Why Orwell Matters
by Christopher Hitchens
Basic Books

In the past few years, columnist Christopher Hitchens has made himself into something of a one-man, iconoclastic cottage industry. The smashing of sacred cows — often using sound, well-reasoned argument, lofty language, and a ferocious, often brutal debating technique — has become his stock in trade, regardless of where he fits in the political spectrum. A Trotskyist early on, then a maverick leftist and finally a secularly humanist, general pain in the ass, "Hitch," as he is ubiquitously known, has raised the ire of, among others, Martin Amis, Noam Chomsky, Sidney Blumenthal, Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Susan Sontag and his former employers at The Nation, from which he left recently over his views on Sept. 11 and the war on terrorism. He has manned the intellectual barricades against his detractors for almost his entire career, constantly explaining and defending seemingly anachronous beliefs that, properly reasoned, may make perfect sense — at least to their author.

Now, here's the kicker: After 20 years of tweaking noses, bruising egos and slowing killing his lungs with Rothmans cigarettes, Hitch might, just might, have found someone on this earth he can agree with almost 100 percent. A dead man, but someone to agree with nonetheless.

That man, of course, is George Orwell, the avowed socialist who hated communism, the anti-colonialist who fought his inner loathing of native peoples, the anti-fascist who refused to supplant one dictator (Hitler) for another (Stalin), the lover of liberty who fought (sometimes unsuccessfully) his prejudices against Jews, women, homosexuals and vegetarians, to name a few. For Hitchens, Orwell correctly understood the "three great subjects of the twentieth century — imperialism, fascism and Stalinism," thus destroying bridges on all sides and standing at the self-made barricades of secular justice and liberty.

"Why Orwell Matters," Hitchens' latest work, stands as the latest weapon that the author fires at the establishment. Academic musket in hand, he stands ready to tear down detractors and revisionists left and right in a point-by-point defense of Orwell's literary legacy. Taken in light of the author's own battles with the literati, it is difficult to separate the author from his subject. In reading Hitchens' defense of Orwell as a prescient author both of and beyond his times, one gets a strange feeling that the author is also defending himself in the process. His cig-sotten hand raises toward his opponents and exclaims in academic terms that Orwell, like Hitchens, suffers slings and arrows toward exposing greater truth.

The book is most characteristic of the author in three areas: defending Orwell against leftist critique, again defending him against rightist critique and addressing the issue of "the list," an allegation that in the mid- to late 1940s Orwell reported a blacklist of communist "fellow-travelers" and other subversives to the Information Research Department (IRD) of the British Foreign Office. Although each is borne out of thorough scholarly research in their own right, these chapters carry enough of the author's own academically pugnacious style to picture Orwell and Hitch side by side mowing down detractors with whiffs of grapeshot.

The weapon of choice is not a new one to fans of the author, a combination of language and massive volume of supporting knowledge. In the use of language, Hitchens takes the arguments of selected Orwell detractors and turns them on their heads. In one glaringly obvious example, Hitchens cites a quotation by Salman Rushdie which, in turn, quotes two separate Orwell essays stating that essentially Orwell proposes "the quietest option, the exhortation to submit to events." According to the author, Rushdie commits a grave error in attributing words intended in the third-person as the author's words. (An independent inspection of the quoted works "Inside the Whale" and "Politics and the English Language" confirm Hitchens' findings.)

His damnation of the right is no less scathing. Hitchens almost takes it as a personal offense that capitalists, right-wing theorists and neo-conservatives have taken Orwell as their own, simply because of his stance against Soviet Communism, especially in coining the term "cold war." Norman Podhoretz, among others, gets the sharp end of Hitchens' pen. Citing an oft-quoted essay in conservative circles, Hitchens tears down the notion that if Orwell were alive in the real-time 1984, he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley. Once again, as in the Rushdie example, Podhoretz stands incapable of quoting Orwell correctly, as well as praising what have been ostensibly his weakest points (mostly his "ill-natured remarks on homosexuals").

The shots continue as he assails the infamous "list," again using language to his advantage. Hitchens notes a difference of degree between the accusation and the alleged truth. In this case the "list" was a "parlour game" played by Orwell and his friend Richard Rees to guess which public figures would sell out if Britain were occupied or under a dictatorship. This and some cursory conversations with people in the BBC and a former lover who happened to work for the IRD, according to Hitchens, do not constitute naming names and selling out the European Left.

In each of the above cases, what is most striking are the similarities in style and technique between the defenses of Orwell's ideas and similar defenses of Hitchens' own.

In articles supporting his stance on Iraq, Hitchens uses turns of phrase, as in both the specificity or vagueness in the term "Anti-American," or voluminous knowledge of minutiae, as in describing the fragility of Saddam Hussein's regime. He has been no less ferocious in defending Orwell's ideas as he has his own. In recent debates showcasing his book, Hitchens takes on all comers, almost demanding the audience to accept that the beliefs of Hitchens and Orwell are one in the same, leaving a wake of bruised egos and shocked academes in the process. Although Orwell did have inner prejudices even Hitchens acknowledges as his weak points, there is enough commonality between Hitchens and Orwell in ideology and style, although Orwell probably never publicly destroyed a colleague in a debate [LINK]. One can sense this particular Hitchens essay is like any other Hitchens essay, that passages defending Orwell will very much be seen in the near future in works on Salon or Vanity Fair.

The question remains: does Hitch successfully defend himself through defending Orwell? He certainly does. There exists an aura of oneness between them, Hitch the arrogant, snarling iconoclast willing to gore his own mother in his search for the truth, Orwell the lanky, sickly journalist who saw the worst in the political labels of his era and eschewed them towards the truth. This doesn't mean that "Why Orwell Matters" does not find fault in its subject. But there is enough in common, according to the author, that merits giving Christopher Hitchens a genuine role model.

— Luciano D'Orazio (loudogs1@aol.com)