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-- Shane
Orwell and Us The battle over George Orwell's legacy. by David Brooks 09/23/2002, Volume 008, Issue 02
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/653xor lj.asp>
Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens Basic, 208 pp., $24
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But for Orwell to really matter today, he can't just be some exemplar of abstract virtue or an academic semiotician before his time. He has to address the main issues of our day. And it is here that Hitchens fails to persuade. The three great issues of the twentieth century were imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism--and Orwell was right on all of them, Hitchens argues, carving out a principled anti-tyrannical leftism (a tradition that Hitchens claims to carry on).
To hold this ground, Hitchens must defend Orwell from those he sees as Orwell's enemies on the left and Orwell's co-opters on the right. Hitchens meticulously rebuts the attacks on Orwell from the likes of the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson and the culture-studies guru Raymond Williams, who despise Orwell because he gave ammunition to the anti-Communist enemy. Then Hitchens turns around and tries to show that Orwell would not have become a neoconservative.
But to reenter these debates is really to go into an intellectual-history museum. E.P. Thompson may have believed that Orwell was an apologist for quietism. Raymond Williams may have regarded Orwell as hopelessly bourgeois. But aside from a few dozen professors, does anybody really think Orwell still needs defending from these ideological dinosaurs? And as for the argument over whether or not Orwell would have ended up at the Hoover Institution, who cares? Orwell was valuable as long as the Soviet Union was around, but few people cite Orwell to buttress their arguments on, say, whether we should seek regime change in Iraq. The Orwell tug of war is over.
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ORWELL WAS PERCEPTIVE about how colonial domination infects both the colonizers and the colonized. But if you see today's world through the prism of colonialism, as some on the left still do, you find yourself in a make-believe world in which Islamic Jihad is an anti-imperialist uprising, the United States poses a greater threat than Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and Arab and African dictators are somehow the legitimate manifestations of their indigenous cultures. Orwell is not to blame. He didn't face the problems we face. Queen Victoria's colonialism was nothing like the democratic imperialism America practices in Serbia and Afghanistan. Islamic fascism is not quite the same as Italian fascism.
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Certainly there is interest in what motivates the Islamic extremists. But there aren't many pro-Islamist intellectuals writing in the New York Review of Books. No one thinks Islamists are heralding a glorious future or are the chief influence on the world. Today it is how you feel about the United States that determines whether or not you think America should play an assertive and, if necessary, unilateral role around the world.
Orwell would matter if he had written about American idealism, America's sense of mission, mass affluence, the triumph of the market mentality, American history, or Pax Americana. But while he seems to have had a general disdain for American culture--and championed, in a vague way, European socialist unity as a way to counterbalance American hegemony--he never turned his full attention to this country and its ideas.
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