Why Orwell Matters

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Hitchens calmly and effectively demolishes the right, the left, and all others who have taken Orwell's name in vain. He delves into the absurd scenarios in 1984 and Animal Farm and highlights the same exact scenarios from real-life scenarios. Imperialism, Fascism, and Communism, the great calamities of the 19th century, are shown through the lens of Orwell, and also how he always lands on the right side of history.

🎨 Impressions

It is a book about Orwell and the literature of Orwell and his musings and writings. It is a good book where Hitchens highlights not only the good parts but also the bad, but Orwell´s character shines through, and his contemporaries' opinions and statements falter.

The dystopian nature of the scenarios Orwell writes about is analyzed and shown as profoundly insightful of states and human nature and how terribly true some predictions were.

Orwell is as relevant today as he ever was, with more than every absurd and dystopian element of his fiction being not only matched but overcome by the real world.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• 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 was Pritchett, after all, who had cheaply denounced Orwell’s dangerously truthful despatches from Barcelona by writing in 1938 that ‘there are many strong arguments for keeping creative writers out of politics and Mr George Orwell is one of them’.

• 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.

• The three great subjects of the twentieth century were imperialism, fascism and Stalinism.

• An old radical adage states that the will to command is not as corrupting as the will to obey

• There seems no doubt that his insight into the colonial mentality informed Orwell’s dislike of the class system at home and also of fascism, which he regarded as an extreme form of class rule (albeit expressed paradoxically through a socialistic ideology).

• Unlike some ‘pinks’, indeed, Orwell never romanticized the victims of colonialism, and was frequently annoyed by the self-centredness and sectarianism of certain Indian militants.

• Orwell’s working title for Nineteen Eighty-Four was ‘The Last Man in Europe’; and there are traces of a kind of solipsistic nobility elsewhere in his work, the attitude of the flinty and solitary loner.

• Totalitarian” describes a certain kind of repressive social control, but, also, any real society, any adequate community, is necessarily a totality. To belong to a community is to be a part of a whole, and, necessarily, to accept, while helping to define, its disciplines.’

• But the transcendent or crystallizing moment undoubtedly occurred in Spain, or at any rate in Catalonia. This was where Orwell suffered the premonitory pangs of a man living under a police regime: a police regime ruling in the name of socialism and the people. For a Westerner, at least, this epiphany was a relatively novel thing; it brushed the sleeves of many thoughtful and humane people, who barely allowed it to interrupt their preoccupation with the ‘main enemy’, fascism. But on Orwell it made a permanent impression.

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

• He monitored the rise and fall of the ethnic joke, noticing that its targets fluctuated with political developments and registering the subtle distinction between jests at the expense of Jews and those which were at the expense of Scotsmen.

• The claim is partly justified by an incisive review he wrote in June 1938, discussing Eugene Lyons’s journalistic memoir Assignment in Utopia: To get the full sense of our ignorance as to what is really happening in the U.S.S.R., it is worth trying to translate the most sensational Russian event of the past two years, the Trotskyist trials, into English terms. Make the necessary adjustments, let Left be Right and Right be Left, and you get something like this: 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 Chamberlain and the rest of his gang are no more than a set of Bolsheviks in disguise.

• ‘Suppression is a much nicer term than murder or torture or rigged trial.

• ‘Power politics’ is a neutral way of saying realpolitik; it gives an impression of stern but regrettable necessity.

• On every public building, a huge picture of ‘The Great Leader’ Kim II Sung, the dead man who still holds the office of President in what one might therefore term a necrocracy or mausolocracy.

• It’s the only time in my writing life when I have become tired of the term ‘Orwellian’. In some respects, the North Korean nightmare falls short of his dystopia: the regime is too poor and too inefficient to provide telescreens or even wireless sets to most of its subjects.

• 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.

• 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.

• The invading German army, which later uncovered the crime, was instead blamed for committing it (and indeed charged with the responsibility by Soviet lawyers at Nuremberg).

• Conspiracy of silence about the fate of some 10,000 Polish officers, murdered in the forests near Katyn by shots in the back of the neck individually administered by agents of the Soviet secret police. It was not thought politic to mention this atrocity even when well-attested reports came to light. The invading German army, which later uncovered the crime, was instead blamed for committing it (and indeed charged with the responsibility by Soviet lawyers at Nuremberg).

