All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting… George Orwell

Because of me placing some pictures of crimes against humanity on my Pinterest ‘Look in the Past” board I got some reactions that I was myself a gruel person and also an accomplish of the horror act. But in case we do not tell about what happened in the past or if we do not show what happens in the world today those atrocities shall be able to continue and lots of people shall not know and shall not react. We do need to react, we do need to avoid such things happen again. Therefore we should always remember others what happened.

We also should avoid negligence, negatiation and lies being told about what human beings did against other living beings. Knowing how and why the civilized nations of Europe descended into unprecedented orgy of destruction is important to keep our generations growing strong and not having them to fall in the same traps of politics and economics.

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Preceding article: Flames of Louvain – Leuven 1914 an attempt to destroy a civilisation

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Related articles

• George Orwell on War (polizeros.com)
  

  All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

  War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

  People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

  Hmm, yet the rough men are often protecting us against other rough men, which could make them more part of the problem than of a solution. Plus, rough men are often the muscle for the moneyed class. Still, we do sleep better because of them.

• George Orwell on War (notthesingularity.com)
  

   The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

  Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’

  He said this in Britain during WWII while the Germans were bombing and he was at the top of their list of people to liquidate. As Dante said, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”

• A Quote for Friday – George Orwell (bookpeeps.org)
  Orwell’s influence on contemporary culture, popular and political, continues decades after his death. Several of his neologisms, along with the term “Orwellian” — now a byword for any oppressive or manipulative social phenomenon opposed to a free society — have entered the vernacular.
• George Orwell Would Be So Proud of Today’s Progressive Socialist Democrats (onecitizenspeaking.com)
  George Orwell would be so proud of the progressive socialist democrats who tell anyone who would care to listen that they are all about promoting free speech, tolerance for all religious viewpoints, equal rights for women, and equal protection under the law for all citizens – and then support Muslim and Palestinian causes that kill children and innocent civilians over the Israelis who have demonstrated their regard for free speech, tolerance for divergent viewpoints, equal rights for women, and equal protection under the law for all of their citizens.
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  America is suffering mightily from government corruption, special interest greed, and the apathy of the average celebrity-worshiping American citizen who treats political parties and their respective politicians as sports teams and players. Reserving the fervor of a fan for their favorite player – full well knowing that the player is deeply flawed, but excusing their performance nevertheless because they play for the fan’s favorite political team. Reacting more to peer pressure and the desire to “fit in” rather than noticing the emperor is not wearing clothes.
• In Praise of Orwellian Principles (mnorth52.wordpress.com)
  The fact that government is showing the same disregard for personal freedom and free speech, in order to combat alien ideologies which advocate those same social and political criteria seems to have evaded them some what. The ends are seen to obviously justify the means, even if those means are corroding and corrupting the self same ideals which they are used as an excuse to defend.
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  Everything Orwell wrote, from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until his death was infused with a hatred of totalitarianism. When he spoke of life at the bottom of the social heap, he did so from personal experience – he was there in the gutter along with all the other scullions and tramps. He had fought in war and seen people die, so he developed a deep suspicion and hatred of authority in all it`s chimeric guises; and of how it insidiously manipulates, cajoles and obliquely threatens people to do as it wishes, and of how it uses words to alter meaning and substance to suit it`s purpose for evasion and obfuscation.
• The Road to Wigan Pier & 1984: A Parallel Analysis on George Orwell (wanderingmirages.com)
  Orwell provides a direct detailing of the life in the ‘industrial towns’, of the proletariat, of the toiling classes. It is evocative and reminded me strongly of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity in depth of detail and emotional involvement. It is a quick tour but captures the essential cruelties and degradation of life – rotten housing, lack of toilets, unemployment – and the complete hopelessness of it all. But just as Boo does later, Orwell also manages to convey that it is not due to the people, it is purely due to the conditions imposed on them. Orwell is very careful to drill this point home. It is the situations that make the classes.
• All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting… George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (oldsaltbooks.wordpress.com)
  George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia – the only worthwhile book to come out of the Spanish Civil War writes –  The men who were well enough to stand had moved across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A crutch waved out of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all. He had gone to the war on the side of the left knowing that, When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
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  One ship drives east and other drives west by the same winds that blow. It’s the set of the sails and not the gales that determines the way they go… Ella Wheeler Wilcox
  What seems to be missing is the analytical insight that smuggling – and the acts of lawlessness that it engenders – is a response to both military occupation and a closed society both of which describe East Germany from 1945 until 1989. What is clearly here is an attempt to conflate the protection of the West with the enslavement of the East – something that requires a great deal of equivocation.
• Orwell prize shortlist headed by Thatcher biography (theguardian.com)
  Charles Moore’s authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher has been shortlisted for the Orwell prize, the prestigious literary award for political writing set up in honour of George Orwell.The award, which aims to reward the book which comes closest to Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art”, had previously drawn fire for its longlisting of the Conservative journalist’s biography of the late former prime minister, with Conrad Landin suggesting in the Independent that Orwell would have “cutting words” about a prize “heaping laurels on establishment figures who write about fashionable establishment subjects”, instead of rewarding writers who “say the unsayable”. But director of the prize Jean Seaton, a historian, said she had “lost count of the number of people who come up to me and wag their fingers and say they know Orwell would be turning in his grave about this or that”.

Old Salt Books Blog

Belgian Canal Boat Fund for the relief of the civil population behind the firing lines. Send them something

The First World War was not the first example of civilian populations being decimated by what is now euphemistically called collateral damage or being intentionally slaughtered by opposing combatants as part of a larger strategy. The ancient and medieval histories are full of captured cities being put to the sword and as the technology of warfare improved targeting skills did not. Look at the conquest of the new world, look at Goya’s paintings from Spain during the Napoleonic Wars and look at what Grant and Sherman accomplished during the War of Northern Aggression. What makes World War I – and subsequent military actions – different is that these actions were widely disseminated and used for propaganda purposes to mobilize populations in hatred of the enemy – often justifying more and greater slaughter…

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