Orwell arrived home from Spain in June of 1937. In April 1938, Homage to Catalonia was published.

It was the first book of Orwell’s which spoke extensively about media manipulation, as well as the first to express a negative attitude towards the Soviet Union (the latter point beginning a rift between Orwell and his publisher, Victor Gollancz, who rejected Homage to Catalonia due to his own Soviet sympathies). It was also the first to signal a more pessimistic outlook of the future. Consider this paragraph from Looking Back on the Spanish War, written in 1942 and published in 1943:

“[I often have] the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world… How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and… [a] Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated… even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.”

Sound familiar? Even the terminology Orwell uses is similar to the kind that he used in his final and most famous novel. Let’s move on to the next paragraph:

“I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously colored what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable… It is just this common basis of agreement… that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists… The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader; or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five.”

Interesting. Clearly, Orwell never gave up on this idea—as we will see, it was the one which remained on the forefront of his mind even on his deathbed. He was terrified. Not of war—he’d seen war and survived it. What he was scared of was a totalitarian future that would destroy not only freedom, but truth.

Things were turning sour in Orwell’s personal life, too. Homage to Catalonia was a commercial flop, only selling about a thousand copies in its first year of publication. He was still recovering from his near-fatal injury, which quite understandably took its toll on him. In 1939, he suffered a severe bout of tuberculosis which necessitated a months-long recovery, during which time he wrote what might be the most pessimistic book of his bibliography: Coming Up for Air. The book is about modernity, the inevitability of change, and the rather depressing, mass-produced world that was beginning to take shape in England.

It was understandable that Orwell’s attitude was bleak. In many ways, it mirrored the world around him. In addition to his own ill health, Europe was on the brink of war—World War II would break out in September of 1939, just three months after Coming Up for Air’s publication. In April, two months before the book came out, the Republican side was defeated in Spain, ushering in a dictatorship under Francisco Franco that would last for decades.

His wife Eileen took a job with the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London—a job which would also serve as fodder for Nineteen Eighty-Four, but which she described as exceptionally dull. The job took its toll on Eileen, if not because of the duties itself then because of the travel it required. She stayed with her family in London during the week for work, and took a several-hour trip home every other week to see her husband. Meanwhile, she was suffering from bouts of lethargy and uterine bleeding, a condition which would only continue to get worse.

Then the war came. At first, Orwell wanted to fight for the British Armed Forces, but was turned away due to his own poor health. Eager to contribute to the war effort, he joined the Home Guard, a volunteer militia consisting of about a million and a half to two million recruits, mostly a mixture of boys who were too young to enlist in the army and older men deemed unfit for service. The point of the Home Guard was to provide an extra layer of protection for local areas, and Orwell described their responsibilities as follows:

“Apart from training, the Home Guard relieves the army of some of its routine patrols, pickets on buildings, etc. and does a certain amount of ARP [Air Raid Precautions] work… The tactical idea is not so much to defeat an invader as to hold him up till the regular troops can get at him.”

Orwell contributed to this effort, and meanwhile, he did a lot of writing. He wrote his essay collection Inside the Whale and his famous three-part essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. During this time he also began writing “London Letters” to the American left-wing publication Partisan Review, in which he provided updates about the war as it looked in England.

The war only strengthened Orwell’s socialist sympathies. To him, the war was a turning point—the moment when the people of Britain would either stand strong and implement a democratic socialist future, or the moment when the country would succumb to totalitarianism. His reasoning was threefold:

1. The military efficiency of the German and Soviet armies proved that planned economies worked better than unplanned economies, particularly for warmaking, and if Britain were to defeat Hitler, they would have to do it by implementing a planned economy.

2. There were two types of planned economies—socialism and fascism—and socialism was the more desirable one of the two.

3. The war (and particularly the emergence of the Home Guard) actually brought about the proper conditions for a socialist revolution in England.

In some ways, the outcomes he expected were threefold, too. Following Orwell’s reasoning, the only possibilities for England at the end of the war would be that the country would remain independent by becoming socialist, remain independent by becoming fascist, or get taken over by the Nazis and become fascist.

None of these outcomes happened, although England did arguably move towards a planned economy—something we will touch on later. For now, let’s look at why Orwell thought what he did, contained in the third section of The Lion and the Unicorn: “The English Revolution.”

Here’s a rather eloquent description of the problem (i.e. the British aristocracy devoling into a ‘functionless class’ and remaining blissfully ignorant of it):

“The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable… For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich”… They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.

By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions were aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end… For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them – into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible.”

It’s a pretty level-headed argument. The aristocracy had achieved its parasitic position not due to malice, but willful stupidity. He didn’t view this class with hatred, although he did want to see them removed from power. Here’s a description of how Orwell thought this could finally change.

"The fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a text-book word into a realizable policy.

The inefficiency of private capitalism has been proved all over Europe. Its injustice has been proved in the East End of London…People who at any other time would cling like glue to their miserable scraps of privilege, will surrender them fast enough when their country is in danger. War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual. It is only because they are aware of this that men will die on the field of battle. At this moment it is not so much a question of surrendering life as of surrendering leisure, comfort, economic liberty, social prestige. There are very few people England who really want to see their country conquered by Germany. If it can be made clear that defeating Hitler means wiping out class privilege, the great mass of middling people, the £6 a week to £2,000 a year class, will probably be on our side.”

In short, Orwell thought that the aristocracy’s jig was up and that a the war could be used as a propaganda tool to push the masses towards socialism. He believed a revolution was coming, and as he outlined in Part II of The Lion and the Unicorn, “Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting, it means a fundamental shift of power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place.”

Although he did not think bloodshed was inevitable, he did think it was justified, and even implied the revolutionary potential of the Home Guard. Consider this line from his August 1941 letter to Partisan Review:

“Somewhere near a million British working men now have rifles in their bedrooms and don’t in the least wish to give them up. The possibilities contained in that fact hardly need pointing out.”

Just how far was he willing to take this?

Revolutionary sympathies and all, Orwell’s writings during this period suggest a deep love for England. Is it to be believed? He certainly had motive for feigning patriotism to achieve his political motives.

In August 1941, Orwell took a job with the BBC disseminating war propaganda to Indian listeners. He had this to say about the BBC in his April 1941 London Letter, before he got the job:

"I believe that the BBC, in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. It is generally regarded here as more reliable than the press.”

Although he has here admitted the “stupidity of its foreign propaganda,” his defense of the BBC’s truthfulness is surprising considering his position after spending some time working for them. Consider this excerpt from his “War-Time Diary,” written just under a year later in March of 1942:

“I have now been in the BBC about 6 months. Shall remain in it if the political changes I foresee come off, otherwise probably not. Its atmosphere is something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless. Our radio strategy is even more hopeless than our military strategy. Nevertheless one rapidly becomes propaganda-minded and develps a cunning one did not previously have. E.g. I am regularly alleging in all my newsletters that the Japanese are plotting to attack Russia. I don’t believe this to be so, but the calculation is:
If the Japanese do attack Russia, we can then say “I told you so.”
If the Russians attack first, we can, having built up the picture of a Japanese plot beforehand, pretend it was the Japanese who started it.
If no war breaks out after all, we can claim that it is because the Japanese are too frightened of Russia.
All propaganda is lies, even if one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.”

