GEORGE ORWELL AND THE NEOCONSERVATIVES

...Another area of embarrassment for the neoconservatives lies in Orwell's unremitting war against the Roman Catholic church...

...In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist...

...A Labour government that "meant business" would also abolish the titles of the "so-called aristocracy," close the House of Lords, and disestablish the Church of England...

...The pertinent portions of the letter appeared in Life (June 25, 1949) and the New York Times Book Review (July 31, 1949): My recent novel [1984] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a showup of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism...

...All right, let them, if it is necessary...

...The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, IF NOT FOUGHT AGAINST, could triumph anywhere...

...Now, suddenly, American conservatives, under the new banner of "neoconservatism," have once again attempted to claim Orwell...

...The loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night...

...Americans were now confronted with the Orwell who had fought with an army of the extreme left against Franco in Spain...

...Well said, but not exactly a neoconservative message...

...Although Orwell lay dying of tuberculosis while the American conservative crusade gathered momentum, he insisted upon issuing "a sort of clêmenti" against what he took to be a deliberate misreading of 1984...

...VVell, if Orwell was neither a socialist nor a revolutionary, then what was he doing in Loyalist Spain in 1936, where he went to write and stayed to fight in the ranks of an army representing the most revolutionary section of the Spanish working class...

...de Camera would have it, "with the Goths at the gates, the leftist swaggering stopped...

...Now Podhoretz contends that "with the outbreak of World War II, a new Orwell was born—Orwell the English patriot," and he cites "My Country, Right or Left" as one of "his most memorable phrases...

...Norman Podhoretz recently provided the answer...

...In view of the enthusiastic conservative response to Mr...

...American conservatives have long admired and envied the British ruling classes...

...The Catholic church was not only opposed to humanitarian reforms, it was "pro-Fascist, both objectively and subjectively...

...All this was queer and moving...

...The usual method, with some interesting minor variations, is to ignore or deliberately blur the distinctions between socialism, communism, and Marxism and then string together carefully selected quotes from some of Orwell's more pointed attacks on the Soviet Union, Communists, Marxists, authoritarian socialists, and pacifists...

...But the nature of Orwell's opposition to communism was always revolutionary, not conservative...

...But anyone who takes the trouble to read his published work carefully is likely to conclude that George Orwell was no more ripe for a conversion to neoconservatism than, say, Alfred Kazin, after his return from a neoconservative revival meeting at the Plaza...

...I have seen wonderful things," he wrote shortly before leaving Spain, "and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before...

...The conservative press, "with its tales of red revolution financed by Moscow, was even more wildly wrong than usual...

...I cannot associate myself with an essentially Conservative body which claims to defend democracy in Europe but has nothing to say about British imperialism...

...He took his self-appointed role of critic and conscience of the left very seriously, even if he was not always fair in his criticism...

...Toward the end of 1944 Orwell admitted with characteristic honesty that in taking 73 the view that "the war and the Revolution are inseparable," he had made "a very great error...

...The central thesis of The Road to Wigan Pier was that socialism had "been buried beneath layer after layer of doctrinaire priggishness, party squabbles and half-baked `progressivism' until it is like a diamond hidden under a mountain of dung...

...The diamond must be recovered...

...In Spain, Orwell was pleased to discover that "churches were pillaged everywhere and as a matter of course, because it was perfectly well understood that the Spanish Church was part of the capitalist racket...

...If anything corresponding to a Petain Government were established here," he wrote in 1941, "it would have to.lean largely on the Catholics...

...And Orwell, of course, never understood the "conservative" implications of his patriotism and went on calling himself a socialist until his death in 1950...

...Now before the discovery of Orwell-the-neoconservative escalates into a right-wing literary cottage industry, it might be well to briefly describe just how this seemingly impossible shell game is played...

...Yours truly [George Orwell] Political converts, like religious converts, not only sing the loudest...

...Orwell leaves the reader of his moving memoir of the Spanish Civil War with little doubt as to his motives for fighting in Spain...

...The conservative conclusion becomes fairly obvious, provided that Orwell's own revolutionary program is carefully concealed and the real nature of his criticism of the Soviet Union and communism is largely ignored...

...He attributed this rather gross misreading of the political climate of Britain to wishful thinking...

