Mr President by Miguel Ángel Asturias Translated by David Unger-Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa- introduction Gerald Martin-Penguin Classics Paperback July 2022-320 pages

 “Our Latin American literature has always been a committed, a responsible literature,” Miguel Ángel Asturias 1973.

The Latin American novel, our novel, cannot betray the great spirit that has shaped – and continues to shape – all our great literature. If you write novels merely to entertain – then burn them!

Miguel Angel Asturias

“The great works of our countries have been written in response to a vital need, a need of the people, and therefore almost all our literature is committed. Only as an exception do some of our writers isolate themselves and become uninterested in what is happening around them; such writers are concerned with psychological or egocentric subjects and the problems of a personality out of contact with surrounding reality.”

Miguel Ángel Asturias

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

Generally speaking, art is an expression of man’s need for a harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits of which a society of classes has deprived him. That is why a protest reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion.

Art and Politics in Our Epoch (1938)

Translation is often an act of revelation—of revealing what is hidden -David Unger

Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias’s masterpiece Mr President was published in 2022 by Penguin.  It is the first English translation in more than half a century. Translated by award-winning writer and translator David Unger and features a foreword by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa and an introduction by the writer and biographer Gerald Martin.

Asturias’s Mr President was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. The novel was subsequently banned in Guatemala. Miguel Ángel Asturias’s novel is a surrealist masterpiece, and a devastating attack on capitalism not just in Guatemala but around the world. It is to Penguin’s credit that such an important book has been given the translation it deserves. The new Penguin Classics edition is timely. David Unger says, “Mr. President has more to say to an American in 2022 than it did in 1962 when we knew less about the shenanigans of the CIA and the liaison between the military and the industrial complex.”

Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, the first Latin American novelist to receive such an honour. Although one of his main occupations was as a diplomat he is primarily known as a fiction writer.

Mr President, although written from 1922 to 1932, wasn’t published until 1946 partly due to self-censorship and was also banned by the Guatemalan state. Asturias quite rightly feared that President Ubico (1931-1944) would assume that he was the dictator being depicted.

Foreword

The foreword is by Mario Vargas Llosa. Llosa is the noble Prize author of twelve novels, including Death in the Andes, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Storyteller, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and The War of the End of the World, 1995, he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most coveted literary honour, and the Jerusalem Prize. His recent book Harsh Times was a described by Hari Kunzru, as "A compelling and propulsive literary thriller “in his New York Times Book Review.

Llosa correctly states “Mr. President is qualitatively better than all previous Spanish language novels and one of the most original Latin American texts ever written. He continues that without Asturias, “there would be no García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Laura Restrepo, Laura Esquivel, José Lezama Lima, or Roberto Bolaño.”

Llosa believes that Miguel Ángel Asturias “wasn’t fully aware of how great a novel he had written and whose magnitude he would never again repeat, because the novels, short stories, and poems he wrote afterward were closer to the narrower, somewhat demagogic literature of “committed” dictator novels that he had earlier championed. He hadn’t realized that the great merit of Mr. President was precisely that he had broken that tradition and raised the politically engaged novel to an altogether higher level “.[1]

Introduction

Every great author needs someone who will defend their work to the death if necessary. Miguel Asturias has Gerald Martin. Martin who is the author of the superb biography of García Marquez is currently working on a biography Vargas Llosa. Penguin will publish Asturias’s Men of Corn in 2025[2]. Martin has translated and written a foreword for the new book. In his introduction to “Mr. President” Martin writes “What is magical realism, if not the solution to writing novels about hybrid societies in which a dominant culture of European origin is juxtaposed in multiple ways with one or more different cultures that in many cases are ‘premodern’? It was not Gabriel García Márquez who invented magical realism; it was Miguel Ángel Asturias.”

What makes Mr President such an important book. Martin elaborates “it’s a novel 'very like a play, a tightly concocted drama (at times a theatre of marionettes),' equally cinematic and poetic. It is reminiscent of Kafka and Beckett in its surreal flights within the consciousnesses of the mad or dying, or within the narrative of myth ... The novel’s vision is relentlessly dark, but its execution is exhilarating, daring, even wild. Asturias’s boldness is repeatedly arresting, and his descriptions unforgettable...Such electrifying vividness animates every page”.

Translation

All great books need a great translation. After fifty years Mr President finally has that kind of translation, David Unger fully deserves the plaudits his translation has received.  In 2014, Unger was awarded the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature for lifetime achievement, the most important literary prize in Guatemala. As a debt of gratitude to the country of his birth Unger decided to take on a new and difficult translation. The main purpose was to restore this great novel to the pantheon of world literature.