Strange, right? Here we have George Orwell, heralded defender of truth, admitting in his personal journal to skillfully lying in order to manipulate the Indian masses. I get the sense that he considered himself a kind of ‘sleeper-agent’ in the BBC, the one benevolent propagandist in a sea of capitalist cronies. Consider this passage from a letter Orwell wrote to the writer George Woodcock in December of 1942:

“As to the ethics of [broadcasting] & in general letting oneself be used by the British governing class. It’s of little value to argue [about] it, it is chiefly a question of whether one considers it more important to down the Nazis first or whether one believes doing this is meaningless unless one achieves one’s own revolution first. But for heaven’s sake don’t think I don’t see how they are using me. A subsidiary point is that one can’t effectively remain outside the war & by working inside an institution like the BBC one can perhaps deodorise it to some small extent. I doubt whether I shall stay in this job very much longer, but while here I consider I have kept our propaganda slightly less digusting than it might otherwise have been.”

Clearly he had no sympathy for his bosses. But consider this passage, also from his diary, written in June of the same year:

“The thing that strikes one in the BBC—and it is evidently the same in various of the other departments—is not so much the moral squalor and the ultimate futility of what we are doing, as the feeling of frustration, the impossibility of getting anything done, even any successful piece of scoundrelism. Our policy is so ill-defined, the disorganization is so great, there are so many changes of plan and the fear and hatred of intelligence are so all-percading, that one cannot plan any sort of wireless campaign whatever… One is constantly putting sheer rubbish on the airt because of haaving talks which sound too intelligent cancelled at the last moment… But even when one manages to get something fairly good on the air one is weighed down by the knowledge that hardly anybody is listening… It has come out recently that (two years after the Empire service was started) plenty of Indians with shortwave sets don’t even know that the BBC broadcasts to India.”

Orwell was morally opposed to the job, but the real reason he hated it was not because what he was doing was wrong, but because it was pointless.

He left the position in 1943 to become a literary editor for the left-wing magazine Tribune. It was a better fit for him, and the two years that he held this job were some of his most prolific. It was in this period that he penned some of his most reputable works, namely Animal Farm—the first of two novels which would become his legacy.

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All quotes in this chapter are from Homage to Catalonia (1938).

"I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do."

This was George Orwell’s reasoning for going to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. It’s the same reason my grandfather cited for why he decided to pack up at the age of eighteen and enlist in the navy during World War II. “It was what you did.” There didn’t seem to be any other option.

George Orwell’s choice to fight for a revolutionary militia in a foreign war was largely influenced by the media. He’d read a lot of newspaper articles (and talked to a lot of people who had also read a lot of newspaper articles) about what was happening in Spain—about how Francisco Franco, the fascist usurper, had forced himself into power, ousting an elected left-leaning government (all true), and how the war that was happening in Spain was a war between good and bad, freedom and oppression (a viewpoint that is far more complicated).

In reality, while the young men who Orwell was fighting alongside were certainly earnest, the greater war was between self-interest and other, differently-branded self-interest. Orwell would not learn this until he was already there, living a life-altering experience that would have him cold and hungry in trenches on the Aragon front, shot in the neck by a sniper, and pursued by police officers as a political criminal.

The Orwell that we know of today—the unorthodox socialist, the intense skeptic, the guy who died an unbridled optimist while simultaneously outlining all of the problems that plague the world until this day—was conceived during the Spanish Civil War. He went into the war naively politically-motivated, and he left with his characteristic distrust of media, propaganda, and government.

Why? In order to answer this question, we need to take a look at what happened.

Orwell went to Spain in December of 1936. He was thirty-three years old, had just finished writing The Road to Wigan Pier (although it wouldn’t be published until March 1937). And while he had certainly had an interesting set of experiences—growing up amongst English upper-class society, enforcing the law in British Burma, then living in the slums of Paris, the streets of London, and shadowing the coal miners of Northern England is certianly not the makings of a sheltered life—up until this point his activism had been somewhat one-dimensional. He was a socialist (albeit a very critical socialist), but, despite being very critical of the party, he hadn’t yet conceived of the idea that despots might hide their political self-interest under the guise of righteousness. He was an idealist; in many ways, he saw the world in black-and-white.

This changed in Spain. When Orwell first arrived in Barcelona, he had wanted to fight with the anarchists (a political movement that he had identified with up until his sympathy towards socialism, which began sometime around the writing of The Road to Wigan Pier). He wound up fighting for the socialist POUM militia (Partido Oberero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) largely due to circumstance:

“As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists; if one became a member of the I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party] one was almost bound to join the P.O.U.M., with which the I.L.P. was affiliated.”

Although relatively widespread in influence for its size, the POUM was a relatively small organization. The militia was made up almost entirely of untrained boys, many of whom had never held a weapon before in their lives. Orwell had spent a great deal of his time during the war badly clothed, and lacking food, weapons, and other supplies. There were other parties which dwarfed the POUM in number, wealth, and influence. The Soviet-backed Communists, for example, were a much larger and more sophisticated group.

At this point, you might be asking yourself what Russia has to do with any of this, and the answer, basically, is that the Soviet Union wanted to expand its influence. Having influence over a socialist Spain would be very good for the Soviet Union, while a fascist Spain might cause problems.

Of course, workers’ control would also have been pretty bad for the Soviet Union, whose objective was power, so they eventually attempted to stamp out the more revolutionary militias such as the POUM (but more on that later).

The shift in attitude during the war from revolutionary to ordinary, pre-revolutionary attitudes actually begs comparison to Orwell’s novel Animal Farm. Note the feeling that Orwell witnessed at the beginning of his time in Spain:

“Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and reedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.”

Barcelona at the start of the war took on an entirely revolutionary character. There were no hierarchical distinctions during this period. The upper-class did not feign superiority over the lower classes as they normally did—in fact, they did their best to disguise their wealth so as not to draw attention to themselves. There were no honorifics among the military—commanders and footsoldiers alike addressed one another by the term ‘comrade.’

This faded quickly. Soon, the elites were comfortable to brandish their wealth around Barcelona again, and ranks within armies returned. A major reason this happened is because of the Soviet influence over the Republican side.

“Everyone who has made two visits, at intervals of months, to Barcelona during the war has remarked upon the extraordinary changes that took place in it… the thing they said was always the same: that the revolutionary atmosphere had vanished.”

"The Communists stood for discipline, centralized control, and the militarization of the trade unions; roughly speaking, for turning the war into an ordinary war instead of a revolutionary war.”

Could this be why Orwell was so hostile towards the Soviet Union? Perhaps. Regardless, it can’t be denied that the trajectory of the revolutionary aspects of the Spanish Civil War—from near-complete workers’ control to the pre-war status quo merely brandishing the same name—is almost identical to the plot of Animal Farm. The only thing missing is the propaganda tactics (the origins of which we will examine in later chapters).

