Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell

Today is August 7th, 2009, and my guest is Christopher Hitchens. He's the author of many books, essays, and articles, including the book *Why Orwell Matters*, which is our topic for today. Welcome to Econ Talk.

Nice to have me. You start by saying that Orwell was right about the three big issues of the 20th century: imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism. Give us the flavor of what he was right about.

Well, to take them in that order, which is the order in which they occur, and also, I think, probably the necessary order. Orwell's first rebellion against power, illegitimate powers, he thought of it, was against the assumption that the world would be ruled indefinitely by white Europeans, and that Indians, Africans, Chinese, and Latin Americans, people like that, would just have to lump it. He saw with great prestige that wasn't going to last very much longer anyway, whether it was justifiable or not. He'd also, as a colonial policeman in Burma, which was then part of the British Empire in Asia, seen the ugly side of it. And I think have guessed it, the dirty secret that underlays the master-slave relationship, as Nietzsche calls it, and the unpleasant sexual side of that, which is available to you if you read his novel *Burmese Days*. I'll phrase it as crisply as I can, um, the most family show. So of course, um, and with with uh due regard to the, so the uh, the values of that. The best way of putting it would be that the most qualified and educated Burmese man would never be allowed as a member of the English club in town, uh, hard as he might try. But the least educated Burmese woman would be admitted to the British colonial officer's mansion by the back door as well, as at best, a mistress. In fact, Flory, the the policeman in Orwell's novel, though these days has it turns out, actually bought his woman as a concubine from her family. So she's in effect, uh, something like a comfort woman or a slave. I think myself, no one, no one knows because there's no writing about it that survives of his. No one knows why Orwell came back on leave and resigned his commission in that police force. But I believe I do know the reason. I think he thought if he went on doing it, he would become a sadist and a racist, and he'd already become a bit of both of those things. And it's a great help if you're going to be an anti-fascist, which he later becomes, to have some insight into the horrible psychodramatic nature of fascism. It's the sexual warp that is part of it, the the thrill of domination, and not just the thrill of domination, but the thrill of being dominated. This is eternally present in all of Orwell's writing. Gives him an insight that many others don't possess. He understands immediately there's something utterly wicked and pornographic about fascism. It has to be resisted. It's a life-and-death question. He hardly even writes anything against it. It's so obvious to him it has to be opposed. Goes off to fight so and early in Spain. And therefore, that's numbers didn't cross off the second of the two. The imagination, I want you to, he's oppressed independent of fascism. I want you to give a little background of his Spanish involvement.

Well, for listeners who may not be aware, in Spain in 1936, the Spanish people elected a government that was broadly speaking, as we call it, republican. It was hostile to the traditional, ancient Spanish, Castilian Spanish monarchy, critical of the power of the church and the undue economic influence of the church, generally left-leaning. A great threat to traditional Spain, which replied in the form of a military coup organized from its African colonies by General Franco, to put down Castilian, sorry, to put down Catalan and vast nationalism, which were also part of the republican cause, restore the Catholic, Christian, centralized, Madrid-based unity of Spain on again, the traditional monarchist and feudal bases. And wasn't ashamed in this enterprise to ask for the military help of Hitler and Mussolini, which was what made it an international cause. So those who had decided that Hitler and Mussolini had already gone far enough, many of them were brave enough to take themselves physically to Spain to fight in the armies of the Republic as volunteers, which in turn, that side was supported by, will was one of those. Now, so now, I think I hope I've tried to explain, succeed in explaining some of the transition between Orwell's anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and this anti-fascism and anti-Nazism. But here, here's where he becomes an immortal figure, instead of just a distinguished one. Within the Civil War in Spain, there was also a civil war. There was a civil war within the left. Because as a counterweight to the support of Franco by Hitler and Mussolini, the Spanish Republic turned for arms and for money and for diplomatic support to Stalin's Russia, which was believed by many people at the time, many of the working class and many of the intellectual classes too, to be a new utopia, to have solved the problems of racism and colonialism, imperialism. Who needs any more to ask any, any questions? We already have a heaven on earth. It's on the other side of the Pyrenees mountains, far away, but was ruled by a beneficent, uh, god-like, uh, person out of whose bottom the sun daily shines, Joseph Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the greatest Georgian of his generation. Discovering that this was a huge lie, and that those who believed it were capable of anything, was Orwell's third greatest achievement. He did it while he was accused of something that must have wounded him very much, um, accused of undermining the anti-fascist threat by telling the truth. Put yourself in that position. What am I supposed to do? If I tell the truth, I'm going to be accused of undermining the left. Then it's out of need in Spain. I'm going to tell the truth anyway. I'm going to say what is obvious to me: communism is a fraud at best, and a monstrous tyranny, um, more probably. And I've seen it in action. I know what it's like. And not all your listeners will know who Czesław Miłosz was, but some of them will. Well, he's dead now. He died at the age of about 98. He was the greatest Polish intellectual of the 20th century, seconded only by Leszek Kołakowski. And he wrote a famous book called *The Captive Mind*, which was a big bestseller in the United States in the 1950s. When he, Miłosz left Poland, having been a communist, left the Polish government, moved to the United States, and began...

Mr. Paul? He's a person. You just say his name.

