Personal life
4) Political views
– Orwell liked to provoke argument by challenging the status quo, but he was also a traditionalist with a love of old English values. He criticised and satirised, from the inside, the various social milieus in which he found himself – provincial town life in A Clergyman’s Daughter; middle-class pretention in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; preparatory schools in Such Such were the Joys; colonialism in Burmese Days, and some socialist groups in The Road to Wigan Pier. In his Adelphi days he described himself as a «Tory–anarchist«.
The Spanish Civil War played the most important part in defining Orwell’s socialism. He wrote to Cyril Connolly from Barcelona on 8 June 1937: «I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before». Having witnessed the success of the anarcho-syndicalist communities, for example in Anarchist Catalonia, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists, anti-Stalin communist parties and revolutionaries by the Soviet Union-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the Independent Labour Party, his card being issued on 13 June 1938. Although he was never a Trotskyist, he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime, and by the anarchists’ emphasis on individual freedom. In Part 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier, published by the Left Book Club, Orwell stated: «a real Socialist is one who wishes – not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes – to see tyranny overthrown». Orwell stated in «Why I Write» (1946): «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.» Orwell was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a position outlined in his 1947 essay «Toward European Unity», which first appeared in Partisan Review. According to biographer John Newsinger,
the other crucial dimension to Orwell’s socialism was his recognition that the Soviet Union was not socialist. Unlike many on the left, instead of abandoning socialism once he discovered the full horror of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union, Orwell abandoned the Soviet Union and instead remained a socialist — indeed he became more committed to the socialist cause than ever.»
In his 1938 essay «Why I joined the Independent Labour Party», published in the ILP-affiliated New Leader, Orwell wrote:
For some years past I have managed to make the capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against capitalism. But I do not delude myself that this state of affairs is going to last forever … the only régime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech is a Socialist régime. If Fascism triumphs I am finished as a writer – that is to say, finished in my only effective capacity. That of itself would be a sufficient reason for joining a Socialist party.
Towards the end of the essay, he wrote: «I do not mean I have lost all faith in the Labour Party. My most earnest hope is that the Labour Party will win a clear majority in the next General Election.»
Orwell was opposed to rearmament against Nazi Germany — but he changed his view after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the outbreak of the war. He left the ILP over its pacifism and adopted a political position of «revolutionary patriotism». In December 1940 he wrote in Tribune (the Labour left’s weekly): «We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.» During the war, Orwell was highly critical of the popular idea that an Anglo-Soviet alliance would be the basis of a post-war world of peace and prosperity. In 1942, commenting on journalist E. H. Carr‘s pro-Soviet views, Orwell stated: «all the appeasers, e.g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin.»
On anarchism, Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier: «I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.» He continued, however and argued that «it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly.»
In his reply (dated 15 November 1943) to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the British League for European Freedom, he stated that he didn’t agree with their objectives. He admitted that what they said was «more truthful than the lying propaganda found in most of the press» but added that he could not «associate himself with an essentially Conservative body» that claimed to «defend democracy in Europe» but had «nothing to say about British imperialism». His closing paragraph stated: «I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country.»
Orwell joined the staff of Tribune as literary editor, and from then until his death, was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) Labour-supporting democratic socialist. According to Newsinger, although Orwell «was always critical of the 1945–51 Labour government’s moderation, his support for it began to pull him to the right politically. This did not lead him to embrace conservatism, imperialism or reaction, but to defend, albeit critically, Labour reformism.» Between 1945 and 1947, with A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell, he contributed a series of articles and essays to Polemic, a short-lived British «Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics» edited by the ex-Communist Humphrey Slater.
Writing in the spring of 1945 a long essay titled «Antisemitism in Britain», for the Contemporary Jewish Record, Orwell stated that anti-Semitism was on the increase in Britain, and that it was «irrational and will not yield to arguments.» He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could «swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others.» He wrote: «For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. … Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own anti-Semitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness.» In Nineteen Eighty-Four, written shortly after the war, Orwell portrayed the Party as enlisting anti-Semitic passions against their enemy, Goldstein. Nevertheless, he opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, taking an anti-colonialist stance against Zionism.
Orwell publicly defended P.G. Wodehouse against charges of being a Nazi sympathiser, a defence based on Wodehouse’s lack of interest in and ignorance of politics.
The British intelligence group Special Branch maintained a file on Orwell for more than 20 years of his life. The dossier, published by The National Archives, mentions that according to one investigator, Orwell had «advanced Communist views and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings». MI5, the intelligence department of the Home Office, noted: «It is evident from his recent writings—’The Lion and the Unicorn’—and his contribution to Gollancz’s symposium The Betrayal of the Left that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him.»