George Orwell: An Exemplary Illustration of Liberal Cowardice
George Orwell is praised by modern Western liberals as an ingenious author, a courageous war hero, and an influential figure in the resistance to totalitarian thought among intellectual milieus worldwide. This gallant characterization of Orwell couldn’t be further from the truth. George Orwell, in life, was a psychotic, cowardly opportunist, who could be considered among the most dull and boring authors of the 20th century. His pathetic self-loathing, and his unwavering lack of self-awareness place Orwell in the most undeserving category of popular writers.
Orwell was born in India under the British Raj and became a member of the British Imperial Police in Burma in October of 1922. In the short essay, “A Hanging”, published in 1931 [1], Orwell recalls one of his experiences as a member of the Imperial Police, as he watched the execution of an Indian civilian. Early on in the short essay, Orwell pitties the Indian man on his way to be executed, stating:
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.
George Orwell, “A Hanging”
In this aforementioned excerpt, Orwell demonstrates what would in any other situation, be seen as a form of remorse, for being involved in the lynching of a prisoner of the British Empire.
However, as Orwell later reveals, despite his awareness of how undeniably wrong the murder appeared to be, that he felt no remorse, no guilt, and no shame, for his involvement in the act, in the events which follow. Orwell is listening, in the final scene at the end of “the Hanging”, to an Indian man named Francis, employed by the Raj as the head jailer, describing one of the executions which he carried out. Francis states:
One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!” But no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome! [1]
What is Orwell’s response to this brutal and gruesome story?
I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. … We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis's anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away [1].
Throughout “the Hanging”, Orwell demonstrates that he not only did not care at all for the poor Indian man who he had just hanged, but rather spends the entirety of his essay pitying his own lack of self-awareness, loathing himself pathetically, and with no real moral lesson to be derived from this whole strange story. The typical “good people can be made to do horrible things” motif found in many stories such as this is nowhere to be found, as throughout the entire essay, Orwell spends his time moping and lamenting over his psychopathic behavior in a very strange attempt to generate sympathy from the audience.
Orwell’s record of callous and sociopathic behavior does not end here, or much less even begin here. Orwell had previously attempted to rape one of his ex-girlfriends, Jacintha Buddicom, as described in the book “Eric & Us”, within the postscript, as described by Dione Venables, Buddicom’s cousin [2].
Eric, it seems, had attempted to take things further and make serious love to Jacintha. He had held her down . . . and though she struggled, yelling at him to stop, he had torn her skirt and bruised a shoulder and her left hip.
Dione Venables [2]
Gordon Bowker, Orwell’s biographer, stated that this was very much in line with the track record which George Orwell would go on to develop. As he states, “Orwell had a record of it. … He tried the same thing later on a woman in Southwold, but she was a strapping PE teacher and fought him off” [2]. Orwell would go on to hate women with a passion, as he expresses in the popular novel, “1984”.
[Winston] disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
George Orwell, 1984, (pg. 56)
Here, Orwell states that women are “the most bigoted adherents of the party” not as a statement of the character’s opinion, but as a statement of fact. Despite the fact that the villains in the book are also misogynistic, the recurrent themes of Orwell’s backwards views towards women & feminism have been explored by many feminist authors involved in analysis of Orwell’s literature, such as Daphne Patai. Orwell’s misogyny is compounded by the fact that Orwell portrays the female character in 1984 as being the first to betray the male character, as well as the fact that women throughout his stories are most frequently reduced to objects of sexual fantasy who serve no other role in the story.
There were two great facts about women which… you could only learn by getting married, & which flatly contradicted the picture of themselves that women had managed to impose upon the world. One was their incorrigible dirtiness & untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality… in every marriage the struggle was always the same … the woman demanding [sex] more & more, & more & more consciously despising her husband for his lack of virility.
George Orwell, private notebook
One may view Orwell’s participation in the Spanish Civil War, and his fight against Francoism, however, as quite heroic, and although a war against ultrareligious tyranny is always heroic, Orwell’s attempt to include himself in the history of this war is far from impressive. Orwell joined a battalion full of almost nobody except child-soldiers, which he seemed to notice and not have much of an issue with at all:
And quite half of the so-called men were children – but I mean literally children, of sixteen years old at the very most. Yet they were all happy and excited at the prospect of getting to the front at last.
…
The centuria was an untrained mob composed mostly of boys in their teens. Here and there in the militia you came across children as young as eleven or twelve, typically refugees from Fascist territory who had been enlisted as militiamen as the easiest way of providing for them. As a rule, they were employed on light work in the rear, but sometimes they managed to worm their way to the front line, where they were a public menace. … The wretched children of my section could only be roused by dragging them out of their dug-outs feet foremost, and as soon as your back was turned they left their posts and slipped into shelter; or they would even, in spite of the frightful cold, lean up against the wall of the trench and fall fast asleep.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia [4].
George Orwell, here, displayed full knowledge of the Spanish Republican government’s utilization of child soldiers, which he vowed his full support to. Not only does Orwell blatantly lie about children entering the front on their own accord (as they were not, rather they were forced to enter the front by the state), but he contradictorily admits to pulling the children out of their dug outs by their feet to fight on the front along with him. Orwell would eventually be shot while standing up in a trench after being warned not to do so by members of the armed forces. He was deemed unfit for service when released from the hospital. This was an especially unintelligent and humiliating way to manage to get discharged, as Orwell himself knew that as the sun was beginning to rise behind the trenches that morning, and his silhouette was completely outlined against the horizon, giving the Francoist forces an easy opportunity to hit somebody as tall as him, who’s figure stood over and above the trenches when standing. He expresses that he knew this already before getting shot within his book, “Homage to Catalonia.”
Within his anti-authoritarian literature, both in “Animal Farm” and “1984”, Orwell lays forward nothing but superficial and witless critiques of statism, lumping all state-oriented ideologies together as though they unanimously desire to supervise and control every single thing which the citizenry says, does and thinks, as Orwell’s literature is nothing but a fear mongering tactic against statist ideologies which Orwell disapproved of, freeing him from the obligation of intellectual honesty, and allowing him to attack a boogeyman which he himself formulated while projecting it onto any ideological framework he disapproved of. And how could it be otherwise? Everything which Orwell wrote after 1936 was either in favor of that which defended “democratic socialism”, or against that which was in favor of “totalitarianism”. There was no “in-between.” Politics was black and white for George Orwell, as he explicitly states in “Why I Write”:
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. … Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows.
George Orwell, Why I Write [5]
All in all, George Orwell was nothing more than a cowardly, self-hating misogynistic rapist, who cared little to represent the positions of his political opponents and failed not only to fulfill his responsibilities in military volunteering, but also in his intellectual career. He proves to be an exemplary illustration of cowardly parliamentary socialism, representing the uninspired liberal left, stripped of its revolutionary fervor. This was George Orwell, and this is how he should be remembered.
Sources
Orwell, George. A Hanging. 1931.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Penguin Classics, 2021.
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia | Chapter 3. 1938.
Orwell, George. Why I Write. 1946.