Eventually, Communist influence got so strong that they succeeded in suppressing the POUM. The communists gained control of the police force and outlawed any association with the organization. POUM leaders (including ones that Orwell served under) were put in jail. Orwell and his wife were targeted as political criminals, and just narrowly escaped arrest by using fake documentation to flee the country.

Oh, and shortly before this Orwell was shot in the neck—an experience he likened to “being at the centre of an explosion”—and was still recovering his ability to speak.

In short, it was a perilous time—a near-death experience followed by near-arrest, followed by, well, not much at all:

“Down here in the milder zones of the world, people are still sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

Much of England was blissfully unaware of how perilous the global political landscape had become, but Orwell would never again be swayed by such willful ignorance (and while World War II would prove his comment “till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs” to be quite prophetic, once again, his statement rings true in much of the Western world).

Nevertheless, the most obvious effects of the war were not his heightened sense of realism—although learning the gravity of such conflicts was certainly a result—but his distrust of media and propaganda. During his time in Spain, Orwell witnessed many disturbing things, but one of the things that disturbed him most was the way that the media distorted the truth, turning small conflicts into devastating battles and glossing over tragedies as it suited their narrative:

“One of the horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

“The Spanish war has probably produced as much lies as truth; it is difficult enough even to discover what is happening within a few hundred yards of you, but much more difficult to discover what is happening in the whole country.”

“I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”

The last quote is by far the most powerful. Orwell had witnessed firsthand a truth that many of us know to be evident today but that, back then, was relatively unknown—that the people who report the news have not actually witnessed the news, that their words are tailor-made to fit an agenda, and that you can read hundreds of newspaper articles and still never really know the truth.

When Orwell returns to England, he will take a job as a newscaster for the BBC, reporting to people in India the exact type of tailor-made propaganda that he loathes. For now, though, he is safe at home, recovering from a bullet wound and still kind of shocked as to just how boring ordinary life is compared to the exciting travesties of battle.

It’s kind of ironic. When reading Homage to Catalonia, the overwhelming feeling is boredom. Orwell spent most of his time during the war sitting in trenches waiting for something to happen, hungry and cold and withdrawing from tobacco, which was always in short supply. However, hindsight is a powerful thing, and the things he witnessed that were most egregious surely seemed to be the ones that stuck with him the most.

Perhaps this is the same for us as readers? Regardless, we will be talking much more about the themes of media manipulation and political disillusionment in later chapters. Stay tuned.

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Chapter Seven:

Take a moment and pat yourself on the back—you’ve made it through the boring stuff.1

Eric Arthur Blair is back on the European continent, and he has taken to the streets of Paris and London without a dollar in his pocket to try to make it as a writer.

To clarify, he wasn’t poor. He could’ve gone home to his modest but dignified life and gotten a job doing just about anything. His decision to live amongst the lower classes was an endeavor of investigative journalism, driven by a desire to write about and truly understand poverty.

Going by the name “P.S. Burton,” he spent nights in spikes, temporary shelters which would house a person for a night or two at a time before sending them elsewhere. He befriended professional ‘vagrants,’ nomadic people who spent their days traveling from one spike to another, making a mental map of every place they could get a free meal along the way.

He had a much easier time blending in than one would expect for someone with an Eton-educated accent that outed him as a ‘gentleman’ immediately. He remarked that once a person reached the very bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, the playing field was virtually wiped clean. Among ‘tramps,’ traditional markers of social classes basically ceased to have any meaning. No one cared where you were born or how you got there; all that mattered was that you were down on your luck. Blair began this journey as a reaction to the gross inequality he witnessed in Burma. In a way, he got exactly what he wanted.

He picked hops with migrant laborers. He went to Paris and experienced the life of a restaurant ‘plongeur,’ or dishwasher (a brutal occupation with gruelingly long hours, but which at the very least allowed him to afford a cramped, filthy room at a cheap boarding-house). His experiences during this time made their way into a number of his books, most notably Down and Out in Paris and London.

Up to this point, Eric Blair hadn’t published much. He’d written articles for British and French periodicals, he’d published book reviews and even the occasional poem. Some of these articles covered his experience ‘going native’ among the lower classes. He wrote a piece about migrant labor (in fact, he journaled his entire hop-picking experience, which was not published at the time but can now be found in select volumes of Orwell’s collected works). His essay “The Spike” (about, as the title suggests, the spike) was his first piece published in the English language, and I’d highly recommend reading it. By this point he had also begun writing about topics that would remain important to him throughout his career, namely censorship, class struggles, unemployment, and the exploitative nature of imperialism. 

However, it was five years after Blair hit the streets in search of writing material before his first book hit the shelves. That book, of course, was Down and Out in Paris and London, a fictionalized account of Blair’s experiences.

The publication of Down and Out was a turning point for a number of reasons. Blair had ended his bout of elective poverty and began a job (which he didn’t enjoy very much) as a teacher at a private high school. Down and Out in Paris and London marked the beginning of his relationship with Victor Gollancz, the owner of the publishing company “The Left Book Club,”which would go on to publish a number of his earlier works. Most notably, though, this was the time when he adopted the alias “George Orwell.”

Although he had published all of his previous articles under the name Eric Blair, his decision to publish Down and Out in Paris and London under a pseudonym was driven by an artistic insecurity that would follow him throughout his writing career. He didn’t think the book was any good, and didn’t want it to be tied to his identity permanently.

Ironically, the name ‘George Orwell’ became just as much a part of his identity as Eric Blair—virtually all friends he made in the latter half of his life referred to him by his pseudonym. Nevertheless, one might argue that he felt more comfortable hiding his true identity behind a mask that he could theoretically take on and off at will.

It’s interesting to think about. The man who we know as George Orwell could have been known to us as something very different. This is perfectly captured in this excerpt from a letter he sent to his literary agent, Leonard Moore, in 1932:

As to a pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc is P.S. Burton, but if you don’t think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about

Kenneth Miles,
George Orwell,
H. Lewis Allways.

I rather favour George Orwell.

Named after the River Orwell, which Blair loved, he reportedly chose the name because it sounded very “English.” Despite his criticisms of British imperialism and class stratification, he was a patriot (something we will discuss in detail later).

By the time Down and Out was published, he already had another novel in the works: A Clergyman’s Daughter, a semi-autobiographical piece which combined his experiences ‘tramping,’ hop-picking, and teaching. The book is about a young woman who suffers a bout of amnesia, wakes up on the streets of London, and winds up doing all of these things. Although Orwell (predictably) was never satisfied with the book and at one point asked that it not be reprinted after his death, I really enjoyed it.

Of course, the man formerly known as Eric Blair couldn’t settle into ordinary lower-upper-middle-class life for long. He didn’t enjoy teaching. I don’t think he enjoyed doing anything for an extended period of time. In 1936, he ventured into the unknown again. This time, he was sent by his publisher, Victor Gollancz, to report on the unemployed and impoverished in Northern England.

This project eventually became The Road to Wigan Pier. It is arguably one of Orwell’s best works, and it marked the first time he wrote extensively about socialism (his political beliefs had hitherto been closer to anarchism). Wigan Pier solidified Orwell’s reputation as a rebel. The Left Book Club was a socialist publishing company, and Gollancz had commissioned the book with the expectation that it would be favorable to the socialist party. However, the book that Orwell returned with was harshly critical of socialism as it existed in England.

