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‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.’

This selection of George Orwell’s writing, from both his novels and non-fiction, gathers together his thoughts on the subject of truth. It ranges from discussion of personal honesty and morality, to freedom of speech and political propaganda. Orwell’s unique clarity of thought and illuminating scepticism provide the perfect defence against our post-truth world of fake news and confusion.

‘The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.’

Includes an introduction by Alan Johnson and passages from Burmese Days, The Road to Wigan Pier, Coming Up for Air, The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s letters, war-time diary, criticism and essays including ‘Fascism and Democracy’, ‘Culture and Democracy’, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, ‘As I Please’, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, ‘The Prevention of Literature’, ‘Politics and the English Language’ and ‘Why I Write’.

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This volume compiled by David Milner. Collected from The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, OBE, published in Great Britain in 1998 by Secker & Warburg

Quoted text here taken from ‘Publication of Animal Farm; “The Freedom of the Press”’, London, 17 August 1945; New York, 26 August 1946

Also by George Orwell

Orwell on Truth

fn4 The military commentators of the popular press can mostly be classified as pro-Russian or anti-Russian, pro-blimp or anti-blimp. Such errors as believing the Maginot Line impregnable, or predicting that Russia would conquer Germany in three months, have failed to shake their reputation, because they are always saying what their own particular audience wanted to hear. The two military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teaches that the defence is stronger than the attack, and the second that the attack is stronger than the defence. This contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the same public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office.

About the Author

George Orwell (1903–1950) is one of England’s most famous writers and social commentators. He is the author of the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is also well known for his essays and journalism, particularly his works covering his travels and his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. His writing is celebrated for its piercing clarity, purpose and wit and his books continue to be bestsellers all over the world.

Introduction

George Orwell died four months before I was born, and yet his writing has always felt contemporary and his impact on my politics has been more profound than that of any other writer or, for that matter, politician. His self-declared intention was ‘to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after’. He certainly succeeded so far as I was concerned. I suspect that few writers have shaped the views of their readers to the extent that Orwell has.

George Orwell entered my life in 1964 when I was in the fourth form at Sloane Grammar School. Our new English teacher, Mr Carlen, decided that the whole of Class 4Y should read Animal Farm together, aloud. I was a voracious reader of whatever I could get my hands on but hadn’t heard of Orwell. We boys, tamed by the effortless authority of Mr Carlen, took turns in reading out from the single copy passed between our lidded wooden desks. Animal Farm cast a spell on me that has never been lifted. Though engrossing as a simple story of animals taking control of the farm, I doubt we would have grasped the subtext if Mr Carlen hadn’t explained it. When he did it not only revealed the full ingenuity of the book, it gave us 4Y boys a sense of the adult world we were growing into: a world in which one-third of the population lived under Communism. Another young teacher at Sloane, Mr Pallai, had escaped from Hungary as the Russian tanks rolled in. He taught us history and economics, branching off occasionally to talk about the iniquity of the one-party state. Two years before my class read Animal Farm, the Cuban Missile Crisis had threatened our existence as the US and USSR contemplated mutual nuclear destruction. The allegory of Animal Farm, published almost twenty years before Mr Carlen introduced us to it, remained relevant. Orwell’s writing brought clarity and an understanding of the dark and dangerous times we were living through.

As I read more and more Orwell I became increasingly impressed by the brutal honesty that he imposed upon his writing. Making no claim to the spurious virtue of consistency, like most of us his views as a young man were very different to the settled position he reached in adulthood. He was a political thinker who was never afraid to adapt his thoughts to emerging developments, rather than trying to reconcile those developments with the rigidity of his thoughts. A self-proclaimed Tory anarchist in his youth, he later joined the ILP (which was far to the left of Labour) only to repudiate all the reasons he’d joined it shortly afterwards. When he went to fight in Spain it wasn’t for the International Brigade, to which most other British participants were recruited, but for an obscure Marxist/anarchist outfit (POUM) in Catalonia. We know about the political machinations he went through because he wrote about them – fearlessly exposing his doubts and inconsistencies. In The Road to Wigan Pier he spent the entire second half of the book making a case against the socialism that he’d advocated in the first half. This devil’s advocacy contained his notorious attack on ‘that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat’. Orwell was probably not the only writer on the left to be attracted by socialism but repelled by socialists, yet he was the only one to commit this dichotomy to the page. I can understand how frustrating this may have been for the contemporary reader following Orwell’s thought process in real time. As his greatest biographer, Bernard Crick, observed: ‘At times he was like those loyal and vociferous football supporters who are at their best when hurling complaint, sarcasm and abuse at their own long-suffering side.’ But for me, following from a distance, it was exhilarating.

As a young man I read Marx’s Das Kapital, thought I understood the theory of surplus value and was drawn towards the concept of a workers’ state. Many of my colleagues in the trade union movement were emphatic about the desirability of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Public opinion was written off as ‘false consciousness’; an elected Parliament represented ‘bourgeois democracy’. Compromise was derided, moderation despised. It was through Orwell that I found the fiercely egalitarian, patriotic, undogmatic socialism that I was comfortable with. His aim wasn’t to convert non-believers, it was to defend democratic socialism against attacks from the left and win back Communist fellow travellers. As he records in the essay ‘Why I Write’, he reached a settled position only when ‘the Spanish War and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. 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 understood it.’