Having read the previous publication of the novel with the translation by Fraces Partridge I was curious to find out Unger’s opinion. Unger told me in an interview I did with him on my website “Partridge’s translation is mostly workman-like but suffers, as I say in the introduction, with many Anglicisms and a failure to recognize many Guatemaltequismos—particularly Guatemalan words and terms that she didn’t fully understand. Mr. President is a very American novel, one that lends itself to translation in the American vein. Words like “coppers,” “blimey,” and “lorry” are acceptable terms in the English language but are not inviting to North American readers. Further, she didn’t have a clue about certain Guatemalan foods, birds and plants that have entered the American vernacular through the immigration of nearly 60 million Latin Americans into the U.S. In some ways, she was hopelessly overmatched though I find that she also came through with some lovely descriptions, a la Bloomsbury style.[3]

It is perhaps an understatement to say that translating this book was an extraordinarily difficult undertaking. But David Unger’s lucid and masterful new translation of Mr President presents an opening for a new generation of readers around the world to appreciate this “influential, and wrongly maligned masterpiece”.

Joel Whitney writes “Mr. President is decidedly hard to translate, as it relies on poetic alliterations and onomatopoeia, devices learned from surrealism’s inventors and other avant-garde movements. But it also relies on Asturias’s very keen ear to the street, his love of myth and Indigenous culture, and Unger proves to be a masterful transformer. Much of the translation is truly of another time, rendering not just Central American Spanish but also Guatemalan neighbourhood-, class-, and period-specific slang. The praise for Unger’s translation is highly deserved. But the fact of Penguin Classics and Unger choosing this unfairly suppressed book is long overdue, the wait like being unburied, with your eyes open”.[4]

As Whitney says in his article the release of Asturias’s Mr President could not be timelier. As Unger explains “I wanted the novel to really speak to our generation and our time,” It is not only in Latin America that the tyranny of the dictator’s rule, but this tyranny is a global phenomenon. The current genocide being carried out in Gaza by the Israeli fascist government is but one example of this worldwide trend of the rule of the dictators. The Israeli president Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, showed that this fascist war criminal still defended genocide in Gaza, stating, “This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.”[5]  The reception Netanyahu’s speech received by the flunkeys in the White has been compared to that of Adolf Hitler when he addressed the German parliament in the 1930s.

The CIA and the Suppression of Mr President

As I said in the introduction Asturias’s novel although finished in 1932 was not published until 1946.  What is perhaps not so well known is the role of the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) role in the suppression of this great novel. This criminal act is one of the reasons why Asturias has not had the international recognition his work deserves. This is not the case in Latin America where the novel according to literary scholar Gerald Martin was “the first page of the Boom.[6] Without Asturias, [the Boom] might not have developed.” Said Martin.

Asturias’s novel was released at the beginning of the Cold War. Latin America was seen by the United States as its own backyard and began installing several right-wing dictatorships many of which carried out genocide on an industrial scale.  On the cultural front it helped set up and backed the Congress for Cultural Freedom[7], an anti-Communist front created to push pro-American articles and stories through magazines like Mundo Nuevo and other similar magazines around the world such as Encounter. To his credit Martin defended Asturias and opposed this right-wing organisation and its puppet magazines. Martin played no small role in discrediting this CIA front.

Miguel Ángel Asturias was born on October 19, 1899, one year after dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera came to power. “My parents were quite persecuted, though they were not imprisoned or anything of the sort, “said Asturias. The treatment of his parents no doubt heavily influenced not only his decision to write about injustice and social inequality throughout Latin America but to become an activist. Asturias joined the Generation of 1920, and became politically active organising organize strikes and demonstrations.  As Asturias writes in his Nobel Prize speech “All Latin American literature, in song and novel, not only becomes a testimony for each epoch but also, as stated by the Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri, an “instrument of struggle”. All the great literature is one of testimony and vindication, but far from being a cold dossier these are moving pages written by one conscious of his power to impress and convince”.[8]

Asturias’s Mr President was groundbreaking in so many ways. As Joel Whitney points out in his excellent article[9] Mr President was published five years before George Orwell’s 1984, and captures the mass propaganda uses of new technologies: Asturias writes: “Every night a movie screen was raised like a gallows in the Plaza Central. A hypnotized crowd watched blurred fragments as if witnessing the burning of heretics. … Society’s crème de la crème strolled in circles … while the common folk gazed in awe at the screen in religious silence.” This fear proves atmospheric, as the president’s favourite advisor, Miguel Angel Face, undertakes a secret mission: to prompt the president’s main rival, a general, to go on the run. Why? The president needs a scapegoat, and running is a confession of guilt, he says. But irony is in constant collision with this fear, mirroring the young Asturias’s wonder at the discredited, delusional imprisoned dictator. Unaware that the president has orchestrated the general’s escape, a judge advocate shouts, “I want to know how he escaped! … That’s why telephones exist; to capture government’s enemies.” This judge also warns a suspected witness: “Lying is a big mistake. The authorities know everything. And they know you spoke to the General.”[10]

As was mentioned earlier Asturias played a central role in the development of the Boom movement. This movement consisted of a relatively young group of writers, Cortázar; Vargas Llosa; Gabriel García Márquez, of Colombia; and Carlos Fuentes, of Mexico, to name but a few of the better-known authors.  Asturias was recognised as their natural predecessor. And was credited with the invention of Latin American magical realism which went on to influence the likes of García Márquez. Instead of acknowledging his debt to Asturias Garcia Marquez somewhat ungraciously denied Asturias had any influence on his work.

