Part Two: George Orwell and the War for Common Decency

Margaret finishes talking with Kaveh Hoda about her problematic fave.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did
Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that people can do good
things and response to bad things, and also sometimes that
people can become better people than.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
They started off. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my
guest today is Cavea, who's host of House of Pod
and a doctor. And you know, oh hi, yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
No, I'm a better person now for having been through
episode one of these two parter learning things about how
to improve as a person.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Yeah, exactly. And you know he needs doctors a lot,
George orwell, oh, I thought you're gonna say me, Well,
I'm going to get to that too. Also is a
is our producer Sophie, who I would not have said
that about on air, but Sophie said about on air,

(00:55):
how do you like our sickly hero pop this week?

Speaker 4 (00:59):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
I think that. Uh, I don't know. I can't get
past some of the things, so I just don't like him.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
That's fair, that's working fair. I did not like him
for a very long time after I learned.

Speaker 5 (01:12):
Thought yeah, yeah, but you know, empathy to people who
also need to live in a bubble.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, also in our bubble of social helping create this
podcast is our audio engineer, Daniel and Hi Daniel H.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Danel, Danel. I liked it and.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Our theme musical was written forced by unwoman and yeah,
no it's Sophie. I like, I feel you about it.
I I don't know. It took me a really long
time to be like, I'm going to give this man
a time a day. Our hero, George Orwell, are complicated here.
George Orwell, he's in Spain and he joins a Marxist militia,

(01:56):
the Poum Poum. They're a smallish unit and they're like
famous in history because George Orwell wrote one of the
main books about the Spanish Civil War. They're not historically
important particularly, but they became important because warwells in it.
And they're Marxists. But the whole thing is that they're
not attached to Stalin. Stalin actually tries to kill them

(02:16):
all soon enough, and he wanted to join the anarchists
because they weren't but they weren't going where he wanted
to go. He wrote quote, as far as my purely
personal preferences went, I would have liked to join the anarchists.
And George ends up an officer soon enough, he was
a few years older, and he had basically had paramilitary

(02:37):
training from being a colonial cop. There was military rank
in terms of structure in these militaries, but not in
terms of social treatment. He said that quote. There was
no titles, no badges, no heel clicking, and no saluting,
and everyone from general to private drew the same pay ate,
the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on

(02:57):
terms of complete equality.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
Why he wanted to be with the anarchists because he
just didn't like the pageantry of the military and being
like a cop and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Well, so he had like kind of come from like
he had this period already where he had been an
anarchist for a little bit. But actually it's this Marxist
militia is also like that. The Marxist militia that he's
part of is also complete social equality, even though there's
a command structure embedded within it, also within the anarchists,
or very similar structurally. But yeah, no, I think he

(03:29):
just he like kind of likes the anarchists. He's still
not one. He's a democratic socialist. He actually comes there
as part of the Labor Party, the Independent Labor Party,
distinct from the Labor Party. They move in and out
in British politics are very confusing to me, and so
these militias fight despite there being no force, making them
nothing but class loyalty. Orwell wrote quote in May. For

(03:52):
a short while, I was acting lieutenant in command of
about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had all been
under fire for months, and I never had the slightest
difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men
to volunteer for a dangerous job. Discipline was built by
spreading revolutionary ideas, not as jargon and most as sloganeering,
but by quote, I'm a sneeze. Please cut this whole one,

(04:16):
or I'm going to acknowledge them with sneeze, and it's
not gonna happen. And you should include it because it's first. Yeah,
just include it. I hope people find it amusing that
I sometimes have to sneeze.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
Look up at the sun. You can trigger an ocular
reflex if there's one available to you. There's a lamp.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Although it is midsummer as we're recording this, I'm sure
there's a sun outside somewhere. So they spread this discipline
by spreading revolutionary ideas by quote, endless arguments and explanations
as to why such and such a thing was necessary,
rather than being like, well, come on, man, dialectical marks
as materialism says that you should go to run into

(04:57):
that machine gun you know. Oh wait, maybe with sneeze again.
Who knows gonna happen at any time.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
I'm not convinced. Almost certainly, oh, he also wrote quote
almost certainly. The main reason why the Spanish Republic could
keep up the fight for two and a half years
against impossible odds was that there was no gross contrasts
of wealth. The people suffered horribly, but they all suffered alike.
When the private soldier had not a cigarette, the general
had not won either. The militias held the line while

