More on Orwell

A week or two ago, I posted a quote from George Orwell, and mused that it was ironic that he had been one of my favourites when I was a young, wrongheaded leftist, and remains one of my favourites now that I'm 70 and a traditional conservative. Here are a couple of essays to show why!

First, a serious essay, 'Wells, Hitler and the World State'.

'What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the SS men patrolling the London streets at this moment.'

'The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.'

Now, 'The Moon Under the Water', a description of his ideal of a pub. One of his criteria:

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women—two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone ‘dear,’ irrespective of age or sex. (‘Dear,’ not ‘Ducky’: pubs where the barmaid calls you ‘ducky’ always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

The man was a brilliant writer, incisive and witty at the same time. And he was the strangest sort of socialist! A socialist who appreciated old things, Victorian architecture in pubs, and religious belief, to name just two, as illustrated in these two essays. I'm sure I'll be posting more!