Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

Author:Christopher Hitchens [Hitchens, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2003-09-11T05:00:00+00:00

The body-snatching of Orwell, however, is a much more specialized task and probably should not be attempted by any known faction. Least of all, perhaps, should it be undertaken by Tories of any stripe. George Orwell was conservative about many things, but not about politics.

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Orwell and America

Some leftists and nationalists in Europe and Canada, and even more people south of the Rio Grande, object to the use of the term ‘America’ to denote the USA. They prefer to say ‘the US’ or ‘the United States’, even though Mexico and El Salvador — for example — are formally entitled Los Estados Unidos de Mexico and Los Estados Unidos de El Salvador, so that the distinction becomes one with little real difference. The point is a simple one: ‘America’ is larger as an idea and as a geography than the fifty states of the Union.

But mention ‘the American revolution’ and you encounter very little argument about terminology. It may well have been Thomas Paine, one of the more intense radicals of 1776, who first employed the phrase ‘United States of America’ to prefigure a republic that would be more than thirteen ex-colonies. It was certainly he who proposed the Lousiana Purchase to Thomas Jefferson, thus helping to double the size of the country (while vainly hoping to exclude slavery from the new dominion).

Because of its long alliance with France, and because of its ancestry in the English revolution of the 1640s, the American revolution fully deserves its place in the pedigree of radical upheavals. It has had its full share of contradictions and negations — its original proclamation by slave holders who insisted that ‘all men are created equal’ is one of the first affirmations on record that some are more equal than others. But as the third millennium gets under way, and as the Russian and Chinese and Cuban revolutions drop below the horizon, it is possible to argue that the American revolution, with its promise of cosmopolitan democracy, is the only ‘model’ revolution that humanity has left to it.

Orwell was an admirer and student of Paine, himself an early pattern of the modest self-employed self-publishing truth-teller. But he exhibited a curious blind spot when it came to Paine’s adopted country. He never visited the United States and showed little curiosity about it. He was suspicious of its commercial and mercenary culture, somewhat resentful of its imperial ambitions, and somewhat fastidious about its sheer scale and vulgarity. America, in other words, is the grand exception to Orwell’s prescience about the century in which he lived.

This picture is not without its measure of light and shade. Like many critics of his day, Orwell took fairly easy pot-shots at the violence and crassness of American comics and pulp fiction. His preoccupation with sadism took the form of elevated concern about the nastiness of certain magazines intended for children, which he contrasted with the relative wholesomeness of British ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ and connected to the gangster ethic then becoming fashionable at the movies. If Al

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