Mr. Hitchens on Mr. Orwell
In 2002, not long after he quit his column at The Nation magazine, Christopher Hitchens explained why George Orwell was great and still is.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s I interviewed Christopher Hitchens a few times for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and later the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In person or on the phone, or as a young buck on “Firing Line” in 1990, Hitchens was always a treat.
Here’s what he thought about objectivity in journalism. Here’s my tale about the night in 2004 I tagged along when he crashed a Henry Kissinger lecture in downtown Pittsburgh.
And here, exhumed from my archives, is the un-shortened and lightly edited version of the Trib phone interview I had with Hitchens in 2002 about his new book, Why Orwell Matters.
George Orwell — Why he still matters
Christopher Hitchens, author of "Why Orwell Matters,” is — like the revered subject of his latest book — one of the most interesting, unpredictable and controversial journalists/authors/intellectuals of the era.
A former Trotskyite and fallen hero of the American Left who now supports the Bush administration's plans for regime change in Iraq, Hitchens writes monthly for Vanity Fair magazine.
He's famous for his iconoclastic books attacking Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger. And for 20 years — until he resigned recently over his increasingly widening differences with its concretized editorial positions — Hitchens wrote an opinion column for the Nation, flagship of American leftism.
I talked by telephone with Hitchens on Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002, not long after he had returned from a journalistic mission to the Middle East for Vanity Fair.
Q: Hello, Mr. Hitchens. How are you doing, sir? I just saw you on “Hardball” with Chris Matthews. Someday you’ll get on a show like CSPAN where you can speak more than 16 words or more before you’re interrupted or talked over.
A: But that’s a strange thing to say. Because Matthews went completely quiet.
Q: He did for a while, it’s true.
A: It’s funny. I mention it because people come up at airports and say, “If only Matthews would let you talk.” He always does let me talk. That’s why they remember that I was on. But they still think Matthews shouts over everybody. So what they think they know oddly trumps what they actually see.
He usually has me on at the end when he’s getting a bit tired and he has to relax and breathe a bit. Actually, at times I’ve thought, “Wait, why isn’t he saying anything?” It’s as if I’m talking just to myself. I need someone to say something. It’s alarming how much time he gives me. I can’t talk as fast as him, or not all the time. But I can motormouth it, I can rival him in motormouth.
Q: We always like to hear more of what you have to say, Christopher…. What – at a minimum – should every good American know about George Orwell?
A: I think every literate American, or anyone hoping to be or claiming to be literate, should have read “Homage to Catalonia,” his account of the betrayal of the Spanish Republic by Stalinism, which is one of the greatest pieces of first-person historical reportage that we have – and one that has been vindicated by every subsequent scholar.
It turns out that a single person, even amid all the chaos, can actually succeed in coming up with something like objective truth and have it verified by independent sources later on, but also to do it in a personal way that shows a kind of integrity as well.
In a sense, that’s the classic of Orwell. If you only read one thing, it would be the one to read. Though I would say that anyone interested in language or the English language should also read “Politics and the English Language,” his essay on how the struggle for truth is also the struggle over language, and over trying to keep it from generating into propaganda or euphemism.
And then, since most people have been told by their teachers at one point or another to read “1984” or “Animal Farm,” I think they should either re-read it as if they hadn’t been ordered to, or, if they had disobeyed the instruction because it was too boring having it as a set book, read it as if for the first time.
Q: What were Orwell’s key moral values, or political values or principles – his basic politics?
A: His basic, essential politics were humanistic, I think. That’s to say that he didn’t believe that people under the skin were very different. He believed that given a chance, people had an instinct for freedom and for justice, and that the overlay of things like racial and national differences, and ideologies that told them that what they really wanted was more food and more security rather than more freedom and so on, were all secondary; that you could appeal to a certain common humanity and common decency in people, in spite of all the odds against it or all the appearances to the contrary.
It’s very simple in a way, but I think that’s what he believed. His favorite remark, his favorite citation, was from John Milton, who said “by the known rules of ancient liberty.” It’s one of those things that you can believe in but can’t quite prove: that there is such a thing as a tradition of freedom and liberty and it can be appeal to and it does come from a real part of our personalities. It’s not the only one, otherwise it wouldn’t need to be fought for, but it does exist. It is innate and it is stronger than some people believe.
Q: Why Milton?
A: Orwell was a great admirer of the English Protestant Revolution. He was an atheist, but he was a Protestant atheist. I think he thought that one of the great traditions was the English radical Protestant Puritan revolutionary tradition, of which Milton is the great poet. And things like the battle to have the Bible, for example, available in English instead of only in Latin and read by the inner party, of the elite, the secret elect, is a constant theme in his writing. Of course, it’s very important in “1984,” where there’s a secret book that only party members can read or understand.
