Editorial / Down and Out in Liberal Fashion
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL DOWN AND OUT IN LIBERAL FASHION by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Orwell. Orwellian. The words hold an august position in our political vocabulary. They connote government dependent on fear,...
...Surely they can forgive him for his commitment to the party of liberty and his never having, so far as I can recall, expressed a cheap emotion...
...They affirm that Stalinism was indeed very nasty...
...They connote government dependent on fear, the use of terror, the pervasiveness of banality, drear, and a thoroughly corrupted language...
...Why all the organ music from the liberals ? Does an anti-Communist have to be dead to rouse their respect...
...Orwell was an independent-minded leftist who in such wonderful books as Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and 1984 blew the whistle on the totalitarian nature of Communism and its ghastly brutality toward all forms of opposition no matter how decent or restrained...
...They memorialize his bravery...
...But I balk at the liberals' refusal to give Orwell's old allies their due...
...But Orwell was not the only writer to follow an independent course in the 1930s and 1940s...
...I have derived great pleasure and instruction from his writing...
...In the 1930s, when the friends of Lillian Hellman here and the friends of journalist Claud Cockburn in England were slobbering all over Uncle Joe Stalin and the Communists of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell parted company, identifying them as the cranks, the frauds, and the knaves that they were and shall ever remain...
...In praising Orwell all these modern-day examples of Communist barbarism can be neglected and prodigious feats of bogus scholarship can be heaved up to demonstrate how Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, and now El Salvador are the normal political developments of an ever-improving world...
...Taking away the fear and terror, it is the government envisaged by the New Age liberals with their benevolent coercions, their enervating levellings, their endless tampering with the meaning of plain English...
...Hence they solemnly heave red roses on the grave of the great Orwell...
...Why not raise a toast to Koestler...
...True, he has gone on to become one of Yahweh's most ardent boomers, and I understand the distress and even the panic his laughter causes these good liberals...
...To the contrary, he lit candles and saluted this pish-posh...
...The reviewer, laboring in the New York Times Book Review, neither snickered nor shuddered...
...Yet so did others, for instance Arthur Koestler, who writes with greater breadth, and Malcolm Muggeridge, who writes as well as Orwell, and with more humor...
...Just a couple of weeks ago the reviewer of an Orwell biography noted that its author, Bernard Crick, ranks Orwell as one of England's three greatest political writers along with Swift and Hobbes...
...I do admire Orwell...
...His prose is the work of a god accompanied by angels...
...He blew the whistle on the Soviet paradise even before Orwell...
...Today the liberal pedant can celebrate him and still feel no compunction about failing to oppose the Communists' more recent acts of aggression-for instance the continuing Communist atrocities in Southeast Asia where poison gas, concentration camps, and slavery remain daily instruments of progressive government, or in Eastern Europe, or in the newly colonized African satellites, and now in Central America...
...Nor did the example of the independent-minded anti-Communist end with his death in 1950...
...George Orwell was the farsighted English novelist, essayist, and critic whose name is now uttered with a hush of reverence in America and England...
...They wrap themselves in Orwell's shroud...
...Unlike Koestler and Muggeridge, he never had the opportunity to discredit himself in their eyes by actually taking an active role in the Cold War...
...Moreover, there was always a seedy fecklessness about him that makes him especially appealing to the left-wing academics who run their reform movements on leisurely schedules from the local university clubs...
...Orwell wrote and wrote, but he always stood aloof politically...
...Orwell is indeed a stupendous political writer, and he did incur torrents of cruel objurgation from the entrenched Left for his outspoken denunciation of totalitarians and their appeasers...
...As 1984 approaches, I predict the reverence will increase as will the exploitation of his name...
...They even arrive at our doors with quotations from Chairman Orwell: his reference to "smelly orthodoxies," to "Big Brother," and on and on...
...But if they would add one or two more anti-Communists to their museum it would make the place more impressive, and it would put the liberals under no greater obligation to oppose Communism today...
...Why is it that he is so venerated today...
...His timely death made him all the more serviceable to his left-wing extollers...
...And what about Muggeridge...
...My suspicion is that, wracked by guilt over their failure to oppose contemporary left-wing aggression, they praise Orwell in hopes of tranquiliz-ing their twinges of guilt while bolstering their now flyblown anti-Communist credentials...
Vol. 14 • June 1981 • No. 6
