
Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell
Abradacamera2
YouTube Description
I took this from another youtube channel, improved the sound considerably because it was hard to listen to in its original form and re-posted it. Great stuff from the much missed Hitch.
Claims (29)
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'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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Stalin refused to believe the accounts when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, one of the stranger moments in history.