What also appealed to me as a working-class boy was Orwell’s confidence in the innate decency of the working class. It would have been hard to mistake Orwell himself for a horny-handed son of toil. Educated at Eton (on a scholarship for four years as a teenager), a former junior official in the British Empire (he’d joined the Colonial Service as a police officer in Burma rather than go to university), and with the kind of plummy accent that marked him out as a ‘gentleman’ rather than a ‘player’, he certainly seemed unlike anyone I knew in the slums of North Kensington, but I somehow felt that he was genuinely on our side.

Publications of his novels were interspersed with what he called his ‘documentaries’ – books which recorded his attempts to understand what life was like for the working classes (The Road To Wigan Pier) and the underclass (Down and Out in Paris and London). Curiously, whilst his accent became a barrier in his attempts to ingratiate himself with the coal miners of Wigan, it was no problem when he took the extraordinary step of living amongst the destitute as what was then known as a tramp. There were apparently many ‘toffs’ who’d fallen upon hard times and ended up in the doss house. These attempts to go underground with the poor were rightly seen by many as patronising and inauthentic given Orwell’s ability to resurface anytime he chose to. The artifice may have been unwise in some respects, but it could be effective, particularly when he literally went underground. The famous passage in The Road to Wigan Pier in which Orwell descends into the coal mine and struggles along the claustrophobic tunnels, bent double for three-quarters of a mile, is a case in point. When he reaches the twenty-six-inch coal face utterly exhausted, he is reminded that he has yet to begin his shift. That long dangerous journey into the bowels of the earth was unpaid. It was merely the prelude to eight hours breaking chunks of coal from that tiny coal face in the airless, pitch-black, suffocating atmosphere, which Orwell brought to life for readers who burnt the stuff without giving a second thought as to how it was produced. That passage certainly educated me about the hardship and dangers of coal mining, as it must have educated millions since the book’s publication in 1937.

Orwell’s brilliance stretched beyond his books. In many ways the man himself is more fully revealed in his essays and journalism. It is here that he discloses his ‘pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information’. Most revealingly (in ‘Why I Write’), he tells us that ‘one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality’. In this sentence, without any overt explanation, Eric Blair reveals why he chose to write under a nom de plume. But for me, Orwell fails in his objective, particularly in the essays. It’s as if Eric Blair writes these, whilst George Orwell concentrates on the books. Apart from the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier, the books are where the fully formed political views gradually emerge. The journey towards them, however, is described in the essays. And thank goodness the attempt at effacement failed, because it’s Eric Blair’s personality that finds such compelling poetry in the mundane. In The Lion and the Unicorn he reveals his love of England where ‘the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant’ by invoking the image of ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings’. He describes a culture ‘bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes’. The essays reveal his essential gentleness, which was as much a part of his personality as aloofness and contrariness. And while he believes that concepts such as justice, liberty and objective truth may be an illusion, they are powerful illusions that people still believe. In Orwell’s England (never Britain) ‘the sword is still in the scabbard’ and the hanging judge, ‘that evil old man in scarlet robe and horsehair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in’, is incorruptible, part of the ‘subtle network of compromises’ that make England a country worth fighting for.

It was the outbreak of the Second World War that crystallised Orwell’s views. He was a patriot who understood the threats posed by fascism and Communism (Stalin’s pact with Hitler was a particular turning point) and these inspired his two most famous novels. Animal Farm came first, portrayed by some as a cautionary tale about the evils of revolution. But Orwell believed revolution to be necessary. He considered it a process, rather than an event, that would come via the ballot box. Violence would only be perpetrated by those ‘Blimps’ who opposed the democratically determined will of the people. Animal Farm railed not against revolution but against a revolution betrayed. The book made him famous throughout the world. Intriguingly, in ‘Why I Write’ he says (in 1946) that ‘I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure’.

That novel was Orwell’s final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, seven months before his death. It wasn’t a failure. Appearing in every list of the best English-language novels, from Time magazine to the BBC, it has sold and continues to sell millions of copies around the world. Orwell made clear that the novel was a warning against totalitarianism of right or left and not a prophecy. It imagined the consequences of a political philosophy that placed power above the law and sacrificed individual liberty to the Party’s interpretation of the collective good. At the time it was written, although Orwell knew about Hitler’s efforts to achieve racial purity, the full extent of Stalin’s crimes against humanity had yet to be revealed – and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was yet to be written. The book was bound to retain its relevance between the year of its publication and the year of its title. The wonder is how resoundingly relevant it remains well into the twenty-first century. The clarity and precision of its prose has ensured its freshness, and its themes – the importance of objective truth and of not confusing patriotism with nationalism – remain acutely pertinent to our age. In essence Orwell’s literary, political and philosophical journey culminated in a final masterpiece which has become ingrained in our lives.

Today we watch programmes like Big Brother and Room 101 on our ‘telescreens’. The terms ‘Newspeak’ and ‘thought crime’ have entered our language, just as their author’s name has entered our dictionaries as an adjective. The momentous events of 2016 in respect of the EU referendum in Britain and the election of President Donald Trump in America had an Orwellian dimension. In The Lion and the Unicorn Orwell says that ‘the insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time’. And in America, the election of the forty-fifth president led to Nineteen Eighty-Four (published when the thirty-third president, Harry S. Truman, was in the White House) becoming a bestseller once again. With delicious irony, Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway channelled Orwell when she described a comment by the president as ‘an alternative fact’ rather than a lie. The concept of ‘fake news’ could have come from the Ingsoc regime in the superstate of Oceania. These developments demonstrate that the battle to defend objective truth is as important as ever, and that whilst Eric Blair died in 1950, George Orwell lives on.

About the Book

Also by George Orwell

Orwell on Truth

About the Author

Introduction