So, well, it's because I pronounced it as the Poles do. Yeah, because I'm such a, for this kind of thing, Polaphobe. Yeah, I mean, a Polaphile. Yeah, because of the W as being the, the being a special L in Polish that. So, so you actually pronounce it's, it's spelled Czesław Miłosz, but it's pronounced Czesław Miłosz. Anyway, in *The Captive Mind*, he says that when he got hold of a pirate edition of *1984*, which was being passed around inside the Communist Party in Poland in secret, read by the cognoscenti, they were all absolutely amazed. How does this guy understand so well how the system works? When they found out who the author was, and that it was an Englishman who had never been to the Soviet Union, who'd never been to a communist country, if that's not possible, he can't have got it so right without having lived under it. There's something wrong here. When you think that Miłosz is passing around a secret book within the inner party, and *1984* is about the passing around of a secret book within the inner party, and it's in 1951 that he writes this, and about roughly 1950 that the book comes up. I think it's probably one of the greatest compliments ever paid by one author to another. Orwell never lived to see Miłosz publish this. But in fact, in Catalonia, in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, Orwell had lived under, briefly, a communist regime before most people had in Europe. He'd seen what the Communist Party was like and how it behaved when it was in the saddle, when it thought it was on the winning side. He'd known what it was to live under a terror and have people disappear without explanation and have censorship and fear, uh, if only for a brief time. It was a lesson for life. And for the rest of his life, which was to consist of another decade and a bit, he devoted himself to combating the prevalent illusion among intellectuals, which was that communism was the future and that would be a radiant and a nice picture. He said, it's neither. It's horrible, and it will fail. And thus, the closing years of his life, just spent desperately ill, fighting tuberculosis, see the publishing of a lot of very important anti-communist essays, but the two great classic novels, *Animal Farm* and, as he's dying, *1984*. So that's number three. And number three is a synthesis of the previous two. In other words, I think in his 46 years, you can think of his life as being all of a piece, in that he was able to diagnose, analyze, and fictionalize and critically oppose all the forms of illegitimate power of man over man that the 20th century and the 19th had been able to furnish us. And wrote, trumpeted a warning that we still listen to and still hear. It's, it's really a rather an incredible thing how well Orwell's people still read his books. They still talk about his ideas. Those are the things he opposed. Tell us what he was pro.

He was anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, anti-Stalinist. It's not so easy to talk about what he was pro, given what he was opposed to. It's not, doesn't naturally follow. He was a natural egalitarian. He didn't have much use for any form of privilege. He was not an austere person. One can picture him as a soldier, actually, probably a junior officer in say, Oliver Cromwell's army. A bit of a puritan, strict but not humorless, very suspicious of any, anything overtly or too overtly ornate or decorative, such as monarchy or the, the flummery of religion, which he always despised. Very fond of the English people. There's a lot of talk about how he was quintessentially English, though in fact, the first book he ever wrote was a critique, written in French, of British oppression of Burma, British economic exploitation of Burma, how Britain underdeveloped Burma. He spoke perfect French. His most English-centered novel is called *Coming Up for Air*. It's about nostalgia for the English countryside in the Thames Valley. Was actually written in Morocco. He fought in Spain and was wounded, very nearly killed, shot in the throat. Um, he was a policeman in Burma. He was very, he spoke several Burmese regional languages and also Hindi. So he was extremely untypical as an Englishman. But he liked the, and here's the word one can't avoid in discussing him, the decency of the English people. He thought that they were humane, that they were friendly, that they had an innate sense of fairness and generosity. Um, he thought that in fact, they were so nice, you could even make socialists of them. Because an English socialism would have to be free of the deformities, I secretly suspect, he thought were largely imported by sort of continental types who didn't have advantages. I'm afraid I think that is true of him. But he was a socialist. He was a socialist at the end of his life. And he actually joined, uh, the only party he ever joined was a group called the Independent Labour Party, a left splinter from the old Labour Party that was associated with the writing and the resistance to Stalin of Leon Trotsky. And that's why when he went to Spain, instead of joining, as most of the volunteers for the Republic did, the International Brigade, which was run as a front organization, though not everyone knew it, by the whole point, of course, not everyone knows it, by an astroturf organization instead of a grassroots one, um, by the Communist Party, he ended up in a small, smaller, more left, more radical group called the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, which was not exactly a Trotskyist group, but was identified with the left opposition to Stalin. And if he hadn't, like that odd coincidence, drifted into that group, he might not have been able to tell the truth, as he saw it, as we now know it to have been true, about what the Communists were doing in Spain in those days. And not just in Spain. The midnight of the century, as people used to refer to it, the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, or the rehearsal for it, when the two great totalitarian empires of Europe suddenly decide they have, what is obvious to everyone, or should it be, more in common with each other than with democracy, and make a formal military pact. The worst moment of all that, when it was broken, of course, Stalin just couldn't believe it. It's one of the stranger moments in history, right? That when Hitler invades Russia, Soviet Union, I'm told that Stalin refused to believe the accounts. It's true. Absolutely true. Trotsky, who predicted it, he saw that after Neville Chamberlain had produced the sell-out at Munich, that's known to all. Whereas Chamberlain, put it, the British conservatives would sell democracy everywhere in Europe if it would give them 10 more years' domination of India, which was what Hitler was offering them. Hitler's exchange proposal was: leave Europe to me, I won't attack you or your empire. We would do our, our own carve-up. He says, now Mr. Chamberlain has done that, the next move is obvious. Mr. Hitler will now make a pact with Mr. Stalin. That's his logical next move. He's been freed to do it. And he just happens to add, because, and he had this wonderful power sometimes, the prescience. And by the way, when this pact breaks down, it won't be Stalin who breaks it. Weird. I mean, someone could have got 90% of that right to get into 110. Yeah, right. Incredible.

