The thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
-- GEORGE ORWELL, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
George Orwell, who wrote so eloquently and clearly about Britain's role in both world wars, is my favorite political philosopher. The lessons of his writings seemed especially resonant following the tragic July 7 bombings in London.
There's a reason the right and left have spent the last 60 years trying to claim Orwell for themselves. His writing has all the qualities we find wanting in politics today: honesty, self-criticism, love of country, the courage to fight for his beliefs, and an equal fervor that any ideology loses meaning if it is not supported by fact.
When London was under attack in World War II, Orwell wrote an essay entitled "England, Your England." The essay begins, "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me," then goes on to describe the gentleness of "a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers" and the "privateness" of a people who love crossword puzzles, stamp collections, and, above all, flowers. Orwell was brutally honest about what was wrong with Britain, from hypocrisy to class privilege -- and yet, as in all his work, what's most striking is how deeply he loved his country anyway.
Orwell didn't like the political extremes of his day because one side refused to see England's faults while the other side refused to see her many virtues. Tories lived to protect wealth and privilege. ("They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.") They wrapped themselves in the flag without deserving it. ("Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism.")
The left had the opposite problem. "Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory," he wrote. "Many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated. ... As a result, 'enlightened' opinion is quite
largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy."
Orwell worried about an intelligentsia badly severed "from the common culture of the country." His call for intellectuals to show love of country rings true today: "Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible."
Orwell understood, as some on the left have since forgotten, that patriotism isn't an obstacle to social
progress; it is the one force capable of sustaining it. "One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty," he wrote. "As a positive force there is nothing to set beside it."
In politics, all of us have a tendency to try to turn every piece of news to our advantage. Orwell took a longer view. The old debates still matter, he was saying, but keep your eyes on the real enemy who is exploding bombs outside your window.
For a few months after 9/11, the United States did just that. Politicians who might earlier have caned one another in the halls of Congress stood together to sing "God Bless America" on the Capitol steps. When Bush chose to turn 9/11 into a partisan issue in the 2002 midterm elections, he blew, for a generation, an unprecedented opportunity to change the tone of our politics.
Ever since, like an old, scratched phonograph record, our political debate has kept going back over the same rut, as if 9/11 never happened. As Orwell put it, "The soldiers do all the fighting, the journalists do all the shouting," and the far right and far left go on contorting every event to suit their ideological agenda.
The London bombings, a direct attack on freedom and decency, should have had the same galvanizing effect as 9/11. But in the early aftermath of 7/7, the debate was, alas, much the same as the one they (and we) were having before then.
Longtime Blair critic George Galloway fired the first shot: "We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. ... Tragically, Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings." On this side of the pond, Rush Limbaugh took the bait and accused Democrats of blaming America.
President Bush did the world a real disservice turning the debate about 9/11 and terrorism into a debate only about Iraq. Let's not do the same with the debate about 7/7.
We've spent enough time listening to George Bush and George Galloway. It's about time we listened to George Orwell.
