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Desmond Macnamara
Review
Why Orwell Matters
By Christopher Hitchens
Reviewed by
Desmond Macnamara
t might be best, before considering this book, to read something
Christopher Hitchens wrote earlier this spring as the Iraq invasion loomed:
There will be no war. There will be a fairly brief
and ruthless military intervention. The President
will give an order. The attack will be rapid,
accurate and dazzling. It will be greeted by the
majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation”
Possibly Hitchens makes no claim as a military strategist, though some might
feel that such a dubious prophecy might call into question his attempt at an
appraisal of George Orwell’s inner beliefs and motives. One can only imagine
what Orwell would say about current events, but it is difficult to imagine
Orwell backing Hitchens, Bush and Blair in that affair. Orwell died in 1950
and most of his celebrated works were based on events leading to the brink of
the Cold War—a very different era from present days of woe. Eric Arthur
Blair (George Orwell) came from a family of British colonial civil servants
“serving” in Bengal (his father worked for the Opium Department of the
government of India) in the unanticipated twilight of the empire, an
institution that started to bleed steadily after the 1916 uprising in Dublin.
As a child, young Blair, as was the custom, was shipped home from India to
England (not Scotland, as his name suggests: Perthsire is full of Blairs: Blair
Gowrie, Blair Athol and so forth) for an education. He very properly was
installed in a public school, those expensive and very unpublic forcing-beds
of empire and Latin verbs, where the White Man’s Burden was laid on the
shoulders of the whitest of white flannels on the cricket field. The best
educated (or the best connected) formed the administration for successive
governments which presided over palm and pine.
Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003