Q: It was the democratization of …
A: Probably he knew he was a bit sentimental in doing this, but he identified this with a certain kind of English tradition, the one that in a subterranean way leads from the struggle against Charles the First and the divine right of Kings and the over-mighty Church through the Cromwellian revolution and breaks out later again in France in the late 18th century but most particularly through people like Thomas Paine in America. But this was original revolutionary tradition and he had a great sympathy with that and with its literature.
Q: If you had to think in terms of a 30-second sound bite, what was Orwell’s greatest insight or his most profound statement about politics and its place in our lives? Anything that comes to mind? Your favorite thing that he said?
A: No. Actually, it’s strange, he doesn’t excerpt that way very well in that way, as a one-liner. He liked often to begin articles with an arresting sentence that wasn’t maybe as true on the second reading but would get people’s attention. He begins his article on Gandhi by saying, “Saints should be assumed to be guilty until they’re proved innocent.”
Q: Which is something you’ve taken up as a motto.
A: Which is a good point. But the reason to revere him is that the three great issues of the century that’s just ended were the end of empire -- the end of the idea that there was a natural right to rule the world that was invested in white Europeans – Dutch or Belgian or English or French people, or German. Orwell was very early indeed in seeing that that wasn’t going to last and didn’t deserve to.
It’s appears to us absolutely uncontroversial, but it wasn’t then, and he was a pioneer in that. In resisting fascism, and National Socialism, which he saw early on was a threat not just of tyranny but also of war.
Q: A lot of people were looking fondly at Mussolini both here and in Europe.
A: Yes. A lot of people thought, “Well! It’s efficient. It delivers the goods. It makes people stand up straight and do their stuff.” He realized not only that it was a ghastly society to live in but that it was a society that was organized for aggression. It couldn’t live just within its own borders. And so he was one of the first people to volunteer to go to Spain to block the road to fascism, physically.
And while he was engaged in that, and also through other researches and readings that he had done, he became aware that there was a huge illusion that was prevalent among the people who thought they were opposed to imperialism and to fascism, which was that the Stalinizing of Russia provided a model for a better society.
He thought that was an unforgivable hallucination, an evil falsification, in fact. He spent the remainder of his life, after he had come back from Spain, the last decade of it, really, opposing and exposing that huge deception.
He can be said to be the only public intellectual, or the only freelance writer, I’d rather say, who got all these three things right – at the same time. And as a result, he was very much reviled. He never had a steady publisher. He never had a steady outlet for his magazine writing. He was always broke. He was always ill. And he was kept to a very minority limited audience and not recognized for his contribution until after he was dead. He only lived to be 46. The only thing he didn’t get right was the United States.
Q: What did he think of the United States and what didn’t he get right about it?
A: Well, his big failure or big disappointment was he never visited the United States, never showed until late in his life any curiosity about doing so. He had correspondence with co-thinkers in America; with libertarian leftist types like the editors of Partisan Review, Dwight MacDonald, people like that -- anti-Stalinist intellectuals. They kept urging him to come over, but he never made it.
His image of America was rather shaped by his own English imperial middle-class background. He thought of America as large, contented, greedy – he shared in a lot of the clichéd impressions of America Europeans have. He suspected it of having imperial designs, as well. But he admired America’s literature. In the few things he did write about the United States, he says – and they’re very passing observations – well, there’s something in this literature that shows there is an instinct for freedom in that country. And also for democracy and equality.
He had a feeling that he American experiment was better as an idea than perhaps the Hollywood expressions of it were that the Europeans were getting. But he never worked hard enough on analyzing this contradiction in his own approach. He was anti-anti-American.
When there were some anti-American things said by Stalinist propagandists in England and France, he knew how to ridicule them. He realized what the roots of anti-Americanism were. But he just never quite got the point of the U.S. – that being the fourth great emerging subject of the 20th century, or big issue; that’s the one you can’t say he quite got.
Q: Did he have any great appreciation for America’s Founding Fathers or the founding principles?
A: Yeah, he did. And he saw them expressed in things like Mark Twain. He was an admirer of Twain’s and an admirer of Thomas Paine. But what he wrote about this is very fragmentary. Though he recognizes that there is a greatness in the American proclamation, the way that America presented itself to him and most Europeans at the time was either through Hollywood and mass-production of rather mediocre goods and rather crass commercialism and then through the G.I.s, who actually he quit liked. He thought it was nice in a way to have them in London.
Q: What are the major weaknesses of Orwell that keep him from being a saint that goes to Heaven and sits with all the other saints we sanctify and beatify?
A: Well, the things that stop him from doing that are not his weaknesses. One of them would be his disbelief in all of that. He understood quite early on that we already lived in a post-religious or post-Christian world. The question that preoccupied him was, in that case, what are we going to do for ethics? Since we can’t rely on holy books for them, we have to try and involve sort of a common human ethic. He took it for granted that religion couldn’t supply the ethical deficit.