According to Graciela Mochkofsky “Many of the Boom authors, starting with García Márquez, dismissed Asturias’s work as archaic, and denied that it had any influence on their writing. Asturias didn’t help matters when, during an interview, he agreed with a suggestion that García Márquez, in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” had been heavily influenced or even plagiarised Balzac’s “The Quest of the Absolute”.[11]

It must be said that Asturias prodigies were a little ungrateful to their master. Julio Ramón Ribeyro defended Marquez saying, “it is difficult to find authentic points of reference between García Márquez’s book and Balzac’s.” Carlos Fuentes bizarrely said that Asturias “shows profound signs of senility.” Juan García Ponce echoed Fuentes writing “It is not that Asturias speaks like that because he is senile; what happens is that he was born senile. He continued “Asturias’ opinions, like his books, are not the same as those of his readers, but rather the same as those of his readers, they are not worth it.” Behaving like a spoilt brat Gustavo Sainz writes that Asturias’s books “do not stand the test of a second reading; furthermore, these works no longer impress us as they did before; fifteen years ago they were the best, but now Latin America has wonderful writers like Cortázar, Fuentes and others who make Asturias look bad.”[12]

These writers are wrong in so many different ways that it would take a book to explain why. So, to finish this review of such a landmark book on more positive note I will leave that final words to the translator David Unger explaining why he will not be translating anymore of Asturias more complex books. “It’s important for a writer and a translator to recognize their limitations. I don’t think I have the skills to successfully render many of Asturias’s more complex and indigenous novels into English. It can be done, but not by me. If I have contributed to the reassessment of Asturias in the Anglo world, then I will be pleased. But I think I will stop here when I am, hopefully, ahead of the game—Claire Messud said in Harper’s that my translation was “brilliant.” I’ll Savor that compliment for now and evermore![13]

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[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/my-president-mario-vargas-llosa/

[2] Men of Maize Paperback – 10 Mar. 2025 by Miguel Ángel Asturias (Author), Héctor Tobar (Foreword), Gerald Martin (Introduction, Translator)

[3] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/search?q=david+unger

[4] A novel The CIA Spent a Fortune to Suppress- https://www.publicbooks.org/a-novel-the-cia-spent-a-fortune-to-suppress/

[5] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/25/lmic-j25.html

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_Boom

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom

[8] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1967/asturias/lecture/

[9] A novel The CIA Spent a Fortune to Suppress- https://www.publicbooks.org/a-novel-the-cia-spent-a-fortune-to-suppress/

[10] Mr. President (Penguin Classics) Paperback – 12 July 2022

[11] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-timely-return-of-a-dictator-novel

[12] https://www.milenio.com/cultura/laberinto/celos-miguel-angel-asturias-gabriel-garcia-marquez

[13] https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2022/07/14/death-hope-and-humor-david-unger-on-translating-miguel-angel-asturiass-mr-president/

Canción by Eduardo Halfon-Published by Bellevue Literary Press on September 20, 2022, 160 pages, $17.99 paperback

“Every writer of fiction is an imposter,”

Eduardo Halfon

“Literature is not about answers. But questions”:

Eduardo Halfon, Author of Canción

 “We only found marbles, toys, coins, cooking utensils, sandals and flip-flops next to their bodies.”

Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

“Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.”

― Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

Eduard Halfon’s novel just over 150 pages is written in the first person and contains autobiographical segments. It begins with the author visiting Tokyo for a conference to honour Lebanese writers. The innocent-sounding title of the book refers to a killer known for his not-so-pretty voice.

Halfon has a deceptively natural way of portraying the murderously complex social and political issues arising from the bitter civil war in Guatemala 1960-1996. Halfon’s prose is simple but exquisite. Canción like all of Halfon’s previous books Polish Boxer, Monastery, and Mourning is excellently translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn.

The book would appear to be meticulously researched and in a recent interview Halfon explains his methodology “When you’re writing a story that’s part of a historical account, that history must be believable. In the case of Canción, that means its historical background, the Guatemalan Civil War, and the country’s recent history. I needed to investigate all of that, and I felt like I had to include it more for the feeling than for the facts. Some details are in the background—they’re props, so to speak—and some details are part of the story.