I'll talk about the Spanish Civil War for a minute because for that generation, it was the transcendent international event. It's almost unimaginable to us today that intellectual elites volunteered to go fight and risk their lives. When we think of all the causes that the intellectual elites have followed since then, most of them don't involve personal risk. They involve standing back from the fray and cherry-picking points and making easy pat remarks. It's hard to imagine that the great writers of today. I mean, the only thing I can think of that's even vaguely analogous would be the, uh, the football player who volunteered to go to Iraq, beginning of the Iraq War, Ben Tillman. Yeah. Tillman. And but I don't know what game he played. He was the famous sportsman. He's a football player of a huge. He was a, he's a, he was killed in Afghanistan. Yeah. He was just, unfortunately, by our side. And he was, you know, a successful athlete. But the idea, I mean, you're picking the wrong analogy. The analogy is with the support of many European intellectuals and poets for the, uh, Greek War of Independence, the Greek Revolution against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, where the most famous figure, of course, is George Gordon Byron, better known as Lord Byron, who died of Missolonghi, not in battle, but of disease, but died having tried to help raise, um, the contingent to fight for the freedom of Greece. But that was then, right? Yes. And it was, very much that is what gives birth to the idea of the Romantic movement, which is a huge influence throughout. What tells it why is it that, to me, or what maybe discipline? But in Spain, by the way, it isn't, it is true, of course, that a number of writers and intellectuals and poets in England, very famously, uh, Delmore Schwartz, Stephen Spender, at least visited Spain, if they didn't fight there. John Cornford, a great poet and contemporary of theirs, was killed there as a member of the Communist Party. Numerous other writers of less renown were associated with it. But the ranks of the International Brigade were largely made up of Jewish garment workers from the East End of London, Welsh coal miners, Scottish coal miners, engineers from the Midlands, people who had seen, here's what I think is the crucial thing. The Labour movement of Germany, the most important Labour movement in history, the most successful, the best organized, the most democratic, go under to Hitler without a shot being fired. We've seen the same happen in Austria in 1934. Seen the, uh, the workers' districts of Vienna reduced to rubble by artillery with barely resistance. Uh, seen one after another, the great, the great achievements of European socialism, the European Labour movement, just fall into fascism. And decided that not in Spain, Spain were going to draw the line. The working class is going to fight back now. Yeah. "No pasaran" was the slogan. No surrender. Around this time, there will be, there'll be a fight. They did prevent the fascists from taking Madrid at the Battle of Jarama. It's still a song and story and legend that, not all the compromises with and subversion of the cause by Stalinism, uh, can take away. The International Brigades, for a while, barred the road to fascism with their bodies in Spain. No one who's read the story properly can be, I think, uh, unaffected by it emotionally, or failed to think of it as being, as Bernard Knox, the great classicist who went to fight, that's why he's still alive at age, they said, can fail to think about it whenever they think about it, as being a personal as well as a political tragedy that they lost.

I like your, is it your phrase, "take on these people"? People of this prestige, at the time, literary prestige, political prestige, moral prestige, class prestige, if he wants, um, all of this and say, "Yes, you're quite right. We have to bar the road to fascism. But you're quite wrong in saying you have to do it as a communist." That is to become the loneliest person in the world. Yeah. It's a little subtle for most people to risk complete, not just isolation, but the worst kinds of calumny and slander, which are indeed going to fall on him. He's going to be accused of every kind of treason and treachery and lying. When he wrote his book *1984*, first about the loneliness of Winston Smith, the person who thinks he may be the only person left in the world who's seen through Big Brother, its working title was *The Last Man in Europe*. When he handed it in to Martin Secker & Warburg, that's what it was called. Martin Secker was the first person in Europe to read it and said, "I think we need another title." But, um, I don't think he was right, by the way. But that's the way Orwell thought of himself. Yes. These, without becoming a monomaniac or an egomaniac. I mean, to say, without becoming too solipsistic about himself. He remained always a fairly modest person. But he could have fallen victim to the temptation to think he was the lone prophet crying in the wilderness, Jeremiah.

No, I'm listening. Is it your phrase, "the power of facing"? Is that yours?

No, it's his. I wanted to call my book *The Power of Facing*.

Maybe explain the phrase.

Well, said, um, when I think it's in his essay "Why I Write," he said that from a fairly young age, he always knew what he wanted to do, which was to be an independent writer. And he said he knew he had for this task already the following two bits of equipment: a certain literary ability and a power of facing unpleasant facts. It's an oddly constructed phrase. One might say the ability to face, or right, the awareness of, for the, the unwillingness to duck completely. Just a power of facing, I thought, was just, it's a beautiful one. It's very good. And his willingness to see facts that were not conducive to peace of mind or a docile party-line attitude or an ability to go along to get along. He would always notice how the facts are stubborn things, as John Adams put it. By the way, I'd like you to ask me a question about John Adams in a minute.

All right. I was gonna ask something about Thomas Jefferson.

