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Why Orwell Matters Christopher Hitchens Books

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Why Orwell Matters Christopher Hitchens Books

Great essay on a great essayist. Hitchens was an intellectual giant with few rivals. All of his works are worth reading. Orwell happened to be a favourite of Hitchens making this read extra special.


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Why Orwell Matters Christopher Hitchens Books Reviews

A series of essays on Orwell,covering Orwell and the Left, Orwell and The Right, Orwell and America and several other topics.

Hitchens is a huge fan and takes on all comers who criticize his man, and there are plenty that do, but in normal Hitchens style he bats them off with his arguments, and like or loath him Hitchens can argue.

Very entertaining, much more so than Orwell's novels which I find a bit depressing. Hitchens makes his arguments for Orwell on his essays not on the novels. Hitchens does not think Orwell a saint, more a candidate for beatification,which incidentally neither of them believed in anyway.

The best thing for me was reading this on a with the dictionary function. When you have a vocabulary that is rather bare when compared with the author it is a very handy tool.
One of our great “public intellectuals” of recent decades turns his critical and fearless eye on both the detractors and exploiters of George Orwell. The detractors come from the left, the exploiters from the right. To the right, Orwell was a prophet of their beloved Cold War, conveniently forgetting that he was also a champion of democratic socialism. To the left, he betrayed socialism and democracy because his dystopian novels “Animal Farm” and “1984” were such potent attacks on Soviet-style Communism that they served to propel the Cold War and McCarthyism.

In fact, Orwell even invented the phrase ‘Cold War”. But Hitchens points out that Orwell used it as a prophetic warning of geopolitical peril to come. On another occasion, Orwell prophesied the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union due to totalitarian excess. And this is precisely the picture that Hitchens paints of Orwell A person of extraordinary intellectual and moral honesty who also had keen insight and curiosity into human affairs.

Orwell first developed a life-long aversion to colonialism and imperialism after a youthful posting to India in the early 1920s as a police lieutenant. Then he deliberately chose to live with the destitute in the slums of London to understand their predicament, despite the discomfort it brought to his upper class upbringing (he was a graduate of Eton, the most elite of English private schools.)

Orwell was very determined to become a good writer – to penetrate the veil of propaganda and euphemism that blinded people to injustice. He quickly became a great essayist but had trouble writing a good novel. Yet he knew that fiction could reach a far greater audience, if he could only find the right model, the right formula, to display his perception and outrage. He kept trying and eventually succeeded, despite social awkwardness and repeated periods of self-doubt.

So how did Orwell come to understand Stalinism long before most others? Once again he exposed himself to danger and deprivation. He volunteered to fight Franco and the fascists in Spain in the late 1930s. He barely escaped death – twice, yet Hitchens downplays his heroism. Once Orwell took a bullet in the neck. Then he fled Spain just before being seized to be “purged” in a Stalinist-type show trail. Thus he experienced totalitarian terror first hand, culminating in his masterwork “1984” just before his death form tuberculosis in 1950.

However I would recommend a good overview of Orwell’s life, such as the Wikipedia article, before this book. Hitchens’ book is not a biography and sometimes glosses over crucial elements. At other times he digs quite deeply into the politics and culture of the time in order to counter certain attacks and misrepresentations, using a high-brow literary British vocabulary, contrary to the transparency advocated by Orwell himself. Nevertheless, Hitchens is absolutely right that “Orwell Matters”, especially today, given the Orwellian proclivities of Donald Trump.
Christopher Hitchens gives us a comprehensive survey of Orwell's literary and journalistic output. This is especially interesting in view of Orwell's orthodox socialism. Socialists disliked him for his anti-Stalinist views even though he risked his life and freedom fighting for the Spanish Republic against the Fascists. He came in for criticism and slander when he tried to show how the Russian backed POUM subverted the Republican cause by undermining and then arresting their noncommunist allies.

It helps to read Hitchens book in tandem with Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's account of the Spanish Civil War. It is a stark description of the conditions at the front, and the "riots" in Barcelona. This is followed by the treachery of the Stalinists.
The European Left turned a blind eye to the horrors of Stalinist Russia, until Orwell produced 1984, and Animal Farm. After that he was persona non grata among the orthodox Leninists and Stalinists, and misunderstood by the right wing "anti-communists". Not a great novelist, but an important one. An honest man in a maelstrom of lies.
Great essay on a great essayist. Hitchens was an intellectual giant with few rivals. All of his works are worth reading. Orwell happened to be a favourite of Hitchens making this read extra special.