Among modern-day liberals and conservatives alike, George Orwell enjoys practically sainted status. And indeed, throughout his body of work, including but certainly not limited to his oft-assigned novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, one can find numerous implicitly or explicitly expressed political views that please either side of that divide — or, by definition, views that anger each side. The readers who approve of Orwell’s open advocacy for socialism, for example, are probably not the same ones who approve of his indictment of language policing. To understand what he actually believed, we can’t trust current interpreters who employ his words for their own ends; we must return to the words themselves.
Hence the structure of the video above from Youtuber Ryan Chapman, which offers “an overview of George Orwell’s political views, guided by his reflections on his own career.” Chapman begins with Orwell’s essay “Why I Write,” in which the latter declares that “in a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”
His awakening occurred in 1936, when he went to cover the Spanish Civil War as a journalist but ended up joining the fight against Franco, a cause that aligned neatly with his existing pro-working class and anti-authoritarian emotional tendencies.
After a bullet in the throat took Orwell out of the war, his attention shifted to the grand-scale hypocrisies he’d detected in the Soviet Union. It became “of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was,” he writes in the preface to the Ukrainian edition of the allegorical satire Animal Farm. “His concerns with the Soviet Union were part of a broader concern on the nature of truth and the way truth is manipulated in politics,” Chapman explains. An important part of his larger project as a writer was to shed light on the widespread “tendency to distort reality according to their political convictions,” especially among the intellectual classes.
“This kind of thing is frightening to me,” Orwell writes in “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” “because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world”: a condition for the rise of ideology “not only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct.” Such is the reality he envisions in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a reaction to the totalitarianism he saw manifesting in the USSR, Germany, and Italy. “But he also thought it was spreading in more subtle forms back home, in England, through socially enforced, unofficial political orthodoxy.” No matter how supposedly enlightened the society we live in, there are things we’re formally or informally not allowed to acknowledge; Orwell reminds us to think about why.
Related content:
An Animated Introduction to George Orwell
George Orwell Reveals the Role & Responsibility of the Writer “In an Age of State Control”
George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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