(05:28):
a regular army assembled and trained behind them, but eventually
the communist forces, and by this I mean the Stalinist forces,
swallowed it all. After about a year, the militias disbanded
or were absorbed into the communist controlled popular army, with
all the usual bullshit like officers getting paid a ton
more than the regular soldiers, or well described it, The

(05:49):
undoubted purpose of this change was to strike a blow
at equalitarianism in every Department, the same policy had been followed,
with the result that only a year after the outbreak
of the war, you get what was in effect an
ordinary bourgeois state with in addition a reign of terror
to preserve the status quo. And like when he says

(06:10):
preserve the status quo, he means that, like when the
revolution first broke out, everyone's like running around and collectivizing
farms and stealing land back from the landlords and shit
like that. Right, the Communists were like, no, no, you can't
do that yet. You're not allowed to collectivize property anymore,
and we will fucking kill you if you try.

Speaker 6 (06:26):
So I'm look confused, though, Yeah, you're confused, so he
said a little bit. Yeah, okay again, I'm I'm not
socially just asking.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
But I feel like that would have been a Communist
thing to do though, or were they There's like, no,
we're the ones to do that, not you people doing
it willy nilly.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
So there's this thing that at this time the Communist
Party was kind of the right wing of the left
because they believed one they were like totalitarian right and
they believed in Stalin and all this stuff, right, But
they specifically were like, we can't have the revolution yet
because we don't want to piss off the rich, because

(07:10):
we want to consolidate power. They were specifically around politicking
and playing power rather than having a communist revolution. So
they're hypocrites and they are like counter revolutionary, is how
I Everyone who listens to this podcast knows, I have
a very low opinion of the USSR. But yeah, so
they are running around preventing the revolution in the name

(07:33):
of the greater revolution. Basically. Part of it also is
that Russia doesn't care about Spain except as a chess
piece on a global board, right, and so Russia is
afraid that if Spain goes communists too soon, the UK
and France are not going to have it, and they're
going to like try to stop Russia.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
Got you, right, gotcha.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
They're playing forty chess with yeah, people's lives instead of
having ideological consistency and trying to, you know, create a
communist society. Everyone else's trying to create a communist society
except the communists, is what's happening. The Labor Party is
down there trying to fucking cause a communist society because
the left wing of the or the Independent Labor Party

(08:19):
is to the left of the Communists.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
Is the Labor Party back then it all similar to
the one that exists now.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
No, So okay, so I'm gonna get this a little
bit messy. So there's the Independent Labor Party and then
there's the Labor Party, and then they kind of intertwine
back and forth every now and then. And I think
by like the mid nineteen forties, the Independent Labor Party
becomes the left wing of the Labor Party, which comes
into power. And it's around then I think that the

(08:49):
Labor Party starts getting a little bit more boring centrist,
even kind of sometimes center right, and that's like Or
will die shortly there after, and like, so we actually
don't know what he would have kind of done politically,
whether he would have like kept fighting for the left
wing of the Labor Party or whether he would have
peaced out on it. But he's down there with the

(09:10):
Independent Labor Party.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
At this time.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
So it's it is distinct at this time, and there's
no official English intervention, like the government is of Britain
is not intervening, but individuals are like, we gotta go
stup fascism. Yeah, I'm also going to just out of nowhere.
Read my favorite quote from this book because I like it. Quote.

(09:32):
I have no particular love for the idealized worker as
he appears in the bourgeois communist mind. But when I
see an actual flesh and blood worker in conflict with
his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to
ask myself which side I am on.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Wow that's pretty. That's a. That's a. It's a major
character arc from where he started.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
I know he was a cop.

Speaker 7 (09:54):
Yeah, wow, Yeah, that's pretty.

Speaker 3 (09:57):
It's pretty interesting. I mean, we're going to get to it,
but I'm I'm like bummed to hear that he died
at forty six, Like I really wonder what would have
happened if, like, you know, he kept going.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
No and everyone conjectures and they would have been like,
he would have been on my team. And I do
that a little bit too, But like everyone's wrong, you know.
Right soon after he gets down there, Eileen comes to
and we don't have as much of her words. He
didn't write much about her the famous war. His book
on the war, Homage to Catalonia, doesn't mention her by

(10:28):
name anywhere in it, and doesn't talk about what she's doing.
Really Some have read this as evidence of him ignoring
her and taking it for granted. Again, my read of
the situation, which could be wrong, is that it was
private and that neither of them wanted her dragged into it. Yeah,
but she went down there, and she was coordinating logistics
for all the independent labor union soldiers, and so she's

(10:49):
running supply and communications and financial stuff and producing a
newspaper and a radio show. And there's like photos of
her on the front lines and stuff. She's not fighting
on the front lines, but she's making it happen.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
Sounded sad upon the radio. Sorry, I had to get
into Dixie being that runner.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Nice, well done you.

