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So, like Churchill, Orwell came of age in a remote part of the British Empire.
went to Spain to fight fascism, but instead wound up being hunted by communists. This is the central fact of his experience of the Spanish Civil War, and indeed it is the key fact of his entire life.
One reason his foreboding speeches on Germany later in the decade would be greeted with skepticism was that he had been equally intense about the dangers of Indian independence.
Churchill’s isolation grew even deeper in December 1936, when he sided with King Edward VIII during the crisis over whether the king should step down over his desire to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson.
The governments of France and Britain instructed the Czechs to give up the heavily Germanic western fringe of their country called the Sudetenland.
The House of Commons endorsed his policy by a vote of 366 to 144.
What he saw in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 would inform all his subsequent work. There is a direct line from the streets of Barcelona in 1937 to the torture chambers of 1984.
Orwell provides one of the best accounts ever written of what it is like to be badly wounded by a bullet and expecting to die soon. He knew he had been shot, but could not tell where. When informed that it was a neck shot, “I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it.” Blood dribbled from a corner of his mouth. He assumed that a carotid artery had been severed, which would mean that he had only a few minutes to live. “My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a
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on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
His notes, wrote one aide, were “like the beam of a searchlight ceaselessly swinging round and penetrating into the remote recesses of the administration—so that everyone, however humble his rank or his function, felt that one day the beam might rest on him and light up what he was doing. In
“I wish I could persuade you to try to overcome the difficulties instead of merely entrenching yourself behind them.”
After the war, Churchill would tell friends that if he could relive one year of his life, it would be 1940.
FDR wanted to know more about who Churchill really was, so in January 1941, he dispatched Harry Hopkins to London as his presidential envoy.
For the next two years, Hopkins would be the key link between Churchill and Roosevelt, effectively the president’s personal foreign minister.
Perhaps most significantly, Orwell’s tenure at the BBC intensified his distrust of state control of information. “All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth,”
At this point, FDR’s son, Elliott Roosevelt, who had joined the dinner without being officially invited, arose from his seat at the table. It was not his place to speak, but he did so, and in a particularly startling manner. He rejected Churchill’s argument and instead endorsed Stalin’s bloodthirsty plan.
He argues that writing that is obscure, dull, and Latinate is made that way for a purpose—generally, in order to disguise what is really happening.
They should not look for consensus, and instead should examine differences between advisors, asking them for the reasons for their different views.
The essence of strategy is making hard choices, deciding between what Dwight Eisenhower once called the essential versus the important. Churchill excelled at that task.
On the same day of the American nuclear explosion, July 16, Churchill traveled into Berlin to see Hitler’s bunker, including the room in which the Führer died.
The premonitory dream was accurate. The next day, Churchill suffered a political death, as he and his party lost the national election in a landslide.
And so, for the first time in six years, Churchill had to look for a place to live in London. It was a devastating turnabout for someone who had just led his nation to a great victory: Britain stood unconquered, and was still a democracy.
was nearly a thousand years since Britain had seen the fires of a foreign camp on English soil.”
“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.”
Orwell depicts the proletarians as essentially uncontrollable. The state does not try to control them as much as it simply distracts them. “Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of minds,” Winston thinks.
Every B-grade Western of the 1940s and 1950s seems to begin or end with a loner riding into or out of town. The image lives on as the motorcyclist roaring alone on an empty highway or the mountain climber soloing in the Rockies, the stuff of today’s television commercials. Americans,
“I’ve taken a lot more out of alcohol than it’s ever taken out of me.”
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
which predictive mid-twentieth-century author got the future more right—Aldous Huxley, with his vision in Brave New World in which people were controlled by the state through pleasure, or Orwell, with his darker view of a state built on the use of pain. (Huxley, in fact, briefly had been one of Orwell’s French teachers at Eton.) Actually, it is a false distinction—both men are right. The great majority of people are content to be amused and not to challenge the state. But a dissident minority often emerges, and suppressing it generally seems to require harsher methods. As Orwell put it near
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The biggest problem civil rights activists faced in the America of the 1950s and 1960s was not prejudice per se, not even always in the South. Rather, it was a reluctance even among well-meaning people to address a festering wrong that could wait no longer.
“right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
