John P. Rossi

If He Had Lived, or A Counterfactual Life of George Orwell

This essay represents an example of what might be termed “counterfactual biography,” or in Niall Fergusons phrase, “virtual history.” George Orwell died in January 1950 at the age of 46. Assuming he had lived to a healthy old age, the authors engage in a counterfactual thought experiment, speculating how he might have responded to numerous public controversies of the last half of the twentieth century and even beyond. Among the topics and issues explored are McCarthyism and the Cold War, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the wars in Korea and Vietnam, imperialism and post-colonialism, the womens and environmental movements, the nuclear freeze debates of the 1980s, the war on terrorism and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and more.

Catholic Opinion on the Eastern Question, 1876–1878

In the middle 1870s British society experienced the greatest debate over foreign policy since the early days of the French Revolution: the dispute known as the Eastern question. For two years the British political world was divided by this issue as the country took sides between the Ottoman Empire, the oppressor of the Christian Slavic peoples of the Balkans, and Czarist Russia, the Slavs protectors. What began as a diplomatic dispute became through its religious dimension a moral, even ideological, issue. Responsibility for this transformation belonged to a strange coalition made up of English radicals, a major portion of the Nonconformist community, and a considerable number of High Church Anglicans. They were joined later by the greatest Victorian exponent of moral force in politics, William Ewart Gladstone. Inexorably the Catholic community in Britain was drawn into this dispute. The major effect of the Eastern question on the Catholics was to deepen their political relationship with the Conservative party, furthering a trend that had been apparent for about a decade. In the past, British Catholics had tended to be sympathetic to the Liberals on most issues, largely out of gratitude for their help in securing civil and religious liberty for Catholics in Britain and Ireland. This sympathy began to wane in the 1860s over complex questions such as Italian unification, the territorial integrity of the papal states, and the papal condemnation of liberalism in the Syllabus of Errors. In the early 1870s the thorny question of denominational education, which was supported by the Conservatives and vigorously opposed by the Nonconformist wing of the Liberal party, drew the Catholics away from the Liberals. The Catholics dilemma of the late 1860s and early 1870s was a difficult one: they had lost their enthusiasm for the Liberals and yet were not comfortable with the Conservatives, a party that had a tradition of anti-Catholicism. This drift of the Catholics away from the Liberals was intensified by Gladstones attacks on the doctrine of Papal Infallibility in 1874 and 1875. The debates on the Eastern question, which lasted from 1876 to 1878, profoundly added to this process of alienation from the Liberals. The Catholic community generally spoke with one voice on the Eastern question. This had the effect of insulating it from the bitter controversy which swept Britain for two years. A small group usually labeled old Catholics,

Ronan Fanning, Eamon de Valera: A Will to Power

Fannings biography of de Valera is the latest in a long line of studies of the man regarded as the single most significant figure ion modern Irish history. It is based on a lifetime study of de Valera by one of Ireland greatest historians. In little over 300 pages Fanning gives the reader the best overview of de Valeras remarkable career that can be found.