Speaker 3 (11:09):
Eventually I find a way.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
I only know, come on, Eileen, that the chorus you know, Oh.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
God, I don't know. I love that song so much.
It is the greatest one hit wonder, even better than
PoCA Bell's canon. It's that good a one hit wonder.
That's how much I love that song.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
It does something really well, which is like be a
like upbeat sad song. Yeah, exactly, that's right. Yeah, I
do like that about it. So, while George is fighting
at the front, a fascist soldier shoots him through the throat.
There's so many people who hate Orwell who write about Orwell,
And there's like this one writer who writes about everything

(11:50):
bad that happens to orwell's his own fault, and like
how he died of sickness as his own fault because
he kept being like dumb, you know. And so this
author whose name I genuinely forget, was like, oh, he
was really tall and he stood up and so they
he got shot and he should have known better because

(12:10):
he was tall and not to stand.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
Should never have stood up in that war.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, and he's like the same versus like he he
was slumming and that's how he got sick and destroyed
his health. So fuck him. And I'm just like damn.
And it's not even one of the people who was
writing about the bad thing he did.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
Anyway, he gets shot in the throat, but he survives.
If he had been shot a millimeter in another direction,
we probably wouldn't have had the book nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
Yeah, those a little important things going through your neck.
Yeah yeah, bad place to get shot. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
I was gonna ask, as a doctor, is like is
that a good spot? Like I know, he just turned
out the best.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
Yeah, turned to kit it really tight. Yeah, yeah, that's
a really bad place. I mean, aside from the blood
vessels that are major to bleed out very easily, the
is you know, you could get swelling from the wound
or the edemon and that could cause a restriction on
your air and your breathing, so not to mention your

(13:09):
spinal cord. So there's all there's a lot of stuff
in there, I mean, unless it just nicks you on
the side. Yes, it's not a good place to get shot. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
No, it's definitely threw the throat, not of graze, and
he definitely was apparently like millimeters from an artery and goodness,
but he's lucky in some ways.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
One thing that wasn't lucky is that while he was
at the front, the Communists had started attacking the Marxists
and the anarchists, and they started disappearing POM members, the
militia that he's part of. They start torturing them, they start,
but don't worry. The communist officers who did this disappearing
and torturing of their political rivals then got disappeared and
tortured by the Communist officers who replaced them, because it's

(13:56):
no one is good at killing communists like Stalin.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
I mean, like why just to like we didn't like
the way you tortured and killed the anarchists. We're going
to do it.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Better or like yeah, like now they're politically untrustworthy, like
Stalin is like fucking paranoid.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
You did what we told you to our colleagues, and
that shows us that you're not to be trusted, so
we are going to kill you now for it.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Yeah, basically, like like it's like it's almost inscrutable, like
Stalin has like the people closest to him are the
people who are getting killed, right, and so it's the
highest like it is the guy who disappeared a Pooh
member and was like the main torture guy. It's I
researched at different time, so I remember anyone's names who
like was then disappeared and tortured within months, you know,

(14:44):
And I don't know. I think that this is why
the Spanish Civil War, and other people argue that we
would have lost either way, but I think this is
why Franco won. There's certainly a big part of it.
It doesn't help when this kind of stuff happens. Yeah,
and so when he gets out of the hospit at all,
there's a warrnt out for his arrest from the Communists
because he's in and for him and Eileen, Eileen saves

(15:08):
the day. She has one eye on the exit the
whole time, and while he's recovering, she's like figuring out passport.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
Shit.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
I think they get out under an assumed name. It's
been a while since I read how much Catalonium and
gets them out of the country. And they were going
to be arrested and tried by the Communists. And we
know this because they were arrested and tried in absentia,
which is two things. One, what a way to start
a married life. They had been married for less than

