Why Orwell Matters

Based on Wikipedia: Why Orwell Matters

The Writer Who Refused to Look Away

Christopher Hitchens posed a question that seems almost absurd on its face: why should we care about a tuberculosis-ridden English writer who died in 1950, barely fifty years old, having never achieved commercial success or critical acclaim in his lifetime?

The answer, Hitchens argued in his book-length essay "Why Orwell Matters" (published in the United Kingdom as "Orwell's Victory"), is that George Orwell represents something we desperately need but rarely find—a mind willing to follow truth wherever it leads, regardless of which side gets embarrassed.

This is harder than it sounds. Much harder.

The Making of an Anti-Imperialist

Eric Arthur Blair—Orwell's real name—grew up in exactly the kind of environment you'd expect to produce a comfortable defender of the British Empire. His family belonged to the upper classes, the sort of people who viewed poverty with a mixture of fear and disgust. His father worked in the Indian opium trade, that peculiar Victorian enterprise where Britain forced China to accept addictive drugs at gunpoint.

Young Eric volunteered to become a police officer in Burma, part of the vast apparatus that kept the Empire running. He was good at it, apparently. Good enough that it terrified him.

His first novel, "Burmese Days," features a policeman clearly based on himself. In the story, this officer keeps a local woman as a live-in mistress—purchased, essentially, from her family. Hitchens speculates that Orwell resigned from the Imperial Police because he could see what he was becoming. He was staring into a mirror that showed him a future racist and sadist, and he chose to smash it.

What makes this remarkable is the self-awareness required. Most people in Orwell's position would have found ways to justify their work, to see themselves as bringing civilization to the backward peoples. Orwell looked at the machinery of colonial power and recognized it for what it was: a system designed to dominate and humiliate, staffed by people who had learned to enjoy inflicting punishment.

Going Native at Home

After leaving Burma, Orwell did something strange. He went "native"—not in some distant colony, but in England itself.

He wanted to know what poverty actually felt like, not as an abstraction discussed in drawing rooms, but as a daily reality of cold and hunger and exhaustion. He tramped through the slums of London and Paris. He picked hops alongside migrant workers. He lived in flophouses where men slept standing up, propped against ropes, because beds cost too much.

This wasn't tourism or research for a book, though books did come of it. Orwell was conducting an experiment on himself. He wanted to test his own principles against harsh facts. Could he maintain his beliefs when they became personally uncomfortable?

By the time the political storms of the 1930s arrived—fascism rising across Europe, the Spanish Civil War, the looming catastrophe of another world war—Orwell was ready. His years among the dispossessed had transformed him into something rare: a committed socialist who had actually experienced the conditions he wanted to change.

Spain and the Education of a Lifetime

In 1936, Orwell traveled to Spain to fight against Francisco Franco's fascist uprising. He joined the POUM militia—a small Marxist group with the unwieldy name Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers' Party of Marxist Unification.

This decision nearly killed him, and not in the way you might expect.

Orwell was shot through the throat by a fascist sniper. The bullet passed straight through his neck, somehow missing his carotid artery and spine. He survived, barely able to speak above a whisper for weeks.

But the real danger came from his own side.

The Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin, had decided that the POUM and similar groups posed a threat to communist control of the Spanish left. Stalin's agents began hunting down POUM members, branding them as fascist traitors—a charge so absurd it would be laughable if the consequences weren't so deadly. Orwell's friends were arrested, tortured, and some simply vanished.

His brigade commander, Georges Kopp, was thrown into a prison where guards tormented him with rats. If that detail sounds familiar, you've read "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

Orwell's throat wound may have saved his life. Too weak to remain in Spain, he escaped just ahead of the Stalinist purges. Had he stayed healthy, he would almost certainly have been arrested for the crime of "Trotskyism"—a catch-all accusation that meant, in practice, anyone who questioned Moscow's authority.

The Lonely Position of Being Right

Here's where Orwell's story becomes genuinely uncomfortable, especially for those who consider themselves progressive.

Orwell returned from Spain to discover that most of his fellow leftists refused to believe what he'd witnessed. The Soviet Union was supposed to be the great hope for socialism, the workers' paradise that proved a better world was possible. To criticize it was to give ammunition to the enemy, to betray the cause.

Orwell criticized it anyway.

He argued, based on direct experience, that the Soviet Union wasn't socialist at all but rather a "vicious form of state-capitalism." The means of production weren't controlled by workers but by a new ruling class of party bureaucrats who enjoyed all the privileges of the old aristocracy while demanding even greater submission from the masses.