Well, this is the same. Not to allow myself too long a throat-clearing here, but having said, I hope convincingly, that on the three critical points of the 20th century, he was right, I should say the one critical, uh, aspect of the century I think he got wrong, or didn't get right, and that's the rise to prominence of America, the United States of America, and the American idea. Orwell had reservations about America that were partly cultural. He had the slight English snobbery about American mass culture, though he admired aspects of it. He liked Mark Twain, for example, very much. And he didn't like American films. He didn't like American comic books. Thought they had a bad influence on English youth. Also, he saw that though the British Empire was bad, the taking over of its colonies by America, that was coming clearly, might not be that wonderful either. He was in touch with some good people in the United States around *Partisan Review* group, men like Dwight Macdonald. Philip Roth wrote a letter from London for them. They tried to encourage him to come to America, probably to have his TB cured, which should have been good. And he wanted to make a trip down the Mississippi. But he died before he could make it. I wish we had had Orwell on the Mississippi. But most of the way he writes about America is either rather slight or rather condescending, has to be admitted. He didn't have enough of a historic sense of its rise and importance. But here's something I think I'm the only person to have noticed. At the opening of *1984*, what is the, what is the opening sentence of the novel? Really don't have to. I'm only asking you very quickly. The opening sentence is: "It was a bright, cold day in April, and all the clocks were striking thirteen." So that's how the novel, you suddenly know you're in another world. When I wrote my book, I didn't know that John Adams had said, when he was trying to get the Declaration of Independence organized, "We have to make 13 clocks all strike at the same time. It won't work unless all 13 colonies join." The segment didn't. I hadn't known that. But I had noticed it. It is in my book that in the dictionary of Newspeak, that's the end of *1984*, when he, he describes the, the new language of totalitarianism, the attempt to organize a dictionary that makes certain thoughts unthinkable, certain concepts unavailable to the human mind by jargonized, propagandistic language, he gives an example of a sentence that couldn't be rendered in Newspeak. And it's this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." That's how it begins. I don't have to finish it for you. But now, the Jeffersonian gamble could not be rendered into Newspeak. Now, I, it would be wonderful if I could show that he knew that the first sentence is also an echo of John Adams, because the, um, Jeffersonian is almost the bookend at the end, because the Newspeak dictionary is an appendix to them. But I think he had studied and appreciated the American Revolution. I know he was an admirer of Thomas Paine, as all English pamphleteers and radicals were. And so, one of the many senses of the unfinished that one has with Orwell, so, so awful that he drowns in his own exploded lungs of poverty, disease, like a Dickensian death, totally avoidable, at the age of 46, at the height of his powers. One of the things is that we'll never get to hear how fruitful a proper engagement between him and America might have become.

Talk about Orwell's view of language, which you also mentioned, talk about quite, quite a bit about in the book. What was his, um, contribution? Why does Orwell still matter when we think about language?

Orwell thought that a lot of the work of illegitimate power is done for it by slave volunteers who all they need to do is to use the, what the French call the *langue de bois*, the wooden tongue, the tongue that has removed all meaning from language. In other words, that you would describe, say, the forced confiscation and dispossession of agricultural workers as "collectivization." Half the job is done if the government gets it called that. They're halfway there. Euphemism was the thing that he was best noticing. So, euphemism, I would define as the, the, the finding of a nice word for a nasty thing. So, oh, um, there are so many, I suppose the best, the most famous one now, so famous that no one ever tries it. This would be "collateral damage" for civilian casualties. No one would have, I think they'll be able to say that with a straight face anymore. Even to say, use the word "purge," which we now, of course, think of as a hateful word. We didn't at the time. Purge is a cleansing. Yeah. Sounds good for the mass murderer by show trial and disappearance and secret execution of your political opponents. Say "appeasement." Remember, at the time, was the word that the Tories themselves used. Appeasement means the satisfying, peaceful, peaceful composition of differences, the slaking of certain, uh, it's, it's an agreeable word, right? It's only through history that it's become, yes, that's the word. "Collaboration" doesn't ever have again the same quite the same ring as it, as it once did. So that's, of course, the revenge of history and euphemism, that the euphemisms themselves become, yeah, um, as we would now, if I was to describe you as "ethically challenged," you would know that there was a deadly sting to that, because it was once a word that was used to soften the description of something disagreeable, such as disability or them. Yeah, to give it, that's right. So, oh, he was very, dead set against all that. And he gave tremendous examples in his criticism, his essayist literary criticism, of the way in which propaganda imports itself into the language, and putting people on their guard against it. And I think he taught, not just his own generation, but succeeding ones, the importance of that. It's impossible to overestimate him. So many of his fictional euphemisms became the real thing. "Big Brother" is not a right. We think "Big Brother" is a frightening phrase. It obviously was meant to be a term of familial warmth and affection, absolutely, by Big Brother. But we now know it, because of Orwell, as a, it's become synonymous with with evil and, uh, oppression. Precisely. It's a little strange that people use his name as an adjective to mean the misuse of language. Well, someone is "Orwellian." This is pardonable, I think. I mean, one can't probably avoid it. But when, if you describe a person as an Orwellian, you pay them a compliment. If you describe a situation as Orwellian, you're describing something that's very dark, possibly. Um, and here's where the uses of pessimism may come in. Possibly so dark as to be without a dawn. I think it may have been Ryle Trilling, an attenuator, was one of his contemporaries who said of *1984*, the power of it was to completely foreclose any hope. By the end, there's nothing Winston Smith can possibly do. He's been totally broken. He's not just broken, he's been recruited. He loves Big Brother. Uh, there's the last man in Europe, the last dissident has been tamed. The argument that many people made at the time, Isaac Deutscher, who I otherwise admire, made this case. So this is a situation that encourages people to despair. It teaches people that there's nothing you can do. It's reactionary in that sense. Others, I think, are a bit more alive to it. Well, I think I think Joy meant it genuinely. Yeah. Now, there's more, a little more alive to what he was trying to do. Said, no, because if you, if you can imagine it being that bad, you can, in fact, imagine not overcoming it, but preventing it. Yeah. It was a, it was a clock. Don't think yourself into Winston Smith's situation. Think of what you can do to stop yourself from collaborating and becoming someone in that situation. And in that respect, we can say that the book is genuinely historic. Because the impact that it had in the enslaved countries of the Soviet sphere, among not just intellectuals, but people who later became leaders of independent trade unions and so forth, cannot be overstated. And how do we know that? I've met people in Czechoslovakia, as it then was, the Czech and Slovak lands, in Poland, in East Germany, who were enormously affected by reading *Animal Farm* and *1984* in various smuggled editions. Orwell was, um, very insistent that he would allow these books to be translated and distributed, originally in Ukrainian, in fact. The only intro he wrote for *1984* was for a pirate Ukrainian edition produced by a group of rank-and-file Ukrainian socialists who had been prisoners of war, were in a displaced persons camp in 1945. So you can have the book, you can have the copyright. Here's my introduction. Here's why the book is not anti-socialist, but it's anti-Stalin. Here's why it's on the side of freedom. It's not Cold War propaganda. It's not, it's not doesn't come from a supporter of British imperialism. Important in itself, by the way, I think. Well, this example was followed by pirate editions in every known language. And I'm willing to bet you that something will happen in my lifetime and yours. *1984* is not yet available in Chinese, or not in mainland China, but it will, I predict, there will be an edition. No doubt. And *Animal Farm* has been produced as a musical in Beijing. I'd love to see. I have not attended a performance. It is not yet available, except that any Chinese person would now know how to get hold of some version on the internet. And there will be a, there'll be a North Korean version. Yeah, they will. Because, um, no one has ever been to North Korea, as I have, without surveying the most perfected, hideous version of totalitarianism that still survives, or that may ever have been attempted, without immediately having recourse to a quotation from *1984*. It's impossible to see it, or even think about it, without thinking about Orwell. This is an achievement of quite a high order. It means that the relevance of the book will go on, and it possibly become even more acute. And I'll add one more thing, which is, *Animal Farm* is banned by the Ministry of Education in almost every Islamic country. In some cases, because of its mention of pigs. But not all mentions of pigs are forbidden by Islam. Peace can be understood. Natural pigs are not represented exactly in a heroic light in *Animal Farm*. No, it's very clear. And it was made very clear indeed by the prohibition on it in Iran, that it is banned as a satire upon absolutism. It's banned in the same way as the Shah of Iran didn't like having public performances of *Macbeth*. So again, it has, in these attacks upon itself, it earns the compliments that are only accrued by great literature.

