George Orwell is
not only my favorite novelist, but he’s also a man that I deeply admire on a
personal level. He did not simply write about his anti-totalitarianism, he
lived it. So often, intellectuals are quick to warn the public that things are
a good deal more complicated than they appear. Often they are right, but, on
some important political questions, this sort of analysis has been dead wrong.
Orwell stood out because he was willing to point out when a certain matter was
actually a great deal simpler than his fellow writers were letting on
(Hitchens). Notably, Orwell saw the evil at the core of Stalin’s regime. Many
other European intellectuals spent decades praising of defending Stalinism and
spent decades more apologizing for or justifying its crimes. Orwell’s lucidity
and perception put him on the winning side of that argument. Orwell’s life was,
in many was, the triumph of a common man with an uncommon drive and sense of
justice.
The events of
George Orwell’s life shaped his political and moral views and, thereby,
influenced his most famous works of literature. Eric Arthur Blair, who later
adopted the pen name George Orwell, was born on 25 June 1903 in India. When
Eric was only one year old, his mother took him and his sister to England while
his father, who was a British civil servant, remained in India. As a result,
Eric rarely saw his father during his childhood and youth. His mother, who came
from aristocratic ancestors but lacked the resources to maintain all of the expected
aristocratic heirs, sent Eric to St. Cyprian’s boarding school at the age of 5.
Young Eric helped make this possible by earning a scholarship. Orwell later
wrote a memoir about his time at St. Cyprian’s entitled Such, Such Were the Joys. There he explains that he came to see St.
Cyprian’s as a microcosm of totalitarian state. Eric felt that he was under
constant surveillance, that the strong were allowed to dominate the weak, and
that the education he received there was entirely superficial.
After leaving the
boarding school and attending Eton College for a number of years, Eric opted to
join the Indian Police Service rather than pursue a university degree. As a
member of the service, Eric was stationed in Burma. Witnessing the evils of
imperialism and racism first-hand, Blair would later write a novel entitled Burmese Days along with several essays about
the period. At age 24, Blair returned to Britain, resigned from the Indian
Police Service, and decided to become a writer. Always a man keenly aware of
social injustice, Blair began a study of the “underclass” in Paris and London. To
gain a depth of experience and understanding about the poor, Blair often lived
and dressed the part of a tramp himself. On the topic he wrote a number of
eye-opening essays, including “How the Poor Die,” along with the first book to
bear the pen name George Orwell—Down and
Out in Paris and London (1933) (Hitchens, 18). After years of speaking for
the disenfranchised, Orwell began his famous fight against fascism—on the
battlefield and in print. In December of 1936, he traveled to Spain and joined
the anti-fascist forces there. In Spain, Orwell aligned himself with the
left-leaning anti-fascist forces. Notably, however, he was one of the first to
see the evil nature of Stalinism, while many of his leftist colleagues were still
praising the USSR as a modern utopia. Of course, the intellectual battles were
only part of the danger in Spain. On the battlefield, Orwell suffered a gunshot
wound to the neck. Thankfully, he recovered from the injury and returned to
England, then a nation already anxious that war would again consume Europe. When
Britain did indeed declare war in 1939, Orwell was deemed unfit for military
service because of his tuberculin lungs. Even so, Orwell assisted in the war
effort in any way he could.
Throughout much of
the war, Orwell labored on his scathing and controversial satire of Stalinism, Animal Farm. Orwell struggled to find a
publisher willing to print such a comprehensive rebuke of the “Soviet allies,” and
some potential publishers petitioned Orwell to make political changes to the
text, which he refused. Eventually, Orwell found a publisher and the novel was
published in 1944. Five years later, in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. The
book was released to popular and critical acclaim, but Orwell did not live to
enjoy much of it. The next year, Orwell died in a London hospital due to
complications from tuberculosis at the age of forty-six. His impact, however,
only increased after his death. In fact, his books even had an impact behind
the Iron Curtain. For example, Nineteen
Eighty-Four was secretly circulated among dissenters within the inner
circle of the Communist Party in Ukraine. Those who read it were shocked that a
man from England who had never traveled to the USSR could understand so
thoroughly the psychology of totalitarianism (Hitchens). In his 46 years,
Orwell diagnosed and helped defeat the three primary political crises of the 20th
century: imperialism, Stalinism, and totalitarianism (Hitchens). His warnings,
however, will never lose their resonance or importance so long as there is one
totalitarian regime upon the earth or one democracy at risk of devolving into
totalitarianism—that is to say, forever. As Christopher Hitchens puts it, “Not
bad for one short lifetime.”
George Orwell
provides an inspiring example of a man who stood up against oppression, even
when it made him unpopular with his peers. Orwell was not an uncommon genius.
He was simply a man with a deep sensitivity to injustice and a dogged
determination to maintain his intellectual freedom. He has shown that it does
not take an Einsteinian mind or a Herculean body to stand against the horrors
of totalitarianism and oppression. Orwell would have been the first to admit
that he possessed neither. Rather, it takes people of decent intelligence and
moral fiber who refuse to deny that 2 + 2 = 4. Orwell has left the rest of us
with no excuses.
Cited: Hitchens, Christopher. 2002. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books.
Note: This essay contains elements adapted from an essay I submitted for PL SC 320 (Amer. Politics Through Literature) with Professor Byron Daynes at BYU.
Cited: Hitchens, Christopher. 2002. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books.
Note: This essay contains elements adapted from an essay I submitted for PL SC 320 (Amer. Politics Through Literature) with Professor Byron Daynes at BYU.