While we previously touched on and will certainly revisit the thematic significance of The Road to Wigan Pier, from a biographical standpoint, his time among the coal miners and the unemployed of Northern England was essentially another example of his unwavering commitment to good journalism.

The next major shift in his life would happen later that same year, when George Orwell traveled to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

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Chapter Six:

Here we are. Burmese Days: the title of George Orwell’s first novel, and an apt nickname for the period of Eric Arthur Blair’s life that began after his graduation from Eton.

Unlike most Etonians at the time (and presumably much to the chagrin of the admissions people who awarded him a generous scholarship), young Eric Arthur Blair did not attend a university. Instead, he followed in his family’s imperial footsteps and joined the Imperial Police Force in Burma (now Myanmar) at the age of nineteen.

He hated it. He stayed in Burma for five years before quitting the police force and returning to England to become a writer.

Blair didn’t do much writing while he was in Burma. He penned a few poems here and there which have faded into obscurity. However, he wrote a fair amount about this period of his life afterwards.

In fact, one of the first articles Blair ever published was his 1928 essay, “How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burma,” written in a French newspaper during his time living in Paris. The article was immensely critical of the British occupation of Burma. Blair describes the English rule of Burma as despotism hidden behind “a mask of democracy.” Burma was firmly under Birtish control (by threat of violence, if necessary), and top positions in Burma were all occupied by Englishmen. However, other, lesser positions—lower-level magistrates, low-ranked police officers, government employees, and civil servants—were all held by Burmese people.

This led to a strange caste system in which the English all ranked firmly at the top, followed by a sect of Burmese who were loyal to the English because the English despots actually raised their standard of living. They got rich, comparatively speaking, by playing along with the exploitative imperialist system

George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days depicts this. It is one of those novels where every single character is loathsome and pathetic at the same time. Englishmen are ugly and sex-deprived, clinging to the small level of prestige associated with their title. Burmese magistrates and other lowly officials who have enriched themselves within the imperial system engage in shady deals and slimy, back-stabbing plots.

It’s a nuanced book which describes a system that has evolved in such a way that it’s not possible for anyone within it to be a ‘good person.’ If you’re interested, give it a read, but it can be long and kind of tedious, so if you’re not interested, an excerpt from a conversation between John Flory, a ‘Bolshie’ English timber merchant, and his friend Dr. Veraswami, a Burmese man who is sympathetic to the English to a naive degree, should do the trick:

““My dear doctor,” said Flory. “how can you make out that we are in this country for any purpose ecept to steal? It’s so simple. The official holds the Burman down while the business man goes through his pockets. Do you suppose my firm, for instance, could get its timber contracts if the country weren’t in the hands of the British? Or the other timber firms, or the oil companies, or the miners and planters and traders? How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn’t the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English—or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.””

“My friend, it is pathetic to me to hear you talk so. It is truly pathetic. You say you are here to trade? Of course you are. Could the Burmese trade for themselves? Can they make machinery, ships, railways, roads? They are helpless without you. What would happen to the Burmese forests if the English were not here? They would be sold immediately to the Japanese, who would gut them and ruin them. Instead of which, in your hands, actually they are improved. And while your business men develop the resources of our country, your officials are civilizing us, elevating us to their level, from pure public spirit. It is a magnificent record of self-sacrifice.”

“Bosh, my dear doctor. We teach the young men to drink whisky and play football, I admit, but precious little else. Look at our schools—factories for cheap clerks. We’ve never taught a single useful manual trade to the Indians. We daren’t; frightened of the competition in industry. We’ve even crushed various industries. Where are the Indian muslins now? Back in the ‘forties or thereabouts they were building seagoing ships in India, and manning them as well. Now you couldn’t build a seaworthy fishing boat there. In the eighteenth century the Indian cast guns that were at any rate up to the European standard. Now, after we’ve been in India a hundred and fifty years, you can’t make so much as a brass cartridge case in the whole continent.”

It’s a strange dilemma, furthered even more by the fact that in a world that was becoming increasingly globalized and ruled by totalitarians and despots, a real case could be made for the fact that it was simply impossible for countries like Burma to exist on their own anymore.

Orwell addresses this problem in his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” which outlines his ideal vision for socialism in England and the future of the British empire. He speaks greatly on the subject of the British occupation of India (with the addendum that “what applies to India applies, mutatis mutandis, to Burma, Malaya and most of [Britain’s"] African possessions”).

Indian independence didn’t seem to be an option for Orwell. His position was that India was not at the moment capable of defending or even feeding itself, and that, if Britain granted it sovereignty, it would merely be gobbled up by some other imperialist state which would govern far less efficiently than Britain:

A complete severance of the two countries would be a disaster for India no less than for England. Intelligent Indians know this. As things are at present, India not only cannot defend itself, it is hardly even capable of feeding itself. The whole administration of the country depends on a framework of experts (engineers, forest officers, railwaymen, soldiers, doctors) who are predominantly English and could not be replaced within five or ten years. Moreover, English is the chief lingua franca and nearly the whole of the Indian intelligentsia is deeply anglicized. Any transference to foreign rule – for if the British marched out of India the Japanese and other powers would immediately march in – would mean an immense dislocation. Neither the Japanese, the Russians, the Germans nor the Italians would be capable of administering India even at the low level of efficiency that is attained by the British. They do not possess the necessary supplies of technical experts or the knowledge of languages and local conditions, and they probably could not win the confidence of indispensable go-betweens such as the Eurasians. If India were simply ‘liberated’, i.e. deprived of British military protection, the first result would be a fresh foreign conquest, and the second a series of enormous famines which would kill millions of people within a few years.

Clearly, Orwell did not consider foreign conquest and famine were not desirable outcomes for India. What was the solution, then?

The one Orwell posed was rather idealist. He spoke of a ‘partnership,’ in which Britain, run by a socialist government, would aid India in the forms of “military protection and technical advice,” while still offering them the option to secede at any time.

Perhaps this would be the moral solution, but of course, as governments typically do not like coughing up money and resources and gaining nothing in return, it did not come to pass.

For our purposes, the point is that this point in Orwell’s life strengthened his disdain for classism and oppression, and sparked his loathing of British imperialism.

He wrote two other narrative essays about his time in Burma (“A Hanging,” written in 1931, and “Shooting an Elephant,” written in 1936), which detail the strange horror he felt about being a police officer upholding a despotism in Burma that he did not believe in.

He only made it five years, after which point he took to the streets of London and Paris to pursue his dream of becoming a writer.

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Chapter Five:

We’ve come a decent way in our Orwellian journey. Climbed the first hill, jumped over the first hurdle. Choose whatever metaphor you’d like. We know why George Orwell was interested in politics, and we know the political cause that he supported.

Now we will examine why—something that we touched on briefly in Chapter Two, but which can only really be understood if we consider the man behind the writing.

Thus, let’s consider this the official beginning of Part II of Breaking Big Brother, which we will tentatively name “The Obligatory Biographical Section.”

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, India.

