Why Orwell Matters

by Christopher Hitchens

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.