That weaving is very organic, though. There’s no premeditation. It’s just a feeling of what should be where on the stage. What should be in the foreground? What should be in the background? It’s a very natural process of selection and placement. The research in books like Canción must be very methodical because I am trying to recreate a specific moment in time. So, newspapers, records, logbooks, accounts, the CIA file on my grandfather’s kidnapping—these were all available to me. Sometimes I need little details, but mostly I just need the prop of facts for the theatre to be believable. That is, for the atmosphere to be believable. I’m not interested in the facts, but in the smell and taste that the facts leave behind.”[1]

David L. Ulin writes “Like so much of Halfon’s writing, the narrative of “Canción” unfolds in an elusive middle ground where heritage becomes porous. For anyone familiar with his project, this will not come as a surprise. The author is a diasporic figure: Born in Guatemala City, raised there and in Florida and educated in North Carolina, he has lived in Europe and Nebraska. His metier is family: the way we are shaped by it and the way we push back on or move beyond it; how it both supports and limits us. In “The Polish Boxer” (2012), his first book to be translated into English, this leads him to consider his other grandfather, who survived Auschwitz with the help of a fighter who came from his village. “Mourning,” his most recent book, revolves in part around his uncle Salomon, whose drowning as a child resonates in “Canción” as well.”[2]

Like many of his generation of Guatemalan writers Halfon never witnessed first-hand the murderous civil war and faced the problem of how to write a book which includes historical facts and events he didn’t witness. As Halfon correctly says “Every writer of fiction is an imposter “. When he returned to Guatemala in 1993, he suffered persecution. Along with other writers and journalists, he was targeted by the government. Halfon often spoke of how he was followed and threatened in his own house after his first novel was published in 2004.

The treatment of writers and journalists by the Guatemalan state shows that the so-called peace accord brokered by the United Nations was nothing of the sort. The Guatemalan civil war was a social, economic and political disaster.  Andrea Lobo writes “Nearly a quarter million people were killed between 1962 and 1996 in Guatemala, 93 percent at the hands of pro-government forces. The UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification classified the massacre of Mayan Indians, treated by the military as a potential constituency for guerrillas, as genocide, including the destruction of up to 90 per cent of the Ixil-Mayan towns and the bombing of those fleeing.[3]

Halfon believes that not much has changed since 1996, He writes that “Certain things in Guatemala are simply not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women are being murdered. The impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects that almost define the country itself, they are only discussed and commented on in whispers, or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in peril. The censoring becomes automatic and unconscious. Because the danger is very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still powerful, and political and military murders are all too common”.[4]

Unfortunately, this will not change with the election of the new government of Bernardo Arévalo. Arevalo’s election was challenged by dominant sections of the Guatemalan capitalist oligarchy who sought to overturn his election through many legal cases alleging electoral fraud, illegal financing and other irregularities. All of which failed.

As Andrea Lobo writes “Arévalo is the son of the country’s first elected president, Juan José Arévalo (1945-1951), who remained within the left nationalist government of his successor Jacobo Arbenz when it was overthrown in a CIA-orchestrated military coup in 1954. A series of military-civilian dictatorships followed, crushing opposition from below to protect the interests of US capitalists and their local partners.

Cancion is well worth a read, as are his previous books. It remains to be seen if Halfon’s next novel reflects illusions that exist within left Guatemalan journalists and writers regarding the new Arevalo government.

  

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[1] “Literature is not about answers. But questions”: An Interview with Eduardo Halfon, Author of Canción-//www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2022/10/12/literature-is-not-about-answers-but-questions-an-interview-with-eduardo-halfon-author-of-cancion/

[2] Review: How a Guatemalan kidnapping inspired Eduardo Halfon’s auto fictional ‘Cancion’ www.latimes.com

[3] wsws.org

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/books/the-writing-life-around-the-world-by-electric-literature/2015/nov/04/better-not-say-too-much-eduardo-halfon-on-literature-paranoia-and-leaving-guatemala

The Starmer Project—A Journey to the Right by Oliver Eagleton Published by Verso, £12.99

 

“Starmer and his enforcers in Labour headquarters have taken extraordinary steps to cleanse the party of socialist influence… The opportunities for building a progressive power base within the party…are negligible.

Oliver Eagleton

“Thus the Labour Party is a ‘capitalist workers’ party’.”

― Vladimir Lenin

In that country (Great Britain], the ruling class of which is oppressing and plundering the whole world more than ever before, the formulae of democracy have lost their meaning even as weapons of parliamentary swindling. The specialist best qualified in this sphere, Lloyd George, appeals now not to democracy, but to a union of Conservative and Liberal property holders against the working class. In his arguments, no trace remains of the vague democracy of the ‘Marxist’ Kautsky. Lloyd George stands on the ground of class realities, and for this very reason speaks in the language of civil war. The British working class, with that ponderous learning by experience which is its distinguishing feature, is approaching that stage of its struggle before which the most heroic pages of Chartism will fade, just as the Paris Commune will grow pale before the coming victorious revolt of the French proletariat.

Leon Trotsky

“When people write they mostly forget to reach deep into their selves, to relive the importance and truth of the subject.”

(Rosa Luxemburg, Letter to the Seidels, 1898)

The election of Sir Keir Starmer, to the British state's highest office, is a mark of acceptance by the British establishment, that Starmer and his new Labour government will look after their interests.

