His real name was Eric Arthur Blair. The world knows him by his pen name, George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four; Animal Farm, etc) - a famed author, journalist, literary critic, editor (and many decades after his death, an iconic internet meme vaticinator). Orwell was the literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine published in London. He wrote a weekly column entitled "As I Please," from 1943-1947.
According to Das Wiki, the magazine was "...founded in early 1937 by two wealthy left-wing Labour Party Members of Parliament (MPs), Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, to back the Unity Campaign, an attempt to secure an anti-fascist and anti-appeasement United Front between the Labour Party and socialist parties to the left."
Parliaments and their insufferable coalitions. Go figure. I'll take American faux bi-cameral, perpetually deadlocked duopoly, any day - but I digress.
I found this lil nugget buried down in Das Wiki's account: "(The) Tribune is revered as one of the greatest left-wing papers in British history. It campaigned vigorously for the opening of a second front against Adolf Hitler's Germany, was consistently critical of the Winston Churchill government's failings and argued that only a democratic socialist post-war settlement in Britain and Europe as a whole was viable. (emphasis mine)
Greatest, indeed. Apparently, the seeds of the EU were planted before the Nazis were ever eradicted off the continent, and illustrates the tenacity of Marxist ideology: move by the left flank; even in crisis, always by the left flank.
Ok, enough setting the table. 26 May, 1944 was 12 days before D-Day, the allied invasion of Europe, but due to the intense intelligence blackout surrounding the largest invasion force in history, it's doubtful Orwell would've known the exact date anymore than his house cat. Orwell was a writer, so he wrote and published his weekly column, per usual, in the Tribune. The subject was Anglo-American relations: national, military - and romantic. War brides aren't deterred by nasty things, like war, and neither are generals or heads-of-state, but sometimes Allied tensions ran high, egos got bruised, and heads butted. Plus, there were ugly prejudice and silly stereotypes to muddy up the waters.
In part, "As I Please," 26 May, 1944, by Geo. Orwell: "I WAS talking the other day to a young American soldier, who told me — as quite a number of others have done — that anti-British feeling is completely general in the American army. He had only recently landed in this country, and as he came off the boat he asked the Military Policeman on the dock, ‘How’s England?’
‘The girls here walk out with niggers,’ answered the M.P. ‘They call them American Indians.’
That was the salient fact about England, from the M.P.’s point of view. At the same time my friend told me that anti-British feeling is not violent and there is no very clearly-defined cause of complaint. A good deal of it is probably a rationalization of the discomfort most people feel at being away from home. But the whole subject of anti-British feeling in the United States badly needs investigation. Like antisemitism, it is given a whole series of contradictory explanations, and again like antisemitism, it is probably a psychological substitute for something else. What else is the question that needs investigating.
Meanwhile, there is one department of Anglo-American relations that seems to be going well. It was announced some months ago that no less than 20,000 English girls had already married American soldiers and sailors, and the number will have increased since. Some of these girls are being educated for their life in a new country at the ‘Schools for Brides of U.S. Servicemen’ organized by the American Red Cross. Here they are taught practical details about American manners, customs and traditions—and also, perhaps, cured of the widespread illusion that every American owns a motor car and every American house contains a bathroom, a refrigerator and an electric washing-machine."
‘Schools for Brides of U.S. Servicemen.’ OMG. Twenty-first century feminist heads would explode if they read such mild-mannered advice, then fly into a handmaid's tale of rage at Orwell's doorstep were he still alive.
Always waging war over something; For our species of hairless, bi-pedal, binary-gendered primates with a 1600cc brain, it never ends.
TY World War 2 Today for the heads up.
