On one attack on the fascist line he tosses a grenade that “by a stroke of luck” falls into a machine gun nest. Orwell’s response is a “vague sorrow” and the assumption that he has killed a fascist. Never does he question whether the righteousness of this act. The sorrow at killing another human being is not an argument against doing ones duty but part of it. So when called on to kill fascists Orwell does so, never losing his humanity but also never wavering in the conviction that he has performed a morally right act. Does it necessarily follow that Orwell would have supported self-styled antifascist groups?
No it does not. When Orwell returned to Barcelona from the front he was appalled by how much it had changed. Where once the authentic spirit of revolution had flown as red and black banners from every window, now came political conniving as Soviet supported communists sought to purge and defang the anarchists he had fought for. Blatant lies about the war were being circulated in the official press while black market profiteering betrayed everything the revolution stood for. Orwell refuses to take the line most convenient to him, that his fighting (and killing) had been for something and opts to shine a light onto the anti-fascist forces. In this way Orwell would never have accepted the simple and convenient option about today’s Antifa. To him niggling details like their propensity to draw first blood at Trump rallies, that they are willing to shut down speakers, no matter how despicable he found them would have amounted to a betrayal similar in nature to that he witnessed in the fledgling Catalan republic.
An interesting observation made about Orwell was that he rarely discussed fascism or even attempted to define it - that it was evil was a given. More important for him was the condition of the soul of the left. An avowed democratic socialist he deeply loathed the excesses of the militant left, their willingness to sacrifice free-speech and resort to violence in the name of class warfare.
The later stage Orwell is the one he is best known for - the fiction writer that produced Animal Farm and 1984. With the rise of fascism checked, Orwell turned his attention to its Totalitarian twin - Stalinism. He often resented the way which many of his contemporaries so freely supported and justified Stalinism by swallowing official propaganda, disregarding the human cost or demanded a united front against fascism. This final-stage Orwell would have made the most compelling argument against Antifa. To him the nobility of intentions at the outset of an enterprise - liberation of the working class, freedom from oppression - was never enough to justify later excesses. To him these amounted to a betrayal and irredeemably corrupted the entire venture. More compelling still with Animal Farm Orwell made the case that any such betrayal would ultimately result in socialism becoming the very thing it was fighting against.
This uncompromising demand for pristine means necessary to achieve noble ends by Orwell is the facet of his character that would have found an organization like Antifa most galling. Yes violence was necessary at times but it needed to be dispensed by parties that stuck to noble ideology unflinchingly. To Orwell Antifa would have been another in a long line of militant left-wing organizations with a flexible platform that defined itself by what it was attacking but never stopped to assess its own moral rectitude. Without being tethered to a firm ideology they would drift toward radicalisation, justifying their own use of violence until they became indistinguishable from the fa they were Anti.