The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity of England, the patriotism that runs like a connecting thread through almost all classes. After Dunkirk anyone who had eyes in his head could see this. But it is absurd to pretend that the promise of that moment has been fulfilled. Almost certainly the mass of the people are now ready for the vast changes that are necessary; but those changes have not even begun to happen. Bağımsızlığını kazandıktan sonra çökeceğini, Japonya ve Rusya tarafından işgal edileceğini düşündüğü Hindistan ile ilgili öngörülerinde ise maalesef sınıfta kaldı diyebiliriz. Evet, Hindistan, Pakistan ve Hindistan olarak ikiye bölündü ama o da İngilizlerin yüzyıllar boyunca sürdürdüğü Hindu ve müslüman halkları kışkırtma politikası sonucu olmadı mı?.. And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you. In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy shipowner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus. And considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and considering that they were buying their way into a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such way.

Orwell, George (1970 [1941]) The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin pp 74-134 Fascinating to read such amazing predictions of England's position in the world and its future while "highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." Sometimes, on top of a cupboard or at the bottom of a drawer, you come on a pre-war newspaper, and when you have got over your astonishment at its enormous size, you find yourself marvelling at its almost unbelievable stupidity (ibid: 145). The first part of the essay, " England Your England", is often considered an essay in itself. With the introductory sentence "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.", [1] the content sheds some light on the process which eventually led Orwell to the writing of his famous dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four. The text is also influenced partly by his other experiences in the Spanish Civil War, which he published his memoirs of in " Homage to Catalonia". His beliefs molded there of the dangers of totalitarianism and his conviction for democratic socialism to defeat fascism and Soviet communism are evident in all of his future novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm but are expressed here without allegory. He comes up with a six-point programme, the kind of thing in his eyes would make a positive difference -They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.”

Orwell’s contempt for the Daily Mirror is to persist. At the end of Animal Farm, the pigs take out subscriptions to John Bull, Tit-Bits and the Mirror – symbolically marking their ultimate betrayal of the revolution! (Orwell 1976 [1945]: 63).Leading on to the relationship between the economy and the war effort, there’s much focus on weapons manufacturing and how to stimulate it: however, I feel like Orwell slightly twists the narrative again for his own argument. We were undeniably old-fashioned in our tactics in 1914, especially in the use of horses, bayonets, and the like, but by the end of the war we’d progressed remarkably, inventing tracer bullets, aircraft carries, and the tank. (This is not to mention perhaps the most significant invention, radar, which was not conceived until the Second World War.) There was a big difference between 1914 and 1918: we learned our lesson, although we would have to learn it again in the Second World War. Orwell’s criticism is fair, but I feel he was neglectful on the point of adaptation.