...The revolutionary intellectuals of England were would-be leaders without a revolutionary army and Orwell's vision of red militias in the Ritz soon faded under the stress of war...

...But by 1945, the ex-Red Duchess had shifted sharply to the political right and was leading a belated campaign against Russian domination of Eastern Europe...

...One cannot really be Catholic and grown up...

...Why, 71 one might ask, should they turn for comfort to a revolutionary socialist such as Orwell at this late date...

...But he could certainly turn a memorable phrase, and neoconservatives have frequently attempted to trade on his wit and integrity by quoting him out of context...

...He was convinced that the destruction of intellectual liberty that went with "Orthodox Catholicism" had "a crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially the novel...

...We now turn to the rather comic political career of the Duchess of Atholl...

...However, Orwell the patriot remained very much Orwell the revolutionary...

...They are the only really conscious, logical, intelligent enemies that democracy has got in England...

...But again, it is not the sort of prescription for human progress that one would expect from one of the "guiding spirits" of neoconservatism...

...It seems more likely that Orwell would have dismissed neoconservatism as merely another one of those "smelly little orthodoxies which are contending for our souls...

...Though Orwell made light of the League for European Freedom, he was nevertheless asked to join and speak at one of its rallies...

...Orwell was pleased with the Labour victory of 1945, but not with the behavior of the Labour government...

...With victory now in sight, Orwell turned his attention to the impending General Election and the practical arrangements of building a democratic society in the postwar era...

...But the Orwell of the '30s cannot be entirely ignored, so he is said to have undergone a patriotic conversion at the beginning of the war or, as Mr...

...I could easily get out of it by saying that the date is impossible or what is quite true—that I know nothing about Jugoslavia, but I prefer to tell you plainly that I am not in agreement with the League's ultimate objectives as I understand them...

...George Orwell was not one of those English 72 socialists of the 1930s who loudly supported revolutionary socialism abroad and lived contentedly with capitalism at home...

...Stanley Baldwin was not even a "stuffed shirt...

...Perhaps so, provided one can properly distinguish "the forces of light" from "the forces of darkness...

...As for Brideshead Revisited, Orwell drew attention to the "last scene, where the unconscious man makes the sign of the Cross...

...The forces of light have Orwell on their side and draw strength from it...

...I do not see how one can oppose Fascism," he concluded in January 1937, "except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of course, in one's own country...

...de Camera concludes that the "forces of darkness have huge armies, a bigger and better arsenal, liberation movements, and the whores' allegiance...

...Podhoretz has no difficulty in presenting Orwell as one of the "guiding spirits" of the neoconservative Committee for a Free World...

...Chamberlain was beneath contempt and there was little respect even for Churchill...

...He vividly recalled "the revolutionary toasts and dialectical-materialist cocktails which flowed like water wherever progressive intellectuals foregathered...

...Buckley's cloying presentation of the Brideshead Revisited TV series, it is 74 worth repeating what Orwell had to say in his notes for a projected essay on Evelyn Waugh...

...My Country, Right or Left" is actually the title of an essay in which Orwell declared that "only a revolution can save England," and he did not shrink from the possibility of violence to achieve it: "I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood...

...Orwell sternly resisted the "dialectical-materialist cocktails," but not the intoxicating revolutionary spirit of the times, especially after the "wonderful things" he had witnessed in Spain...

...Orwell accused Catholic writers from Chesterton to Graham Greene of debasing their talents and ruining their work by becoming Catholic propagandists...

...For example, Norman Podhoretz and Jeffrey Hart are fond of using the vivid description of the social deviants of the English socialist movement that appears in The Road to Wigan Pier: "One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and `Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice maker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sexmaniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England...

...Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was written largely with the intention of exposing the Communist betrayal of the revolution in Spain...

...In one of his London newsletters to the Partisan Review, he insisted that no Labour government really "means business" unless it "(a) nationalises land, coal mines, railways, public utilities and banks, (b) offers India immediate Dominion Status (this is a minimum), and (c) purges the bureaucracy, the army, the diplomatic service, etc., so thoroughly as to forestall sabotage on the Right...

...But we must remember that revolution was in the air...

...When confronted by the depression and the rise of fascism, they escaped "into stupidity...

