Orwell in Spain [antikvár]

IntroductionThe grandeur of George Orwell, in our store of moral and intellectual memory, is to be found partly in his very lack of grandeur. He is remembered, with different and varying degrees of distinctness, as the man who confronted three of the great crises of the twentieth century and got all three of them, so to speak, 'right'. He was right, earlier than most, about imperialism, viewing it as an unjust and unjustifiable form of rule, and also as a cause of war. He was right, early and often, about the menace presented by Fascism and National Socialism, not just to the peace of the world but to the very idea of civilization. And he was right about Stalinism, about the great and the small temptations that it offered to certain kinds of intellectual, and about the monstrous consequences that would ensue from that nightmarish sleep of reason.He brought off this triple achievement, furthermore, in his lowly capacity as an impoverished freelance journalist and amateur novelist. He had no resources beyond his own, he enjoyed the backing of no party or organization or big newspaper, let alone any department of state. Much ofhis energy was dissipated in the simple struggle to get published, or in the banal effort to meet a quotidian schedule of bills and deadlines. He had no university education, no credential nor area of expertise. He had no capital. Yet his unexciting pen-name, drawn from a rather placid English river, is known to millions as a synonym for prescience and integrity, and the adjective 'Orwellian' is understood widely and - this has its significance - ambivalently. To describe a situation as 'Orwellian' is to announce dystopia: the triumph of force and sadism and demagogy over humanism. To call a person 'Orwellian' is to summon the latent ability of an individual to resist such triumphs, or at least to see through them and call them by their right names.