Churchill and Orwell

by Thomas E. Ricks

Churchill helped give us the liberty we enjoy now. Orwell’s writing about liberty affects how we think about it now.

“When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

His perspective was that the powerful would almost always try to obscure the truth.

it is clear now that appeasement rested more on self-delusion than on rational calculation, because it necessarily required faith in Hitler’s sanity and trustworthiness.

“The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”

at the end of October, “Our foreign policy is one of appeasement.” Charles Lindbergh arrived in London and told his hosts that he believed that in the event of war, “the democracies would be crushed absolutely and finally.”

the night he shot a rat, exciting his comrades into thinking they were under attack. Edwards, leading the British fighters in the area, said Orwell had a particular phobia about the rodents that gnawed on their boots at night.

“One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right,” he wrote.

Orwell hammers home two points. The first is that Soviet-dominated communism should not be trusted by other leftists. The second is that the left can be every bit as accepting of lies as the right.

be skeptical of everything he read, especially when it came from or comforted those wielding power.

Hitler’s Germany signed a nonaggression pact with Stalin’s Russia on August 23, 1939. With that agreement, the totalitarian right made peace with the totalitarian left.

“This is a sad day for all of us, and to none is it sadder than to me,” he said. “Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.”

national government.

“The first thing is to get the US into the war. We can settle how to fight it afterwards.”

In wartime, people will believe the worst if they are not told the truth,

He wrote approvingly of a friend’s statement that “with individual exceptions like Churchill the entire British aristocracy is utterly corrupt and lacking in the most ordinary patriotism.”

Suspicion lingered among some Britishers that the aristocracy, with its widespread sympathy for fascism,

I can’t bear the typical Southern attitude toward the negroes. It is a great ulcer on the American civilisation

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Churchill’s self-indulgence, maintained even during the stresses of war, is a work of art in itself. He customarily wore underwear made of pale pink silk.

It was in Iran that Churchill realized that his dream of dominating a long-term Anglo-American alliance would not come to fruition.

Stalin then mused more on the subject of the mass liquidation of the German General Staff. Churchill again denounced it, saying he would rather be shot himself than to “sully my own and my country’s honour with such infamy.”

“Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”

“Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“The man who cannot say what he has to say in good English cannot have very much to say that is worth listening to,”

If meetings are not contentious, they probably are not productive—especially

Churchill’s half-American background may have “blinded him to Roosevelt’s aim to overthrow the British Empire—in which he succeeded.”

Churchill probably may have been angry that de Valera, respecting diplomatic niceties, two weeks earlier had extended the condolences of the Irish government to Germany upon the death of Hitler.

“Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you from enjoying it,” he wrote in April 1946. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators, nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

“This is the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and probably cannot allow the individual any freedom whatever.

Collecting the facts is a revolutionary act. Insisting on the right to do so is perhaps the most subversive action possible.

the society of Big Brother has failed to achieve gains in productivity because “scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought,

It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

in 1942 in an essay in which he meditated on some “visions of a totalitarian future.” In it, he explained why he thought the working class would be most resistant to an intrusive right-wing state:

Most of all, he would have been alienated by America’s determined, self-centered individualism.

Essentially these books consist of asking the reader to forget about the forest of Churchill’s life and instead focus on a few trees that a given writer believes deserve more attention.

the theme that runs powerfully through all of Orwell’s writings, from his early work on Burmese Days through the late 1930s and then through the great essays, and into Animal Farm and 1984, is the abuse of power in the modern world by both the left and the right.

Orwell’s earlier meditations on the abuses of political power also found new audiences. An Islamic radical, reading Animal Farm while imprisoned in Egypt, realized that Orwell spoke to his private doubts. “I began to join the dots and think, ‘My God, if these guys that I’m here with ever came to power, they would be the Islamist equivalent of Animal Farm,’”

The second driver of the current Orwell boom is the post-9/11 rise of the intelligence state.

Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state, but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him—products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere.

Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond.

For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly.