Orwell resigned his colonial police commission in Burma because he sensed that continuing would turn him into a sadist and a racist, and this insight into the sexual warp and thrill of domination/submission gave him a unique understanding of the pornographic, wicked nature of fascism.

Orwell was right about the three big issues of the 20th century—imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism—and these occurred in a necessary order, with his anti-imperialism (from colonial service in Burma) feeding his anti-fascism and culminating in his anti-Stalinism.

Orwell's greatest achievement was discovering, while fighting in Spain, that the belief in Soviet communism as a utopia was a huge lie and that its believers were capable of anything—and choosing to tell that truth even though he was accused of undermining the anti-fascist cause by doing so.

Czeslaw Milosz, in The Captive Mind, recounted that communists in Poland reading a pirated edition of 1984 were amazed at how well its English author—who had never lived under or even visited a communist country—understood the system, which Hitchens considers one of the greatest compliments ever paid by one author to another.

Trotsky predicted, after Chamberlain's Munich sellout, that Hitler's logical next move would be a pact with Stalin (because Chamberlain showed the conservatives would sell out European democracy for 10 more years of Indian domination), and even predicted that when the pact broke it would not be Stalin who broke it.

Unlike modern intellectual elites who pursue causes from a distance with no personal risk—cherry-picking points and making pat remarks—the Spanish Civil War generation physically volunteered to fight and risk their lives, with the only loose modern analogy being the Greek War of Independence that birthed the Romantic movement.

The International Brigades in Spain were largely made up not of famous writers but of Jewish garment workers, Welsh and Scottish coal miners, and engineers who had watched the great organized labour movements of Germany and Austria collapse into fascism without a shot, and decided to draw the line in Spain.

Orwell's working title for 1984 was 'The Last Man in Europe,' reflecting his self-conception as potentially the lone person who had seen through the system, though Hitchens argues Orwell never became a monomaniac or egomaniac about this isolation.

Orwell got the rise to prominence of America and the American idea wrong—his writing about the US was slight or condescending due to English snobbery about American mass culture, and he lacked a historical sense of America's importance, though Hitchens notes Orwell admired Twain and Thomas Paine.

Hitchens claims to be the only person to notice that 1984's opening line ('all the clocks were striking 13') may echo John Adams's remark about getting all 13 colonies to 'strike at the same time,' and that the Newspeak appendix uses the Declaration's 'we hold these truths to be self-evident' as the example sentence that cannot be rendered in Newspeak.

Much of the work of illegitimate power is done by 'slave volunteers' through euphemism—finding a nice word for a nasty thing (e.g. 'collectivization' for forced dispossession, 'collateral damage' for civilian casualties, 'purge' for mass murder)—so that getting a deed renamed accomplishes half the job of legitimizing it.

1984's genuine historical impact was not to encourage despair (as critics like Isaac Deutscher charged) but to enable resistance: by imagining how bad totalitarianism could become, readers could work to prevent it, which is why the book profoundly affected dissidents and future trade union leaders across the Soviet sphere.

Animal Farm is banned in almost every Islamic country—nominally because of its mention of pigs but really, as Iran's ban makes clear, as a satire upon absolutism—just as the Shah disliked public performances of Macbeth, so that attacks upon the book earn it the compliment accruing only to great literature.

The left has a built-in trap: it rightly values solidarity and fraternity, but this undervalues or treats with suspicion the independent thinker, recasting the person who breaks ranks as a traitor or scab and attributing the lowest possible motive to them—a tribal feeling that explains why an anti-imperialist, pro-working-class egalitarian like Orwell was caricatured by the left.

The communist-influenced argument that anti-communists were 'objectively'—and in Claud Cockburn's stronger version, knowingly—doing the work of Hitler, by which an anti-communist is by definition pro-fascist, drove a campaign to suppress Orwell's truthful Spanish reporting (Homage to Catalonia struggled to find a publisher partly due to KGB agent Peter Smollett in the British Ministry of Information).

Orwell signed away vast royalties by refusing to amend Animal Farm to make it more explicitly anti-communist for the Book of the Month Club and Reader's Digest, and gave free publication rights to Ukrainian, Polish, and Serb anti-communist socialist groups—demonstrating an unusual indifference to money and material comfort.

Churchill's 1945 'Gestapo speech'—claiming Labour's national healthcare plan would require 'a gestapo of bureaucracy'—was influenced by Hayek's Road to Serfdom and helped Churchill lose the election, because the British working class, having endured slump, war, bombing, and third-world health conditions, was in no mood to be told that voting for welfare meant voting for a Gestapo.

Orwell, reviewing The Road to Serfdom, judged it the wrong book at the wrong time for a working class that preferred state-intervention risks to laissez-faire risks—yet conceded Hayek's stubborn point that if a certain share of national income passes under state control past a certain point it becomes tyranny and the citizen loses both liberty and welfare, making Orwell again slightly out of step with the near-total social-democratic consensus.

Orwell anticipated, in 'You and the Atom Bomb,' a second danger beyond annihilation: that nuclear weaponry would make the state invulnerable—armored behind a shield no guerrilla war, insurrection, or revolution could ever overthrow—necessarily leading to tyranny, an insight Hitchens links to Orwell's general weather-eye toward the over-mighty state.

There were moments in the Cold War when one was forced to think the superpower rivalry had become about itself—with crisis-managers like Kissinger and Helmut Sonnenfeld feeling more sympathy with the managers in Beijing and Moscow than with troublesome movements in subordinate countries like Czechoslovakia or Vietnam—vindicating Orwell's insight that rival superpowers might share a secret common interest in maintaining a balance of terror.

Orwell's family background—his father made a living selling Indian opium under British imperial auspices to a China compelled to buy it—and his hatred of imperialism, class snobbery, and suburban hypocrisy meant he had no choice but to move left toward the underdogs; the conspicuous absence of any father figure in his works (and 'Big Brother' rather than a literal eternal father) reflects this distraught attitude to family.

Orwell was always willing to be fair to an individual even if that person represented a cause he found objectionable—as when he wrote of someone whose religious opinions he found contemptible that if all Christians were like him, religion's reputation might not have sunk so low—which is part of his integrity and 'power of facing.'

Orwell's signal virtue was moral courage exercised under genuine hardship—he never had a steady publisher, job, or income, was always ill and insecure, and repeatedly risked his life—so any comparison of Hitchens to Orwell is absurd because Hitchens never faced poverty, imprisonment, or death for his views and would have been dead at the equivalent age.

The job of the public intellectual is usually to say 'it's more complicated than that,' but on certain occasions—such as the Salman Rushdie fatwa—the truly thoughtful person must instead insist that it is simple, refusing manufactured complexity, because while you may not always be able to identify the truth, you can always identify a lie and refuse to tell it.

Lionel Trilling argued the great thing about Orwell is that he is 'not a hero'—he is uncomfortable precisely because he shows what anyone can do with few resources (the ability to write, the power of facing unpleasant facts, refusal of the lie, and a bit of courage), removing the excuse that only heroes can resist tyranny.

Orwell correctly predicted, in a letter to Mulk Raj Anand in the mid-1940s, that a whole department of English literature would emerge written by Indians—dismissing attacks on both for using 'the conqueror's language'—and that it would become like American literature, a major subject in itself, now borne out by writers like Rushdie, Mistry, Naipaul, Seth, Roy, and others.

The Spanish republican government elected in 1936 was broadly secular, left-leaning, critical of the church's economic power, and supportive of Catalan/Basque nationalism, prompting a military coup organized from Africa by Franco who sought military help from Hitler and Mussolini, which is what made it an international cause.

Stalin refused to believe the accounts when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, one of the stranger moments in history.

Despite government growing bigger every few years in the US and Europe, it is remarkable how much freedom has been preserved, suggesting the worst fears about state expansion are not yet realized.