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Entry: Orwell on Passive Resistance

Horizon has two entries. Firstly Orwell on Passive Resistance:

One of the things I used to most enjoy over at the Scottish Newsgroup were the interminable (often learned, sometimes silly, but nearly always fun) squabbles over Orwell's ideas. I see no reason to drop the tradition, and I also see that Martha has provided a useful entry into such a discussion with her post about GO over at Harry's Place:

For one thing, he didn't like or understand the kind of nonviolent civil disobedience invented by Gandhi. He repeatedly classed Gandhi with totalitarian demagogues in a way that seems strange now, and the "Reflections on Gandhi" essay itself is mainly critical. I honestly don't know what he would have written about MLKing and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. I'd almost rather not know.

Now, Martha and I have had this out before, but I still think she's missing the point about Orwell and nonviolent civil disobedience (hereafter NCD).

The second entry is Werner Herzog, Non-fiction Part 1:

Sometime in 1995 or earlier, Werner Herzog went to Italy with a small crew to film the old castle of Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, died 1613. While wandering through the palace, filming cracked walls and collapsed ceilings, the sound of bagpipes rings deafeningly through the ruin. Looking for the source, the crew come upon a man moving from room to room with his pipes, standing in corners as if looking for a particularly interesting acoustic effect. When the stunned crew ask the man what he's doing, he says he's plugging up the cracks in the walls with music so the evil spirit can't escape.

So begins Herzog's portrait of Don Carlo Gesualdo, widely considered the best composer of Renaissance madrigals, foreshadower, two centuries before his time, of Wagner, posthumous recipient, as Gesualdo fans like to remind people, of a "pilgrimage" by Stravinsky, murderer and lunatic.