Via Libertas and IMDB, we learn today that activist and sometimes-actor George Clooney has recommended that his fellow celebrities refrain from political commentary. Our jubilation was short-lived, however, as Clooney quickly followed his admonition …

What love of fascism? Wells’ writings on fascism led the Nazis to brand him a “degenerate”, give his books pride of place on their literary pyres, and name this septagenarian as one of the key public figures who should be captured immediately upon the German conquest of Britain. You shouldn’t believe everything you read in hysterical, dissembling op-eds in the Wall Street Journal.

And if it’s his anti-Catholicism that narks you, you should be aware this was shared by just about every Anglican in England, and plenty of non-conformists besides, before the 1950s – memories of Bloody Mary died hard. The Catholic Church’s support for fascism, for all that it may have become tepid in 1937, did much to re-ignite that disdain.

Orwell’s 1941 article was a response to one in which Wells claimed that the Nazis would be defeated within a short space of time and that it would be impossible for Hitler, a “screaming little defective” in Wells’ words, to challenge the supremacy of Western values. Orwell was incensed that one of his biggest childhood heroes had failed to see how much of a threat Nazi Germany presented, and dispensed much vitriol showing it. Characterising himself and his entire generation as Wells’ children, Orwell says Wells changed the world (or, at least, a generation of Englishmen) and gave rise to the scientific rationality of the twentieth century. But according to Orwell, Wells’ world-view, that of a “nineteenth-century liberal”, was woefully inadequate for the world of 1941 because the world had changed yet again.

Orwell accused Wells of under-estimating the atavistic appeal of fascism, and the necessity of an atavistic response. He said Wells, and the rest of the Victorian and Edwardian left, were wrong in their belief in the profound and enduring appeal of rationality and Enlightenment values and in the inexorable flow of history towards utopia. That wasn’t actually the totality of Wells’ view, and Orwell believed in the same values and, to a lesser extent, that there was a historical flow towards a better world. But Orwell’s claim was that Wells had a misplaced belief in the inevitable victory of science over superstition in every conflict rather than merely in the long term – and, indeed, that Wells was incapable of seeing that Nazism had blurred the lines between science and superstition. According to Orwell, Wells was incapable of grasping the “tremendous strength of the old world”, of “nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty”, nor that the “Creatures out of the Dark Ages [that] have come marching into the present” cannot be defeated by science, by humanism or any rational response, but instead “need a strong magic to lay them”.

Orwell suggested Jack London, a man of the generation between Wells’ and Orwell’s, as a more useful “prophet” for the second World War; and that, of Wells’ contemporaries, only “Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military glory [...] would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin.” Orwell concludes that “Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.”

Orwell, his contemporary, seemed to agree with me.

Wells was that oddest of birds, a pessimistic utopian. Maybe that’s the recipe for a Stalinist, who knows.

“Wells flirted with the worst ideas of his time. After interviewing Lenin, Wells called him “creative” and described communism as the best hope for reforming Russia. The man simply never met a collectivist movement that didn’t intrigue him. “There is good in these Fascists,” he said of Italians in 1927. “There is something brave and well-meaning about them.” He despised Catholicism and mocked Jewish traditions as “nonsense.” It was for views such as these that George Orwell delivered a blunt verdict in 1941: “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.”

http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006849

Koepp– and modern Liberalism in general– are worthy inheritors of the pro-communist, anti-religious, anti-West tradition that people like Wells represented.

Then again, as has already been noted elsewhere in this blog, similar leftist statements have also been attributed to Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and the new Harry Potter book. In all three cases, though, even if there is an underlying message intended it’s veiled well enough to be hard for the casual viewer to recognize (and in the case of Star Wars, it’s also undercut by mixed messages and the clumsily-written dialogue that’s been a hallmark of the prequel trilogy). In other words, much ado about very little.

Of course there are many more examples of David Koepp-style self-importance. A great example is a recent interview in the NYT with actress Tilda Swinton about the supernatural-fantasy movie Constantine, where she unrolls some rhetoric about the current administration as religious absolutists, and says that Constantine has the potential to be ‘revolutionary filmmaking’ because somehow there’s supposed to be subtext about Bush in there. It’s hilarious. Also check out Romero’s Land of the Dead for an unwitting object lesson in appalling leftist moral equivocation.

Actually, what I found fascinating was the unwritten aspect of it- how the horror of the tragedy was evoked. And I gotta pull on the psychoanlytic aspect of this, the shocking imagery of the aliens genocide.

Throughout the films it was constantly repeated ‘They came from below’ or ‘They could have been waiting for millions of years’, and the sheer impressiveness when they came up and started slaughtering. Or how it was worked out that the aliens had to be inserted into the inert genocide machines by lightning. This is kind of like a modern ideology or charismatic leader leading the masses to some kind of horrible tragedy.

I wrote a review on my own blog, but it’s not too much longer than this. Basically, I thought you could make the case that part of the horror of the aliens could be a reflection of ourselves, how we had these primal urges to wipe everyone out in genocidal fashion but had managed to suppress them under the veneer of civilization. How in the modern era we are really scared that this ‘civilization’ is not so solid, that a lightning storm could come and awake these monsters.

But that’s just me. I could be wrong.

LMAO! from Battleship Potemkin to America=martian invaders! how far these “intellectuals” have sunk.

“For much of the film, it seems the obliteration of mankind is just a swell excuse for parental bonding. As Cruise traipses up the Hudson River and swings east to Boston, bickering with his alienated son and whiney daughter, Spielberg seems to be reversing the priorities of Casablanca: this crazy world doesn’t amount to a hill of beans next to the problems of three little people. “

I’m offended — but it’s so common I almost laugh.

I wouldn’t equate being a Leftist with “intellectual”. Certainly not today, where being a Leftist means you get to call people “nazis” and “bushitler” and make martian invader movies and say it’s about America. How embarrassing.