Oliver Eagleton's new book on Starmer is a useful if politically limited examination of Starmer’s rise to power. Starmer began his political career under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Eagleton shows that Corbyn was instrumental in Starmer’s political development and rise to power.

Incredible as it may seem Starmer began political life with a reputation as a “lefty lawyer”. He was a member of the Pseudo Left group Socialist Alternatives.[1] And wrote articles on the 1986 Wapping Strike. Starmer has been portrayed in the media as a defender of human rights. But as Eagleton points out, this is a carefully cultivated image. Starmer early on "was motivated by ambition” and steered “a careful course between good-cause legal campaigning and collaboration with the security services”.

When the Haldane Society sent Starmer to investigate allegations of police brutality in Northern Ireland, Starmer became friendly with British troops. Starmer's support for the British army and police led to the extreme right MP Ian Paisley, saying that Starmer “gave us the tools and the arguments and the defence lines to allow us to say that water cannon are necessary or plastic bullets are allowed…and all police officers in Northern Ireland carry a gun… His lasting legacy is that you can have all these accoutrements to policing provided they meet human rights guidelines effectively, and he provided…the arguments for doing that and the legal cover to do it”.[2]

During his time as director of public prosecutions—Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from July 2008. He worked closely with the Tory government and implemented their spending cuts with great efficiency. But it was during his close collaboration with the United States government that Starmer came into his own.

As Ian Taylor writes “he also began strengthening the CPS’s role within the British security state Starmer began to regularly liaise with the United States National Security Agency and the Specialist Operations Directorate of London’s Metropolitan Police on CPS “work” overseas. This was significant given the international “War on Terror” being ­prosecuted by the US and Britain. Eagleton quotes an unnamed member of the CPS’s ­international division: “We made sure what we were doing was most relevant to Britain’s international objectives.” This involved “building up the counter-terrorism capacity of overseas security services” in countries such as Yemen, Somalia, Kenya and Afghanistan.8 Eagleton also finds evidence that Starmer liaised regularly with Eric Holder, the attorney general in Barack Obama’s administration, who advised on “how the CPS could best advance US counter-terrorism objectives in Africa and the Middle East”. He argues the CPS under Starmer “agreed to act as a proxy” for the US State Department in countries “reluctant to accept direct US interference”.[3]

Perhaps the most despicable action of Starmer was his involvement in the pursuit and prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the behest of the US government. Among many attacks carried out by Starmer on Assange was the overseeing of the destroying of documents relating to the Swedish government's prosecution of Assange on trumped-up rape charges. As Chris Marsden relates “It was revealed by the excellent journalism of Stefania Maurizi that, in 2011, the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then under the direction of one Sir Keir Starmer, had destroyed correspondence with Swedish prosecutors relating to Assange. One line which did survive was from a British CPS lawyer advising Swedish investigators not to question Assange in the UK”.[4]

Starmer’s political career began in earnest in the 2015 general election when he was elected in the safe London seat of Holborn and St Pancras. Starmer was appointed shadow minister for immigration by Corbyn. Later, he would be instrumental in the denigration and removal of Jermy Corbyn as a labour leader.

The recent election of a Labour government with Starmer as Prime Minister is the culmination of a long process whereby the Labour Party has now been fully transformed into the UK’s leading bourgeois party. The current Labour government's share of the national vote was just 33.8 per cent. Labour takes power with the lowest share of the popular vote of any incoming government in British history. Thomas Scripps writes “Sir Keir Starmer takes his place at the head of a Labour government on a collision course with the British working class. He owes his “landslide” victory entirely to the hatred with which the Conservative government of the last 14 years was viewed, the thoroughly undemocratic first-past-the-post system, and the fact that widespread left-wing sentiment has found no organised socialist expression.”[5]

Instrumental in Starmer's coming to power were the various pseudo-left groups. In another article on the World Socialist Website, Laura Tiernan writes “Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) used its “Marxism 2024: a festival of socialist ideas” on July 4-7, to promote former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as the figurehead for a new pseudo-left alliance against Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government. During the election campaign, the SWP called for a Labour vote, urging “everyone to use their vote on Thursday to smash, exterminate and snuff out the Tories. Then dance on their grave. These bombastic statements indict the SWP as a defender of Starmer’s Labour government, which is—no less than the Tories—an open party of genocide, war, austerity and anti-immigrant racism.”[6]

Suffice it to say this type of analysis is not to be found in Eagleton’s book. Despite Eagleton saying “Starmer and his enforcers in Labour headquarters have taken extraordinary steps to cleanse the party of socialist influence and the opportunities for building a progressive power base within the party…are negligible.” his solution is to “develop multiple groupings, and “then to cultivate this various flora and enable their cross-pollination”. His solution is so vague and thoroughly bankrupt and must be rejected by the working class. Workers must develop a revolutionary solution to the problems they face. Their starting point for a struggle against the Labour government should be a thorough examination of the articles on the World Socialist Website(wsws.org). 

