On Slavery

George Orwell wrote a withering passage about money, adapting I Corinthians xiii in Keep the Aspidistra Flying:

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money. "

I am reminded of this when I read this article by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the NYT, where he discusses the role of African kings in the commercial activity of slavery: they sold Africans to European merchants- and when the issue of giving them freedom and sending them back home came up, Frederick Douglass wrote,

“The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia. We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

 It is a sorry story, with no winners in terms of race and colour.

Animal Farm

Animal Farm is one of those books the reading of which can mark you for life: I was eighteen when I first read it, and it created in me an aversion to all totalitarian regimes, whatever their ideology. It is entertaining, and well-written, and in reading it, children and adults, whatever their situation, can by a stretch of imaginative outreach, can find their own dictator portrayed there.

Superb book, and there is a superp appreciation of it at The Guardian: Christopher Hitchens re-reads Animal Farm:

"There is a timeless, even transcendent, quality to this little story. It is caught when Old Major tells his quiet, sad audience of overworked beasts about a time long ago, when creatures knew of the possibility of a world without masters, and when he recalls in a dream the words and the tune of a half-forgotten freedom song. Orwell had a liking for the tradition of the English Protestant revolution, and his favourite line of justification was taken from John Milton, who made his stand 'By the known rules of ancient liberty'. In all minds – perhaps especially in those of children – there is a feeling that life need not always be this way, and those malnourished Ukrainian survivors, responding to the authenticity of the verses and to something 'absolute' in the integrity of the book, were hearing the mighty line of Milton whether they fully understood it or not."