Reading Orwell, as one does. Not just the obvious ones, but his essays and radio broadcasts as well, which are no less important. It’s a cliché now to say he’s more relevant than ever – indeed, at a time when a lot of people – millions and millions – think that “truth” is whatever the former President says it is, Orwell is incredibly important.

                Even so, I can’t help thinking some of the direct historical parallels are no longer quite so invocable. I thought that today while reading one of his essays, on the response to atrocities of all things. “The worst thing about atrocities is that they happen,” he writes, in that way of his, making blindingly obvious statements that nevertheless sound profound because it didn’t occur to anyone else to say them. His point being that in the run-up to WWII, fascist atrocities, communist atrocities, imperialist atrocities and capitalist-bourgeois atrocities were only selectively reported and selectively condemned, depending on one’s traditional sympathy with the perpetrators. The Left and the Right accused each other of atrocities, but turned a blind eye to their own. When the Molotov-Rippentrop pact was signed, it got messier still, with the radical Left forgetting all about both.

                It’s a huge theme of his – arguably the central one – and essential for understanding 1984 and Animal Farm. It’s pointless to read either without understanding this context. Orwell was writing at a time when the perception of reality was being twisted to suit political agendas. At such a time, telling the truth, or insisting there was such thing as Truth, became a revolutionary act.

                It’s not hard to see the relevance of this today. Truth is more malleable than ever, and the concept itself more-or-less out of fashion.

                Yet it’s even weirder than what it was in Orwell’s time. Could Orwell have imagined that Flat-Earth-Theory would be in vogue again? That germ-theory would be widely disputed? That elections could be swayed by a belief that everything is controlled by hidden satanic child-sex cults? Civilization isn’t being crushed by competing tyrannies – it’s bleeding to death from a thousand delusional cuts.  Truth is broken mirror. What would Orwell have made of it all?

                When I was younger I did dabble in Marxist-Leninist circles. Orwell’s descriptions felt very familiar. I recognized the selective analysis of history, the selective condemnation of atrocity – only when committed by, or attributed to, the capitalist-bourgeois west, and selective memory required to rehabilitate Lenin and Trotsky. Orwell talked about those kind of things, and it all felt very close to home.

                That all feels so remote now. We’re pulled in so many different directions now, the old Left/Right divide seems positively quaint. There’s no monolithic Leftist bloc out there competing for legitimacy. China (literally) bought into capitalism a long time ago. There was some blinkered thinking around Chavez and Venezuela, but that was really just a blip. The response to Islamic terrorism provoked intense debate,  but no one denied that it happened – only what caused it and what to do about it. The dominant ideological-fault line these days seems to have formed around “Woke” culture, which is a poor substitute indeed.

                Even if you think it’s not completely ridiculous to compare university pronoun guidelines to Zhdanov’s address to the Soviet Writer’s Congress, one has to admit the stakes are so much lower here. No one’s been shot. No one’s been sent to a Gulag. That’s not what’s happening here. I doubt that Orwell – who picked up a rifle and literally fought fascism, and literally took a bullet – in the throat – for Democracy- would have had much truck with all this bellyaching over “cancel culture”. Nor would the author of “Politics and the English Language” care one bit for all these stupid buzz-terms flying around.

                All of which is to say the analogies seem less perfect now, the parallels less immediately obvious. We’re getting into really strange territory here, into situations and scenarios Orwell wouldn’t recognize, and maybe can’t help us with. If his analysis was intimately tied to the particulars of his time, it might not perfectly apply to the particulars of our time. Maybe not. But I think the gist of his thought – that Power lies, that language matters, and that truth is a thing – will always apply.