was George Orwell Wrong: Part Two by Dave Jaffe

  Was George Orwell Wrong: Part Two




         As George Orwell was putting the finishing touches on his novel 'Nineteen Eighty Four', a communist revolution was about to sweep across China. British troops were clashing with mostly Chinese guerrillas in Malaysia. Communist led Vietnamese were fighting with French troops  who wanted to crush the Vietnamese struggle for independence from France. Meanwhile in Indonesia, Dutch armies were trying to suppress the Indonesian fight for freedom from Holland.
     So Orwell's dystopian novel wasn't about the future. It was about the present. As Dorian Lynskey wrote in  a very fine article on Orwell in 'The Guardian Weekly' in May 2019, "Orwell felt he lived in cursed times." He was right. Now the world has changed again. The Soviet Union has vanished. China has now embraced a type of capitalism. Yet new tyrants and right wing populists like Donald Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and president Duterte in the Philippines win elections and wield power.
    In China President Xi Jinping tightens the lid on his country's people. And in Russia, Vladimir Putin has gobbled up Crimea and parts of the eastern Ukraine. These two men are real tyrants. All over parts of the world, Orwell's prophesies once again seem to be coming true.
    "There are alternative facts," said U.S. president's Donald Trump's aide Kelly Anne Conway to justify her boss's lies. What she said is truly Orwellian. So was Orwell right? Is the world doomed to be run by tyrants and/or far right populists? Yet one trend denies Orwell's pessimism. "It is not wrong to rebel," said the brutal Chinese Communist dictator Mao Tse Tung.. A communist very like Orwell's Big Brother, Mao helped kill millions of Chinese. Still Mao's comment is now endorsed by millions of people.
     In '1984' Winston Smith and Julia are arrested and tortured. In Room 101. O'Brien, who is Winston's main torturer tells Winston that any hope of rebellion is futile.Winston says that 'the Proles' or working class will rebel. O'Brien denies this and finally Winston accepts O'Brien's verdict. He betrays Julia and ends his life a broken man, believing that any dissent in thought or action is hopeless.
      Here I believe Orwell was wrong. People do rebel against tyrants.. In 2015 and later black Americans protested against police who shot and killed unarmed African Americans. In France the yellow vest movement sprang up in 2018 to demonstrate against the crushing taxes that French president Emanuelle Macron slapped on poorer French people. And in 2019 protests against injustice have erupted around the world.
     "Iran gave a glimpse into what might have been the biggest anti-government in the 40 year history of the Islamic Republic," said a 'National Post ' story in November 2019. Hundreds of thousands of people in Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Hong Kong, Ecuador, Chile and many other places have taken to the streets to protest unjust rule. Hong Kong, Iraq, Algeria and Iran are basically tyrannies. Yet in these places protesters have frightened the ruling governments. They and others have given the lie to Orwell's pessimism. Here, Orwell, born Eric Blair was wrong.
     At this time, most  of the governments mentioned above are too entrenched to be overthrown.  Still, people do protest injustice and sometimes rebel. Orwell was wrong here. Yet on most other points he was right. This is why 'Nineteen Eighty Four' is still a best seller and will be for many years to come.

Was George Orwell Wrong? Part One by Dave Jaffe

Was George Orwell Wrong? by Dave Jaffe. Part One.