Though he had a reverence for the liturgy – he knew the Bible very well and the Prayer Book and the Hymnal. He often quotes from all three, usually to great effect and almost always from memory. He knew it well enough to trust himself to quote it. And he considered the King James Bible particular and the Prayer Book as very beautiful examples of English, which they are.
So there’s that. But I think what probably prevents him from being saint or martyr was that he was most of his life a very unhappy guy, very much twisted in his own mind by prejudices he’d been brought up with or had innately. He had a hard time getting on with women. He had a dread of sexual deviance, particularly male homosexuals. He couldn’t get over the revulsion about it, which often is a bad sign – a sign of someone being distraught. He had been brought up not to like the unwashed masses or the colored subjects of the empire. He had to educate himself out of those.
Q: In the book or in a review someone said ‘he rose above his snobbery.’
A: He argued himself out of snobbery and prejudice. For example, a big struggle he had with himself was a suspicion of Jews, which was either innate in him or had been inculcated by his education and background. He more or less completely emancipated himself from that, but it was by a struggle.
So the whole interest of the guy is that he isn’t just a person with OK opinions who writes about how nice it is to have the right view of things. It’s someone for whom arriving at these conclusions involves a confrontation with himself, so he knows what it’s like to feel the opposite way.
He understands the conservative – in the Tory sense, in the British ruling class sense – very well, which made him a very formidable critic because he knew by instinct what it was they were relying on in people.
And he also knew what it had been like to be a policeman, to be a jailor, to be a censor, to be all the things he later opposed. He knew how they justified these things to themselves, which means that in writing about something like “1984,” the master-slave relationship, he’s seen it in both dimensions.
Q: Did his politics evolve or change – aside from the fact that he rose above his class prejudices – during the time he wrote and was more famous?
A: They did, but it’s hard to be sure because most of the evolving bits come towards the end of his life. When brought up in the great struggles of the ‘20s and ‘30s – the Depression and the war against fascism – he took it pretty much for granted that first, the empire was on its way out (and by the way that was a good thing, too).
Second, what he would have called laissez-faire capitalism wasn’t going to be able to survive without being socialized in some way or another, by welfare and by various kinds of intervention. He had the view that practically everybody took in those days, summarized I suppose by the Keynesian revolution, that, you know, capitalism on its own would either collapse or mutate into something more horrible like fascism; common sense was a sort of leftwing social democracy.
He was able to see beyond that. He was able to see the critique of this. I can prove this because I came across a review he wrote of Frederich von Hayek. He wrote a review of “The Road to Serfdom” when it came out in the Observer. It was a book that was very widely denounced at the time, derided. It seemed like a piece of work from antiquity – from this Austrian immigrant.
Q: I blessed myself when you said “The Road to Serfdom.”
A: Yes, and genuflected. Not only that, but Hayek had been ridiculed, actually, correctly, for giving some apparently very stupid advice to Winston Churchill during the 1945 election campaign. Churchill made a speech saying that Labor may well propose to give free national health care and things like this, but it will need a Gestapo to enforce it.
Really, that was a stupid thing to say to the British people in 1945 about their labor movement. They didn’t believe that. It sounded like alarmist rubbish, which it actually was. But Hayek was credited with having advised Churchill on that speech, so for a long time he was considered a figure too marginal to bother with.
So it’s to Orwell’s credit in a way that in reviewing the book on publication in ’45 or ’46, he says, ‘Well, this guy has got hold of an essential point, which is that if you give the state a certain amount of power over the economy, after a certain time you are granting it power over the citizen too. It’s not just an economic trade-off. It will lead to the habits of dependence and could become very dangerous.’
And Orwell says Hayek makes this point very well. He argues it very well. He says, mind you, many people would prefer almost anything to going back to the cycle of boom and slump and so forth. He recovers himself.
But he did see and he did make the concession that Hayek was on to something. At that point Orwell has only a few years to live. You know, he had the gift of seeing other peoples’ points, which is something everyone ought to have but a lot of people don’t.
Q: How does Orwell matter today and how does his moral outlook remain indispensable, as you say it does, when there are no totalitarian monsters to scare us and it’s a much, much different world?
A: Well, as someone who’s been to two of the Axis of Evil countries – I don’t think Iran by the way belongs in that axis but I have been to Iraq and to North Korea, It’s not possible to spend a day in either society or longer than that, because I have, without thinking of Orwell.
It’s as if they designed their governments by having read “1984,” rather than the other way around. It’s not as if he used them as a model, it’s as if they used him. It is extraordinary. Not that many people have been to North Korea, but I’ve talked to a lot of those people who have. It’s impossible to try and write even a short article describing reality there without reference there to this unbelievable slave system and the hysteria which underpins it.
