Why Orwell Matters, released in the UK as Orwell's Victory, is a book-length biographical essay by Christopher Hitchens. In it, the author relates George Orwell's thoughts on and actions in relation to: The British Empire, the Left, the Right, the United States of America, English conventions, feminism, and his controversial list for the British Foreign Office.
Summary
The British Empire
Orwell spoke for his radio magazine 'Voice' on the BBC of India where he spoke about literature and ideas. Orwell agreed to broadcast to India under his own name on one condition; that he could express his anti-imperialist opinions without diluting them. He criticized the British government's lack of principles regarding Indian self-government and never failed to argue for India's independence. Orwell's experience working with the BBC correlated with some of the concepts in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Such as his concept doublethink, in relation to the sometimes extreme daily changes in political propaganda that was being broadcast. Orwell's thoughts and writings on colonialism are a permanent part of his lifelong commitment to the subjects of power, cruelty, force, and the relationship between the dominator and the dominated. Orwell can be read as a teaching in Britain's transition from an imperial society to a multicultural and multi-ethnic one. Since this was a great development in his time, and continues to be, this is one reason Hitchens argues that Orwell matters.
The Left
Orwell contributed to the socialist press in England for many years. He considered himself to be on the left and advocated for democracy, decolonization, egalitarian ideals and heavily criticized totalitarianism. Orwell had lived under a Stalinist police regime in Spain when he fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. His time in Spain never left him; he continuously helped vindicate those he had known that survived the Stalinist regime. He did this by publicizing their cases, helping their families, getting them out of prison and saving them from being condemned. He witnessed how the government could distort the truth and how political enemies could suddenly disappear. Orwell returned home after he was shot in the throat by a fascist bullet. This may have saved him in a way as he was "guilty" of Trotskyism and served with the POUM militia, which was more than enough to land him in prison. Orwell's friends, such as his brigade commander Georges Kopp, were imprisoned under horrendous conditions. Kopp was subject to torture of close confinement with rats; this, and some of Orwell's other experiences in Spain, initiated some of the subject matter for Nineteen Eight-Four. His socialist peers had a great appreciation for the Soviet Union. Since Orwell had witnessed its cruelty first hand, he did not. He argued that it was not socialism, but a viscous form of state-capitalism. Many of them never forgave him about his criticisms towards the Soviet Union and being right about Spain. Despite being a leftist himself, many of Orwell's harshest critics were on the left and came about after his death. In the 1960s and 1970s the New Left despised Orwell, partly because his writings were right about the issues in society and they were not. 'Orwell put it best: the sin of most leftists is that they wanted to be anti-totalitarian without being anti-communist.'