WITNESS
for the
DEFENCE

George Orwell

In 1936-7 George Orwell fought in Spain against the Fascists and on the side of Republicans and Communists. He saw friends he loved killed, and innocent civilians massacred.  Shot in the neck, he returned to England with a profound and permanent dislike of both Fascists and Communists. He had come to understand where he stood and why: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” We may quarrel with his support for socialism, but we are grateful for his courageous criticism of totalitarianism.

Orwell mastered a lucid and devastating style of writing essays and satirical novels. Down and Out in Paris and London is his firsthand report about living in poverty. Burmese Days is a fiercely anti-imperialist novel based on his experience working in the East as a policeman. Homage to Catalonia is his heartbreaking account of the men and women who died in Spain for a cause that had been corrupted. His genius was to include the ironic details. Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming up for Air are elegies to the lost and civilised way of life he remembered living as a child in Britain. The Road to Wigan Pier is a sometimes grisly report of living with the unemployed working class. To write he had to live an experience first. It was his way of grounding himself.

Orwell freed himself from his family, and rooted himself in England by inventing a new name. Born Eric Blair in India in 1903, Orwell took the name George from the patron saint of England, and Orwell from the River Orwell in Suffolk, one of his favourite country haunts.

We think it was his love of water and earth and trees that made him doubtful of unreal concepts masquerading under the mask of words. He sardonically observed in “Politics and the English Language,” that “ the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” In "Notes about Nationalism," he observed that "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool." And he concluded, "The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged."

His writing expressed his political views, but Orwell's views did not compromise his artistic standards. His artist's eye is evident everywhere in his work. He vividly sketches men, women, even an elephant, "beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have."

At the onset of World War II Orwell tried to join the Army to fight the Nazis, but his fatigue and persistent cough were diagnosed as tuberculosis. He served with the Home Guard and worked on war propaganda at the BBC. It was not the work he wanted to do, and he must have known he was dying. He began to write a remarkable book.

As the war ended Orwell published the ferocious and unexpectedly tender fable called Animal Farm . The animals revolt against the farmer's tyranny, and win their freedom, but almost immediately they face betrayal by animals whose credo becomes:  “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Animal Farm is a psychological portrayal of the person or party that insists on controlling us for their profit and power, all the while insisting they are controlling us for our own good.

The TB was making ruinous inroads on Orwell’s energy, but he struggled to write his last book, the most damning indictment of tyranny ever written. He worked on the remote island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland, and managed to finish and publish 1984 just before he died in 1950 at the age of forty-six. 

In 1984, Big Brother uses Doublethink, a willful blindness to reality, and the violent Thought Police to manipulate the past and present and control the future. Men and women endure a grim and horrible world where no one can be trusted, and no one can truly love. In 1984 even Winston Smith's love for Julia cannot resist Big Brother, but Orwell's love of freedom gave him the strength to write.  He is a witness for the defence – the defence of each of us.

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