    In 1948 George Orwell was dying. The tall cigarette smoking author's body was racked by tuberculosis. Still, he continued  to work in the bitter cold of Scotland on his soon to be famous novel called 'Nineteen Eighty Four'.
     When it was published a year later Orwell was dead. Yet to-day 70 years after it came out, Orwell's novel  has once again climbed into the best seller's list. Its terms like Big Brother doublethink, Room 101, telescreen ,unperson, and memory hole live on long after Orwell's death. And the term 'Orwellian' has been used many times to describe total lies put out by brutal dictatorships and sometimes popular democracies.
     Quite a few people dished Orwell's book after it came out and for many years after that. The Marxist author Isaac Deutscher thought Orwell was a complete paranoid. The literary critic Walter Allen saw the book as a pessimistic novel written by an unhappy dying man. Raymond Williams who helped set up modern cultural studies dismissed the book.
      Others later on like Allan Bloom and the Czech novelist Milan Kundera thought 1984 was a poor novel. Anarchists like Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian preferred Orwell's memoir of his time in the Spanish Civil War called 'Homage To Catalonia'  to 'Nineteen Eighty Four'.
   "For every one artist there'll be ten critics" a visual artist said in the Vancouver art studio of 'Basic Inquiry' in the 1980's.  Critics continue to put down '1984' and yet it's still popular For Orwell's novel wasn't just about the future. It was close to the truth about the present he was living in.
     As he typed away, the world was dividing into two great power blocs, namely the United States on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. They had been allies in the fight against German Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese militarism. Yet now they were poised against each other. Both had combined to crush Hitler's German Nazi machine and now Germany lay in ruins though only after Hitler had killed close to 40 million people. Japan too was devastated and was defeated though it too had killed millions of people throughout East Asia.
     In The Soviet Union, dictator Josef Stalin was planning another  wave of murderous purges in the Soviet Union and thoughout his Eastern European satellites. Meanwhile in the United States, the federal government was setting up the Central Intelligence Agency and other secret organizations that would help overthrow dozens of governments around the world in the next fifty years.

Two Peiople Who Got the 2019 Election Right by Dave Jaffer: Part One

  Two People Who Got the Election Right : Part One


          Two people, a capitalist and a communist did tell  the truth about the just recently finished 2019 federal election.
   The capitalist or businessman if you prefer, Kevin O' Leary told the truth after all the ballots were counted. O'Leary who has been a star of a t.v. show and a very successful entrepreneur made the comment that if Conservative leader Andrew Scheer had gone to the various Pride parades around the country, he'd now be the new Prime Minister of Canada. I think O'Leary was right but I'm glad that Scheer didn't attend the various Pride Parades. Had he done so I'm sure he would have won the election.
      Of course the Conservatives did win 22 more seats than they'd won in the 2015 election. They also won more votes than the Liberals. Yet that didn't translate into more seats than the Liberals. So Justin Trudeau squeaked back into power and now heads up a minority government.
      I still think that Mr. Scheer would have had to explain a little more his stands on abortion and same sex marriage that he personally was against. Yet there's no doubt that his non appearance at Pride Parades cost him a lot of votes - which was good. And this brings me to the communist side of the story.
      Liz Rowley heads up the miniscule Communist Party of Canada. I've never voted for the communists and don't plan to do so in the future. Yet Ms. Rowley held a meeting in Vancouver long before the election of 2019 was underway. A friend of mine went to the meeting and came away terrified at the prospect of a Conservative victory.
     "She said that if Scheer won he'd take Canada back to 1945," he said. "The Conservatives would make savage cuts to every social program they could." Now I tend to feel that communists can be very alarmist. Yet this time I think M. Rowley was right.
     Long before the election started in earnest I wrote Mr. Sheer a letter. "Are you planning to scrap the universality of the Old Age Security Payment?" I asked Mr. Scheer. I also asked him if the would make cuts to the Guaranteed Income Supplement and also raise the age if retirement from 65 to 67.  I waited a few weeks and received no reply to my letter. Then I sent Mr. Scheer another letter with the same questions. Again no reply came my way. I then sent another letter to the Conservative leader on this issue and once again he sent me nothing back.
    While I waited for a reply to my letters on payments to seniors I did receive a letter from Mr. Scheer  which replied to my concerns about the Conservative policies on the environment. All this lack of answers about cuts to payments to seniors confirmed my belief that the Conservatives were planning big cuts to social programs. Yet thankfully the Conservatives didn't win the election.
    Right now the Liberals aren't planning any big cuts in social programs. This doesn't mean they won't make any in the future. After all, the Chretien Liberal government tore big holes in Canada's social programs in the 1990's. So who knows what Prime Minster Justin Trudeau will do in the future? Yet right now most of the federal programs won't be cut.
     In any case Mr. O'Leary and Ms. Rowley were right.  Two people at opposite ends of the political spectrum told the truth.  In the end,Andrew Scheer lost the 2019 federal election and I'm so glad he did.
      

