MISREADING THE FIGHTS

100 years of George Orwell - a thinker and writer of great influence. (Robert Manne, 7/03/2003, Online Opinion)

For Orwell the essence of totalitarianism was the attack it waged against freedom. After Spain he lived with a permanent dread that the liberal civilisation into which he had been born was gradually being destroyed. This was the source of 1984, the most important warning he wrote about the abuse of absolute state power in the technological age.

But Orwell did not love only liberty. He also loved equality. In Republican Spain he fleetingly experienced a world where "the working class was in the saddle". This was the kind of world in which Orwell wanted to live. His great Russian Revolution fable, Animal Farm, is essentially the story of the hope for equality cruelly betrayed.

This passage starts with an insight then passes into error. The key to understanding Orwell is precisely his love of the society he was born into, even with its inequality. This is the theme of novels like Coming Up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. His great utopian novels--1984 and Animal Farm and his memoir, Homage to Catalonia--are warnings of the dire results that most follow from the effort to impose equality. It was the recognition that freedom and equality can not coexist, that totalitarianism is the necessary precursor of equality and that the end is not worth that means, that makes him a such an important author. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 19, 2003 9:10 AM