(15:36):
six months when they go to this war. Yeah, and
it is like around their one year anniversary that they
are fleeing under assumed names from the Communists who they
were supposedly supposed to be helping.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
Yeah, romance, I know.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
And the other thing is that he hates Stalinists, and
with the burning heat of fiery son, the two things
he hates are fascists and Stalinists and he sees them
equally as bad. And because they killed probably an equal
number of his close friends during that war. Yeah, and

(16:12):
so yeah, Stalin gets stal George Horwell gets home, gets
really anti Stalinists at this point, and the left in
the UK fucking hates him when he gets back because
he doesn't like Stalin. Everyone's like, what, you can't be
mad at Stalin, the Man of Steele, He's our guy.

(16:33):
He couldn't get Homage to Catalonia published for a very
long time, and when he did, it's sold like a
couple hundred copies. He's like already a known author at
this point, right, but no one will buy it because
leftists right wing doesn't want it and the leftists don't
want it either. This is where Orwell starts getting taken
out of context constantly. His existing books are starting to

(16:55):
get taken out of context and being like, oh, or
was not a real leftist. He said the following about
the working class or whatever. Like there's this thing where
like in one of his books he was like the
working class smell, and you take that out of context,
that sure doesn't.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
Sound great, right, yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
And he's like talking about being like the sweat of
honest labor and hard lives and like bad hygiene caused
by poverty, and like, yes, there is actually a distinct
smell and you know, and so they're like, ah, or
Well just thinks that everyone, all the working class are
smelly idiots or whatever. Yeah, but Orwell remains a leftist
despite this, He wrote, quote, every line of serious work

(17:31):
I have written since nineteen thirty six has been written
directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. And
what's funny speaking of being taken out of context after
he dies and they like are reprinting Animal Farm and shit,
they start off with a intro introduction where they take
out the for democratic socialism.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
No kidding, yeah, oh my, what did they did? They
replace it with something or they took up that line completely.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah, there's every line of serious work I've written is
against totalitarianism.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
What point did he write animal Farm? Was this? Okay,
it's soon.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
So he moves in with Eileen's family for a while,
and then they moved to another place and they got
a French poodle they named Marx and a rooster they
named Henry Ford. And he kept getting sick a bunch,
which is like, you know, his the style at the
time for him and a writer friend pays for them
to recover in French Morocco, and so he goes to

(18:26):
hang out in warmer air or whatever because he's stole
a middle class and by middle class and British standards
like vaguely boucheoisie guy.

Speaker 5 (18:33):
You know.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, Eventually World War two does its whole thing like start.
And prior to the outbreak of the war, George actually
came back from Spain and he was a pacifist, which
was like the further left position, which doesn't mean that
he was against It doesn't mean what it means today,
like no violence. It means he didn't believe in England
joining a hypothetical European war. As soon as the war starts,

(18:57):
he won eighties and he is very pro war. There
are Nazis to kill and there's an England to defend.
Eileen is off to working in the censorship department at
the Ministry of Information. Yeah, they sounds very nineteen eighty four.
His life is very nineteen eighty four. George Orwell is

(19:17):
going to soon we'll talk about it. First he tries
to sign up for the military. He's like, well, I know,
my shit, I've been in a war. I you know
and say what you want about George orwell, he was
pathologically fearless. As far as I can tell, the Army,
the Navy, and the Air Force all reject him like
one after the other.

Speaker 3 (19:35):
Your next buddy, you can't come. No, we're not taking you.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
You are sickly, you are constantly down with pneumonia. And
also I think the fact that he's like a leftist
is part of this, right, like he's been. He actually
like kind of tries to join like more proper like
Ministry of Information type stuff, and I think and they
don't let him because he's on there like sk lefty

(20:00):
watch list. Yeah but yeah, and he's in his late
thirties and shit, and he's like not medically fit for
the war. So he joins the Home Guard, and the
Home Guard is mostly made up of like brave but
too young or too old or too sick, people like
people who can join the regular military over under eighteen
over forty one. And they all were training to fight

(20:21):
as partisans in case Germany invaded the UK, which absolutely
could have happened. It didn't come super close to happening.
We now know, right because we can like look at
the war documents and shit, but it like absolutely could
have happened. Or well, wants to turn the Home Guard
into a socialist militia to have a socialist revolution during
World War Two.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
It's strong, yes commitment.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
He is not alone in this And basically he starts
talking about how we need to win the war against
Hitler for socialism to have a chance, but we also
need to have a socialist revolution in order for winning
the war to have a chance. And I mean, he's wrong.
They managed to defeat Hitler anyway without a socialist revolution.
And did you know what one result of us not

