jim submits:

"Yes, Orwell Matters — But Does Christopher Hitchens?"

Bill Weinberg Reviews Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters

Basic Books, New York, 2002, 211 pp., $24

(Published in the UK as Orwell’s Victory, Penguin, London, 2002)

Here is a little exercise in historical ironies.

Few seem to remember it now, but in the 1980s, forgotten little Nicaragua
was one of the last front-lines of the Cold War. When I was there in
those years, one of many idealistic gringos who came to witness the
besieged revolution, the right-wing opposition was distributing a Spanish
translation of a classic parable of revolution betrayed. This was a
probable element of the CIA "psychological operations" campaign aimed at
subverting the revolutionary Sandinista regime, which also included
distribution of the notorious "dirty tricks" manual advocating sabotage
and assassination. The regime responded by denouncing the parable as a
counter-revolutionary polemic written by a reactionary pro-imperialist
writer. The work, of course, was Animal Farm by George Orwell.

This same author was in Spain in the 1930s, supporting a besieged
revolution of his own day -- fighting in an independent communist militia
("Trotskyist," to use the common misnomer) then allied with anarchist
militias in resisting Gen. Francisco Franco’s fascists in Catalonia.

These anarchists and independent communists were collectivizing land and
industry in Catalonia -- much as the Sandinistas would in Nicaragua 50 years
later. Together, these forces would also resist the center-left Popular
Front government in Madrid, which paradoxically moved to crush
Catalonia’s revolution in 1937 at the behest of Josef Stalin -- who feared
that the Catalan movement was too uncontrollable. In his war memoir
Homage to Catalonia, the habitually critical Orwell relates how, arriving
in Spain purely to fight fascism, he wound up bearing arms in defense of
the Catalan revolution. "I have no particular love for the idealized
‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind," he wrote, "but
when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural
enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on."

Orwell even expressed enthusiasm for the anarchists’ vicious habit of
torching churches! In one passage he describes a brief touristic
excursion to Barcelona’s modernist cathedral -- clearly Gaudi’s Sagrada
Familia, although he doesn’t mention it by name -- and finding it
appallingly ugly. "I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing
it up," he mused. He did, however, take some comfort from the fact that
the anarchists had hung their red-and-black flag between its spires.

The irony is exquisitely nuanced. Nicaragua’s Sandinistas revived the
anti-fascist slogan of the Spanish war, ¡No pasaran! (They shall not
pass!) -- coined in the 1930s to refer to the Nazi-backed Franco forces, and
then in the 1980s to refer to the US-backed "contra" guerillas. And the
Sandinistas’ own flag was a direct descendant of that which Orwell
hailed on the spires of the Sagrada Familia. The flag of the Spanish
anarchists was a field equally divided into red (for revolution) and black
(for the negation of authority). The 1930s Nicaraguan revolutionary
Augusto Cesar Sandino, who resisted the occupying US Marines, was inspired
by the anarchists, and adopted this flag -- putting a skull and cross-bones
on
it in place of the acronym of Spain’s National Labor Confederation, CNT.

When the Sandinista National Liberation Front launched their struggle
against the US-imposed Somoza dictatorship a generation later, they
revived this flag, replacing the logo this time with their own acronym,
FSLN. With a few minor differences, it was the same flag flown by the
anarchists in the ‘30s. At the same time that they flew it, their regime
tilted towards Moscow in the Cold War, ran Moscow-line denunciations of
Poland’s Solidarity union in the government daily Barricada, -- and
denounced Orwell as a counter-revolutionary.

Meanwhile, the architects of the Nicaraguan counter-revolution, Reagan’s
"privatized" spy network that undermined the US Constitution and
international order by organizing a lawless mercenary army out of
basement of the White House -- the "contras," led by thugs from the ousted
Somoza dictatorship -- had the chutzpah to call themselves "Project
Democracy." This abuse of the English language was of precisely the kind
that Orwell relentlessly satirized. Yet these architects, for their own
cynical interests, apparently promoted Orwell in revolutionary Nicaragua.

And now, in 2003, one of those architects, former National Security
Council chief John Poindexter -- who was convicted (and pardoned on immunity
grounds) of lying to Congress about his role in the Nicaraguan affair -- has
been appointed head of a Pentagon agency, the Office of Information
Awareness, which is building the capacity to peer into the intimate
details of the private lives of the citizenry. Your credit card,
telephone and personal computer have conspired to become the all-seeing
"telescreens" of Orwell’s 1984. A final irony -- now that the Cold War is
over, the telescreens have finally arrived. So has the Ministry of Truth,
in the form of a special Pentagon office for "black" propaganda (lies, in
the vernacular), the quite Orwellianly-named Office of Strategic
Information, revealed in the New York Times last year.
Orwell was a man of the left whose biggest boosters since his death in
1950 have been on the right, and whose biggest critics have been on the
left. Both the boosters and critics have a lot invested in the notion that
1984 was only a satire of the East -- despite the fact that Orwell
explicitly denied this, more than once. This lie -- this appropriation of a
socialist, anti-colonialist writer in the interests of empire -- can be
termed the Orwellian manipulation of Orwell. The writer’s own personal
obsession with the very concept of truth makes the manipulation even more
perverse. Now that the telescreens are finally here -- under capitalism, not
Communism -- it is more important (and one would think easier) than ever
for the left to reclaim Orwell.

