re: #8 Gus

“What a multi-level masterpiece of Orwellian political deceit that sentence is!!” Orwell is the deus ex machina of today’s pundit class.

Which is also a little ironic coming from Greenwald. The real gems of Orwell’s work aren’t 1984 and Animal Farm; he’s got several nonfiction books like Road to Wigan Pier and an anthology of essays that lay out his political thought, and he had a few things to say about the socialists of his day and political writing.

First of all, he’d have a few works about Greenwald’s loghorrea, “pretentious diction”, and “Marxist writing”. In his time, he kicked over a hornet’s nest by going off on the Socialists in the forward to Road to Wigan Pier and his essays. Essentially, the Socialists ended up being reflexively anti-British and pro-Soviet until it was impossible to pretend that Stalin wasn’t a genocidal maniac. He also pointed out that the worst advertisement for Socialism were the Socialists, who insisted on odd clothing and diet, talked in ideological soundbites, and couldn’t relate at all to average citizens who didn’t have the luxury of sitting around worrying about philosophical bullshit.

Orwell had enough of middle class revolutionary ideologues and wasn’t afraid to say so.