Why Orwell Matters

by Christopher Hitchens

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.

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States . . .

Nearly all aristocracies having real power have depended on a difference of race, Norman rules over Saxon, German over Slav, Englishman over Irishman, white man over black man, and so on and so forth. There are traces of the Norman predominance in our own language to this day. And it is much easier for the aristocrat to be ruthless if he imagines that the serf is different from himself in blood and bone. Hence the tendency to exaggerate race-differences, the current rubbish about shapes of skulls, colour of eyes, blood-counts etc., etc. In Burma I have listened to racial theories which were less brutal than Hitler’s theories about the Jews, but certainly not less idiotic. Not

A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.

death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party. Of course, Orwell had in a way undergone the experience, and in a relatively direct fashion.

Coincidence, said Louis Pasteur, has a tendency to occur only to the mind that is prepared to notice it.

striking fact about Orwell, a tribute to his ‘power of facing’, is that he never underwent a Stalinoid phase, never had to be cured or purged by sudden ‘disillusionment’. It is also true that he was somewhat impatient with those who pleaded their original illusions as excuses for later naiveté. This — with its potential hint of superiority — is certainly part of the reason for the intense dislike he aroused then and arouses still.

It only remains to be said that in 1953 — three years after Orwell’s death — the workers of East Berlin protested against their new bosses. In 1956 the masses in Budapest followed suit, and from 1976 until the implosion of the ‘people’s democracies’, the shipyard workers of Poland were the celebrated shock troops who mocked the very idea of a ‘workers’ party’.

I was about to say ‘long after Williams has been forgotten’ but I forbid myself the cliché and prefer to say — whether Williams is read and remembered or not.

There isn’t much room for doubt about the real source of anti-Orwell resentment. In the view of many on the official Left, he committed the ultimate sin of ‘giving ammunition to the enemy’. Not only did he do this in the 30s, when the cause of anti-fascism supposedly necessitated a closing of ranks, but he repeated the offence in the opening years of the Cold War and thus — ‘objectively’, as people used to say — became an ally of the forces of conservatism.

Orwell never went through a phase of Russophilia or Stalin-worship or fellow-travelling. He wrote in mid 1940 that he had learned to trust his gut on certain questions: Since 1934 I have known war between England and Germany was coming, and since 1936 I have known it with complete certainty. I could feel it in my belly, and the chatter of the pacifists on the one hand, and the Popular Front people who pretended to fear that Britain was preparing for war against Russia on the other, never deceived me. Similarly such horrors as the Russian purges never surprised me, because I had always felt that — not exactly that, but something like that — was implicit in Bolshevik rule.

Mr. Winston Churchill, now in exile in Portugal, is plotting to overthrow the British Empire and establish Communism in England. By the use of unlimited Russian money he has succeeded in building up a huge Churchillite organisation which includes members of Parliament, factory managers, Roman Catholic bishops and practically the whole of the Primrose League. Almost every day some dastardly act of sabotage is laid bare — sometimes a plot to blow up the House of Lords, sometimes an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the Royal racing-stables. Eighty per cent of the Beefeaters at the Tower are discovered to be agents of the Comintern. A high official at the Post Office admits brazenly to having embezzled postal orders to the tune of £5,000,000, and also to having committed lèse majesté by drawing moustaches on postage stamps. Lord Nuffield, after a 7-hour interrogation by Mr. Norman Birkett, confesses that ever since 1920 he has been fomenting strikes in his own factories. Casual half-inch paras in every issue of the newspapers announce that fifty more Churchillite sheep-stealers have been shot in Westmoreland or that the proprietress of a village shop in the Cotswolds has been transported to Australia for sucking the bullseyes and putting them back in the bottle. And meanwhile the Churchillites (or Churchillite-Harmsworthites as they are called after Lord Rothermere’s execution) never cease from proclaiming that it is they who are the real defenders of Capitalism and that ...

On practical or immediate questions the same essential clarity is to be found. Orwell took it for granted that there had been a hideous famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s, something that was denied by many fellow-travelling journalists who claimed to have visited the scene. 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 nat...

This is not the place to tell the entire tale. But 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. As it happens, he was an eyewitness of the attempted Communist coup in Barcelona in early May 1937, and newly available documents from the Soviet Military Archive in Moscow make it plain that a full-scale putsch was in fact intended. Had it succeeded, then plans for another ‘show trial’, along the lines of the Moscow frame-ups, were in train. Even as it was, the great Catalan leader Andrés Nin, founder of the POUM, was kidnapped, savagely tortured and — on refusing to crack — murdered. It was then said by Communist spokesmen that he had fled to join the Nazis.

