Why Orwell Matters

by Christopher Hitchens

Orwell’s own work is much preoccupied with the demoralizing effects of the freezing point, and not entirely free from the ancestral belief that a cold plunge is a good thing. But this gaunt and aloof person underwent his two crucial epiphanies in the torrid and sultry climates of Burma and Catalonia; and his work in its smuggled form was later to kindle a spark in the Siberias of the world, warming the hearts of shivering Poles and Ukrainians and helping to melt the permafrost of Stalinism. If Lenin had not uttered the maxim ‘the heart on fire and the brain on ice’, it might have suited Orwell, whose passion and generosity were rivalled only by his detachment and reserve.

it has lately proved possible to reprint every single letter, book review and essay composed by Orwell without exposing him to any embarrassment.

‘Orwellian’ in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as ‘Orwellian’ is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as ‘Orwellian’ is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime.

By teaching himself in theory and practice, some of the teaching being rather pedantic, he became a great humanist.

as Williams sourly told his interviewers at New Left Review in 1979, ‘along every road that you moved, the figure of Orwell seemed to be waiting. If you tried to develop a new kind of popular cultural analysis, there was Orwell; if you wanted to report on work or ordinary life, there was Orwell’. . . Does this sound like acknowledgement, or like envy?)

In 1940 — a bad year — he wrote this, about the Poles: Amid a spate of books about Czechoslovakia and Spain there have not been many about Poland, and this book raises once again the painful question of small nationalities. As it happens I recently saw it reviewed in a left-wing paper under the heading ‘Fascist Poland did not deserve to survive.’ The implication was that the state of independent Poland was so bad that the downright slavery instituted by Hitler was preferable. Ideas of this kind were undoubtedly gaining ground between the outbreak of war and June, 1940. In the Popular Front period left-wing opinion was committed to defending the crazy pavement of Versailles, but the Russo-German pact upset the ‘antifascist’ orthodoxy of the past few years. It became the fashion to say that small nationalities were a nuisance and that Poland was ‘just as bad as’ Nazi Germany . . . But actually the Polish army fought as long as the French, against far heavier odds, nor did the Poles suddenly change sides in the middle of the war. It seems, in fact, that this nation of thirty million souls, with its long tradition of struggle against the Emperor and the Tsar, deserves its independence in any world where national sovereignty is possible. Like the Czechs, the Poles will rise again, though the old feudal life, with the private chapel in the castle grounds and the gamekeeper who is the baron’s foster-brother, is vanished for ever.

most chroniclers and historians are now in agreement: Orwell told the truth, in his Homage to Catalonia, about the deliberate subversion of the Spanish Republic by the agents of Stalin, and about the especially ruthless way in which they tried to destroy Catalonia’s independent Left.

Marxism in the twentieth century did produce its Andrés Nins as well as its Kim Il Sungs. It’s something more than an irony that so many calling themselves leftists have been either too stupid or too compromised to recognize this, or have actually been twisted enough to prefer the second example to the first.

the New York Daily News had printed an editorial saying that Nineteen Eighty-Four was an attack on the British Labour Government, Orwell was asked by Francis Henson to make a statement and wrote: My recent novel is not intended as an attack on socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism . . . The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

The Labour government had, after all, just negotiated a fairly honourable independence for India and Burma, an achievement for which socialists had been pressing for some time (and which might have been better accomplished to a socialist timetable than to the expiring rhythms of imperial exhaustion, with its disfiguring accompaniments of scuttle and partition).

he is credited with coining the term ‘cold war’, in a paragraph that deserves quotation. On 19 October 1945, in an essay entitled ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, he drew attention to both the military and the political dangers inherent in a weapon that, not merely unprecedentedly destructive of the innocent, could also only be wielded by an elite: We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours. It can be seen even from this fragment that Orwell did not conceive of the Cold War as a one-dimensional fight against the totalitarian menace, but as a contest (rather too well-matched) between superpowers, in which the danger of annihilation could be used to petrify and immobilize dissent.

He made the same point in more detail on 13 December 1946: (i) The Russians, whatever they may say, will not agree to genuine inspection of their territories by foreign observers. (ii) The Americans, whatever they may say, will not let slip the technological lead in armaments. (iii) No country is now in a condition to fight an all-out major war. By making the seldom observed distinction (between the Cold War and the arms race or, if you prefer, between the Stalinization of Eastern Europe and the global ambitions of the United States) Orwell took up and separated two threads that were to become fatally entangled in many minds. He could feel the onset of the permanent war economy, and he already knew the use to which permanent war propaganda could be put. This, of course, is why the hideous world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is made possible by a constant, shifting hostility between three regional superpowers. (It is also made possible — in a detail that is seldom emphasized — by taking place in a country which has already suffered a limited nuclear ‘exchange’, to borrow a cretinous modern euphemism which Orwell would have despised.) When Nixon and Kissinger went to China, which they had more than once threatened with nuclear attack, and proclaimed that Washington and Beijing were henceforth allies against the Soviet empire, I had already read the news by virtue of studying the abrupt shifts of allegiance between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.

In England life is subdued and cautious. Everything is governed by family ties, social status and the difficulty of earning a living, and these things are so important that no novelist can forget them. In America they either do not operate or it is the convention for novelists to leave them out. Hence the hero of an American novel is presented not as a cog in the social machine, but as an individual working out his own salvation with no inhibitions and no sense of responsibility.

Together with his friend Richard Rees, Orwell had for some time enjoyed playing what Rees himself called a ‘parlour game’. This game consisted of guessing which public figures would, or would not, sell out in the event of an invasion or a dictatorship. Orwell had been playing this game, in a serious as well as a frivolous way, for years.

It was indeed difficult for him to oppose Stalinism and Western imperialism at the same time, while attempting to hold on to his independence. But the stupidity of the state only helped to make certain that, at any rate while he lived, he was always its victim and never its servant. The British Foreign Office, which had been erring on Stalin’s side for almost a decade, suddenly needed anti-Stalinist energy in the mid 1940s. It had nowhere to turn, in its search for credible and honest writers, but to the Tribune Left. This is not, taking the medium or the long view of history, the most disgraceful moment in the record of British socialism. It is also part of the reason why there was no McCarthyite panic or purge in Britain.

When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe he is reported to have said he was impressed to meet the woman whose little book started such a great war.

what he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.