Churchill and Orwell

by Thomas E. Ricks

The result of this policy split was that until the last year of the 1930s, Churchill would be regarded, as the historian Tony Judt summed it up, as an “overtalented outsider: too good to be ignored but too unconventional and ‘unreliable’ to be appointed to the very highest office.” He was derided by other politicians as flighty, with more energy than judgment, immovable in his views but loose in his party loyalties.

“It was a disagreeable business,” he conceded, “which had to be done as pleasantly as possible.” That uneasy sentence may have been the essence of the appeasement policy—and its epitaph.

Orwell also would be shocked by how quickly party-line communists sought to erase the memory of Stalin’s treaty with Hitler, with no mention of it in official Russian histories. Instead, they began demanding that the United States and England open a “Second Front Now” to relieve German pressure on the Soviet Union. This ideological control of basic facts, of putting events in a kind of “memory hole,” as he would call it, would become a major theme when he wrote 1984 seven years later.

For Churchill, the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought a joy that he could hardly disguise, even when writing about it at a distance of eight years. The unrestrained passage in his memoirs can be read as a kind of hosanna: England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. . . . We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.

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 would argue that the first step, collecting the facts, is the most revolutionary of acts, as it was for Winston in 1984. King was arguing that in a world based on facts, in which the individual has the right to perceive and decide those facts on his or her own, the state must earn the allegiance of its citizens. When it fails to live up to its rhetoric, it begins to forfeit that loyalty. This is a thought at once profoundly revolutionary and very American.