How Do You Like Your Orwell?
Bowker, Gordon & Redden, John
BOOKS IN REVIEW part and the knowledge on which that history rests. The idea that there was a life after death was unsustainable, but the moral baggage that accompanied that belief was...
...It seems unlikely that Orwell would find a home today on either side...
...This is Nineteen Eighty-four's "doublethink," the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in mind—war is peace, defeat is victory—and it is a form of "newthink," and it leads to "duckspeak...
...Many respectable thinkers have already done so...
...But when he was stationed in Burma, the pundits who annoyed him most were the leftist ones who spoke so knowingly about the place but had never spent any time there...
...Try to imagine any of the current candidates, or even a future nominee, as a secular saint...
...No doubt the book went a long way toward confirming the view of both Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender, of Orwell 'the secular saint.— SO WHO SHOULD INHERIT ORWELL'S MANTLE...
...The Founding Shopper General Washington's Christmas Fareure& A Mount Vernon Hornecornimg, 1783 By Stanley Weintraub (Free Press, 224 pages, $25) Reviewed by Terence P Jeffrey ONG BEFORE LT...
...Animal Farm, after all, was more than a barnyard fable...
...A really accomplished duckspeaker could make you believe that a tragedy was somehow a triumph...
...Weintraub's book is a quick and pleasant read—a worthy literary travelogue that tells readers where Washington really did sleep and where he was feted in the final weeks of 1783 as he made his way home for Terence P Jeffrey is editor of Human Events and a nationally syndicated columnist...
...Bowker, in Inside George Orwell, says it is "not just a work of shining integrity, but the clearest version of Orwell's own version of socialism, one inspired more by Christianity than Marx...
...Thus Spain, where Orwell fought with a Marxist militia, endured the horrors of trench life, and saw the Communists betray a revolution, was a defining experience in his life...
...It would be presumptuous and dishonest, no matter how comforting it might be to some, to claim now that Orwell reallybelieved in God, and that his atheism was a sham...
...Once a whore, always a whore," he said when he dismissed them in the past, and I think he would say that again...
...It was about the betrayal of a revolution...
...But Homage to Catalonia came first, of course, and while it sold only 800 copies when it was first published, in 1938, it is recognized now as a classic...
...WILLIAM G. BOYKIN became the object of an inquisition for having sketched ut—in a church of all places—what he under stood to be the rough theological outlines of the war against terrorism, American war leaders had no qualms declaring that God was on our side...
...Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be," he said, "while holding untenable opinions...
...Again I can only imagine what he might say about so many pundits today, but the herd instinct runs deeply now on both the left and the right, and unanimity is expected on all issues...
...Orwell, I am certain, would deplore the antiAmericanism that is now so fashionable on the left, especially as it is expressed by European intellectuals...
...They substituted ide ology and sloganeering for independent thinking...
...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004...
...no one can...
...When Orwell heard about that he was amused...
...It can help us frame our own views...
...Orwell was one of a kind, and there is no pretending otherwise...
...On the other hand, Orwell never had much use for media pundits, whether they were on the left or the right...
...When Evelyn Waugh visited Orwell in the hospital a few months before he died, he is supposed to have said afterwards that his old friend was "very near to God...
...You can't...
...But I can only imagine what he might say whenev er the Administration claims, as it often does now, that suicide bombings in Baghdad prove that the enemy is becoming "desperate" because conditions there are returning to "normal...
...It crystallized his political thinking, and influenced much of what he would write later...
...He shared their anti-imperialist views, but their herd instinct repelled him...
...He also says it is possible to see Homage to Catalonia "as the quintessential expression of Christian Socialism (and the highest virtues of Judaism and Islam...
...Evidence for this emerges from the pages of Stanley Weintraub's new book, General Washington's Christmas Farewell...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW part and the knowledge on which that history rests...
...All the evidence is against it...
...Its mindlessness would appall him, and so would the leftist intellectuals...
...Nonetheless you can make the case that Orwell represented what was best in the Christian-Judeo tradition without vandalizing his coffin...
...The idea that there was a life after death was unsustainable, but the moral baggage that accompanied that belief was indispensable...
...But ideological shell game or not, speculating on what Orwell's views would be if he were here today is worthwhile...
...No one really...
Vol. 36 • December 2003 • No. 7
