Once upon a time my dad made some snarky comments about my fondness for George Orwell. I was a tad obsessed and spent a year (or two) reading everything he wrote. His biggest offense, as far as I could discern from my Dad's comments, was his lack of Sainthood. But I liked his prose because it was all done simply and plainly (anything else is wasted on me).

In my opinion, Orwell underwent a conversion of sorts that's necessary here in the US. In many essays he damns the British Empire, but at the end of his life, envisioning the stark alternatives, he came to see the redemptive qualities of his own national charater.

If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.

Orwell was a man who understood the human condition and his essays mean more now because of our own precipitous slide into the primordial ooze. This is Orwell some 50+ years ago:

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. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the “sacred soil of the Fatherland”, etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered form. 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.

This is what the West needs now...not some phony politicos engaged in listening tours and conversations.

Epilogue & Disclaimer
The idea for this entry came from an article written by John Derbyshire called In Memory of Private Moyse. My outlook is very grim these days and I probably have a case of the Derbs. Coping suggestions?

Labels: democrats, islamofascism