Now, you've mentioned in passing something you talk about at length in the book, which is the left's reaction to Orwell. And I think the way you've put it is, it's a little strange that an anti-imperialist, a deep defender of the working class, and a strong egalitarian should be caricatured when talked about by the left. So talk about why that is. You've sort of mentioned in passing already, but talk about it in more detail.

There's a deadly, a trapdoor built into a large floor of the left mentality, if I haven't mixed the metaphor by phrasing it about that. I don't think I have. But it's this: there's the, it's quite right to value solidarity. It's quite right to value fraternity, and all of these things that keep the movement together in hard times. But what this can undervalue, or even, uh, trevor suspicion, is the person who thinks for himself or herself. It can be suspected of being a traitor, a blackleg, someone who lets down the front of solidarity. Her worst, gives comfort to the other side. They've had the vulgar phrase for this, which isn't a leftist phrase, actually. It's a sort of phrase that any public school or regimental or, um, team spirit conservative would recognize too. You know, you don't give aid and comfort to the enemy. You don't spread alarm and despondency on your own side. It's a tribal feeling rather than a leftist one. But it's peculiar to the left in that it can be like being a strike breaker, or someone who's a traitor and a scab. By the way, there's a lot of euphemism. No, "scabbing" is not a euphemism. It's not, or any of the other equivalent terms. And this has another element that's, I would say, a leftist one in its way, which is a form of leveling rather than a form of egalitarianism. But that says people who do such things do so for the lowest motive. That once you've found the lowest motive for someone breaking ranks, you've probably found the correct one. In other words, so that in my own lifetime, I met Claud Cockburn, who was a very, very important journalist on the left in the '30s and, and subsequently until his death, actually, in the early '80s. I was considered a very admirable man, despite his long, long memory in the Communist Party. And he was indeed a very brave and very humorous and very original writer. But he believed that all of those like him in Spain who had criticized the Popular Front and the Soviet role in it were consciously doing the work of Hitler. But it was not that their work, as it were, objectively had the audience can't see me doing my air quotes, but objectively doing the work of the other side. But no, we're knowingly doing the work. So an anti-communist is, in fact, pro-fascist, almost by definition. But by a certain, uh, metric, it must be so. That's what the *Daily Worker* said. Um, and they spread all kinds of other communist-inspired slanders against Orwell, having the afraid of attacking his motives, his character, anything rather than engage with and, and, uh, made very spirited and quite successful attempts to make sure that his work from Spain did not see print. It didn't get printed in the *New Statesman*, which had a very strong fellow-travelling wing at the time, was the leading left cultural magazine in Britain. I used to work for it myself in the '30s. It was, you could say, it had the combined effect in Britain and British English-speaking world, the *New Republic* and *The Nation* combined. They were strong enough to make sure that he never got published. There was a place that would be most important to publishing, that the Left Book Club didn't publish him. *Homage to Catalonia* didn't get published, uh, in that quarter. They could have done. The book, in fact, is hardly read by anyone until after the Second World War. *Homage to Catalonia*, which was his description of where *Animal Farm* was, had a very, very hard time indeed getting a publisher because of the efforts of someone we now know to have been a KGB agent in the British Ministry of Information, a man named Peter Smollett, alias Smallca, who tirelessly worked to put around the idea among wartime publishers that Orwell, in criticizing the great Soviet ally, was undermining the war effort against it. A line which actually, and here is, if you like, a literary, historical, cultural irony, which also seems to have persuaded T.S. Eliot, who, though he was a friend of Orwell's and had been invited by Orwell to appear on his BBC show, given every opportunity by him, that he was a well-known reactionary to his views, uh, declined to publish *Animal Farm* on the grounds that it was anti-Soviet. So that Orwell's in the position of being accused of selling himself out to the other side in order to get sales and publicity, and then denied these things by the same people. It's really, uh, well, it's, it's a trope that others have gone through. Yeah. He got the last laugh, but he was, can you go through a trope? It's a trope that's not unfamiliar to people who study this, this phenomenon of Stalinism and culture and publishing in the academy, elsewhere. It's a double negation. He got the last laugh, but he wasn't alive to really hear much of it or enjoy much of it, I guess. And he gave away, actually, he gave away two, as I told you, I mean, Ukrainian and Polish and Serb anti-communist, usually socialist, social democratic groups, gave them the right to publish him for free. Who would help the cause? Eventually would have made some money out of *1984*, but wouldn't make the changes that were required by the Book of the Month Club in America and *Reader's Digest* to *Animal Farm* for their nominations. So signed away vast numbers of royalties because he wouldn't amend the book to make it anti-communist in the way that they thought it ought to be. Good choice with the night. History not toward his the quality of his dinner and his fl is flat, but he really, it's, it's a strange thing. He doesn't really seem to have cared. I mean, if you offered him a car, say, he wouldn't particularly know what to do with it. If you'd said, "You could have a house twice as big as the one you live in," he said, "Well, actually, the one I live in is what I want." It may be nice to be immune from certain temptations.