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Alternative_(England_and_Wales

2. https://isj.org.uk/knight-shift/ 

[3] Knight shift: Keir Starmer and Labour’s move to the right -https://isj.org.uk/knight-shift/

[4] Julian Assange and the fight against imperialist war-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/25/ymiy-m25.html

[5] Build the socialist opposition to Starmer’s right-wing government!-wsws.org

[6] Socialist Workers Party “Marxism 2024” festival promotes Jeremy Corbyn as leader of a “left” regrouping-wsws.org

The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War-By Peter Stansky Stanford University Press, 2023, 150 pp.

 

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell

“If there was hope, it must lie in the Proles because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated."

George Orwell 1984

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

George Orwell 1984

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

George Orwell

The ancient philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a revolutionary dictatorship means, by its very essence, strict limitations of freedom. But for that very reason, epochs of revolution have never been directly favourable to cultural creation; they have only cleared the arena for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state.

Leon Trotsky Revolution Betrayed (1936)

The essence of Marxism consists in this that it approaches society concretely, as a subject for objective research, and analyses human history as one would a colossal laboratory record. Marxism appraises ideology as a subordinate integral element of the material social structure. Marxism examines the class structure of society as a historically conditioned form of the development of the productive forces; Marxism deduces from the productive forces of society the inter-relations between human society and surrounding nature, and these, in turn, are determined at each historical stage by man’s technology, his instruments and weapons, his capacities and methods for struggle with nature. Precisely this objective approach arms Marxism with the insuperable power of historical foresight.

Leon Trotsky's Dialectical Materialism and Science (1925)

 

The Socialist Patriot, published in 2023, joins an extremely busy book market on the English writer George Orwell, one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th century. There is no special reason for reviewing Stansky’s book other than to place it in the context of recent Orwell studies.

The majority of recent publications, it must said, have not been very good. Some have been written by paid-up members of the #MeToo movement that have been nothing short of character assassination. The attack on Orwell by Anna Funder in her book Wifedom is particularly nasty.[1] Given the caustic nature of the attack, it is not surprising that Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, took to his father’s defence in the Spring edition of the Orwell Society’s journal. In the same journal, John Rodden argues that Orwell was neither a “plagiarist” nor a “predator”. Other writers have written in defence of Orwell.

In an essay for The Article, Jeffrey Meyers defends Orwell. He relates how “In Barcelona in May 1937, the Stalinists attacked POUM, their supposed anti-fascist allies, and began a civil war within the Civil War that led to their defeat. Orwell was in the losing faction of the losing side. While he was fighting at the front, the Stalinist police searched Eileen’s hotel room. She was not arrested and hid their passports and chequebooks under the mattress while she remained in bed. Funder says Orwell “abandoned” Eileen by returning to the front, but he went to Spain to fight the fascists, not to take care of her. It is true that when he was shot through the throat, she devotedly nursed him. In July, the Stalinist secret tribunal condemned Orwell and Eileen to death for espionage and high treason, and they barely managed to escape with their lives into France.

Anna Funder, extremely imperceptive, says she’d read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) twice without realising that Eileen had been in Spain with him. Though there are in fact 37 references to Eileen in his book, Funder, determined to put a malign interpretation on everything Orwell does, states that she’s scarcely mentioned and never named and that he wrote her out of the story. She doesn’t realise that Homage is about Spain, not Eileen and that his sense of privacy and decorum prevented him from naming her. (Orwell would have been sickened by the current dedications “To my beautiful and brilliant wife” that are deleted in the post-divorce edition.)  More important, after being convicted of treason and condemned to death, he feared he could be murdered by Soviet agents whom he knew were operating in England, and wanted to protect Eileen from dangerous reprisals by hiding her connection to POUM Funder repeatedly calls his very real fear “paranoia”. But millions of people were murdered in Stalin’s Purges of 1936-38, and Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940. The Communists continued to murder their enemies for the next 80 years. Recently, Sergei Skripal was poisoned in England, and Yevgeny Prigozhin was blown up for opposing the present Russian dictator.[2]

While containing biographical elements, The Socialist Patriot is more polemic than biography. Stansky is broadly politically sympathetic towards Orwell. While reading Stansky’s book, one is struck by how contemporary much of what Orwell wrote about. Room 101, Ignorance is Strength, Big Brother, and doublethink – to name but a few are Orwellian phrases instantly recognisable even today’s phrase-laden society. Despite being born over one hundred years ago, Orwell’s writing is still part of our everyday culture.

Orwell was a brilliant writer who took the study of culture very seriously and was one of many writers in the 20th century to chart its influence. Orwell had an extraordinary range. He wrote about the 19th-century British novelists Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, the American writer Henry Miller, and Donald McGill’s postcards, to name but a few. While Orwell’s Novels and cultural writings are important, I believe Orwell’s greatest book is neither Animal Farm nor 1984 but his Homage To Catalonia.

