Saturday, October 17, 2009  Recommended Reading - Why Orwell
Matters  George Orwell may be the only person who got it right
on all three of the Big Issues of the 20th Century: Imperialism,
Fascism, and Communism. Certainly that's Christopher Hitchen's
thesis, powerfully presented in this slim history.  I once asked
Of What Use is an Intellectual Class? Hitchens shows us. There
has always been a principled Left, of which Orwell (and
Hitchens, and Norm Geras, and Roger L. Simon) is a
representative. He was defined by a set of core beliefs that are
- unlike those of the unprincipled Left, whose shameful record
goes back at least to Bolshevik times - unrelated to which party
is in power or which leader's star is rising.  Orwell was a
complex mix of what we'd term "right" and "left" in today's
scorecard: It is true on the face of it that Orwell was one of
the founding fathers of anti-Communism; that he had a strong
patriotic sense and a very potent instinct for what we might
call elementary right and wrong; that h