I was, uh, intrigued to see in the book that Orwell had reviewed *The Road to Serfdom*. What was his view of Hayek and Hayek's worries about totalitarianism?

The role played by Friedrich August von Hayek in British politics in 1944-45 is a forgotten episode now, but it was at the time of huge importance. Winston Churchill made a speech in the 1945 election. He, having vanquished the Nazi empire, helped to do so, having led the British people through very hard times, saying that the plan of the Labour Party to institute national healthcare and other comparable socializing reforms might be all very well in its way, but would in practice require, and he said this advisedly, and I would say ill-advisedly, a Gestapo of bureaucracy to implement. That you couldn't have national healthcare without black-uniformed, jack-booted enforcers. Well, the British working class was actually in no mood to be talked to in that tone of voice by then. It had been through the slump after the First World War, where it lost the flower of its young men in the trenches on the Western Front for not very much gain, through the General Strike, through the collapse of the gold standard, all of these things, by the way, identified very much for Winston Churchill, through the long conservative collapse in front of fascism, through a bloody awful war which they had been, housing they had had been bombarded, dwellers hadn't even been allowed to join the armed forces, they were so ill. There's 70% people with deficiency diseases, things like rickets, bad teeth, poor eyesight, I mean, third-world health conditions. They were pretty determined to vote that the end of the war would bring the end of this sort of regime of neglect. And then to be told that they were voting for a Gestapo was just a little much. Churchill's rhetoric wasn't always as golden as some people think. Anyway, it is sad, perhaps unjustly, that that speech was suggested to, uh, Churchill by Hayek himself. I have some reason to doubt it, but it certainly was influenced by what Hayek had written in *The Road to Serfdom*. And he had a position as some kind of consultant at that point, Conservative Central Office, to the research department of the Tory Party. So he got blamed for what became known as the Gestapo speech. And there's no doubt in my mind that the Gestapo speech helped Churchill to lose that election, though I'm pretty certain the Tories under any leadership would have lost that one for historical reasons. At any rate, at around that time, David Astor, the *Observer*, had the clever idea of asking Orwell to review *The Road to Serfdom*. By the way, I just say "entrepreneurs" in parenthesis. It's, it's the sort of difference a good editor can make. Think, okay, there's this book by this relatively unknown Austrian. Who'd make a good review for it? Think of Orwell. On Hayek. Who thought of asking him to do that? It's a short piece. It shows that he's clearly read and understood the book. And he begins by saying, "This is the wrong book at the wrong time." The working class has been through fascism, war, slump, mass unemployment. It much prefers the risks that are run by state intervention to the risks that are opposed by continuation of laissez-faire or capitalism as they used to know it. They've made up their minds to this. However," he then adds, "almost as an afterthought, it would be stupid to ignore the point that Professor von Hayek is making." He probably didn't say "von," probably said "Professor Hayek is making," which is that if a certain share of the national income and the gross domestic product passes under state control, past a certain point, that will become a tyranny, and the citizen will lose his liberty. And if he loses that, he may also lose his welfare. I mean, it's not unlike the Benjamin Franklin admonition, you know, "Don't trade liberty for security, because you may end up with neither." I don't know if it would be nice to think that was in Orwell's mind too, but anyway, there it is. And this is a time when the, the social democratic rate consensus among the British intellectuals, including conservative ones, is almost 100%. So once again, he manages to be the one who is just slightly out of step, just slightly not in tune, who can see beyond the view that welfare state tourism or conservative social democracy is the most one can expect from the economy of society. You know, as someone who would like to see the world move toward a smaller role for government, government spending, it is remarkable how much freedom we have preserved. You know, there are disputes about how free we really are, half empty, half full. It seems to me that the worst fears are not realized, at least yet. And yet government grows bigger every few years in the United States and Europe. It may start to reach a level where people are going to push back a little bit. But it doesn't seem to be obvious. Harold Laski, who, the old socialist and strong advisor to the Labour Party in that same election, who I think alternated in the chair of the London School of Economics with Hayek, I could be wrong about that, used to say in response to Hayekian and Churchill and Christian, "Look, if you can plan for tyranny, and if you can plan for state control, you can plan for perhaps you can plan for freedom as well." I mean, it's not inevitable the planning is only a one-way street. I think a lot of people felt comforted by that and thought, "Well, freeing people from fear, some simple terror that if they got sick, that'd be the end of their lives. They couldn't, it wouldn't just be the end of their lives physically as healthy people, but they wouldn't have a job or a house either. Everything would go. They couldn't raise their children, they couldn't educate them." Take that away by some government intervention. Are you saying people are less free or more? More. Come on. This went on, just went on working, I think, as with, as did analogous concepts such as the New Deal, didn't begin to hit diminishing returns until quite late. Churchill's view, therefore, was considered by many people alarmist, and the Conservative Party went out of its way to drop it for a long time.

