Orwell on Heaven

Posted on November 28, 2007

I’ve ben reading a lot of Orwell lately, fits my mood. He’s at once cynical and hopeful, optimistic and realistic. It might surprise some of you that George Orwell, a writer best known to american readers for his book Animal Farm (a metaphorical indictment of the Soviet Union), was a life-long socialist and actually fought with the UGT in the Spanish Civil war. The UGT, of course, was an independent (ie: not aligned with the Bolsheviks) Socialist labor union that was roughly allied with the Anarchosyndicalis C.N.T. and fielded one of the several different militias that fought in what was essentially a 5-way civil war that pitted a rough alliance of anarchists, socialists, left-nationalist basque separatists, and  communists against fascists, as well as pitting all of the above against eachother to various degrees. I’d love to get a bit deeper into the history but I’ll save my analysis of that particular bloodbath for another post because I’ve already wandered way off topic. In the meantime, if you’re interested, I’d recomend checking out the book Orwell wrote about his experiences in Spain. It’s called Homage to Catalonia and you can read it for free online. Did I mention that I fucking love the internet?

anyway.

So I’ve been reading a lot of Orwell. He Rocks. And I found this beautiful indictment of the concept of Heaven and “infinite happiness” in one of his essays called “Why Socialists Don’t Believe in Fun.” Read more