In a letter he wrote to Cyril Connolly from the hospital in Barcelona where he was being treated for a bullet wound to his throat and arm by the fascists, he wrote: “Thanks also for recently telling the public that I should probably write a book on Spain, as I shall, of course, once this bloody arm is right. I have seen wonderful things and I believe in Socialism, which I never did before. On the whole, though I am sorry not to have seen Madrid, I am glad to have been on a comparatively little-known front among Anarchists and POUM [Workers Party of Marxist Unification] people instead of in the International Brigade, as I should have been if I had come here with CP [Communist Party] credentials instead of ILP [Independent Labour Party] ones. “[3]

In Another letter to his publisher, Victor Gollancz On 1 May 1937, he wrote “ I shall be going back to the front probably in a few days & barring accidents I expect to be there till about August. After that, I think I shall come home, as it will be about time I started on another book. I greatly hope I come out of this alive, if only to write a book about it. It is not easy here to get hold of any facts outside the circle of one’s own experience, but with that limitation, I have seen a great deal that is of immense interest to me. Owing partly to an accident, I joined the POUM militia instead of the International Brigade, one which was a pity in one way because it meant that I had never seen the Madrid front; on the other hand, it has brought me into contact with Spaniards rather than Englishmen & especially with genuine revolutionaries. I hope I shall get a chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies – more, I can’t say, owing to the censorship. If I can get back in August I hope to have a book ready for you about the beginning of next year.[4]

After Orwell returned from Spain, he elaborated his commitment to Socialism by writing the essay/pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn, Socialism and the English Genius. Orwell's essay was not just a knee-jerk reaction to the war. Gregory Claeys writes, "Before he wrote The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell had briefly suggested three of its central themes: first, patriotism was not inherently conservative or reactionary, but might be expressed as a legitimate sentiment among those on the left; second, patriotism alone would not prevent England's defeat, but instead the social revolution must progress (and here his Spanish ideals were carried forward). Third, Orwell argued that it was those who were most patriotic who were least likely to "flinch from revolution when the moment comes." John Cornford, a Communist killed while serving in the International Brigades, had been "public school to the core." This proved, Orwell thought, that one kind of loyalty could transmute itself into another and that it was necessary for the coming struggle to recognise "the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues."[5]

Orwell is crystal clear that the only way to beat the fascists was for the working class to make the war a revolutionary one. He writes, "It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting; it means a fundamental power shift. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class. The people in England who grasp what changes are needed and are capable of carrying them through are not confined to any one class, though it is true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are among them. Ordinary people want a conscious, open revolt against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old. It is not primarily a question of change of government. British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the people, and if we alter our structure from below, we shall get the government we need. Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial administrators who are senile or pro-Fascist are more dangerous than Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in public. Right through our national life, we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a half-witted public schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest individuals among them, we have to break the grip of the monied class. England has got to assume its real shape. The England that is only beneath the surface, in the factories and the newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its destiny."

Stansky spends a fair amount of time and space writing about Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn essay. It is then all the more bizarre that he could conclude on page 73 of his book that Orwell disdained theory and had an empirical outlook. He further elaborates that Orwell was part of an unbroken radical tradition. This is a line that is perpetrated by the Pseudo Lefts, who see the working class as inherently radical and in no need of a revolutionary perspective. It must be said that the paragraph looks out of place from the rest of the book. It seems like another writer might have inserted it.

Orwell spent the last few years before his death coming to terms with the defeat of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism. Orwell's Animal Farm was his second attempt at reckoning with Stalinism, his first being the book Homage to Catalonia. At 120 pages, the book Animal Farm can be read on many levels. As John Newsinger points out, "The politics of the book were pretty straightforward: a capitalist farmer had been quite properly overthrown by the worker animals, and an egalitarian socialist system had been introduced on the farm. The pigs had then betrayed the revolution with the revolutionary Snowball (Trotsky) driven out and the dictator Napoleon (Stalin) establishing a murderous police state".

Right-wing ideologues have attempted to portray the book as anti-revolutionary. Orwell refuted this slander saying, "I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down, then it would have been all right…I was trying to say, "You can't have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship."

Despite having serious political differences with Leon Trotsky, there is no doubt that Orwell respected and was heavily influenced by the writings of Trotsky. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his not-too-friendly essay on Trotsky and Orwell, "In May 1946 Orwell tried to persuade his publisher Fredric Warburg to publish the English edition of Trotsky's Life of Stalin (1941): "I have read a good deal of it, mostly the bits dealing with Stalin's childhood, with the civil war and with the alleged murder of Lenin" by Stalin. The earlier parts were "particularly interesting because they demonstrate the difficulty of establishing any fact about a public figure who has been a subject for propaganda. It might be worth trying to get a little more information about the circumstances of Trotsky's assassination, which may have been partly decided on because of the knowledge that he was writing this very book."