Orwell was more worried by state control over things like the media and the war economy, right? For example?

Yeah. When he thought of an overmighty state, he thought of things like the nuclear state. One of his very best short essays is written in 19, I think '46, maybe it could be late '45, because it's post-Nagasaki, first in Russia, and it's called *You and the Nuclear Bomb*, or *You and the Atom*, sorry, what if we call the atom bomb, *You and the Atom Bomb*. He gets a lot of work done in a few hundred words. And he says, "Of course, the immediate fear is that of annihilation and apocalypse. But there's another fear that one might pay attention to that no one's drawn attention to yet. What if this kind of weaponry makes the state completely invulnerable? So that no guerrilla warfare, no, no insurrection, no revolution could ever, ever throw it. The state would be armored behind us." He doesn't say plutonium, but behind a shield that was impenetrable. It would lead necessarily to a tyranny which would have the horrible idea of being honest with an interesting issue. So he was certainly, I mean, as many leftists are supposed to be, and Marxism is the first ideology to pronounce the idea in so many words of the "withering away of the state," of replacing the government of men with the administration of things, as Marx put it, very well. I think it's in the 1844 manuscript. The sight of this had been lost by the struggle to replace predatory and fascistic capitalism and imperialism with social democratic government, where government was considered axiomatically good for that reason. But the idea was that one should always have a weather eye to the overmighty state.

Suddenly, at the end of the war, the earth appears to be covered in military superpowers whose rivalry, while great inside, may conceal a secret sympathy they have with one another and a common interest in maintaining a balance of terror.

Um, there were moments in the Cold War where one was forced to think that that might be what was going on, that the Cold War had become about itself only, no larger or noble subject. It was never quite true, but it was never quite untrue either. And there were certainly managers of it, people like Henry Kissinger, for example, I would nominate, and possibly, uh, Hal Sonnenfeld, who felt far more sympathy with the managers of crisis in Beijing and in Moscow than they did with troublesome movements in subordinate countries like Czechoslovakia or Vietnam. So, the, oh well, was never completely wrong. And even when he's wrong, he's got a hold of an insight that needs to be retained.

So he was, in your mind, a leftist, but he was also a radical. Certainly, he was embraced by the right. A radical, certainly. And because of his emergence out of a family and a society that he had every reason to distrust him, his father, after all, had made a living out of selling Indian opium under British imperial auspices to China, compelled to buy it. It's, it's very fascinating that there's no mention of any father in any of Orwell's works. Now, it's all, it looks very occasional, very distant, and always very negative references, even when he describes England as a family with the wrong members in control. "We, okay, we're a family, but the wrong members control." He describes various poor relations and aunts are horribly sat upon, adverse rich cousins and so on, and who are awfully cowed and deferred. There's, there's no father in this. Is he called Big Brother? It could have been worse, you see. It's Big Brother, whereas obviously the analogy to the totalitarian dictatorship is the unchanging, eternal father. But he's already eternal. He's already coped with that by an early essay in which he says that he is, his initial problem with Christianity, I think this is in *Such Such Were the Joys*, his book about his prep school, was that you had to love a father figure who you also had to fear. An unsupervised problem for Christianity, of course, that he saw, he saw coming right away. But so we know that he was fond of his mother. We know that he couldn't bring himself to talk about his father, and that his general attitude to family life was somewhat distraught.

Uh, right. Yes. So because his, his hatred for imperialism, for British, uh, class snobbery, um, and hypocrisy, for the all the so-called advisors and the so-called virtues, these are advisors of the suburban small-time aspirant, those who hated the working class but feared and groveled to the class above them. He was not going to be able to express his dissent in a conservative form. No, he had no choice but to move to the left and to the underdogs in the working class. That's why it's interesting that when he sees that Hayek has a critique of illegitimate power, even though it comes from the right wing, but he's at once able to summarize in a few sentences what faculty is and the virtue of Jesus and the virtue of it and the veteran.

Well, he strikes indeed. Yes. All I guess is a truth-teller, which is part of the power of facing and part of the integrity you talk about in the book. I forget now who it is he writes about, but I came across it looking for something else the other night. He's writing about someone whose religious opinions he finds ridiculous, even contemptible, but he says there's something charming about the person. He says, if all Christians were like this guy, uh, the reputation of religion might not be sunk as low as it has. I, I'm paraphrasing this poorly, but he was always willing to be fair to an individual, even if that person represented a cause or a party that you found objectionable.

We're almost out of time. I want to turn to Christopher Hitchens, who strikes me as a somewhat Orwellian figure, used in a complimentary way, a mix of apparent contradictions, someone who's taken political stands that surely have cost you some currency, maybe not at the level of Orwell's, or maybe I don't know. Do you see yourself in his footsteps?

No, no. I've had to write very firmly about this because some people have very kindly said what you just said, and others less kindly have said, "Aha, Hitchens wants the mantle of Orwell," and so forth, which by which they don't intend a compliment. It's non-Orwellian, um, paradox. And I say, well, both for whatever reason, kindness and generosity, it's obvious that anyone might want to say this. It wouldn't be true. I mean, the most conspicuous thing about Orwell, I think, is his moral courage. He, he never had a steady publisher, he never had a steady job, he never had steady income. He was always ill, he was always insecure, and he often had to risk, and did risk, his life. I haven't had to do any of these things. And I have a hard time filling the quota of stuff that people want me to write and publish. I mean, I always got something I'm supposed to be doing that I, for which there's a space already reserved once I've written it. That wasn't always true, I have to say. But my struggle in the garret wasn't a very epic one.

