The Telegraph hyllar George Orwell

Nästa vecka är det 60 år sedan George Orwells 1984 publicerades för första gången. Med anledning av årsdagen har någon Jeremy Paxman i brittiska The Telegraph skrivit en hyllning till den makalösa författaren Orwell, som ju givetvis räknas till de mer framstående i den brittiska litteraturhistorien.

It is, of course, as a 'political' writer that he is now best-known. Sixty years after publication, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the greatest fictional demolition of totalitarianism, and any decently educated 12-year-old can explain what Animal Farm is about. But, in truth, there is almost none of his successful work, either fiction or non-fiction, that is not political. His work is always about that basic question – why do we live like this?

[...] But he also had the paradoxical good fortune to live in evil times. There could be no accommodation with fascism – it was either resistance or capitulation, and everything he wrote from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until his death was infused with the same urgent imperative to resist totalitarianism. Of course, some of it is absurdly overstated. Can he really have believed that "only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years... I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood," in 1940? But evil times force harsh judgments.

Och visst är det väl extra lämpligt att framhålla Orwell just i dag...med tanke på Piratpartiets framgångar i EU-valet i går. Blir onekligen intressant att följa Christian Engströms framfart i Bryssel framöver.

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