(21:05):
having had a social democratic socialist revolution in the nineteen
forties is.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
I'm gonna guess it's something to do with the commercials.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
It does the fact that we were about to pivot
to actually, you know, we'd probably be pivoting to like
the people's ads or whatever its because the world's a nightmare.
But here's ads and rebeca the beginning of the war,

(21:33):
he spends two years in the propaganda services for the
BBC nineteen forty one to nineteen forty three. He's doing
wartime news in propaganda for British India. Because people tend
to forget that Britain was still in imperial power, Like
this is the there's like a couple year period where
Britain looks good and this is it, Like that's it.

(21:54):
The only time that Britain ever looked good was when
they were fighting the fucka Dazis.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
Yeah, because of all the movies. That's why all the
movies are about that time, because yeah, they look pretty cool. Yeah,
pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
People forget that Britain was an imperial power and a
fuck ton of Indian soldiers fought and died against the
Nazis and are often left out of the Like an
Indian friend of mine was like talking about basically being like,
oh yeah, whenever the like credit Pie for beating the
fucking Nazis gets rolled out, everyone leaves us out, you know.

Speaker 3 (22:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
And he was well aware of the irony of him
as an anti colonial writer working for the Eastern Service.
He told his superiors, quote, if I broadcast as George orwell,
I am as it were selling. My literary reputation, which
so far as India is concerned, primarily arises chiefly from
books of an anti imperialist tendency, some of which have
been banned in India because some of his books are

(22:45):
banned in India because they're anti colonial, and here he is.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
Doing colonial radio for them.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, and this is the like, I mean, this is
this is part of why a lot of his friends
were anti war is that were like, we hate the
British government, we can't support them, right, And he's like,
this is a big compromise for him. He gets really
jaded about this job. He's not much of a speaker,
he never had been at being sick and getting shot
in the throat probably didn't help that. He wrote amazing

(23:14):
scripts and he got like sort of interesting and sly
things past the censors here and there. I forgot to
include some examples. But who like invite anti colonial thinkers
on to talk about something totally unrelated and just kind
of vaguely get at anti colonial ideas.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
Yeah, well this is really I mean, this is a
really interesting parallel to what's happening now with a lot
of people trying to decide in this current election state
that we're in. You know, people who are very against
what the current administration might be supporting or doing at
the border and in Gaza, but still having to find
a way to like support the state of our current government.

(23:53):
You know, it's a very interesting it's a very interesting topic.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
No, totally, and it's a it is a very similar
like I feel, there's not a lot of things I
could say. A lot of people say that George row
will do this, George ro will do that, George Rowyll
would probab Voe Forbiden, like and he feel dirty about it,
and he talks shit about it, you know. Like that
seems to be because he believed in democracy versus fascism,

(24:19):
you know, and like he was willing to be in
some ways more like compromised in order to defend what
he believed was common decency. He's interesting and he like, well,
we'll talk about some of it.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
More in a minute.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
And uh, there's no recordings of anything he did during
this period. Apparently there's no recordings of his voice at all,
which I like, wow, struggle to believe. I like read
that somewhere, but I didn't then do my independent research.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
That is wild. And we even have like recording of
like Abraham Lincoln somewhere, like on some cylinder somewhere, Yes,
some I actually heard. I never heard it. I heard
that we do somewhere, And that's where they figured out
that his voice is a little bit more like tinny
nothing deep booming voice that you think he's supposed to have,
but more like Kenny sounding. I don't know if they's
like or not. Hey, Abraham Lincoln.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah, that's another example where I'm like, like, the Civil
War in the US is another one of these examples
where I'm like, yay, the Union an evil empire, you know.
But I'm like, but the right side of that war.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Yeah, right, like, undeniably the right side, even though they're terrible.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yeah, orwell tried to basically just be as good as
he could while he was there. He said, about this time,
I doubt whether I shall stay in this job much longer.
But while here, I consider I have kept our propaganda
slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been. He's
got insight, yeah, And he like because he read he
was listening to and reading all of the propaganda of
like Germany and all the other countries, you know, and

(25:50):
he was just like, how do I be less gross?
How do I tell fewer lies?