Yet the man who would rise to this task has problems of his own. The most
disappointing thing about Christopher Hitchens’ Why Orwell Matters is its
lack of passion -- especially in light of the current terrifying historical
juncture. Hitchens argues that Orwell matters because he was prematurely
correct about Fascism, Stalinism and Empire. But there is a distinct
absence of outrage against the machine here -- which is not surprising,
given Hitchens’ own recent rightward trajectory. Hitchens may argue that
Orwell was right about Empire -- but he now supports imperial military
adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. He recently left The
Nation, where he was a columnist of many years, in disagreement over
such issues. The title of his book’s British edition, Orwell’s Victory,
is especially telling -- implying that the world, or at least those who run
it, has actually heeded the dystopian prophet’s warnings.

Does it help Orwell to have Hitchens leading the charge in his defense?
Even in Orwell’s lifetime, the agents of empire were seeking to exploit
his work, and he was cognizant of this. Hitchens actually does a good job
of illustrating this reality. In his chapter "Orwell and Empire," he
notes an episode in November 1945 -- on the very cusp of the Cold War -- in
which the Duchess of Atholl asked Orwell to speak at a meeting of her
League for European Freedom protesting Communist brutality in
Yugoslavia. Orwell responded: "…I cannot associate myself with an
essentially Conservative body which claims to defend democracy in Europe
but has nothing to say about British imperialism…. [O]ne can only
denounce the crimes now being committed in Poland, Jugoslavia etc. if one
is equally insistent on ending Britain’s unwanted rule in India. I belong
to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian
totalitarianism and its poisonous influence…"

More irony: Hitchens himself was apparently willing to share a bill with
Jeanne Kirkpatrick -- Reagan’s UN ambassador and a contemporary ideological
pillar of empire -- at a George Orwell Centenary Conference, held this May
at Wellesley College. Unless Hitchens called out Kirkpatrick as inimical
to Orwell’s true spirit in his remarks (of which we have not heard), it
seems his own standards of who he will "associate himself with" are
considerably lower than those of his hero.

It is admittedly a useless exercise, but a bug which has been in my ear
since (as a matter of fact) 1984: If Orwell had lived to the see that
year, would he have applauded the distribution of his work in Nicaragua,
as he did in fact applaud the distribution of Animal Farm in the Soviet
Bloc, as a form of resistance to Communist tyranny? Or would he have
perceived that his work was being manipulated in a neo-colonialist venture
to return Nicaragua to the US orbit? Would he have perceived this in
spite of the Sandinistas’ own authoritarian tendencies and pro-Soviet
tilt?

If he had lived only a little longer than he actually did, would Orwell
have taken sides in the Cold War? Would he have, like post-communist
Dwight McDonald in 1952, "chosen the West"? And if he had lived to be a
very old man indeed, how would he have viewed the post-Cold War
interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq? Some of us Orwell
fans would like to think he would be neither among the
neo-interventionists such as Hitchens, nor with much of the
actually-existing anti-war movement -- such as International ANSWER, led at
its core by the Stalin-nostalgist Workers World Party, stateside
cheerleaders for Slobodan Milosevic.

While Hitchens doesn’t mention the Nicaraguan case, he does note
approvingly that the opposition in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is making good
use of Animal Farm. The book’s serialization in a Zimbabwe opposition
newspaper in 2001 was cut short by a bomb attack on the presses -- almost
certainly the work of the regime. Mugabe is assuredly an anti-democratic
thug. But Hitchens fails to note the complexities -- that the issue of land
reform that Mugabe exploits (however ineptly and cynically) is, in fact,
a legitimate one; that the Bush/Blair moves towards intervention in
Zimbabwe are, once again, a neo-colonialist campaign.

Even in Russia, where the tyranny of the Czar gave way to that of
Stalin -- so that the metaphorical farm animals could look "from pig to man,
and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was
impossible to say which was which" -- a decade after the fall of Communism
the New Boss is once more starting to look suspiciously like the Old
Boss. In May, when Hitchens was schmoozing with the triumphant
anti-Communist Jeanne Kirkpatrick at Wellesley, Yelena Bonner, widow of
the famous Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was protesting that
authorities in St. Petersburg were erecting a statue to her late
husband -- despite a deteriorating human rights climate which he certainly
would now be protesting were he alive. "It is out of place to erect a
monument to Sakharov in today’s Russia," she said.

