HANS BIOGRAPHICAL EXCERPT FROM NEBIRU THIS WEEK (Christmas, 2004):

[FROM A REVIEW OF GEORGE ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM]

……..Peter Worthington recently (Oct. 8^th, The Toronto Sun) referred to George Orwell’s Animal Farm as “…the most thorough (and effective) indictment of totalitarian horror ever done” and Peter’s view is held by many others of the over 3 million past purchasers of that book.  This is a view shared by Kangaroo Poet Karol Hans Jewinski, although having met Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name) in 1922, Hans was always puzzled as to how Orwell could have written such a masterpiece.  In 1922, the 18 year-old Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police and while in training, had a brief chess and conversation relationship with the 16 year-old Hans, refugee via Afghanistan to India from the Russian Civil War, with the latter practicing his newly-acquired English, and the former practicing his French.  Hans talked about his personal experience of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, but could not dissuade Orwell from what became life-long socialist views.  These were so strongly held that Orwell later fought on the socialist side in the Spanish Civil War.  Although he wrote two worldwide best sellers [Animal Farm and 1984] against totalitarianism, and quite clearly diagnosed the techniques and flaws of totalitarianism, Orwell remained such a socialist idealist, that he was unable to connect socialism with totalitarianism.  In his personal philosophy, he could not see that he was just like his pig-character, Napoleon, who felt that he knew better and was capable and justified in making decisions on other people’s behalf.  There is a very fine line between the voluntary socialism practiced by, for example, the early Christian Church, and the compulsion issuing forth from modern socialist governments.  Hans spent 88 years of his long life actively battling every form of totalitarianism, and this book comes highly recommended by him in spite of his personal doubts about the author……..

[NOTE: this item provides some of the clues needed to win free books in our LUCKY 13 contest.  See http://kangaroopoets.blogspot.com/2011/03/win-100-bucks-in-store-merchandise.html  ]