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In the last seven days, we've been reminded very forcibly that the totalitarian principle - the principle which enslaves one society, the better to commit an aggression against others - is not something that we can confine to the perhaps compulsory study of 1984 and of Animal Farm, but is a living, vivid, actual principle and a clarifying threat. I'm referring first to the unspeakable degradation that was inflicted last week by the Big Brother on the people of Iraq, forced once again to gather adoringly, unanimously and terrified, and not only to turn out to vote 100 percent, but to turn out to vote 100 percent the same way. After what they've been through, one felt they might have been spared this last Ceausescu-style abnegation or humiliation. Second, there has been the discovery that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, while its people have been starving and screaming with hunger and pain and the absence of all culture, has been choosing to spend all its resources on the enrichment of uranium. Who will say, in the face of this, that the relevance of George Orwell belongs in the past?

Kafka the Realist

I was in Czechoslovakia under the old Communist police regime in the late 1980s and resolved while in Prague to become the first reporter to write an article from there that wouldn't mention the name Franz Kafka. (Like Amis, I believe in the war against cliché). And so what was my horror when I was arrested by the secret police at a meeting of the Charter 77 forces in a private apartment; when I asked them what was the charge, I was told, "We're not telling you." I ended up mentioning Kafka after all.

I've started in a way at the opposite end of my answer to the question, Why does Orwell matter? To answer the question one has to begin a little earlier than his partly Swiftian and partly dystopian novels. In the century that's just closed behind us, the three great moral and political and cultural crises were: the end of empire (the end of the idea that the world and its inhabitants and resources were the property of white Europeans); the question of fascism and national socialism and the threat to civilization that was posed by that; and the delusions of Stalinism. George Orwell I propose as the only writer - some would say public intellectual - who managed to get all three of these questions right.

Orwell was a British colonial official, having had a fairly standardized, what we call in England "conventional" upbringing. Like a lot of other successful writers, he skipped university altogether, partly out of poverty, and became a police official in Burma. He threw up the job, for reasons he never publicly stated, but I believe I understand from a close study of his writing. He thought if he kept on with the job he would become a sadist, a robot; that he'd understood something very essential about what Nietzsche called the master-slave relationship and also the other term often used rather cheaply - exploitation. It was one thing to notice that the British kept Burma forcibly underdeveloped in order that its economy would be a blood bank for the British economy. But there was exploitation of another kind: The most educated, integrated, sophisticated and qualified Indian or Burmese man, however Anglicized, would never be allowed as a member of the English "club" to come and have lunch or dinner or a cocktail in European company. But the least qualified and least literate and least assimilated Burmese woman could be allowed into any Englishman's bungalow, though only by the back door. Flory, the central character in Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days, and the man I believe anticipates by decades the sweltering guilt-ridden anti-heroes of the later Graham Greene stories, admits to us through his author that he'd bought his Burmese mistress from her family.

These two declensions of exploitation condemned the system of imperialism morally, economically and politically. His decision to refuse it and to become instead a campaigner against it was in the early 1920s a very unusual decision. It seemed to most people at that time that imperialism would last for many more generations, that it was rational and progressive and even liberal, and it was a gift from Europe to the rest of the world. Orwell took the side of the underdog and the oppressed for the rest of his life and was determined, as far as possible, to share their suffering, to look at the world from their perspective. That aided him powerfully in the novelistic portrayals in 1984, the essential sadomasochistic quality of the master-slave relationship, the pornographic secret that is at the heart of domination.

We're looking at a figure who knew what it would be like to hold the other end of the whip, to be the one wielding it rather than receiving it, and understanding the ghastly temptations involved. The great test of any writer and any intellectual is their ability to handle contradiction. Orwell's prose retains for us the sinew and muscle that it does because we have a man arguing all the time with his own prejudices and fears, his own bigotries and shortcomings. It's easy to see why he was so quick to detect the menace of fascism, the really pornographic assault on European civilization that began a decade or so later, which took the doctrines of racism that had been evolved for purposes of colonial domination and did what he'd always feared they would do and began to apply them to other Europeans as well.

Off to Catalonia

Orwell went to Spain and became one of the first volunteers to feel the weight of a pack and a rifle on his shoulder and to physically bar the road to war and fascism as it tried to conquer European civilization. His account of that struggle, almost unpublished in his own lifetime because publishers wouldn't take it, editors censored it or people wouldn't distribute it, Homage to Catalonia, is still the most imperishable account of being both a volunteer and a reporter in a context of war and revolution. It was while engaged in that struggle that he became aware of a third great illusion or delusion or hallucination very prevalent among the intellectuals and those who imagined themselves to be emancipated, rational and progressive, and this was the one which stated that beyond the Ural Mountains in the far distant provinces of Stalin's Russia, a new utopia was being created where history would come to an end, where human emancipation would be consummated. In trying to dispel this hallucination and also in showing that it was a terrible lie and depended upon the suppression or distortion of some appalling truths, Orwell was forced to confront physically as well as mentally and morally the consensus of the enlightened who were the most intolerant people in society because they're sure they're right and they're sure that their motives must be ideal. The last decade of his life was spent in an imperishable struggle, conducted almost entirely as an individual, really only with a typewriter and an attitude against the betrayal of society and its highest values by its intellectuals.

I must briefly say why I think one, lone stubborn Englishman was able to do this. With some part of himself, and with his long wrestling with love of literature and of the liturgy, he was a convinced atheist. He had a strong belief in the long struggle to have the Bible translated out of Latin, where it was the possession of a priestly class - or, to use the analogy of 1984, of the members of the Inner Party: a secret book with knowledge arcane and limited to an elite - so it could be read and understood by the people. He believed in the long struggle of the Protestant revolution where men like William Tyndale were strangled and burned for the right to have a Bible that the congregation could read too. He understood intuitively that there is a connection between language and truth and logic, that there is innate in us an instinct for language that makes us human and that along with that comes the wish for clarity and honesty of expression. It's not what you think, it's how you think; it's whether you are willing to trust in the struggle for liberty and the distrust of lies, the distrust of propaganda and the distrust of authority and the "folded lie…in the brain" as Auden puts it in his wonderful poem, "September 1, 1939." He made it clear that one individual, if possessed of a love of language, an understanding of literature and a respect for truth, can prevail in a time when the mind is in chains and when people's willingness to accept coercion has temporarily eclipsed their will to resist. Since we happen to be in such a time and such a place now and since there is so much fear around us and so much propaganda in the language to which we're compelled to listen, my title Why Orwell Matters is in that extent at least, its own justification.