The Selkie wrote:Orwell, if I am not mistaken. And, if you ask me, it is polite to give a source when someone tries to rip someone else out of context and try to use his or her words for his or her own argumentation.
As for pacifism being objectively pro-fascist... well, if you read the text your source comes from, you'll see, that Orwell had a bloody good reason to believe so. If you would know, who wrote these two famous letters to Scholz and who signed under it, you'd know, why they believe in pacifism.
Do not get me wrong, I don't agree with either position, neither Orwell's nor the one of the German celebrities calling for an end of the deliveries of weapons, I firmly believe, that we should get our rear ends moving on that (all of the nations promising aid), but I firmly believe, that it is important to always know the contexts. Or, to quote the words of another great person:"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
- Sun Tzu/Sunzi, Chinese general, tactician, writer, philosopher, The Art of War.
Orwell, As I Please, Dec 8 1944:
"For years past I have been an industrious collector of pamphlets, and a fairly steady reader of political literature of all kinds. The thing that strikes me more and more – and it strikes a lot of other people, too – is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point. When I look through my collection of pamphlets – Conservative, Communist, Catholic, Trotskyist, Pacifist, Anarchist or what-have-you – it seems to me that almost all of them have the same mental atmosphere, though the points of emphasis vary. Nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a ‘case’ with complete disregard for fairness or accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them. The same propaganda tricks are to be found almost everywhere. It would take many pages of this paper merely to classify them, but here I draw attention to one very widespread controversial habit – disregard of an opponent’s motives. The key-word here is ‘objectively’.
We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are ‘objectively’ aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the ‘objectively’ line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore ‘Trotskyism is Fascism’. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
