Fariha’s Reviews > Essays > Status Update
Fariha
is on page 203 of 1369
M is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual claptrap—Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round, etc etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working-class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking from as it were a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers.
— Dec 28, 2025 06:44AM
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Fariha’s Previous Updates
Fariha
is on page 355 of 1369
Dickens had had vivid glimpses of "low life"—life in a debtor's prison, for example—and he was also a popular novelist and able to write about ordinary people. So were all the characteristic English novelists of the nineteenth century. They felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modem novel is a novel about a novelist.
— Jan 10, 2026 08:04AM
Fariha
is on page 355 of 1369
It is not merely a coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly about food. He was a cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilised but not primarily useful. A thing that strikes one when one looks below the surface of Dickens's books is that,
— Jan 10, 2026 08:02AM
Fariha
is on page 336 of 1369
A time is coming when even the comparatively comfortable will suffer under the terror of lawless governments, created in their own choice or by their acquiescence....For it only needs a turn of the screw, an increase of tension, and the fragile and rather imaginary partitions by which the masses of all the world are allowed to cherish their divisions will blow away.
— Jan 05, 2026 10:33AM
Fariha
is on page 331 of 1369
In every country except those which are definitely outside the war-orbit, the supposed necessity to prepare for war is being systematically used to prevent every kind of social advance. It goes without saying that this happens in the Fascist countries, but "guns before butter" also rules in the democracies.
— Jan 05, 2026 10:23AM
Fariha
is on page 307 of 1369
Nevertheless, owing to the exceptionally high traditions of the Indian Civil Service, the law in India is administered far more fairly than might be expected and incidentally, far too fairly to please the business community. Mr Collis grasps the essential situation clearly enough; he recognises that the Burman has profited very little from the huge wealth that has been extracted from his country,
— Jan 04, 2026 08:47AM
Fariha
is on page 307 of 1369
The account of the trial makes curious reading—an Indian crowd roaring outside, Mr Collis wondering whether he would be knocked on the head the next moment, and the prisoner sitting in the dock reading a newspaper to make it clear that he did not recognise the jurisdiction of an English court. Mr Collis's sentence was ten days' imprisonment—a wise sentence, for it deprived Sen Gupta of a chance of martyrdom.
— Jan 04, 2026 08:37AM
Fariha
is on page 287 of 1369
Definitely revolutionary events had taken place—land had been seized by the peasants, industries collectivised, big capitalists killed or driven out, the Church practically abolished—but there had been no fundamental change in the structure of government. It was a situation capable of developing either towards Socialism or back to capitalism ;
— Jan 04, 2026 05:17AM
Fariha
is on page 284 of 1369
After what I have seen in Spain I have come to the conclusion that it is futile to be "anti-Fascist" while attempting to preserve capitalism. Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to tum into Fascism when the pinch comes.
— Jan 04, 2026 05:09AM
Fariha
is on page 283 of 1369
The other is the fact that all known methods of defence against the aeroplane are more or less useless and that the German bombers could probably reduce England to chaos and starvation in a few weeks. It is doubtful whether this has much value as an argument against war ; though true, it amounts to scaremongering and, coupled with the consciousness of German rearmament,
— Jan 03, 2026 07:47AM
Fariha
is on page 278 of 1369
It is evident that people can be deceived by the anti-Fascist stuff exactly as they were deceived by the gallant little Belgium stuff, and when war comes they will walk straight into it. I don't, however, agree with the pacifist attitude, as I believe you do. I still think one must fight for Socialism and against Fascism, I mean fight physically with weapons, only it is as well to discover which is which.
— Jan 03, 2026 07:41AM
M kept extolling Italy and Germany, but when questioned about concentration camps etc always replied, "We have no foreign models ; what happens in Germany need not happen here." To the question, "How do you know that your own money is not used to finance cheap foreign labour ?" (M having denounced the Jewish financiers who are supposed to do this), M replied, "All my money is invested in England," and I suppose comparatively few of the audience realised that this means nothing.
Anyone who interrupts can be assaulted and thrown out and then charged into the bargain, and of course the stewards, i.e. M himself, are the judges of what constitutes an interruption. Therefore one is liable to get both a hammering and a fine for asking a question which M finds it difficult to answer.