by Dan Flynn

"Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd-seemingly the leading actor of the piece, but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind," George Orwell writes in his classic essay, "Shooting an Elephant." Orwell, who as a young man served as a policeman in the British imperial outpost of Burma, describes in the essay how he was compelled to kill a rampaging elephant-not because it was necessary, but because the local mob wanted him to give them a show. "I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.... For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him."

When we read "Shooting an Elephant" today, we hear Orwell's exhortations against the reality created by British imperialists in the early 20th century applied to the fantasyland dreamed up by American Wilsonians at the outset of the 21st century. Nation building, exporting democracy, and other modern euphemisms for imperialism-an imperialism free from base motives, but imperialism nonetheless-are deconstructed better in an essay written 65 years ago than they are by modern critics.

Orwell remains relevant because he still has much to say, while many of his contemporaries are now irrelevant. In Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens makes this case convincingly.

Among Orwell's many enduring writings is "Politics and the English Language," which anticipated political correctness by four decades. Speaking of the promiscuous use of the word democracy (e.g., "people's democracy" ), Orwell wrote: "Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different." One thinks of this cogent essay, as well as "Newspeak," "Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others," and "2+2=5," when encountering "tolerance," "diversity," "sensitivity," and other campus buzzwords whose contemporary usage often denote definitions the reverse of their true meanings. Speaking of the aversion to truth among the postmodernists, Hitchens writes: "It may one day seem strange that, in our own time of extraordinary and revolutionary innovation in the physical sciences, from the human genome to the Hubble telescope, so many 'radicals' spent so much time casting casuistic doubt on the concept of verifiable truth." Orwell, on the other hand, shined light on the darkness and found truth.

Is there a writer since Shakespeare who has had a more discernable effect on language than Orwell? Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 unleashed hordes of new words and phrases into the lexicon, the most widely used of which is perhaps the adjective form of the author's last name. Video cameras at traffic lights, companies monitoring the internet habits of individuals, government tracking of five-figure bank deposits or withdrawals, and a thousand other aspects of life in 2002 all conjure up images of Big Brother watching over us.

"I don't share the average intellectual's hatred of his own country and am not dismayed by a British victory," Orwell wrote during World War II. Sixty years later when Western intellectuals exhibited a particularly virulent strain of cultural self-hatred after 9/11, Orwell's words again proved germane. Writing immediately after the fall of Hitler, Orwell penned lines that just as easily could have been written in the wake of 9/11. He explained, "there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States." Amazingly, a man who never read Gore Vidal or Noam Chomsky is better equipped to deconstruct their arguments than any contemporary nemesis of either figure.

"The three great subjects of the twentieth century were imperialism, fascism and Stalinism," Hitchens writes, noting that his subject got them all right. Hitchens' choice of words is curious. While "fascism," and not just its most extreme variant (Nazism), is correctly identified as an evil, "Stalinism," but not communism, stands as the problem to him. Ignoring Lenin, Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Castro, Pol Pot, and dozens of B-list Communist dictators, Hitchens, like Orwell, blames Stalin and not socialism for the crimes committed in socialism's name. "Stalinism was a negation of socialism and not a version of it," Hitchens writes. Why, then, did the problems associated with Stalinism precede Stalin's rise to power and continue after his death? To admit that it was the idea of socialism, rather than some bastardized form of it, is to indict both the author and his subject. As lifelong socialists, both are reluctant to face the truth. This blindness to the root cause of oppression within Communist systems stands as black marks against Hitchens and Orwell.

Why Orwell Matters argues, "It is true on the face of it that Orwell was one of the founding fathers of anti-Communism." On the face of it, this certainly is not true. The entire Right beat Orwell to the punch. From its inception in 1917, 20th century Communism had many opponents. For Hitchens, these anti-Communists are a collection of troglodytes and atavists. They are not worth noting. Only anti-Communism from the Left commands Hitchens' praise and recognition. Orwell, of course, focused his ire upon Communism only after his horrific experiences fighting alongside the Communists in the Spanish Civil War, which he chronicled in Homage to Catalonia. For Hitchens, it's as if a "founding father" can come along 20 years after a movement has started-and spend many years fighting against that very thing before having an epiphany-and still be considered an originator of the movement. Like Whittaker Chambers, Arthur Koestler, and Richard Wright, Orwell was a particularly effective anti-Communist because-although never a full-fledged Party member like Chambers, Koestler, and Wright-he was of the Left. Thus, one uncovers Orwell's iconic status on the Right and his "public enemy" status on the Left. To the Left, he was a traitor. To the Right, so desperate to claim a respected man of letters as their own, he's a saint.

Orwell's lone-wolf spirit was not without consequence. Kinsley Martin, Victor Gollancz, and other prominent leftist publishers who had once fawned over him refused to print his writings after he vocally criticized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Animal Farm, for instance, was one of the bestselling works of fiction of the century, yet it was rejected by publishers on ideological grounds. Orwell ended-up accepting a 45-pound advance for the book! "There isn't much room for doubt about the real source of anti-Orwell resentment," Hitchens writes. "In the view of many on the official Left, he committed the ultimate sin of 'giving ammunition to the enemy.' Not only did he do this in the 30s, when the cause of anti-fascism supposedly necessitated a closing of ranks, but he repeated the offence in the opening years of the Cold War and thus-'objectively', as people used to say-became an ally of the forces of conservatism." The author could be just as well talking about himself. After years of shilling for the Left, Hitchens has done somewhat of an about-face. The Clintons and reflexively anti-Western intellectuals are just two of his recent targets. Like his contrarian subject, Hitchens has done this without abandoning his socialist beliefs. In praising Orwell, the author is in many ways praising himself.

Despite the Left's rejection of Orwell, one should be weary of conservatives claiming the former Eric Blair as their own. "The body snatching of Orwell," Why Orwell Matters contends, "is a much more specialized task and probably should not be attempted by any known faction. Least of all, perhaps, should it be undertaken by Tories of any stripe. George Orwell was conservative about many things, but not about politics."

Had he continued to write essays like "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell would have today a less controversial, and less interesting, legacy. Ironically, the same independence of mind that allowed this armed guardian of the Empire to question colonialism and become a hero of progressives, also led this committed socialist to question Stalin, the official version of the Spanish Civil War, and other sacred cows of the Left and become a pariah among men of the Left.

George Orwell's writings on such diverse topics as the corruption of language, cultural alienation among intellectuals, government intrusion, and imperialism seem to speak to issues of contemporary import better than what is put on paper today. Hitchens is right. Orwell still matters.