A variant of this sentence has undoubtedly introduced at least a quarter of all Orwell biographies in existence. If it weren’t so ubiquitous as to render the original author of this sentence completely unknown, it would feel like plagiarism.

However, despite its popularity, the sentence packs a decent punch. It tells us that the name George Orwell is a pseudonym, for one, which already tells us a great deal about Eric Blair’s character.

The year he was born is also important. During this period in history, Europe was in flux. Britain’s unbridled prosperity and years of relative peace were ended by the First World War, which started when Blair was eleven years old and ended when he was fifteen. Britain was declining as a global superpower, and new, more efficient governments were dominating the international landscape. All around was this general feeling that things were getting worse, coupled by a willful ignorance among some members of the upper echelons of society towards any possible change.

The place Blair was born was equally important. Although he spent virtually his entire childhood in England (the Blairs moved back to England in 1904), when Eric Blair was born, his father was working as a civil servant in British Colonial India, overseeing the production of opium which would eventually be sold to China.

His family was what he described as “lower-upper-middle-class.” Although they never had much money, they had status (his great-great grandfather was an English plantation owner and ‘country gentleman’), and the English class system was divided along occupational rather than monetary lines. Orwell explains what this was like in detail in The Road to Wigan Pier:

“People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade…
To belong to this class when you were at the £400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical. You lived, so to speak, at two levels simultaneously. Theoretically you knew all about servants and how to tip them, although in practice you had one, at most, two resident servants. Theoretically you knew how to wear your clothes and how to order a dinner, although in practice you could never afford to go to a decent tailor or a decent restaurant. Theoretically you knew how to shoot and ride, although in practice you had no horses to ride and not an inch of ground to shoot over. It was this that explained the attraction of India (more recently Kenya, Nigeria, etc.) for the lower-upper-middle class. The people who went there as soldiers and officials did not go there to make money, for a soldier or an official does not want money; they went there because in India, with cheap horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it was so easy to play at being a gentleman.”

In other words, Blair was suspended between two worlds. He understood the upper class. He learned the same things, evolved the same prejudices, attended the same schools. However, he was never truly one of them.

Orwell was highly intelligent, and as such, he had access to the finest education. He attended Eton, a famed British ‘public school’ that boasts alumni from the highest levels of the British aristocracy. Before this, young Eric Blair attended St. Cyprian’s, an all-boys preparatory boarding school whose main function was to groom its pupils to eventually attend fancy public schools such as Eton.

There was a blatant caste system in place at this school, and Blair was at the absolute bottom. He was there on a scholarship; his parents would not have been able to afford the tuition otherwise. He was beaten often (something which wealthier students were spared), and was habitually excluded from activities because “his parents couldn’t afford them.” The headmaster and his wife, nicknamed “Sambo” and “Flip,” would often remind him that he was attending St. Cyprian’s on their dime. He described the feeling that this left him with as follows:

“A child accepts the codes of behaviour that are presented to it, even when it breaks them. From the age of eight or even earlier, the consciousness of sin was never far away from me. If I contrived to seem callous and defiant, it was only a thin cover over a mass of shame and dismay. All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude — and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.” (-George Orwell, “Such, Such Were the Joys”)

His last point is the most interesting to me. He reiterated this fact more than once in “Such, Such Were the Joys”:

“It was possible, therefore, to commmit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be something that happened to you… this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good.”

It sounds an awful like the state of affairs in Nineteen Eighty-Four, doesn’t it?

Sex was prohibited at these schools and homosexuality, while taboo, was relatively commonplace (this undoubtedly caused Orwell to go through his life a self-proclaimed prude when it came to sexual matters). There were ‘thought police,’ (i.e. Flip and Sambo). There was a clearly delineated, externally-enforced caste system.

I’m sure some of this has to do with the fact that a school is a microcosm of a society—there are people of all kinds filling a myriad of roles, some more fortunate than others and all just trying to survive. And just like the Winston Smith of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Eric Arthur Blair did not fit neatly within any of ‘boxes’ that were delineated for him.

Despite his rank at the bottom of the social hierarchy, young Eric Blair was not without friends. He managed to find a social circle in both Eton and St. Cyprian’s, often with people of a higher social class than his own. One of these friends was the writer Cyril Connelly, who he attended both schools with and would stay in touch with throughout his life.

In 1938, Cyril Connelly published the book Enemies of Promise, a work of literary criticism which contained an autobiographical section detailing his time in school. In the book, Connelly described Orwell as follows:

“I had two friends whose “favour” was as uncertain as my own, George Orwell, and Cecil Beaton. I was a stage rebel, Orwell a true one. Tall, pale, with his flaccid cheeks, large spatulate fingers, and supercilious voice, he was one of those boys who seem born old. He was incapable of courtship and when his favour went it sank for ever. He saw through [St. Cyprian’s], despised Sambo and hated Flip but was invaluable to them as scholarship fodder.”

Clearly, Orwell adopted his rebellious spirit early, and seemed to retain it throughout his time at Eton (Connelly described Eton-aged Orwell as “rather extreme and aloof”).

At first, Cyril Connelly’s account of his time at Eton appears to be just as brutal as his St. Cyprian’s. For example, the boys had to undergo ‘fagging’ upon their arrival at Eton, a ritual in which they were forced to be personal servants for the upperclassmen. Despite this, the whole experience seemed on the whole much more ‘democratic’ than his preparatory school days. Underclassmen were treated poorly, but this was the same for all underclassmen, rich and poor alike.

Furthermore, apart from the “Dark Ages” in which he was mistreated and bullied (i.e. his first year or two of schooling), Connelly seemed to look back on his time at Eton positively. The school fostered a culture of genuine curiosity. The students there admired pre-Raphaelite art (the style that was ‘in vogue’ at the time) and idolized ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Socrates. He had some complaints about the school (e.g. their use of corporal punishment), but as a whole, Connelly liked Eton.

By contrast, Orwell’s opinion of the school seemed to be one of indifference. In “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell didn’t speak much about his time at Eton, except to say that he liked it a great deal better than his time at St. Cyprian’s. However, his rebellious spirit must have continued, because after leaving Eton, instead of going to college (the path that was laid out for him since he was a young boy at St. Cyprian’s), he decided to go to Burma to become an Imperial Police Officer.

Was this decision motivated by a desire to experience a taste of the ‘good life’? Perhaps. Or maybe this was simply Orwell’s independent spirit. He was a “true rebel,” after all, and he’d been that way his entire life.

As always, if you’d like to correct any errors or add on to anything I’ve said, feel free to do so in the comments.

Thank you so much for reading.

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Chapter Four:

We know why Orwell committed himself to writing about politics (if you don’t, check out the first chapter of Breaking Big Brother: “Inside the Whale”).

What is less clear (or, at least, what seems less clear to us twenty-first century readers of Orwell’s work) is why he dedicated himself to the cause of ‘democratic socialism.’ It seems almost counter-intuitive—all of Orwell’s most notable works seem to work as persuasive arguments against socialism as I understand it.

In order to reconcile this, we need to understand how Orwell defined socialism—something which changed somewhat as his career progressed.

