From: "Michael Dawson -PSU" <mdawson at pdx.edu> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Coming back to the list with... historical
ephemera, or something My view = Hitchens is right about Orwell, despite Orwell's flaws in personal and political life. He had a nose for freedom, a deep honesty about both the need for and difficulty of socialism, and he was a great essayist. The Road to Wigan Pier is a tour-de-force, as is Homage to Catalonia. If left social scientists had followed Orwells' lead and adhered to his six rules of thumb for good writing, the left would be immensely stronger today.
But apart from all this, I would say that to understand him politically one simply has to be well acquainted with the Spanish civil war. Orwell's conversion to ultra-leftism occurred in a war which is significant because it was probably the last time that the Stalinists seriously had the ultra-left under the hammer in the West and were able to choke off any possibility of revolution. Later, say in May '68, they still played a reactionary role by not coming to the party (pun!), but the days in which these were major players were already numbered back then. Orwell's utter disillusionment with official communism in 1936/37 meant that he wandered off into the political wilderness so to speak. His later books like 1984 and Animal Farm really reflect his bitterness born in Spain and no doubt a lack of alternative politics in his time. I think he would have been a more hopeful man today than he was then. One should not underestimate the degree of hatred that was bred within the Republican ranks during the civil war. Tahir