Revisiting "Catalonia" again

Letters

April 2007

Revisiting "Catalonia" again

A letter from Keith Windschuttle.

To the Editors:

George Orwell was a great writer and a good man but he was not perfect. Anthony Daniels’s re-reading of Homage to Catalonia [The New Criterion, February 2007] performs a public service by showing that, although he was one of the first English socialists to denounce the tyranny of the Soviet Union, Orwell’s romanticism about the Spanish working class nonetheless harbored a reverence for totalitarianism of its own. There are other aspects of Orwell’s political writings that also deserve to be better known.

When I taught journalism in the late 1970s, I used to cite Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier as classic examples of the participant-observer genre. I thought they were strictly autobiographical accounts of events Orwell had witnessed and experiences he had lived through. I also thought that, being authored by Orwell, their facts would be scrupulous. ...

Keith Windschuttle is an author and publisher who is a frequent contributor to The New Criterion and Quadrant. He is author of The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past, which is now in its fourth edition from Encounter Books, and five other books on contemporary social issues. His book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847, will be published by Macleay Press, Sydney, in November. He is publisher of Macleay Press, Sydney. He is a graduate in history from the University of Sydney and in politics from Macquarie University. He is a former academic who taught history, social policy and media studies the University of New South Wales and other Australian universities. His principal research interests are in historiography, especially of Australian and American history, and in the theories of history produced in the last two hundred years.