George Orwell's dialectical paradoxes

Two of my favorite quotes are from George Orwell: "Pacifists don't mind violence, as long as it's violent enough", "Only an intellectual could believe something like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool." These are humorous paradoxes, internal dialectical arguments, along the lines of Hegel, or Marx, that resolve themselves into a synthesis in our minds, that approximates the truth. They are funny, because they are contradictory, on the surface anyway -- pacifists are very violent, intellectuals are stupid. Now, of course, it's not as simple as that. Pacifists do, sincerely abhor violence, insofar as they really are pacifists. And, in their own lives, they generally are gentle, non-violent people. However, they tend to only exist in relatively peaceful societies, or they couldn't possibly survive at all. So, they tend to focus on the relatively mild examples of violence in their own societies -- police arrests of demonstators, for example -- and totally ignore mass violence in other societies, completely, as it doesn't impact them. When Orwell says "Only an intellectual could believe something like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool," he is referring to a very specific example, to illustrate a point in his excellent essay "notes on Nationalism". When American troops began arriving in large number in Great Britain, in order to prepare for the Normndy invasion in 1944 of Nazi Germany, the local communist intelligentsia in Britain actually responded with hostility to their presence, claiming that, actually, they were there to prevent a communist revolution in Britain! And, they believed it! Perfect example, eh? Orwell's paradoxes help to illustrate the difficulties of really understanding reality, and our own prejudices, in a world where nothing is as it really seems. After all, this is a world in which Adolf Hitler really was, as a young man, a "typical Viennese charmer", happily earning his living selling his charming paintings to Jewish art dealers in mutual respect and admiration!