The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War

Many on the political left have long struggled to support any war, no matter how just—as some still do with regard to the one in Ukraine today. The evolution of the English writer George Orwell’s thinking about war is instructive. In this slim and readable volume, Stansky considers how four wars transformed Orwell’s worldview. Still at Eton and too young to fight in World War I, Orwell penned vulgar poems suffused with the jingoism for which his elite school was famous. Twenty years later, he became a resolved antifascist and anticommunist after witnessing how Moscow-backed radicals betrayed the socialists in the Spanish Civil War. Yet he had also come to believe that capitalism was almost as bad as communism and hardly worth defending, and so he espoused pacifism. He then reversed himself after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, which paved the way for World War II. Orwell supported the war effort as a British patriot, standing firm with fellow democracies. The Cold War solidified his anticommunism, as expressed in his novels Animal Farm and 1984. Only democracy, he came to believe in his final years, could enable the emergence of his preferred democratic socialism—although he doubted that such politics could ever hold sway in North America.