Why Orwell Matters

I recently finished Christopher Hitchens’s very fine book Why Orwell Matters.

It’s a good read and I recommend it highly. As I’m blogging from an airport just before boarding, I’ll quickly mention two flaws, one minor and the other rather serious.;

The first is the in-joke character of some of the discussion of squabbles among now forgotten intellectuals, some of which may be best left forgotten. Nonetheless, Hitchens manages to drag some of them out of their deserved obscurity in a manner that is at times enlightening and often entertaining.

The second is a more serious failing in a book that excoriates various writers for their blindness to or active collaboration with various forms of totalitarian violence, notably Stalinism. In the same book in which he points out the beams in the eyes of others, Hitchens reveals the enormous splinter in his own, as the following sentences reveal:

“[H]e [Orwell] was in contact with the small and scattered forces of the independent international Left — forces now largely forgotten, but containing important individuals who witnessed at a critical time, and at immense risk, to the menace of totalitarianism. The generic name for this movement was Trotskyist….” (p. 62)

“There will always be Trotskys and Goldsteins and even Winstson Smiths, but it must be clearly understood that the odds are overwhelmingly against them, and that as with Camus’s rebel, the crowd will yell with joy to see them dragged to the scaffold.” (p. 191)

Leon Trotsky was an architect of the Soviet terror state and personally participated in many of the murders, “liquidations,” and other horrors of that regime. He lost in the power struggle with Stalin, but there is no reason at all to think that, had he been the winner, the regime would have been any less horrifying.

That rather glaring problem having been noted, I can recommend the book highly.