The book The Road to Wigan Pier was the first major work of Orwell’s to extensively discuss socialism. The book was commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz, the head of the socialist publishing agency the Left Book Club, as an exposé on poverty—a firsthand look into the lives of coal miners and unemployed people in northern England.

The first half of the book showcases Orwell’s investigative journalism at its best. Orwell lived with coal miners, shadowed them at work (a grueling process—just getting into the mine required a miles-long crawl through a short, dark tunnel where a man couldn’t stand upright, an intensely physically-demanding exercise which exhausted Orwell before the day even began).

However, much to Gollancz’s surprise, Part 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier took a sharp turn, going from a harrowing expose of the grueling working conditions of coal miners and the unemployed to a harsh criticism of socialism as it was practiced in England at the time. Orwell was deeply critical of the socialist movement in England. He (quite comically) stated that the movement was largely made up of “vegetarians” and “cranks,” and criticized them for being out-of-touch and unpersuasive, having created no good literature to speak of.

It’s kind of ironic, actually—Orwell would go on to write extensively about how toxic totalitarianism is to literature (“Inside the Whale” was one of numerous essays dedicated to this subject).

However, considering what Orwell was up against, it becomes clear why he might have been drawn to the socialist cause. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he argues against the apparently pervasive idea that poor people were a separate breed of human from rich people, a race separate from the aristocracy that was designed specifically to work. He argues against an apparently deeply-rooted belief that poor people were dirty by choice, and that if they had the means to bathe regularly (which most did not), they’d still choose not to.

Orwell was educated among the British aristocracy. He details in Wigan Pier how much of his early education was designed to instill in him a type of loathing for the lower classes. It is possible that, at this stage of his life, Orwell was drawn to socialism as a rebellion against these egregiously false beliefs.

In 1936, when The Road to Wigan Pier was first published, Orwell’s understanding of socialism seemed unsophisticated—naive, even. Despite the fact that the entire latter half of the book was dedicated to improving the socialist cause in England, Orwell fails to posit a comprehensible definition of what socialism would actually look like if put into practice.

He was also sympathetic to the common Marxist belief that technological advancements would make socialism possible. The argument goes something like this: Social classes evolve out of necessity. In order for a civilization to enjoy the bare necessities of life, there are people who need to perform the labor that makes this possible (farming, working in coal mines, etc.). However, as technology advances, there will come a point in which people do not need to work anymore, as machines will be able to create a world so prosperous that humans will no longer need to compete for resources. In the absence of scarcity, true equality can exist, as people will no longer feel the need to have more than anyone else.

Of course, it did not pan out this way (and a lot of thinkers at the time could’ve probably predicted this—a major element of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is the question of how to keep the population distracted when they no longer needed to work twelve hours a day). However, it is a belief that Orwell held onto, even after his life experience provided him evidence to the contrary.

When Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, he witnessed the city of Barcelona take on an entirely socialist organization for a time before eventually going back to the way things were before. This brief period of ‘government by the people’ seemed to convince Orwell that such a thing was possible.

Then World War II broke out, marking the next major evolution of Orwell’s socialist thought. In 1941, Orwell published The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, a pamphlet detailing the position that England was in during this stage of the war, and urging Englishmen to turn the war into a socialist revolution.

“Revolution” seems a harsh word, but it is, in fact, Orwell’s own—he calls for the necessity of revolution in The Lion and the Unicorn, defining the word as “a fundamental shift in power,” and positing that “Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place.”

Orwell thought that this was desirable—necessary, even. One of the main arguments in The Lion and the Unicorn was that laissez-faire capitalism simply wasn’t working. In addition to the problems that had been going on for some time in England’s capitalist system (unemployment, extreme wealth inequality, etc.), it simply didn’t seem possible for an economy based on supply and demand to compete militarily with ‘planned economies’ like Nazi Germany (i.e. economies in which the government rather than the free market determined what to produce).

Orwell wrote about this extensively in essays and letters. He considered it an absolute certainty that a planned economy was going to take over England, because a capitalist economy was simply not as good at waging war as a fascist or socialist one. A free market economy would simply continue to produce luxuries despite England’s need for military equipment, which would ultimately lead to military defeat. Faced with the threat of a German invasion, England’s choice seemed to be between succumbing to the Nazis or adopting a planned economy of its own to combat them.

Orwell believed this planned economy would be either fascist or socialist, and that socialism was the desirable outcome because, unlike fascism, “Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal beings” (a quote from The Lion and the Unicorn). Fascism and socialism were similar in that they put production power in the hands of the government, but fascism was “socialism without the morals” (a quote that I swear Orwell wrote somewhere, but which I can’t find for the life of me).

The Lion and the Unicorn was also the first (and as far as I know, the only) time in Orwell’s career that he spelled out a plan for what exactly English socialism should look like:

“I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we need. The first three points deal with England’s internal policy, the other three with the Empire and the world:

1.     Nationalization of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries.

2.     Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.

3.     Reform of the educational system along democratic lines.

4.     Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war is over.

5.     Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured peoples are to be represented.

6.     Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other victims of the Fascist powers.

The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims quite frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a Socialist democracy.”

From 1941 to 1946, Orwell wrote a series of articles, titled “London Letters,” to the American left-wing magazine Partisan Review. His earlier ones expressed the same sentiment that was contained in The Lion and the Unicorn: that there were only two possible options for England’s future, fascism or socialism.

Obviously, this did not happen. England did move away from laissez-faire capitalism, but socialism did not take its place. In one of his “London Letters” written in 1944, Orwell admits he was “grossly wrong in [his] analysis of the situation”:

“In 1940 I had written, “Either we turn this into a revolutionary war, or we lose it”, and I find myself repeating this word for word as late as the middle of 1942. This probably coloured my judgement of actual events and made me exaggerate… the socially leveling process occurring in Britain as a result of the war. But what really matters is that I fell into the trap of assuming that “The war and the revolution are inseparable.” There were excuses for this belief, but still it was a very great error. For after all we have not lost the war, unless appearances are very deceiving, and we have not introduced Socialism. Britain is moving towards a planned economy, and class distinctions tend to dwindle, but there has been no real shift of power and no increase in genuine democracy. The same people still own all the property and usurp all the best jobs... When we look back at our judgements of a year or two ago, whether we “opposed” the war or whether we “supported” it, I think the first admission we ought to make is that we were all wrong.”

Orwell would only live for another six years after this admission, and in that time, he became much less optimistic that they would ever be realized in England. Instead of socialism taking the place of capitalism, a different type of economy was emerging—one that was explained by American writer James Burnham in his 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution.

Burnham wrote of a new type of economic system emerging, in which a class of ‘managers’ would take the place of wealthy capitalists at the top of the social ladder. What he described was essentially an elaborate bureaucracy. He was, of course, not right on all counts, but he was absolutely correct that this bureaucratic future was the one toward which most Western countries were heading.

In 1946, Orwell wrote an article titled “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution” in which he addressed Burnham’s predictions. I bring it up not only because Burnham’s prediction managed to get closer to the truth than Orwell’s, but because in this essay, Orwell revisits the idea of technological advancement bringing about socialism.

