Orwell - Who follows his take on Socialism ?

I really enjoyed a book called "Orwell and the Left" by
Professor Alex Zwerdling. (Don't laugh, it's a LOT more fun than those
books on Euro Communism written in the 1970s!)

It contains a chapter called "Socialism and Pessimism" which is
nothing less than a real straight-forward look at the human emotions
which configure activism or "giving up" and talks about the limits of
institutional embodiment of humane values.

Read after reading H. G. Wells "A Mind at the End of its Tether" and
you see how bleak the perspective on actually succeeding and
manufacturing a descent society looked then to various socialists, and
now days it looks that way even more.

I had this same struggle with a decade spend practicing Buddhism which
traditionally says "tranform yourself and the world will automagically
reflect this in the aggregate",...how can you NOT try to do something
in a group effort?....yet human nature seems to transmute collective
social efforts into "Here comes the new boss...same as the old boss."

Does it really come down to just working locally and hoping the human
race matures in time...because efforts to accellerate the process in a
large scale always produces large scale stuctures with inherant
tyrannical momentums? (Note how huge the anti Iraq War movement in the
US and the Seed and Water Ant-Privatization Movements in India
are...and how little they actually modulate Social Policy.

Could the United States be a Totalitarian State that breeds Humans that
don't need Liberty the way Scientists can breed cows without horns?

"Orwell: Socialism vs. Pessimism," The New Review (London), 1 (1974),
5-17. - also ontained in:
Orwell and the Left (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974;
second edition, 1978)

"Madimi" <madim.RemoveThis@madimi.com> wrote in message
news:050820031604308253%madim@madimi.com...

 > Could the United States be a Totalitarian State that breeds Humans that
 > don't need Liberty the way Scientists can breed cows without horns?

Well, first of all, the United States may be many things today, not all of
them very attractive, but it is not a totalitarian state; or at least, not
in any sense that someone like Hannah Arendt would have understood that
term.

Second, you need to clarify what you mean by 'liberty', which I doubt is
going to be as simple a task as you might think. Both Right and Left can
plausibly claim that liberty is their guiding principle, but they have
irreconcilable notions of what it means and the conclusions it demands. It's
something we all say or think we want, but we don't seem to be able to agree
much on what it represents. Therein lies the problem.

Alan.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->