• It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing ... And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm — in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.

• For several occasions I translated different parts of ‘Animal Farm’ ex abrupto. Soviet refugees were my listeners. The effect was striking. They approved of almost all of your interpretations. They were profoundly affected by such scenes as that of animals singing ‘Beasts of England’ on the hill. Here I saw, that in spite of their attention being primarily drawn on detecting ‘concordances’ between the reality they lived in and the tale, they very vividly reacted to the ‘absolute’ values of the book, to the tale ‘types’, to the underlying convictions of the author and so on. Besides, the mood of the book seems to correspond with their own actual state of mind. In a subsequent letter, Szewczenko gave Orwell some information about his potential audience, supposing that he should agree to a Ukrainian edition of the book.

• However, power-worship was at least as strong on the Right as on the Left in the post-war period, and partook of the same kinds of cynical pseudo-realism.

• And how often one was to notice, during the Cold War, a sort of Western penis-envy for the ruthlessness of Soviet methods, coupled with incantations about the relative ‘decadence’, even tendency to suicide, displayed by the effete democracies.

• Orwell described a certain crude view of modern warfare as being ‘if someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother’,

• It was certainly he who proposed the Lousiana Purchase to Thomas Jefferson, thus helping to double the size of the country (while vainly hoping to exclude slavery from the new dominion).

• Like many critics of his day, Orwell took fairly easy pot-shots at the violence and crassness of American comics and pulp fiction.

• Up till about 1930 nearly all ‘cultivated’ people loathed the U.S.A., which was regarded as the vulgariser of England and Europe.

• You remember — doublethink is the trick of holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time — and accepting both.

• And he had a strong conviction that the metric system — which was to become such a toxic issue in England in the early years of this millennium — was somehow ill-suited to humans, let alone Englishmen

• Thus pigs — despised by Orwell — are at least to be given high marks for intelligence, while dogs — much admired by Orwell — are exploited, and mutate into enforcers, because of their famous quality of loyalty.

• 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 should be borne in mind here that until recently the Soviet Union had been in a military alliance with Hitler — an alliance loudly defended by Britain’s Communists — and that Moscow Radio had denounced the British naval blockade of Nazi Germany as a barbaric war on civilians.

• No less to the point, he had discovered in Spain that the Communist strategy relied very heavily upon the horror and terror of anonymous denunciation, secret informing, and police espionage. At that date, the official hero of all young Communists was Pavlik Morozov, a 14-year old ‘Pioneer’ who had turned in his family to the Soviet police for the offence of hoarding grain.

• This was Peter Smolka, alias Smollett, a former Beaverbook newspaper executive and holder of the OBE, who was the very official in the Ministry of Information who had put pressure on Jonathan Cape to drop Animal Farm. It has since been conclusively established that Smolka was indeed an agent of Soviet security; this represents a match of 100 percent between Orwell’s allegation of direct foreign recruitment and the known facts.

• A phrase much used by Communist intellectuals of the period was ‘the great Soviet experiment’. That latter word should have been enough in itself to put people on their guard. To turn a country into a laboratory is to give ample warning of inhumanity.

• ‘here is a study in pessimism unrelieved, except by the thought that, if a man can conceive “1984”, he can also will to avoid it’.

• Stalin’s propagandists were fond of saying that they completed the first Five Year Plan in four years; this was sometimes rendered for the simple-minded as 2+2=5.

• Orwell: ‘Autobiography is not to be trusted unless it reveals something disgraceful’; ‘Freedom is slavery’.

• Adorno lost faith even in that. ‘No poetry after Auschwitz’, as he famously said in a statement that is somehow as profound as it is absurd.

• Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.

• History to the defeated May say Alas! But cannot alter or pardon.

• At the last moment, he changed the proofs of Animal Farm so that the story would say: ‘All the animals, except Napoleon, flung themselves flat on their bellies.’ The original had read ‘All the animals, including Napoleon’, but Orwell had been assured by Russian exiles that Stalin had remained in Moscow during the German assault, and he wished to be fair to him. This is the same Orwell who would not shoot at a Spanish fascist soldier while the man was running from the latrine and trying to hold up his trousers; the same Orwell who sacrificed the enormous extra bounty of a ‘Book of the Month Club’ selection, at a time of extreme financial anxiety, rather than make some minor suggested alterations to his novel.

• 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...