No Space In A Hosing Co-op by Dave Jaffe: Part One

No Space In A Housing Co-op: Part One.




      Meetings can drive me up a wall. I hate sitting in them and that's one of the reasons I left political parties. Yet there's one meeting I do enjoy going to and that's the orientation meetings at my co-op. Here, often a dozen or so people show up who want to join and live in our co-op. Yet there's a problem  we face as a co-op. We usually have to turn away nearly all the people who show up because we only have one spare apartment in our 42 unit co-op building. 
     At the orientation meeting I and about seven or so others interview our prospective co-op members. But in the end, after the interviews and maybe another hour of discussion after the prospective applicants have left, we have to e-mail most of the people who showed up. The text message usually says "Sorry but you have been refused. We will keep your application on our waiting list for the next year."
     At our last orientation meeting which stretched out over four hours our choices boiled down to two people: a young indigenous male and a an older retired woman. Both candidates were excellent choices to move into our co-op. In the end we chose the senior. Yet all of us felt the indigenous applicant was a good choice too. And there were at least four or five other applicants who could have also fitted into our place .
    So who is to blame for this often agonizing situation I and others find ourselves in? I blame the federal government in Ottawa that hasn't developed social housing in decades. Look at the stats. In 2011 which is the last year I could get reliable figures on, there were about 14 million residences or apartments and houses in Canada. Less than 600,000 or about 4 to 5 per cent of that total were social housing units. This is a very small figure compared to other countries like Singapore or Germany.
   "Nobody's building any social housing these days," one housing activist told me a few years ago.
This was true. The N.D.P. government of John Horgan's in British Columbia has launched a program to build social housing. Yet this is the only government across Canada that's doing this on any scale. Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has pledged to house  the homeless and build social housing and we'll see if the Liberals live up to their campaign promises.
     In the just recent 2019 federal election N.D.P. leader Jagmeet Singh vowed that if he were elected Prime Minister of Canada, his government would build 500,000 units of social housing. Yet Singh's New Democratic Party finished in fourth place and at this time has no chance of forming a federal government.
      After the last three orientation meetings I've ben to, I write letters to the Prime Minister of Canada and urge him to build more social housing. So far my letters haven't had much of an impact. Still, I'm forever hopeful. Anyway who knows? Maybe one day Canadians will elect a government that will build hundreds of thousands of units of social housing. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that blessed day.

Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Six by Dave Jaffe

  Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Six




     Would Martin Luther King  have condemned the movements that sprung up after he died? Some he might have praised. Others he might have shied away from.
     Tamara Burke is  an Alabaman born social activist  She was talking to a 13 year old girl in the 1990's. "My mother's boyfriend is sexually abusing me," this girl said in effect. After this, Burke started a #MeToo movement. It targeted men who sexually harassed women. In October 2017, this movement went viral after one woman alleged she'd been sexually harassed by media mogul Harvey Weinstein Soon scores of women publicly denounced certain men who they claimed had molested them. People like Charlie Rose, Jeffrey Epstein and other powerful men were toppled from power after being accused of sexual molestation.
     The #MeToo movement would never have become so powerful if feminism hadn't been reborn in the early 1970's. King probably would have supported this movement. On the other hand, he might have had trouble dealing with the movement of transgendered people.
     For the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior in some ways was a very conventional man. He grew up in the 1930's and 1940's, in the very conservative U.S. south. His father and smother ran  a very conventional home. And King didn't always get on with assertive women. He clashed with black activist Ella Baker, a brave woman who helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
    King didn't stand alone on this issue. "Women's position in the civil rights movement is prone," said Stokely Carmichael the charismatic leader of SNCC. Many women, black and white ones, were repelled by the machismo of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War protestors. That was one reason why women set up feminist women-only groups in the 1970's.
     Nearly all the leaders of the civil rights movement were men. Until the 1970's men ruled the roost in left wing, right wing and all movements of whatever political persuasion. Male domination of nearly everything was the order of the day. This only started to change with the emergence of feminism. Even to-day most of the top people in the world are men.
     Yet that said, Martin Luther King Junior deserves the praise heaped on him. He was an exceptional man. His tactics probably wouldn't have worked to-day For in the past fifty years, the world has changed dramatically from what it was in say, 1965. "I have a dream," he said in his famous speech in Washington, D.C,. in 1963. His dreams didn't all come true. Yet his struggles on behalf of social and racial justice, peace and equality stand out as an awesome example of activism in this age of conservatism.
     He was truly a great American.
    

Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Five by Dave Jaffe

  Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Five.




       It's hard to know whether Martin Luther king Junior would have agreed with some of the groups that sprung up after the civil rights movement appeared.
    Even in his lifetime some African-Americans had no time for his non-violent approach to social change. "Violence is as American as apple pie,"  said H."Rap" Brown,  a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or "Snick" as it was called. Snick in the mid-sixties swerved away from the path of peaceful change and embraced black nationalism. King never denounced Snick. Rap Brown was later imprisoned and is still in prison to-day.
     The black revolutionary Malcolm X. jeered at the 1963 March on Washington , D.C. He dubbed it "The farce in Washington". In 1966 Huey Newton and young other African Americans paraded in some African American areas armed with guns and confronted police. At  one time, Newton who grew up in the Oakland Bay area  went along with some of his friends to California's state capitol of Sacramento to confront the state government. On that day most of the Panthers openly carried guns.
     Police clashed with the Panthers in several cities and killed some Black Panthers. Under these police attacks, the Panthers faded away or then supported moderate African American politicians. At the start of their movement, the Panthers set out ten basic points to lift African Americans out of poverty and free them from white racism. I don't think King denounced the Panthers. Yet I doubt he would have embraced the Panthers who had no time for King's non-violent approach.
     Native Americans were the poorest of all U.S. citizens in the 1960's. I forgot to mention them in the previous parts of this entry. In the late 1960's many of them looked at the civil rights movement and were spurred into protesting their status. Some of them joined with King in 1968 in his proposed march on poverty in Washington. Others occupied the former prison and island fortress of Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay. Others picked up guns and had shootouts with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
     The Lakota Sioux native Leonard Pelletier fled the U.S. for Vancouver, Canada in the mid-1970's. Pelletier was charged with killing two F.B.I. agents in a clash on an Indian reservation  at Wounded Knee. He was later deported back to the U.S. where he was tried and then imprisoned. He's still in prison to-day.
      Other people from the white New Left like the Weathermen and some maybe who were African Americans planted bombs at draft boards, companies that made war products, police stations
  and U.S. government  offices. In 1971 alone, over 2,000 bombs went off in the U.S. many of them aimed at political targets. "America was born out of a genocidal impulse," said U.S. activist Tom Hayden.in  effect. True or not, many left wing Americans condemned the U.S. war in Indochina, drawing parallels between the U.S. past wars on native Americans and the prevailing war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
     U.S. prisons were also the scene of many uprisings in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Many of these protests were led by African American prisoners. George Jackson was a black man and prisoner who wrote a best selling book called 'Soledad Brother'. He was killed in a shootout with prison guards. His brother Jonathan also died in a hostage taking incident in Bay area courthouse. The last great rebellion in the U.S. occurred in the Attica prison in upstate New York in 1971. "You're doing a great job," New York state governor Nelson Rockefeller told journalist Tom Wicker who was invited by hostage holding prisoners to the prison.
     Later Rockefeller sent in police and others to crush this rebellion. Close to three dozen people were killed in the shootout that ensued. Among this group were some prison guards.
     The yippie Jerry Rubin went even further in his verbal assault of American institutions. "Kill your parents," he told some of his audiences in the late 19760's. Rubin later modified this statement
     It's unlikely that Martin Luther King would have agreed with Rubin or many other revolutionary groups that surfaced in the late 1960's or early 1970's. He wouldn't have endorsed their open embrace of violence. He was a Christian minister, a believing Baptist and was close to his well-known minister father. King embraced non-violent protest and had no time for bloodshed.

Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior by Dave Jaffe: Part Four.

   Let Us Now Praise Martin Luther King Junior: Part Four




          "I have a dream," Martin Luther King said, in his speech at the great March in Washington, D.C in the summer of 1963. Yet his dream of racial equality and racial justice is still a long way away. This is true not only in the United States but also in Europe, Canada and other parts of the world.
     In the U.S. at this time,  a right wing president Donald Trump slashes one social program after another. The Republican Party, that Trump belongs to, applauds these actions while remaining firmly anti-abortion, anti-gun control, anti-same sex marriage and anti-trade unions. It also has little sympathy for African-Americans even while about 10 per cent of black people who vote, do vote Republican. Meanwhile millions of African Americans live in dire poverty while Hispanic refugees from Central America are parked in camps that are prisons. Many of these people are separated from their children.
     The U.S. remains a country where one in five of its people have no medical coverage or inadequate medical care plans. Many of these people are African Americans and other people of colour. "If all the discriminatory laws in the U.S.," wrote Michael Harrington in the early 1960's, "were immediately repealed, race  would still remain one of the most pressing political and moral problems in the United States." Harrington was right. Despite all the anti-racist laws that were passed in the last 50 years and despite the fact that an African American Barack Obama has been president, the U.S. is still more unequal today than it was when Dr. King was alive.
      The U.S. hardly stands alone here. In Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the events of 9/11 and the great economic recession of 2007 and 2008, have turned many European countries into very unequal places. In Germany, Italy, France and other places millions of voters have turned away from political parties of the centre right and centre left. Instead they vote for racist and anti-immigrant parties. The social democratic parties survive in some Scandinavian countries. Elsewhere they survive on borrowed time or have vanished.
   In eastern Europe, that was  freed from the heavy hand of communism, openly anti-Semitic and anti Moslem governments have taken power in Hungary and Poland.
     Of course this is not the whole story. 1968, the year that Reverend King was shot dead, saw massive rebellions across the world. Yet they nearly all failed. In France, Czechoslavakia, Mexico and other countries the old conservative governments remained in power. In Vietnam the terrible war dragged on, despite the massive Tet Offensive launched in early 1968. Yet in the wake of these failed rebellions, new groups suddenly appeared to claim equality. Feminists, gays, lesbians, environmentalists, Black Power advocates, Quebec sovereigntists and a massive anti-Vietnam  War movement emerged from the shadows.
      In the next twenty years women won the right to abortion, ran for political office and often won. Women became lawyers, doctors, business people, and filled many other professions and jobs. Openly gay people ran for office and sometimes won .In Canada for instance, in 1970 there was only one women Member of Parliament, namely Grace McInnis, whose father James S. Woodsworth. had been a famous socialist. Yet nearly fifty years later in 2015 there were 90 women Members of Parliament out of a total of 238 M.P.s This was still  not true equality. Yet it was a tremendous step forward.
     The rise of the civil rights movement that King was part of, transmitted the elixir of dissent and protest across vast swaths of people in the U.S. and then to other parts of the world. "Let freedom ring," King proclaimed at the 1963 March in Washington. His message was heard not just by African Americans but by many other people in his country and elsewhere. As King's friend and comrade the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the 1984 Democratic convention,the civil rights movement paved the way for many other movements for justice and equality. And the fact that Reverend Jackson was running for the Democratic nomination for president showed how far African Americans had come.