Many on the left never forgave him. How could they? Orwell was saying that their most cherished belief—that at least one country had achieved the socialist dream—was a lie. Worse, he was saying that the dream itself had been corrupted into a nightmare of secret police, show trials, and mass graves.

Orwell put it with characteristic directness: "The sin of most leftists is that they wanted to be anti-totalitarian without being anti-communist."

This is the hardest kind of honesty—the willingness to criticize your own side, to point out when the people who share your values have betrayed them. It cost Orwell friendships, publishing opportunities, and his reputation among people he'd considered comrades.

The Strange Case of Conservative Instincts

Orwell's politics resisted easy categorization, which made him suspicious to ideologues on all sides.

He valued liberty and equality above almost everything else. He wrote passionately about "a society of free and equal human beings." Yet he also harbored what could only be called conservative instincts—traditional views on morality and sexuality, a deep attachment to English customs and countryside, a visceral dislike of bureaucracy.

Some of these instincts were less admirable. Orwell occasionally expressed hostility toward homosexuals and wrote comments that carried the casual antisemitism of his class and era. He wasn't proud of these attitudes. Hitchens argues that Orwell spent much of his life trying to reason himself out of them, though his efforts weren't always successful, particularly when illness or depression weakened his defenses.

The key insight is this: Orwell was conservative about many things, but not about politics.

He understood that liberty and equality exist in tension. A society that maximizes freedom may allow the strong to exploit the weak; a society that enforces equality may crush individual expression. Most political thinkers try to resolve this tension by choosing one value over the other.

Orwell refused. In "Nineteen Eighty-Four," he dramatized what happens when people accept a "utilitarian trade-off between freedom and security." The result is a world where neither exists—where the Party's slogan "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" captures the total corruption of meaning itself.

The American Blind Spot

For all his insight, Orwell had one significant gap in his worldview: he never really understood America.

He never visited the United States and showed little interest in doing so. He was suspicious of American consumerism, resentful of its imperial ambitions, and vaguely contemptuous of its size and supposed vulgarity. In this, he shared the prejudices of many British intellectuals who saw America as a cultural wasteland—lots of money, very little taste.

This was a mistake, and Orwell began to recognize it near the end of his life.

He developed an appreciation for American literature, particularly the writer Jack London, whose tales of harsh survival and fierce individualism resonated with something in Orwell's own character. He understood the importance of Thomas Paine, that radical English pamphleteer who became one of America's founding voices. He recognized that America's "incomplete struggle for liberty"—imperfect as it was—represented something valuable.

His American admirers urged him to visit. The climates of the Southwest might have helped his failing lungs. The streptomycin that could have treated his tuberculosis was manufactured and readily available only in America. But by then, Orwell was too ill to travel.

Hitchens calls America "Orwell's missed opportunity." Had Orwell lived another decade, Hitchens speculates, he would have eventually crossed the Atlantic and found much to admire alongside much to criticize—which was, after all, his natural mode.

The Question of Women

Orwell's treatment of female characters drew criticism even in his own time and has attracted more since.

His novels were written for what he assumed was a predominantly male audience, and his female characters often seem like afterthoughts—present but not fully realized, "practically devoid of the least trace of intellectual or reflective capacity," as one critic put it.

Yet Orwell's actual relationships with women tell a more complicated story.

He was married twice, and his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, was his intellectual partner in ways that didn't always make it onto the page. She helped sharpen the plot of "Animal Farm," listening as Orwell read aloud his newest chapters and offering the kind of constructive criticism that only a sharp mind can provide.

Hitchens suggests that Orwell "liked and desired the feminine but was somewhat put on his guard by the female." He was uncomfortable with women who didn't fit conventional gender roles—uncomfortable, too, with men who seemed feminine. This was a limitation, a failure of imagination in someone who was otherwise remarkably good at imagining his way into other people's experiences.

Broadcasting Truth to Empire

During World War Two, Orwell took a job that seemed to contradict everything he believed. He went to work for the British Broadcasting Corporation, creating radio programs aimed at India—the crown jewel of the Empire he'd spent years condemning.

He had one condition: he would express his anti-imperialist opinions without diluting them.

Remarkably, the BBC agreed. So there was Orwell, using the imperial broadcasting apparatus to argue for Indian independence, criticizing the British government's hypocrisy about self-determination, and generally causing exactly the kind of trouble you'd expect from him.