Passport, and also, yeah. I'm, I would have been dead, um, 14 years ago if I was him, having had the last few years of that life rendered very horrible by poverty and illness and unhappiness. So I've never had to find out how I would shape up if I was threatened with poverty or imprisonment or death or obscurity if I carried on the way I was. I've never had to know what that would be like. So, in other words, the comparison is absurd. However, I don't mind saying, and I think it's clear to some people, that ever since I first read him, everything he's had to say has weighed with me. And if that didn't show, I would be surprised. He must be the person I most often quote or cite, quite unashamedly, using it, I hope, as much for support as for illumination.

I was thinking this morning, or something, actually, while I was right, trying to write my own memoir, the job of the intellectual, the so-called public intellectuals, we're now for some reason doomed to call it, is or ought to be to say something along the following lines: "It's more complicated than that. You mustn't simplify this. It's more, there's more complexity to the subject." That's what an intellectual should be doing to public discourse. One things. But then there are occasions when it seems to me that the, the reverse is the case, that actually what the really thoughtful person should be saying to you is actually, "It's simple. Couldn't agree more. Do not make complexity here where none is required."

I was trying to imagine what Barack Obama would say if he was asked about Salman Rushdie. Would he say, "Of course, I'm, of course, free expression over religious sensibilities, every time"? He wouldn't be able to do it. I suddenly pronounced, he's never been asked. But in his campaign to remake our relationship with the Muslim world, no one's ever asked him the fatwa question. Could he just give a straight reply and no dancing around? I bet you he could not. A tough one. Whereas the critical, the most boring thing I ever said about someone asking it was was the only thing I wanted to say, which was, "You have to be on his side. There's no other side you can possibly be on. Don't accuse me of something complicated. I understand what complexities we want to introduce, but I'm here to repudiate them and say, no, no, keep it simple."

Orwell's very good in that way. It's very hard to tell what the truth is. And some people even say that you can't quite do that, that there may not even be such a thing as objective truth. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try for it. But crucially, it doesn't mean the following attempted corollary, which is, you wouldn't know a lie when you saw one. You may not be able to tell the truth every time, not tell it, I mean, detect it, identify it, but you sure can identify a lie. And if you refuse yourself the lies, "I just won't tell any, even if it suits me or my cause, I won't do it." I make that simple renunciation. It's amazing what you'll have to do instead. This is, some people might say simplistic, but in that case, then the word simplistic deserves an upgrade.

So I was just brooding on this this morning and I realized that being even able to think or argue in this way, even if it's not very profound, does have its utility. And I get it at a rate from the visible, palpable relationship within the writing of Orwell between language, truth, and logic, between plain honest speech, transparent political positions, detestation for euphemism and falsification. Get you a long way.

Lionel Trilling says in his introduction to *Homage to Catalonia*, the first time the book was ever published in the United States, long after Orwell was dead, he said that the great thing about Orwell is he's not a hero. He's uncomfortable for that reason, because he shows what anyone can do with just a few resources: the ability to write, the the power of facing unpleasant facts, the refusal of the lie, and a bit of moral, physical guts, as we used to say in English schools. Courage. You can peel away all the flummery of fascism, colonialism, Stalinism, religion, just like that. And of course, people hate this because they think only a hero can do this, so they're excused. They don't have to. No, no, no. There are no excuses. You could have done this too, with a bit of effort, a bit more self-criticism, a bit more use of your own faculties, too.

I make this point in my book, and, uh, Richard Posner wrote an excoriating attack on me, very clever. As I said, "What do you mean he wasn't a hero? He went to Spain, he took a bullet in the throat, he threw up a job where he had no other job to go to, he fought off illness, he wrote three great, two certainly very great novels, hundreds of great essays. Are you saying this is an ordinary guy?" Well, actually, I think I can have that both ways. Yes, I think I can say that it shows how the qualities of heroism and virtue are accessible to ordinary people if they will absolutely keep driving themselves and not excusing themselves or making excuses for others. This is why the qualities that he convinces are going to remain important to us as long as English language is used.

Which I don't know how far I'm trespassing now on your time, but, uh, another little thing he got completely right. Writing to his friend Mulk Raj Anand, a writer in Bombay, who'd been working for the BBC Indian Service and who was attacked in India for writing novels in English, saying, "You're using the conqueror's language, you're using the language of the white man." I was attacked in England for being a *barbu*, a sort of wannabe white man, it was really a walk, um, in disguise. And Orwell always said, "Pay no attention to this. It doesn't matter how you're insulted. You'll get insults on both sides of this. But what's going to happen within, it'll happen quite soon, is there will be a whole department of English literature written by Indians, and great advances in the novel, and in fiction in general, and criticism will be made, and it'll be like American literature. Yes, it'll be a whole subject in itself." He must have written that to Anand in the mid-40s. Now, no literate person can go into a bookstore and not see, or not have read, or picked up by now, something by Rohinton Mistry, Osama, and Rushdie, or Hanif Kureishi, or running out of the names of, well, um, Vikram Seth, I've just forgotten, Ved Mehta, Will, from Trinidad, but yes, and she, even I thought also from Trinidad, but yes, of the Indian diaspora, of course, um, and others who I'm sure I haven't even heard of, who are Indians writing in Uganda, and probably in English, or in South Africa. It's undoubtedly there are names I don't know. Very interesting, very clever to have noticed that on the, on the thing they prided themselves in most, their language, in the English, could be out-beard, outdone, outdone by people who they looked down upon. I mean, it's really true. Arundhati Roy, I have huge disagreements with what she writes, but she writes it very beautifully. Gita Mehta, Murder, another great woman, Indian man. So language, truth, nudging a certain attachment to historical irony, I think, is important. Understanding some of the laws of unintended consequences. If you do this, you can go a long way.

My guest today has been Christopher Hitchens. Thanks for being part of Econ Talk.