Were George Orwell alive today he would be 115 years old. Despite this, nearly everyone purports to know exactly what the old Etonian would have thought were he still around.
I have exhumed Orwell myself on occasion. It is hard not to; Orwell is one of the great twentieth century writers. As such, his influence is everywhere. To mull over a certain set of political questions in print – war and peace, freedom versus authoritarianism, socialism or capitalism – is invariably to tread upon ground previously walked by Orwell. And so while it has become something of a cliché to quote Orwell, it is also a sin of omission not to.
Columns and polemics that begin by asking ‘What would George Orwell do?’ (WWGOD) are ubiquitous. To see what I mean, type ‘Orwell and Brexit’ into Google – you’ll find page after page of articles purporting to know what Orwell would have made of the 2016 referendum.
Brexit is only the latest incarnation of WWGOD. Casting an eye back more than a decade ago to the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, pro- as well as anti-intervention pundits frequently sought to borrow Orwell’s perceived moral authority to push their own respective positions.
One of the favoured Orwell-isms deployed by proponents of the war was that pacifism was “objectively pro-Fascist” – a phrase Orwell used in his correspondence with Alex Comfort, a pacifist who drew parallels between Nazi concentration camps and the British wartime state. Yet Orwell himself recanted on the phrase, later describing it as one of the “propaganda tricks” that “I have been guilty of… myself”.
More recently, Orwell’s famous jibe at fellow socialists has been applied to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters:
“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”
There is undoubtedly some truth to any comparison of Corbynism – with its conspiratorial thinking and flirtation with antisemitic tropes – to the cranks who flocked to socialism “like bluebottles to a dead cat” during Orwell’s day. One can also imagine Orwell being appalled by the gruesome communist apparatchiks that Corbyn has chosen to surround himself with.
Yet Orwell remained a committed socialist until the end of his life, and his insistence that he “belong(ed) to the Left and must work inside it” has little in common with those who have chosen to ‘resign’ from the Left rather than stay and fight against a new generation of communist fellow travellers.
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