The experience also fed his fiction. Working at the BBC, Orwell witnessed how political propaganda could shift dramatically from day to day, how yesterday's truth became today's heresy with no acknowledgment that anything had changed. The Ministry of Truth in "Nineteen Eighty-Four"—that grim bureaucracy devoted to falsifying history—owed something to his time in those broadcasting offices.

The Paradox of "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

When "Nineteen Eighty-Four" appeared in 1949, it was immediately misunderstood.

Conservative critics claimed it as an attack on the Labour Party government then running Britain. American cold warriors used it as anti-communist propaganda. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to recruit Orwell's dystopian vision for their own purposes.

Orwell pushed back. He supported the Labour Party. He was a socialist. His novel wasn't an attack on socialism but an exploration of how any centralized system—communist, fascist, or otherwise—could become totalitarian.

He set the story in Britain deliberately. He wanted to make clear that "English-speaking races are not innately better" and that totalitarianism "can triumph everywhere, if not fought against." This wasn't about Russians or Germans being somehow predisposed to tyranny. It was about the machinery of power itself and how easily it corrupts those who operate it.

The novel's concepts have entered our language in ways few other books can claim. "Big Brother" watching over everyone. "Doublethink," the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. "Newspeak," the deliberate impoverishment of language to make certain thoughts literally unthinkable. "Memory hole," where inconvenient facts disappear. The "Two Minutes Hate," channeling rage against designated enemies.

We reach for these terms constantly because they describe phenomena we recognize all around us.

The Controversial List

One episode from Orwell's final years continues to generate controversy.

In 1949, desperately ill with tuberculosis, Orwell provided the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department with a list of people he considered unsuitable for anti-communist propaganda work—writers and journalists he suspected of communist sympathies or fellow-traveling.

Critics have called this a betrayal, a collaboration with the security state. Defenders point out that Orwell wasn't informing on anyone for their political beliefs but simply advising a government department about who might be unreliable for specific work. The people on his list faced no legal consequences; they simply weren't hired for certain positions.

The episode reveals the impossible position of anyone trying to be anti-totalitarian without easy answers. Orwell despised the British Empire but fought for Britain against fascism. He was a socialist who recognized that the Soviet Union was socialism's greatest enemy. He wanted to fight communist influence without becoming a tool of right-wing reaction.

Sometimes there are no clean choices. Orwell knew this better than most.

Why He Still Matters

Orwell died in January 1950, having just completed "Nineteen Eighty-Four." He thought it was a failure, like most of his other books. He had no idea that his last two novels—"Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four"—would become among the most widely read books of the twentieth century, assigned in schools around the world, translated into dozens of languages.

Hitchens argues that Orwell matters because of how he thought and wrote, not just what he concluded.

His style was clear and direct at a time when most political writing hid behind jargon and abstraction. His thinking was honest in ways that made everyone uncomfortable—the right, the left, even his friends. He faced unpleasant facts about himself and the causes he cared about, and he didn't look away.

"Power is only what you allow it to be," Hitchens writes. "You can resolve not to be a citizen like that, not to do the work of power for it."

This is Orwell's real legacy. Not a set of political positions to adopt but a method of moral attention. Reading Orwell, Hitchens suggests, "is not an exercise in projecting blame on others but is an exercise in accepting responsibility for yourself."

That's why he'll always be honored. It's also why he'll always be hated.

Orwell wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

The Critical Reception

When "Why Orwell Matters" appeared in 2002, it provoked the kind of mixed response that Orwell himself might have appreciated.

Publishers Weekly praised Hitchens for "brilliantly marshaling his deep knowledge of Orwell's work," suggesting that fans would enjoy his defense while newcomers might be inspired to read the source material.

But George Packer, writing in The Independent, was more skeptical. He found the book "oddly unfocused and hard to get through," arguing that Hitchens never sustained any line of thought long enough to reach truly provocative insights. "One is never allowed to forget the gesticulating presence of the critic," Packer complained.

Alex Lee, reviewing for the Yale Review of Books, concluded that Hitchens had "proved his basic point: The modern world needs more of the clear thinking, good writing and simple ideals that Orwell stood for." But Lee recommended readers go back to Orwell's own work. "Only by directly dealing with Orwell's work can one comprehend his profound wisdom and his continued relevance in troubled and uncertain times."

Professor John Rossi called it "one of the best books on Orwell to appear in recent years," praising its ability to function as both an introduction and a summary insight.

Perhaps the most telling reaction is that people are still arguing about it, still debating what Orwell meant and whether Hitchens got him right. Both writers would probably be satisfied with that outcome. The argument continues, which means the thinking continues, which means the reader must engage rather than simply accept.

And that, in the end, is exactly the point.