You’re right that his work has outlived the major totalitarian powers. It’s still relevant to the ones that are with us. I write about those two examples in the book, and the example of Zimbabwe. And in all cases the opposition forces, when you can hear from them, which is very seldom, make references to “Animal Farm” and “1984,” as if this is the guidebook to what we’re against. That’s quite an amazing compliment to be paid to someone who died in 1950.
So there is that. But I think the crucial thing is that he did it all on his own. He had some reason to suspect that he was the only person who thought this way, but he thought, “I don’t care. It could well be that everyone is wrong and I’m right.” And he had the fortitude and integrity to maintain that and he didn’t seem to mind that he never had a pot to piss in.
So what it shows is, that not only the truth can prevail, if you like, but that it can prevail just through the efforts of one skeptical individual. I doubt we’ll ever reach a time when that wouldn’t be a good example.
But I think the second bit may be the most important – that he realized that in order to do this you had to have a way of using language that was truthful and direct, and that there were traps being set in the language itself for people to fall into. So they would talk about “land reform” instead of “enforced collectivization.” If you get people to talk a certain way, half the battle is won.
And so you’ve always got to be on the alert for when you think you are talking common sense or received wisdom, actually you are simply repeating propaganda that was designed for you by very ill-intentioned people. If they can get you to think or talk like that, you’ve become their hostage. You should be careful of how you speak and be alert when you’re reading.
And that’s something one needs the entire time, because we are surrounded by euphemisms and propagandists. The most famous recent one is “collateral damage” which is about dead civilians. That would have delighted him. It’s a perfect example.
Q: The word “Orwellian” goes right in front of that phrase.
A: Just in today’s New York Times there’s a story on this unbelievable cynical referendum in Iraq, with a 99 percent turnout and 99 percent vote. John Burns is one of their better writers and he doesn’t use second-hand phrases when he can avoid it. But he says this is an Orwellian state of affairs. There isn’t another word for it, which is an amazing fact. We also use “Orwellian” to describe someone who is fighting against it. So those are two quite big compliments for a freelance hack in a short life time.
Bonus:
Hitchens doesn’t cancel Churchill
Every week for about 17 years, starting with the LA Times and continuing through the 1990s at the Post-Gazette and until 2007 at the Trib, I wrote a column on magazines called Magazine Watch. In March, 2002, I wrote this about an essay on Winston Churchill that Hitchens did for the Atlantic Monthly, which in those days was an excellent magazine, not a shamelessly partisan one.
Troublemaking intellectual puts Churchill in spotlight
by Bill Steigerwald
Look out below.
Revisionist historians are toppling the statue of one of the greatest supermen of Western Civilization.
This time, the beloved victim is everybody's all-time favorite 20th-century leader, Winston Churchill, the brilliant, heroic and wartime prime minister of England.
Every American schoolchild has been raised to honor and revere Churchill for his country-rallying oratory and his near-singular ability to foresee the threat to Western Civilization posed first by the Nazis and then by the Commies.
Churchill is still a great man, Christopher Hitchens concludes in Atlantic Monthly, in another of his entertaining, erudite and provocative essays.
But Churchill's mythic reputation, built into near-cult status in America, has been brought hard to earth by a gang of historians who no longer are willing to leave out some of the true but unflattering stuff that previous historians have.
It's not just that the everyday Churchill was a ruthless, boorish, manipulative alcoholic who smoked too many cigars. Or that three of his famous 1940 radio broadcasts actually were delivered by an actor hired to impersonate him.
Or that brave Britain's beaches were never in danger of actually being invaded by the German army, whose High Command never drew up serious plans to do so. Or even that Churchill and Roosevelt seriously disliked and distrusted each other.
Churchill's amazing government career, says Hitchens and the 13 history books he employs to make his case, is strewn with "many defeats, fiascoes and dishonors."
The inglorious list includes Churchill's role in the World War I disaster at Gallipoli, his "ruling-class thuggery against the labor movement," his "diehard imperialism over India" and "his pre-war sympathy for fascism."
Pulling quotes left and right, Hitchens, the rumpled Vanity Fair columnist, prolific author and troublemaking intellectual, shows that Churchill was hardly the "resolute and unwavering opponent" of the dictators that prowled Europe in the 1930s, including Stalin and Hitler.
Yet, after many pages of chopping away at the reigning Churchill myth, Hitchens suddenly pivots 180 degrees and points to a 1938 speech in which Churchill "excoriated" the Nazi empire "as a wicked and nihilistic thing."
That sounds like a no-brainer today, but Hitchens says it was what makes Churchill pretty great after all.
Churchill, "alone among his contemporaries," was a leader who saw the Nazi empire for what it really was - not as a threat to the wobbling British empire but a "pornographic and catastrophically destructive" evil.