I think Orwell was mainly against lies. And he was the kind of independent thinker who was able to spot and expose lies, in any direction. If Stalin’s boys were klying in Spaion, he said so. If Stalin’s loyal followers in Britain were lying, he said so. More power to him.

He’s independent still. No faction can “appropriate” him. And FWIW I don’t think Hitchens tried to appropriate him. He wrote a book praising Orwell. If only our journalists could write as clearly and presciently as Orwell.

Yeah, that’s an ask too big.

I was about post several hyndred words here making the same point. But…

Bingo! Nailed it there in around a dozen words, ramhead.

I think the best expression of what Orwell really wanted political systems to deliver was captured here
http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/moon-under-water.htm

Orwell’s appropriation by the right I think would have disturbed him - the right mistake his anti-communism for pro capitalism, which are two very different things.

You know, how when you ridicule the crazed foamings of an Oz columnist, it means you don’t understand what it’s like for the battlers. It makes perfect sense.

“FDB, perhaps your reluctance sometimes to unleash ridicule is a symptom of your abiding humanity.”

Aw, shucks.

‘It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.’

His enthusiasm for republican Spain is difficult to marry to Republican America.

FDB, perhaps your reluctance sometimes to unleash ridicule is a symptom of your abiding humanity.

Is it that we’re scared of the out-of-touch label?

Rightist appropriation of Orwell is as self-serving and as brazenly false as rightist accusations that the Left are more virulent in their anti-semitism than Rightist have been for at least 200 years.

The Right has been adept at Swift-boating the truth for longer than is proper.

I think this capability pre-dated Web 2.0, but I’d suggest that the intertubes have given the Right a useful sandpit in which to practise their dark arts.

In general the Left appears to be handicapped by a residual respect for evidence and by their propensity to allow their outrage to be expressed as whininess.

I’ve said it before, but the Left has much greater access to ridicule than the Right. Ridicule is a WMD against RWDBs.

Whininess must be abdured.

Stop. You lost me at “he fought.”

Of course you might try to save it by saying, “Yes of course, but Orwell wasn’t a ‘warmonger’ himself, just for fighting in a war; he simply participated in a war because he knew it was the necessary thing to do.”

Spot the special pleading.

Class dismissed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM

http://www.fundanin.org/durgan1.htm

The whole point is that it does a disservice to a complex writer to come up with reductionist claims about a single political hermeneutic to explain his literary work.

On which see the unpublished preface to Animal Farm, which certainly suggests a lot more nuance in his motivations and intentions in writing the book than your Jovial friend sees:

http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html