Surprisingly, Hitchens’ book takes no overt swipes at his great nemesis,
The Nation’s requisite Orwell-basher, Alexander Cockburn. He even passes
up the opportunity to take on Alex’s father Claud Cockburn -- who,
strangely, is only mentioned in the acknowledgements. Under the pen name
of "Frank Pitcairn," Claud wrote for The Daily Worker about the Spanish
war -- and was called out in Homage to Catalonia for (not to mince words)
lying about Madrid’s crushing of the left-dissident elements in Spain in
1937, portraying the "Trotskyist" group which Orwell’s militia was
attached to (the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, or POUM) as a
crypto-fascist front.

Hitchens does, to his credit, take on the stickiest question: Did Orwell
collaborate with Big Brother? Orwell’s notorious "list" of perceived
crypto-Communists and fellow travelers has provided his leftist critics
with powerful ammo. Orwell initially drew up the list -- consisting almost
entirely of public figures he did not know personally -- in 1949 for his
personal edification. But, as Alex Cockburn took great glee in pointing
out in the pages of The Nation, he eventually turned it over to the
British government. The affair is an unavoidable one for any contemporary
defense of Orwell.

What makes the affair doubly damning is Orwell’s annotation, which took
an unhealthy interest in the ethnicity of the figures on the list. After
Charlie Chaplin, he scrawled "(Jewish?)" (he wasn’t). This is sleazy
stuff, even for something not intended for public consumption. (One thing
can be said in Orwell’s defense on this point: his essay "Anti-Semitism in
Britain" so successfully exposed the phenomenon by examining how he
shared in it -- precisely the kind of brutal honesty and moral complexity
that his fans admire.)

Embarrassingly, the list accused Paul Robeson of being "Very
anti-white" -- a crude caricature of his politics. But Robeson indeed was
actually too soft on the Soviets -- as were many of our culture heroes on
the left. Woody Guthrie was not on the list, but maybe he should have
been, with his now near-forgotten lyrical homages to Stalin. Is it really
mere red-baiting to point this out?

Far more problematic is that Orwell turned the list over to the
Information Research Department (IRD) of the British Foreign
Office -- particularly to one Celia Kirwan, who was his editor at Polemic
(and unrequited crush of many years). Kirwan (the twin sister of Arthur
Koestler’s wife Mamaine) was apparently connected to the IRD, a
burgeoning Cold War propaganda unit.

Hitchens avoids taking on Alex Cockburn’s writing on this question, but
focuses on Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain’s Secret
Propaganda War, a 1998 history of the IRD. The first (and smallest) point
is the authors’ claim that the list was revealed in 1996 by The Guardian.
Hitchens says it was actually revealed in Bernard Crick’s 1980 biography
George Orwell: A Life. But Crick only mentions that Orwell kept the
list -- not that he turned it over to Kirwan, the salient point. In fact,
none of the numerous references to Kirwan in Crick even note that she
worked for the IRD.

Next, Hitchens claims -- contrary to the assertions of Lashmar and
Oliver -- that nobody was "blacklisted" or targeted by the "Thought Police"
for being on the list. This is also questionable. The IRD was akin to the
US Information Agency -- it published and distributed books and articles by
intellectuals who were thought to further British imperial interests (or
"democracy" -- although this takes on an Orwellian meaning in some cases,
such as the IRD’s complicity with the CIA-backed coup in Indonesia).

Owell was familiar with such efforts, having served as a BBC war
propagandist from 1941-43 (despite profound criticisms of the Allies). In
sending the list to Kirwan, he was warning a colleague against promoting
writers he felt were Communist dupes. There was clearly a possibility
that, at a minimum, these writers would be blacklisted by the IRD! And
even if the IRD was not engaged in surveillance, once the list had been
passed on to one government office, it could always be forwarded to
another -- theoretically, to MI6 or even the CIA. In fact, Britain’s Secret
Propaganda War details the close links between the IRD and these two
sinister agencies.

So if Cockburn overlooks context and disingenuously refers (in The Nation
of Dec. 7, 1998) to Kirwan as a "secret agent" (was her work with the IRD
secret?), Hitchens is also off the mark to exculpate Orwell on this ugly
episode.

It’s again to Hitchens’ credit that he avoids hagiography. He deals
forthrightly with Orwell’s downright anti-feminism and undisguised
homophobia. Although his 1946 essay "Thoughts on the Common Toad"
brilliantly presaged ecological politics, Orwell rarely missed an
opportunity to diss vegetarians, pacifists, "sandal-wearers and bearded
fruit-juice drinkers" (The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 182). Time has not
treated these stodgy prejudices as well as it has Orwell’s lonely refusal
to accommodate lies and mass murder.

Hitchens also provides worthwhile discussions of Orwell’s "Englishness"
and the related question of how his beliefs in clarity and objectivity (at
least as an ideal, if not a fully attainable one) set him apart from the
Continental philosophers and post-modernists.

But Hitchens makes almost no attempt to apply Orwell’s ideas to the
contemporary world situation -- even as the ubiquitous surveillance and
unending military conflict of 1984 become realities at the dawn of the
21st century. Orwell, despite his many contradictions, may matter more
than ever -- precisely because an uncompromisingly anti-imperialist,
seriously democratic left remains such a marginal prospect as the world
moves into a state of permanent war.