...Buckley's ultra-rightist National Review to look upon George Orwell as a kind of unholy cross between Jane Fonda and Bertrand Russell...

...Note that after all the veneer is bound to crack sooner or later...

...Catholicism was also seen by Orwell as a sinister influence in the literary world...

...But his real quarrel with the Roman church turned on his belief that "its influence is and always must be against freedom of thought and speech, against human equality, and against any form of society tending to promote earthly happiness...

...Orwell rather grudgingly favored "retaining the Royal Family," but only because "modern people can't, apparently, get along without drums, flags and loyalty parades" and "it is better that they should tie their leader-worship onto some figure who has no power...

...Stealing or willfully bowdlerizing...

...There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...

...It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle...

...Yet the future "guiding spirit" of the Committee for the Free World "recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...

...He was simply a hole in the air...

...Robert de Camera paid very respectful "Homage to Orwell...

...Yet Orwell emerged from the Spanish Civil War less disillusioned with socialism than conservatives generally assume...

...As the war progressed, his "leftist swaggering" found concrete expression in the series of radical socialist reforms that I have outlined...

...q 76...

...The Communists in Spain, Orwell insisted, betrayed the workers by deliberately preventing a real revolution from taking place: "The whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain...

...Waiters and shopwalkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal...

...Podhoretz concludes that "it is, after all, no small thing to have the greatest political writer of the age on one's side: it gives confidence, authority, and weight to one's own political views...

...His major fear was that the Conservatives would "conduct a whirlwind campaign, present themselves as 'the party that won the war' . . . promise everything under the sun, and then chuck everything down the drain as soon as they were back in office...

...I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country...

...According to Podhoretz, Orwell was never much of a socialist—"beyond a generalized faith in 'planning' he never showed much interest in the practical arrangements involved in the building of socialism...

...By nationalization of the land, Orwell meant that the state should "certainly impose an upward limit to the ownership of land (probably fifteen acres at the very most), and . . . never permit any ownership of land in town areas...

...I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily WILL arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is satire) that something resembling it COULD arrive...

...Neoconservatives "deny that Orwell was a revolutionary: they think of him instead as a major critic of revolution...

...From the very beginning of his literary success in this country, the creators of the myth of the conservative Orwell would appear to have deliberately ignored Orwell's own interpretation of his work...

...if one is equally insistent on ending Britain's unwanted rule in India...

...It seems that he was no revolutionary either...

...But the old reactionary, politically one-eyed Church that Orwell hated is pretty largely the Church that conservative Catholics long for and hope to revive...

...Orwell had previously advocated the strict "limitation of incomes" on such a scale that "the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one...

...Orwell's interpretation of 1984 went largely unnoticed, but the enormous commercial success of Animal Farm and 1984 gradually brought Orwell's lesser known works back into print...

...During the Spanish Civil War, as Orwell was later to recall, "the Red Duchess as she was affectionately nicknamed," was "the pet of the Daily Worker and lent the considerable weight of her authority to every lie that the Communists happened to be uttering at the moment...

...I came to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do...

...Orwell's renewed sense of patriotism led to a series of sharply worded attacks upon Marxists, pacifists, and other elements of the Socialist left whose motives he questioned...

...Orwell, as Podhoretz readily admits, is a writer "well worth stealing...

...Generally unnoticed is a brief and unsuccessful neoconservative attempt to capture Orwell in Britain as early as 1945...

...Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized...

...It seems to me that one can only denounce the crimes now being committed in Poland, Jugoslavia, etc...

...Here the strained credibility of the neoconservative argument turns on one's willingness to accept the notion that conservatives have such a monopoly on patriotism that patriotic utterances can be equated with a "conversion" to the conservative cause...

...Indeed, Orwell sometimes sharply condemned views and positions that he himself had only recently abandoned...

...Richard Rees, Orwell's friend, later drew attention to the extraordinary "political hysteria" of the late '30s...

...After Spain, Orwell's personal war with communism began in earnest...

...Accepting the Catholic point of view meant "accepting exploitation, poverty, famine, war and disease as part of the natural order of things...

...Socialism must stand for "justice and liberty" and regain its anticapitalist revolutionary posture...

