Few dead old white guys have a holier aura than George Orwell. Despite his place next to Dickens and Dostoevsky in the pantheon of Writers You Had to Read in High School, he enjoys a popularity amongst the general population that can’t be attributed (entirely) to the shortness of his books. Neither can his books’ simplicity (the lack of “thees” and “thous” and ten-syllable names) fully explain Orwell’s appeal. No, what makes him great is the universal thought bubble that has burst above the head of every teenager who’s ever picked up Animal Farm or 1984 :
“Damn, this dude was right .”
Orwell was right about the badness of Stalin and he was right about the badness of the surveillance state. He was right that people are easily brainwashed, and he was right that technology is making things worse. This is where most people conclude their reading of Orwell. They walk away with a pleasant, fuzzy impression of him as honest and objective, gentle and worried, a supra-political truth-teller who just wanted folks to be nice to each other.
And so, aside from a few grumpy Stalinists , it’s hard to find anyone who truly dislikes him, though every aspect of his life has been subjected to intense posthumous scrutiny for more than fifty years. He’s venerated as a symbol of basic human decency , the kind of person who either gets “canonized or burnt at the stake,” according to his former boss at the BBC. Some people come right out and call him a “ secular saint.”
Orwell’s prophecies inspire pilgrimages from the faithful and great volumes of scholarship from a priesthood of learned elders . When calamity strikes, people seek his wisdom to help them grapple with the incomprehensible . He’s as universally beloved as one can be in this snide, contentious age. Squint hard enough, and the tall, lanky Englishman starts to look a little like Jesus Christ.
He’d be very annoyed by the comparison. This was a man who once wrote that, “alcohol, tobacco, and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid .” Orwell was no utopian. Rather, he was outspoken in his belief that, “[t]he essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty.” In his famous essay “Why I Write,” he is explicit about where his own loyalties lie: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism , as I understand it.” Elsewhere, he dares the reader to misunderstand him: “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.”
Indeed, the more you read of Orwell, the more he transforms from a cuddly, bipartisan grandpa into a bare-knuckled revolutionary. He is withering in his criticism of global capitalism and liberal impotence: “We all live by robbing Asian coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that all these coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment,’ demands that the robbery shall continue .” And while he’s perhaps the world’s most famous advocate for free speech, he also shows a sensitivity to language that would surprise most readers, like when he revealed in a newspaper column that “I have recently been going through the proofs of a reprinted book of mine, cutting out the word ‘Chinaman’ wherever it appears and substituting ‘Chinese’.”
All in all, it’s Orwell’s “natural hatred of authority” that strikes you the hardest, like a sack of bricks to the teeth. So why do authority-fetishists like Hillary Clinton and Paul Joseph Watson keep gurgling his name with such slobbery enthusiasm? Though she’s a liberal plutocrat and he’s a right-wing conspiracy theorist, they share a common goal—to butcher Orwell’s reputation and wear its pelt like a cape.
First came Watson’s video , where he informed his viewers that Orwell would’ve denounced the loose collective of anti-fascist groups known as Antifa because “they are fascistic in every single way imaginable,” which makes only slightly more sense than saying Greenpeace was founded to hunt whales. Next was Clinton’s memoir , which compared the Trump administration’s duplicitous “attempt[s] to define reality” with the torture scene in “Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered,” a feeling familiar to anyone who’s heard her talk about health care .
Clinton and Watson aren’t the first bullshit merchants to blaspheme the name of a beloved radical (or to profit from it). To millions of people, Che Guevara is just some guy on a t-shirt . Similar tactics have been used with great success on revolutionaries like Martin Luther King, Jr., whose sanitized legacy is now safely exploitable by the kinds of people he fought against his entire life. The corruption of Orwell’s memory, though, reeks with a uniquely hideous stench. They’re re-writing the history of the man who is famous for warning against re-writing history......
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https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/taking-orwells-name-in-vain