A memorandum from the archives of the KGB (then known as the NKVD), dated 13 July 1937, describes him and Eileen O’Shaughnessy as ‘pronounced Trotskyites’ operating with clandestine credentials. It also asserts, with the usual tinge of surreal fantasy, that the couple maintained contact with opposition circles in Moscow. This accusation would have been no joke in the hands of an interrogator, even though Orwell makes the least of it in Homage to Catalonia. ‘I was not guilty of any definite act,’ he wrote, ‘but I was guilty of “Trotskyism”.

It will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes and what I have learned from other eye-witnesses whom I believe to be reliable . . . This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history . . . The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five.

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.

It is true on the face of it that Orwell was one of the founding fathers of anti-Communism; that he had a strong patriotic sense and a very potent instinct for what we might call elementary right and wrong; that he despised government and bureaucracy and was a stout individualist; that he distrusted intellectuals and academics and reposed a faith in popular wisdom; that he upheld a somewhat traditional orthodoxy in sexual and moral matters, looked down on homosexuals and abhorred abortion; and that he seems to have been an advocate for private ownership of guns. He also preferred the country to the town, and poems that rhymed.

Shortly, Professor Hayek’s thesis is that Socialism inevitably leads to despotism, and that in Germany the Nazis were able to succeed because the Socialists had already done most of their work for them: especially the intellectual work of weakening the desire for liberty. By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it. Britain, he says, is now going the same road as Germany, with the Left-Wing intelligentsia in the van and the Tory Party a good second. The only salvation lies in returning to an unplanned economy, free competition, and emphasis on liberty rather than on security. In the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.

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.

(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

The fate of the Ukrainian edition was a sad one on the whole. It reached a certain number of readers, but most of the copies were seized and impounded by the American military authorities in Germany, who turned them over to the Red Army for destruction. It was not only the British Ministry of Information which regarded Stalin’s amour-propre as the chief object of propitiation in those days.

In the end, the European peoples may have to accept American domination as a way of avoiding domination by Russia, but they ought to realize, while there is yet time, that there are other possibilities.

Even if you steer clear of Piccadilly with its seething swarms of drunks and whores, it is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes . . . Before the war there was no popular anti-American feeling in this country. It all dates from the arrival of the American troops, and it is made vastly worse by the tacit agreement never to discuss it in print.

He abhorred cruelty to dumb creatures but found vegetarianism more than mildly ridiculous. He was very fond of animals but generally represented fanatical pet-owners as somewhat contemptible. He had a dog named Marx but kept him engaged in a working farm. He adored fishing but it’s impossible to imagine him bothering to keep a fish in a bowl. He loved the landscape but didn’t want it depopulated — as it had been in English history — to make room for sheep or pheasants or deer.

Jean-Paul Sartre — who was regarded with great suspicion by Orwell — once made a telling point about fictional and science-fictional monsters. What we fear, he said, is a creature of great cunning and energy, quite devoid of any moral or mammalian scruple. This, as he went on to say, is an exact description of our very own species in time of war or scarcity. Thus it is perfect, in its way, that the dehumanized torturers of Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrate their purely human ingenuity by devising the punishment of the rats.

‘It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was “rod” . . . Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?’

This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can’t cut it right out, or at least be like the animals — minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hens’ backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come too near his food. He is not called upon to support his offspring, either. Lucky pheasant! How different from the lord of creation, always on the hop between his memory and his conscience!

Orwell could be tongue-in-cheek about this, too, as when he wrote to his friend Brenda Salkeld in 1934: I had lunch yesterday with Mr Ede. He is a bit of a feminist and thinks that if a woman was brought up exactly like a man she would be able to throw a stone, construct a syllogism, keep a secret etc. He tells me that my antifeminist views are probably due to Sadism! I have never read the Marquis de Sade’s novels — they are unfortunately very hard to get hold of.

I once asked Irving Kristol, who had helped Stephen Spender edit Encounter in the 1960s, how he had found the cultural translation from New York to the London of those days. He responded rather coldly that he and his wife had been astounded by how many homosexuals there seemed to be. I remember being shocked that he had been shocked. In the same way, it seems at least perverse of Orwell to have been surprised that, in the world of arts and letters, there should have been so many gentlemen who preferred gentlemen.

we know that Orwell married one very tough-minded and intelligent woman, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, whose life was lost to a botched hospital operation.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!

But Smith, though he does not mention Newspeak in his litany, is clear that one does not need a new language with which to oppose doublethink and lies. What one needs is a pure speech that means what it says, and that can be subjected to refutation in its own terms. This will very often be an old speech, organically connected to the ancient truths preserved and transmitted by literature.