“So long as methods of production were primitive, the great mass of the people were necessarily tied down to dready, exhausting manual labour; and a few people had to be set free from such labour, otherwise civilization could not maintain itself, let alone make any progress. But since the arrival of the machine the whole pattern has altered. The justification for class distinctions, if there is a justification, is no longer the same, because there is no mechanical reason why the average human being should continue to be a drudge. True, drudgery persists; class distinctions are probably re-establishing themselves in a new form, and individual liberty is on the down-grade; but as these developments are now technically avoidable, they must have some psychological cause which Burnham makes no attempt to discover. The question that he ought to ask, and never does ask, is: Why does the lust for naked power become a major human motive exactly now, when the dominion of man over man is ceasing to be necessary? As for the claim that “human nature” or “inexorable laws” of this and that, make Socialism impossible, it is simply a projection of the past into the future. In effect, Burnham argues that because a society of free and equal human beings has never existed, it never can exist. By the same argument one could have demonstrated the impossibility of aeroplanes in 1900, or of motor cars in 1850.”

As you can see, Orwell still believes in the possibility of a future in which technological advancement eradicates inequality. However, he is not oblivious—he sees that this is not happening, and wants to figure out why this is the case.

This is the character of Orwell’s writing throughout his entire career.

He was an optimist, but not so much so that he would ignore what was happening right in front of him. He was a socialist, but not in the same way everyone else was. Orwell followed nobody. Despite his left-wing leanings, he was fiercely independent, unafraid to speak his mind.

It is because of this unique character that the spirit of Orwell's work rings true, despite everything he got wrong.

Thanks for reading. 

I’m not an expert—if I’ve gotten anything wrong, or if there’s something you have to add, please leave a comment.

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Chapter Three:

“Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.”

This quote is taken from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write,” and if there is any quote one can point to in order to glean a true understanding of George Orwell, this is it.

Orwell was a political writer, and if consulted on the issue, he would likely say that this was out of necessity rather than preference. He witnessed two World Wars and numerous minor ones. Communism and fascism were on the rise, and the once-dominant economic structure—laissez-faire capitalism—was dying. Times were changing, and in the face of this, Orwell surmised that there were only two options: to view the issue head-on, or to retreat into delusion.

Orwell states this opinion most clearly in his 1940 essay collection, Inside the Whale. The book came out in March of 1940, six months after the start of World War II.

There is a sentiment in Orwell’s writing that these times were unprecedented, and in many ways they were. While despotism is as old as time, totalitarianism was something new, brought about by the increased connectivity modern technology allowed.

Interestingly, though, Inside the Whale is not a political treatise—or, at least, not in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a collection of three pieces of literary criticism: “Inside the Whale,” a discussion of the author Henry Miller, “Charles Dickens” (whose title is self-explanatory), and “Boys’ Weeklies,” which analyzes a type of weekly pulp-fiction paper that was popular with boys at the time.

The essay collection can be viewed as a call to action of sorts—a plea to the masses that the political tensions of the era could not be ignored.

“Boys’ Weeklies” is the most straightforward essay of the three, attacking lowbrow works of fiction which are intentionally written as a distraction for young men, “pump[ing] into them the conviction that the major problems of [their] time do not exist,” and subtly indoctrinating them into right-wing worldview.

Orwell asserts that the political message was probably intentional, since seven of the twelve papers in question were owned by the Amalgamated Press, “one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more than a hundred different papers.”

In other words, Orwell’s suspicion was that easy-to-digest literature was distributed to the masses in different publications mostly run by one media conglomerate in order to distract them from the realities of the world, all while feeding them a political agenda. Sound familiar?

“Boys’ Weeklies” is the only one of the three essays which points to any deliberate deception. The remaining two essays in Inside the Whale examine deception of a much more subtle kind—self-deception, something which Orwell seemed very keen on preventing in his own writing.

First, let’s examine “Charles Dickens,” which tells us a lot about Orwell as a political thinker. Orwell shows a great respect for Dickens as a writer, yet he does not agree with his lack of political concern (which could be explained as a product of his time). Although he acknowledged and wrote about poverty and other social problems of the time, Dickens considered the injustices of the world to be moral issues rather than political ones.

“There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property.” - George Orwell, “Charles Dickens.”

Orwell criticized the archetype of the “good rich man” who often came about as the hero of Dickens’ stories. He asserted that human nature would never change, and that any person who would be inclined to grand acts of charity would be unlikely to become rich in the first place.

I’m not sure how Orwell reconciled this with his own socialist views—for all his talk about ‘changing the system,’ he never provided any adequate explanation for how changing the structure of society would alter human nature.

Regardless, it seems like the main reason Orwell was so politically active despite this was the overwhelming feeling that he should be doing something. Take this quote, from the collection’s eponymous essay, “Inside the Whale”:

“As a rule, writers who do not wish to identify themselves with the historical process at the moment either ignore it or fight against if. If they can ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it well enough to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize that they cannot win.”

Of all the essays in the collection, “Inside the Whale” is by far the most interesting. This time on the chopping block is the author Henry Miller, best known for his novel “Tropic of Cancer.” Again, Orwell thought he was a good writer. However, he considered him to be an exceptionally naive one (more so than Dickens, probably because he was more ‘modern’). His reason for this was that Miller refused to concern himself with politics at all.

“I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain [to fight in the Spanish Civil War]. What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot. He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense obligation was sheer stupidity. In any case my Ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney. Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human — a prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit throughout his work. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm, and almost everywhere the implied belief that it doesn't matter.” - George Orwell, “Inside the Whale.”

This was unfathomable to Orwell. How could someone see the world devolve before their very eyes and do nothing about it? Orwell compared Miller’s perspective to the biblical parable “Jonah and the Whale.” Miller, indifferent as he was to the mess of the world around him, was in the belly of the whale, a “womb big enough for an adult,” in which he could remain blissfully unaware of what was going on around him.

Orwell contrasts Henry Miller with Walt Whitman, a writer with a similar lack of concern for politics, but for reasons which were justifiable to Orwell. The reason Orwell gave was that the United States during Whitman’s time had a spirit of freedom and progress, as compared to the spirit of degeneration he witnessed in his own time.

There’s a lot to be criticized about this assertion. For one, the United States in the 1800s was not a land of magic and freedom. Walt Whitman witnessed the American Civil War. In place of poverty, the United States had slavery. The luxury Whitman enjoyed in being able to write non-political poetry was entirely due to his being born on the right side of the shackles—exactly the same type of luck that made Miller wealthy enough to roam the streets of Paris without a care in the late 1930s.

In other words, I think Orwell was kind of wrong. Not about everything—he was right that in political times such as the one he was living in, it was impossible to write anything at all without betraying some type of political bias. But I think he discounted the importance of good non-political literature, even in times of crisis.

Of course, 1940 was a particularly incendiary year, peculiar even for the highly politically-charged decade that would follow. Orwell’s position on the issue may have changed as his career progressed. He posed the question again in his 1946 essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.”

"Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so.”

Here, Orwell offers a slightly more relaxed conclusion than the one he presented in Inside the Whale in 1940. Perhaps, since the war was over and he was a bit wiser, he realized that there was no point in anything if one couldn’t enjoy life (which sometimes meant looking away from politics for a time).

“Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of Spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia?”

It’s strange—reading this quote, it seems like Orwell is trying to convince himself of this fact more than anyone else. Perhaps Orwell would’ve done well to learn how to stop and smell the roses.1

Nevertheless, the fact that Orwell felt this way offers us great insight into why he wrote as he did, and Inside the Whale clearly delineates the monsters that Orwell was fighting—false propaganda, the death of literature, and of course, the global onset of totalitarianism.

“To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but, those things among-others.” - George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”

We are in political times yet again. Perhaps this is why Orwell has posthumously made a name for himself as a pop culture icon. Predictably, though, many people are still living inside the proverbial ‘whale’ of Orwell’s imagination, while others, like Orwell himself, are having a difficult time ignoring it. 

Thank you for reading, and for bearing with me. As this is still a work in progress, this chapter may be expanded upon and changed as the project takes shape. 

We touched on Orwell’s ‘democratic socialist’ identity this week. The next chapter of this book will examine what Orwell meant by this.

As always, if you know something I don’t, or if I’ve made a mistake, please comment. I’m not a scholar or an expert—I’ve just read a lot of Orwell’s writing.

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Read Chapter Two:

WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

These are three tenets of George Orwell’s famous dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The slogans are plastered upon buildings, thrust into consciousness at every possible moment. They are almost as ubiquitous as Big Brother himself, the emblem of the governing power of the “Party,” whose stern mustachioed face looms threateningly over the population and whose eyes seem to always follow you no matter which angle they stare at you from. A person cannot enter a room, walk down the street, or count the change in their pocket without a reminder that they are always being watched.

George Orwell writes of a class-stratified society. An elaborate bureaucracy governed by an idea instead of an actual leader. A nation suspended in a perpetual state of artificial war designed to maintain the status quo. A population under constant surveillance, to whom words mean their opposites and people unquestioningly swallow lies as truth.

Sound familiar?

Nineteen Eighty-Four was George Orwell’s magnum opus. It is the culmination of everything that Orwell believed in—all of the themes that he carried with him throughout his career. It makes sense that it should be this way. The novel was written at the end of Orwell’s life, and published less than a year before his death. Perhaps he knew on some level that the novel would be his last word on the topics he’d committed his life to exploring.

Given this fact, it is perhaps unsurprising that virtually every major theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four was touched upon earlier in Orwell’s nonfiction:

• Propaganda

• Language manipulation

• Falsification of records

• Surveillance

• Fear-mongering

• Perpetual war

• Bureaucratic government

In this book I will dissect each of these topics, analyze how they evolved throughout Orwell’s lifetime, and examine why, in our modern world, we should care about them.

One of the most common ‘myths’ about Orwell that I’d like to dispel is the idea that his work was ‘prescient,’ and that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a work of political prophecy. It is more accurate to classify the novel as a work of political satire.

This is an important distinction—if the work is viewed as prophecy, then the reader is compelled to examine what Orwell got ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ This misses the point of the novel completely. I do not believe that Orwell was trying to predict exactly what would happen in the future. It is more likely that he was trying to satirize what was already happening, and to illustrate what could happen if a would-be despot utilized all of the tools which were already at his disposal. This is true whether or not Orwell was privy to some sort of insider knowledge (a suspicion which will also be examined over the course of this project).

Though I did not know it at the time, the seeds for this book were planted during my last semester of college, in an undergraduate Renaissance philosophy class. Something the professor said really stuck with me. He remarked that during the Renaissance, the approach to art was different than ours today. People did not treat a work of art as an isolated entity; they approached a novel, poem, or painting with the intent of connecting with the artist on a personal level, understanding who they were as an individual and what message they wished to convey. The goal was to form a relationship with the artist—a type of intimacy that crosses time and space.

Once you ‘know’ an author well, this knowledge adds color to all of their work. Statements start to take on double or triple meanings; the true implications of each point are brought to light. I hope that this project will acquaint you with Orwell in the same way that I have been acquainted.

Orwell had an interesting life—it is no wonder that he had such a keen understanding of the world around him. He was born in British colonial India and educated in some of the finest schools in England. He graduated from Eton, a famed English ‘public school’ which boasts many notable aristocrats among its alumni. Instead of going to college (something he had been ‘groomed’ for his entire life), he went to Burma to work as an Imperial Police Officer. Appalled with what he was doing there, he came back home to become a writer. He immersed himself in a life of poverty; lived on the street, worked menial jobs. He got shot in the neck fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He spouted propaganda for the BBC, wrote book reviews for magazines (‘hackwork,’ as he called it), and toiled for years before eventually enjoying great success as an author.

There’s a kind of morality, a kind of optimism that shines through when reading Orwell’s work. Even when highlighting the dangers of totalitarianism, he never gave up his hope of creating a better world. If anything, he was too optimistic—something that may come as a surprise to readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

This project is, at its core, a search for truth—both the truth about Orwell himself and the truth contained within his works. It is a search for the truth about our world—something which becomes increasingly clear when viewed through the lens of Orwell’s ideas.

Big Brother is an idea. This is true in our world just as much as Winston Smith’s.

In Orwell’s novel, the citizens of Oceania all lived in fear, deferring to the power higher up on the chain of command. However, at the top, there was nobody. Only a figurehead which everyone willingly bowed down to. If everyone stopped bowing, his power would be lost. This is why totalitarians try so hard to keep everyone fighting amongst themselves.

A shadow is being cast upon our world—one which closely resembles the looming figure of ‘Big Brother’ which governed Oceania. People are censoring themselves in deference to an orthodoxy that they may or may not believe in, but which they fear they must pretend to. Individuality has made way for the collective; the vast majority of people feel unhappy and absolutely powerless.

I do not mean to say that our world is terrible. We have it pretty good, at least in the United States. We can say what we want, publish what we want, do what we want (for the most part).

Do not take this for granted—if you believe yourself to be unfree, it will not be long before this becomes a reality.

If Orwell’s work elucidates anything, it’s the need to hold fast to the freedoms we have, lest they disappear. We mustn’t be afraid to speak, and we mustn’t fall prey to the many distractions which prevent us from truly examining the world around us. Deceptive ideologies rule through fear and ignorance.

Big Brother cowers when you look him in the eye. His only defense is the mob that stands behind him; on his own, he is powerless.

With knowledge, we can break him.

Since this is a work in progress, I may be coming back to old posts to update them. Typically, I note when I edit my posts. I will not do so here.

There are two reasons why I’ve decided to write this book in ‘real-time’ on Substack. The first is to hold me accountable—I publicly started writing this book, so I’ll have to finish it now.

The second and far more important reason why I’m publishing this thing in installments is to invite your feedback. Feel free to correct me (I’m sure I’ll be wrong more than once), to add information I don’t know, to suggest articles I may not have read.

I am not a scholar or a biographer. I’m just a regular person who’s read a lot of Orwell, and think it will be worthwhile to share the conclusions I’ve drawn from it. If you’re interested, welcome aboard. I hope you find the information valuable.

As always, thank you for reading.

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Read Chapter One: