The GEORGE ORWELL PROJECT or New G.O.P.

George Orwell

Who was GEORGE ORWELL?

George Orwell, for whom the new G.O.P. is named—not the Republican Party—is among the most influential writers of the mid-20 th century. He was born in 1903 and died in 1950 and was primarily known for the dystopian novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). Offering chilling warnings of the dangers of totalitarianism, these books also contributed the basic vocabulary of the authoritarian practices that emerged rather than disappeared after World War II. How could the post-war era have been described without Orwell’s lexicon about surveillance and truthfulness embodied in terms like Big Brother, doublethink, Thought Police and NewSpeak?

An essayist, critic and journalist, Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in British-held India. His father was a minor bureaucrat, whom Orwell later termed one of the “landless gentry” to denote colonials with pretensions of social status that failed to match their income or assets. His bourgeois life of some privilege in England resembled what he decried about English colonials in India: as a scholarship student he attended prestigious Eton where Aldous Huxley was his French instructor and later followed the family footsteps to Burma, where his grandmother lived. His critique of colonialism in his novel Burmese Days (1934) and other short works examined what Orwell described as seeing “the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.” What followed was his life-long belief in the virtues and necessity of socialism.

This socialism was indelibly inscribed on the pages of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), an account coupling reporting about the unemployed miners in northern England and a critique of the socialist organizations advocating on their behalf. His critique provided a model for his discussion of the Republican Spanish forces in his Homage to Catalonia (1938), perhaps the most read book in English apart from Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls about the Spanish Civil War. Homage recounted Orwell’s experiences in Barcelona, where he was seriously wounded by a sniper’s shot and forced to flee Spain after having fought against pro-Communist forces trying to suppress political opponents, like Orwell, on their Left.

Back in England, Orwell wrote prolifically, publishing classic essays on subjects ranging from Charles Dickens to criticism of the Labor Party’s brand of socialism. He finished Animal Farm in1944 but it was poorly timed given its critical attitude toward the Soviet Union at a time of shifting alliances between the UK and Russia. When Animal Farm was finally published in published—with a few days of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945—it brought him fame and money, for the first time. (See my comments about the recent animated film version of Animal Farm.)

He continued to write and publish, perhaps most important was his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” about the debasement of political speech. This subject remained at the center of his thinking and the heart of his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). It evokes a future of warring police states in which its bureaucrat hero longs for truth and decency. He and a similarly warm-hearted woman have an affair before being arrested by the Thought Police and tortured to motivate love for the monstrous Big Brother. Orwell died soon after completing the book in early 1950.

What is the GEORGE ORWELL PROJECT?

George Orwell, for whom the new G.O.P. is named—not the Republican Party—is among both the most inspiring and progressive thinkers of the mid-20th century. He noted, speaking of his own reasons for writing, “What I have most wanted to do…is to make political writing into an art…My starting point is always a feel of partisanship.” His allegiance to both socialist ideas and their artful expression defies the cliché of art and

politics never mixing.

Consider the project a virtual clubhouse designed in the spirit of Orwell. And perhaps in its multi-media literary form as well. At its inception it comprises a collection of varied expressions in poetry, prose, essays and dialogue. What do you think it should contain? What might it be? How can we support Orwell’s criticality and clarity? And your own?

Best regards,

Robert Atkins