Remarkably, the political discussion over Orwell's opposition to Stalinism continues unabated today. At a recent election meeting held by the Uk Socialist Equality Party,[6] a member of the audience used Orwell’s book Animal Farm to conclude that revolutions have always been defeated. In his reply, Chris Marsden said that despite Orwell being a brilliant writer and an opponent of Stalinism, he nonetheless drew pessimistic conclusions from the victory of Stalinism in the former USSR. One example of this confusion was his turning over some 35 of these names, a year before he died in 1950, to a secret government unit called the Information Research Department. This arm of the British Foreign Office had been set up to organise anti-Soviet and anticommunist propaganda.

Marsden made the point that The co-leader of the Russian Revolution and his Left Opposiiton opposed Stalinism from the standpoint of Marxism and had faith in the working class overthrowing it. They worked under extraordinary political and physical pressure to provide a Marxist opposition to Stalinism, something Orwell could never have done.

As the Marxist writer Fred Mazelis wrote, “The Trotskyists showed that there was a socialist alternative to Stalinism and that the bourgeois-democratic regimes headed by Churchill and Roosevelt, the same regimes which praised the Soviet government at the time of the Moscow Trials and were its allies during WWII, and whose predecessors had intervened to destroy the Russian Revolution, were no defenders of democracy at all. Those who today praise Orwell as a solitary opponent of Stalinist are the same ones who deliberately censor any mention of Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Fourth International.”

 

Notes

A Link to the Debate over Animal Farm.

https://www.tiktok.com/@sep_uk/video/7386965563416775969?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

 

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[1] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html

[2] In defence of George Orwell- https://www.thearticle.com/in-defence-of-george-orwell

[3] The Collected Non-Fiction: Essays, Articles, Diaries and Letters, 1903-1950

[4] Orwell in Spain-by George Orwell- bookreadfree.com/412706/10147298

[5] "The Lion and the Unicorn", Patriotism, and Orwell's Politics-Gregory Claeys-The Review of Politics-Vol. 47, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), pp. 186-211

[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/01/dmho-j01.html

Spare: by Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex Hardcover – Bantam first edition (10 Jan. 2023)

Normally, I would not be caught dead writing about, let alone reviewing, a book by a murderous and racist parasite such as Prince Harry, but something caught my attention. It was not anything written in the book but in a tweet from Harry’s ghostwriter.

The tweet quoted our royal genius saying, “Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory…. There is just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as in so-called objective facts.” The quote would not have looked out of place in George Orwell’s 1984 or Harry’s friend Donald Trump.

But as John Adams, the second US President, once said in 1770, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”[1] The ghostwriter and editor did not oppose this garbage is extraordinary.

As one writer said, “This crime is compounded if ghostwriters are complicit and editors are lazy or amoral. Every memoir should be put through a fact-check in the interest of credibility, not only so that readers are not misled but also that the other people and events featured in it are given a fair deal. Spare has not been fair, and there could be several reasons why it remains riddled with inaccuracies, putting a question mark on the gamut of his claims and complaints.”

When it comes to making things up as he goes along Prince Harry is an amateur. Certainly, the most damaging attack on the concept of historical truth has come from what I term the post-modernist school of historiography. It would not be an understatement to say that post-modernist historians have been extremely hostile in academia to the concept of historical truth. The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of post-modernism as the dominant force in university life. This philosophical and historical outlook has replaced what passed for Marxism inside universities all over the world.

The chief characteristic of the post-modernists is the use of debatable philosophy, to blur over the difference between truth and lies, and in doing so, commit a falsification of history. The practice of lying about history has been taken to a new level by the various schools of post-modernism. It would not be an overstatement to say that the impact of this school of history has been as David North put it "nothing short of catastrophic".

There is, of course, a connection between the falsification of history and the attack on the struggle for objective truth. One of the most outlandish post-modernist thinkers and an opponent of objective truth is the German Professor Jorg Baberowski b (1961)[7]. A student of Michel Foucault, Baberowski describes his method of work in his book (The Meaning of History)

"In reality, the historian has nothing to do with the past but only with its interpretation. He cannot separate what he calls reality from the utterances of people who lived in the past, for there exists no reality apart from the consciousness that produces it. We must liberate ourselves from the conception that we can understand, through the reconstruction of events transmitted to us through documents, what the Russian Revolution was. There is no reality without its representation. To be a historian means to use the words of Roger Chartier to examine the realm of representations".

Accepting this premise that truth is not objective but relative sets a very disturbing precedent. Aside from the moral and intellectual damage this may do to the individual historian, this kind of false philosophy will poison the well that future young historians and people interested in history have to drink out of.

The logic of this philosophy of history is that truth is whatever goes on in someone's head. Smoking is good for you, and hard drugs are not dangerous. Hitler is misunderstood and was a good guy. No person who wants to function and live effectively cannot do without some sense of truth's objective correspondence to reality. I believe that Objective truth is possible but not without a struggle. The first stage in that struggle is telling the truth about history.

 

 

 

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[1] https://www.amdigital.co.uk/insights/blog/boston-massacre-1770