"The Pursuers of George Orwell "

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<http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2003/06/09&ID=Ar01500>

Publication:The New York Sun; 	Date:Jun 9, 2003; 
Section:Arts & Letters; 	Page:15
COMMENTARY 


The Pursuers of George Orwell 


By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ Mr.Schwartz is the author of "The
Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud From Tradition
to Terror" (Doubleday). 

[...] As a writer, Orwell had an amazing capacity to
pierce, however distant he was from it, the heart of a
heartless world, the world of antihuman abstractions.
Such capacities have not been as apparent in the
commentators and intellectuals who have bandied his
actions and writings in the half century since his
death. One notable recent exception is Christopher
Hitchens, author of last year’s "Why Orwell Matters,"
who summarized the whole matter eloquently in an
introduction to Harcourt’s new omnibus hardbound
reissue of "Animal Farm" and "1984": 
    He suffered a good deal in making the 
    discovery, but he has assisted us in realizing
that, while the drive to corruption 
    and cruelty and power is certainly latent 
    in human beings, the instinct for liberty 
    is innate as well. 
    But a school of Orwell studies has risen up, and
scholars and public intellectuals use him as a pretext
for preening about the clichés of the moment.
Self-regarding leftists assail him as a renegade and
alleged "snitch" because he denounced Stalinists.
Revisionist historians of the Spanish Civil War,
seeking to burnish the reputation of the Stalinists in
that conflict, have made him their chief object of
hatred. Certain diehard leftists, on the other hand,
insist that had he lived Orwell would have remained
faithful to socialism, not to capitalist democracy.
Feminists use him as a target for their obsessions,
projecting on him, decades back in time, their
insistence that nobody of traditional masculine habits
and prejudices can be considered worthy of respect. 

[...] 

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