jim writes "Orwell's Victory by Christopher Hitchens (Penguin, £9.99)
Orwell in Spain edited by Peter Davison (Penguin, £9.99)

In recent years, British writer George Orwell has
joined his friends, the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone,
and American journalist Burnett Bolloten as a
politically dodgy commentator. Bolloten, who wrote
a history of the Spanish civil war critical of the
Stalinists, was supposed to have had CIA
connections, while Silone was damned because he
wrote for the journal Encounter at a time when it
was receiving secret CIA sponsorship. All three have
also been seen as friends of the libertarian left.
Christopher Hitchens, not to be confused with his
right-wing brother Peter, argues in Orwell's Victory
that the controversial list of minor 1940s celebrities
with communist sympathies which Orwell gave Celia
Kirwan, a former girlfriend and an officer of the
(MI5-sponsored) Information Research Department,
in no way "denied his credit for keeping [the]
libertarian and honest tradition alive".
Hitchens supports this by drawing attention to
Orwell's work with the Freedom Defence Committee
and his opposition to attempts to purge political
extremists from the Civil Service. The Freedom
Defence Committee was founded in 1945 to deal
with infringements of civil liberties. Orwell was its
Vice Chairman. In March 1948 Orwell wrote a letter
to George Woodcock, editor of literary journal Now
and secretary of the committee, in which he asked,
"is the Freedom Defence Committee taking up any
position about this ban on communists and fascists?"
Naturally he reserved the right to attack
crypto-Bolsheviks and fellow travellers too. He'd
suffered in Spain at the hands of the Stalinists and
ended up on the run from their secret police,
sleeping on building sites in Barcelona. But he was
fair in so far as he gave people like Konni Zilliacus, a
Bolshevik-inclined Labour MP, the credit they
deserved, arguing that Zilliacus was "sincere if not
honest".

Hitchens shows up many of Orwell's left-wing critics
as feather-bedded intellectuals. Some, like E.P.
Thompson, Raymond Williams and Claude Simon,
were all once supporters of Stalin. And the hangover
of power worship continues for many intellectuals in
the west up to the present day. Most of Hitchens's
scorn is reserved for Raymond Williams who, in his
1958 book Culture and Society, declared that Orwell
was "the spokesman ... of another kind of despair:
the despair born of social and political disillusion".
Political disillusion! Hitchens writes that "the
transcendent or crystallising moment (for Orwell's
last book, Nineteen-Eighty-Four) undoubtedly
occurred in Spain, or at any rate in Catalonia".
In 1971, Williams wrote "most historians have taken
the view that the revolution - mainly
anarcho-syndicalist, but with the POUM taking part -
was an irrelevant distraction from a desperate war.
Some, at the time and after, have gone so far as to
describe it as deliberate sabotage of the war effort".
Hitchens responds by arguing that the words 'most
historians' are meaningless as "no such consensus
exists".

Besides writing Orwell's Victory, Hitchens also
contributes an introduction to Orwell in Spain,
edited by Peter Davison (both books are published
by Penguin). In this introduction, he insists that
material recently released from the Soviet Military
Archive in Moscow makes it clear Russian agents
were plotting a seizure of power to take place in
Barcelona in early May 1937. What happened when
the police tried to take the telephone exchange from
the workers was, it now seems, a prelude to a coup
attempt against the syndicalist Confederacion
Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the left-wing Partido
Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (POUM) and the
"staunchly anti-Russian positions taken by Largo
Caballero and his Republican cabinet".
On 11th May 1937, a further paper released from the
archives reported to the Comintern on the mixed
results of the action. Hitchens writes, "regretting the
extent to which the POUM and other forces had been
able to resist the Stalinist onslaught, the author
(whose identity in this instance is uncertain) relays
the demand for 'energetic and merciless repression'
by means of a 'military tribunal for the Trotskyists'."
The documents in question were disclosed, Hitchens
says "as a consequence of an exclusive agreement
between the State Military Archive and Yale
University Press".

In 1940, Orwell wrote to a friend saying he'd never
had any fear of the workers being in charge because
he'd never met "a genuine working man who
accepted Marxism". But, he continued, "I admit to
having a perfect horror of a dictatorship of theorists,
as in Russia and Germany". This attitude was based,
he claimed, on "certain things I saw in the Spanish
war ...". But it was Spain, or rather Catalonia, that
inspired in Orwell the greatest hope for what
Hitchens calls "his most oft-repeated statement", of
a "society of free and equal human beings". And it
was his Catalan experience of 'spontaneous
fraternity' that sustained him throughout the rest of
his life. Not for nothing did he write, in his undated
Notes on the Spanish Militias, "had I had a complete
understanding of the situation [in Spain], I should
probably have joined the CNT militia".

Q.D. Leavis in Scrutiny (September 1940) wrote of
Orwell, "starting from an inside knowledge of the
working class, painfully acquired, he can see through
the Marxist theory, and being innately decent (he
displays and approves of bourgeois morality) he is
disgusted with the callous theorising inhumanity of
the pro-Marxists".

Orwell has critics amongst postmodernists, as well
as amongst feminists and anti-homophobes (he
dismissed the Bloomsbury Group as 'pansy poets'
and 'nancy boys' among other things). In France,
Claude Simon claimed that his account of the
Spanish experience in Homage to Catalonia was
"faked from the very first sentence". But of course
Orwell's work can be checked, and his work is full of
health warnings about his own subjectivity. As
Hitchens says, "'Objectivity', though in practice as
unattainable as infinity, is useful in the same way, as
a fixed point of theoretical reference". He thinks
Orwell stumbled on the near impossible, "the
synthesis of the empiricist dialectic", and that in his
rigorous methodology he "went native in his own
country", consorting with the unemployed and
destitute of England.

Neither the Marxists with their mechanistic
approach nor the postmodernists with their
promiscuous relativism, can stomach his keenness
for observable facts. He was, as Nicolas Walter
wrote in Anarchy (October 1961), "always striving,
striving to tell the truth about what he saw and what
he felt". But on the three great issues of the
twentieth century - imperialism, fascism and
Stalinism - it's hard to fault Orwell's observations.
These are books anarchists ought to read.

Brian Bamford

Both books are obtainable from Freedom Press
Bookshop, add £1 p&p for each within the UK, £2 for
each elsewhere"