...Orwell's revolutionary Barcelona, with its gutted churches, collectivization extending down to cafes and bootblacks, strictly enforced economic equality, and absence of well-dressed people, surely comes close to a description of the ultimate neoconservative political nightmare...

...This is not the place to evaluate the political viability or wisdom of Orwell's proposals...

...But this was not really a "new Orwell...

...The revolution was in full swing...

...They were a class that had declined during the interwar years to the point where "stuffed shirts like Eden and Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent...

...Collections of his essays, journalism, and letters began to appear and by the late 1960s Orwell had become a kind of cult figure of the liberal anti-Communist left...

...Very amusing from the neoconservative point of view, but Podhoretz and Hart take care not to point out that The Road to Wigan Pier is in fact a sustained argument in favor of a socialist society...

...On the page preceding the above quotation, Orwell warned the reader that he was "arguing FOR Socialism, not AGAINST it...

...I merely wish to point out that Orwell did in fact take considerable interest in "the practical arrangements of Socialism...

...Conservatives had to reckon with the Orwell who was convinced that only a socialist revolution could save Britain from defeat in World War II and the Orwell whose fervent anticommunism was rooted in the suspicion that communism was "merely a particularly vicious form of state capitalism...

...Podhoretz's Committee for the Free World...

...In the face of such revelations, the image of the conservative Orwell quickly evaporated, and subsequent political studies have centered largely on the question of precisely where Orwell belongs on the complex spectrum of the socialist left...

...It should go without saying that the Catholic church that so aroused Orwell's anger was the Church that supported Mussolini and Franco and made its degrading Concordat with Adolf Hitler, the Church of the Index and the Legion of Decency—and not the Church of the era following that of Pope John XXIII...

...In May of 1983, the National Review featured an essay in which Mr...

...But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago and for such different reasons is somehow persisting...

...But the problem here is that the patriotic Orwell was initially convinced that only a radical socialist revolution could save Britain from "the Goths at the gates...

...I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences...

...To assume, as Orwell did, that only a socialist revolution could save Britain from defeat in World War II seems absurd or at best naive in retrospect...

...But to Orwell, "they were simply parasites, less useful to society than fleas on a dog...

...After taking note of the remarkable posthumous rise in Orwell's reputation as an essayist, Mr...

...Modern neocon75 servatives would do well to ponder the implications of his response: Dear Duchess of Atholl, I am afraid I cannot speak for the League for European Freedom...

...they also assume that everyone is ripe for conversion to their cause...

...The revolutionary posters were everywhere...

...It was more like a heightened version of the old Orwell of the highly controversial Road to Wigan Pier...

...But Spain was not Britain...

...Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no "welldressed" people at all...

...In their frequent references to Orwell's anticommunism, neoconservatives forget (or deliberately omit) the fact that his bitter condemnation of communism was based on the belief that communism was a reactionary force dedicated to the suppression of any genuine social and economic revolution...

...The dementi took the form of a letter to Francis A. Henson of the United Auto Workers...

...Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers . .. almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt...

...As early as 1932, Orwell was taking "great pleasure" in taunting Catholic theologians and converts to the faith...

...The point has often been made that Orwell was a lonely, solitary figure who stood outside of the age in which he lived...

...But not so...

...Having detached Orwell from socialism and revolution, Mr...

...The Duchess was one of the founding figures of the anti-Communist League for European Freedom, an earlier, more limited version of Mr...

...Like so many other critics, Orwell identified the "driving forces" of Waugh as "snobbery" and "Catholicism...

...He was simply admitting that "as with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents...

...In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution...

...He called for a "reform of the educational system along democratic lines" that should begin by immediately "abolishing the autonomy of the public schools and older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability...

...That is to say, she had taken the dramatic left-to-right political shift that characterizes the modern neoconservative...

...True enough in some ways, but he was also very much a man of his times...

...In reality, it was the Communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain...

...Orwell feared that the Marxists and the crank elements of the English socialist movement were discrediting the cause of socialism in the eyes of the common people he celebrated in his novels...

...Given the radical nature of Orwell's politics and the ferocity of his attacks on Roman Catholicism, one would logically expect Mr...

...During the dark days of World War II, he virtually accused the English Catholics of plotting treason...