ORWELL MISQUOTED EOGHAN HARRIS THE SOURCE ,. MEA CULPA, CAVEAT LECTOR by Donal Kennedy


CAVEAT LECTOR means Reader Beware.

MEA CULPA means Through my Fault.

And it’s my fault for accepting the written word of  Eoghan Harris printed in the Sunday Indpendent on January 10.

The words quoted were from Sebastian Haffner a German born in 1907 who fled with his German Jewish wife to England in 1938. He was extremely anti-Nazi and had written an analysis of that movement. He was not a champion of the rights of all nations to liberty, thinking that powerful ones had the right to bully smaller ones.

Orwell disagreed – up to a point. He believed it would be necessary to bombard the world with propaganda before seizing Irish ports and even then it would be opposed not only by America but also by much of British opinion. In later times the ex-British Officer and media Commentator Mark Urban commented that Bloody Sunday was a British PR fiasco rather than an atrocity.

The actual words of Sebastian Haffner attributed by Eoghan Harris to Orwell are on A Patriot After AL page 444 of The Orwell Diaries 1938-1942 and dated 14 March 1941.

You can find them on the link – https:/orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/14-3-41/.

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