If we had to draw up a list of authors who can be considered moral benchmarks of their time, one of the indisputable names would be that of George Orwell, whose candidacy would also be promoted by enlightened sectors on both the left and the right. In that sense, his posterity is in excellent health. Orwell is the moral genius who emerged from a dirty age with clean hands.
As much or more than Camus or Hannah Arendt, Orwell embodies the paradigm of the intellectual committed to severe militancy for the search for a truth unrelated to compromises or strategic conveniences. He accounts for it in the entirety of his work, from his novels and his innumerable articles, essays and radio programs to his correspondence. Thomas Mann’s coined motto—”A harmful truth is better than a useful lie”—would have been a fitting fit for the spare gray headstone on his grave.
In Homage to Catalonia, written based on his experiences as a brigade member in the POUM militias during the Spanish Civil War, he emerged as a critic of totalitarianism and, especially of the Stalinist pathology of communism, to whose denunciation he also dedicated an unsurpassed satire, Rebelion on the farm.
Because Orwell, one of the most widely read socialist authors of all time, was a staunch anti-communist, which generated him – in the long years of idyll of the gaucho intelligentsia with the regime of the Soviet Union – all kinds of misunderstandings. Basically from those whom Stalin would have labeled without blinking an eye “useful idiots”, who reproached him for criticizing communism more vigorously than fascism.
This was not true, even though Orwell believed that the appeal of communism was treacherous because its goals were nobler than those of fascism and therefore needed more lies on which to rely. No end, no matter how utopian, could be justified with means as grotesque as those he saw used by the KGB in Barcelona, ??while the lice were eating him in the Wellington barracks where the Pompeu Fabra University is now located.
In 1948, after World War II, he published 1984, the quintessential dystopia. A manifesto against tyranny that has sometimes been pigeonholed in the science fiction genre and whose message is both a dire warning about the consequences of absolute state control and a premonition of defeat and death.
It immediately became a best seller, banned throughout Eastern Europe (it was Timothy Garton Ash who said that 1984 ended in 1989) and whose impact has been felt by people as diverse as Churchill, H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood (evident in The Handmaid’s Tale), David Bowie or Steve Jobs’ Apple advertising campaigns. In the era of fake news and post-truth, coinciding with Trump’s election to the US presidency, its sales skyrocketed by 10,000 percent.
Dorian Lynskey, a music journalist at The Guardian and a writer specializing in the intersection between popular and political culture, dedicates his latest book to this literary meteorite. It is an entertaining yet scholarly cultural study of Orwell’s intellectual journey from his ideation and publication in 1984 to his influence after his death. A text reinterpreted over and over again by politicians, artists and publicists and from which already cliché concepts such as “Big Brother” inspired even the production of a lamentable reality show.
A brilliant and highly recommended essay in which the author, in view of the current threats, ends up concluding that Orwell, despite everything, tended to underestimate human imbecility.
Dorian Lynskey. The Ministry of Truth. Captain Swing Translation by G. Facal Lozano 23.75 euros 400 pages