Orwell is frequently cited by both the left and right as the most clear-headed social critic of the millennium. But he is not a corrective to muddle-headedness. He was, indeed pretty muddle-headed himself. His early works, Down and Out, and The Road to Wigan Pier, were, he later admitted, largely fictionalized, lavishly embellished accounts of his adventures among the exploited and desperately poor. The conditions he described were not untrue, but they were dramatized. He entered the Spanish Civil War on the highly romanticized left and quickly became disillusioned and revealed the Soviet Union's betrayal of the Left, the side he had joined. Prior to that. shortly after graduating from the foremost establishment preparatory school, he joined the British Colonial police in Burma. He became disillusioned with colonialism. What did he expect? A policeman no less. Yes,1984 is a prophetic masterpiece, but he failed to recognize that the totalitarian state had already arrived in the USSR. His "future" predictions were already the present. He died, as left literary and political commentators are at pains the underline, as a man of the left, and a socialist. The USSR died when Gorbachev tried the impossible, to invent socialism, or communism, with a "human face," That is, free of intolerable coercion. Not even the fantasizers, from Bacon on, ever imagined that a utopian "paradise on earth" could be fashioned without totalitarianism. He had great insight into the mechanisms of totalitarianism, but his life was rife with contradictions.
Orwell is frequently cited by both the left and right as the most clear-headed social critic of the millennium. But he is not a corrective to muddle-headedness. He was, indeed pretty muddle-headed himself. His early works, Down and Out, and The Road to Wigan Pier, were, he later admitted, largely fictionalized, lavishly embellished accounts of his adventures among the exploited and desperately poor. The conditions he described were not untrue, but they were dramatized. He entered the Spanish Civil War on the highly romanticized left and quickly became disillusioned and revealed the Soviet Union's betrayal of the Left, the side he had joined. Prior to that. shortly after graduating from the foremost establishment preparatory school, he joined the British Colonial police in Burma. He became disillusioned with colonialism. What did he expect? A policeman no less. Yes,1984 is a prophetic masterpiece, but he failed to recognize that the totalitarian state had already arrived in the USSR. His "future" predictions were already the present. He died, as left literary and political commentators are at pains the underline, as a man of the left, and a socialist. The USSR died when Gorbachev tried the impossible, to invent socialism, or communism, with a "human face," That is, free of intolerable coercion. Not even the fantasizers, from Bacon on, ever imagined that a utopian "paradise on earth" could be fashioned without totalitarianism. He had great insight into the mechanisms of totalitarianism, but his life was rife with contradictions.