Why Orwell Matters

by Christopher Hitchens

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.