Speaker 3 (25:53):
You know? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (25:54):
While doing war propaganda? And he didn't nail it, but
he tried. It's around this time that the last trace
of anti Semitism has gone. World War two obviously a
high water mark for some anti Semitism. It shook a
fair amount of anti Semites who were basically decent people
into dropping that.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
You know, they saw the extreme there, they saw where
that road goes.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah. He quit the BBC in nineteen forty three before
the war's over. He's like, I can't do this anymore,
to focus on writing what became his breakthrough book, Animal Farm.
His wife Eileen probably helped him a lot with this.
This is contested because people like to argue about everything,
and it seems very likely that she was like, not
quite a co writer, but like, I think they were close.

(26:43):
I think that they were like, actually they cheated on
each other constantly, right, And I don't know whether or
not this was like them being dicks to each other
or whether they were doing what was actually the style
at the time, which was just to be in an
open marriage, you know. And because they didn't write about
their personal lives, so I don't know.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
Yeah, something like sounds like a thing that like European
authors would do.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
Yeah, totally. And they're both sickly. He's constantly down with
bronchitis and shit, and she is suffering from uterine bleeding
and has been for years. They're trying to have a
kid but can't manage. It's probable that George is sterile.
He also becomes the literary editor of the Tribune because actually,
by the way, it's all stored in the neck, you know,

(27:28):
and he had lost all that, right, isn't that the case.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah, I'll have to look at the pub med literature
on that, but yeah, I think that's right.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
Okay. He becomes the literary editor of the Tribune, which
is a journal for the left wing of the Labor Party,
what gets called the farthest left among the factions supporting
the war. Further left of that is the anti war left.
His friend George Woodcock wrote about this time. Even more
than his predecessors, he opened the review pages to writers

(27:57):
of almost every shade of political opinion. Only the Communists
were uninvited. In those days. Quite apart from Orwell's particular
antagonism towards it, the Communist Party, which was constantly clamoring
for the suppression of rival minorities, was regarded as pretty
far to the right in the ever shifting political spectrum.
Basically since around nineteen seventeen, Anyone saying communist in the

(28:18):
West meant bolshevik. Prior to that the word had broader meaning,
But to say communist in this era meant pretty specifically
like we take orders from Russia, not a we should
have the worker's control for the means of production. The
words for that were socialists, which usually implied democratic socialism,
like Orwell, anarchist or Trotskyist. So and that helped me

(28:41):
that like broke through a lot of like reading about
this era was to be like, oh, overall, if someone
says communist and they know what they're talking about, they're
not just throwing it around as a slur, like they
mean the communist party that is taking orders from Russia.
And if they say trotskyist or anarchist or democratic socialist
or socialist, they mean something different.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
M hm.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
So he finish his animal farm and five presses turn
it down. One of them turned it down because, as
Orwell suspected, everyone thought, Orwell is crazy for thinkiness Orwell
has lost his mind. He's he's so anti communist, he's
seeing communists everywhere. He's Spain broken. I mean, I think
Spain broke him a little bit. But like, how could
it not. Yeah, he suspected that a Soviet spy embedded

(29:25):
in the Ministry of Information got a publisher to change
its mind. It turns out he was right, no kidding.
Soviet spy embedded in the Ministry of Information went to
that publisher and was like, Yo, don't publish this.

Speaker 3 (29:39):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
And so everyone's turning it down because it's anti Soviet
and it's World War two and people are like, those
are our allies right now? Yeah, yeah, we can't publish that,
which I even I even kind of get yeah, you know, yeah,
I even kind of be like, let's wait a couple
of years on that. I don't know, I would probably
still publish it, but I can and see where they're

(30:01):
coming from. But then one press turned it down that
I'm like sad about the anarchist press turned it down.

Speaker 3 (30:08):
That's a real disappointment, I know.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
And some of his anarchist friends, George wood Cockway keep
quoting a lot because he's one of the first people
who write a book about Gorge Orwell after he died.
He as an anarchist historian and was friends close friends
with Orwell, and he was like, hey, we should publish this.
But he wasn't able to push it through like reach
consensus or whatever. I don't know if that were consensus
based because the anarchists they were anarchists and anti war,

(30:33):
and Orwell socialist and pro war, but.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
It just such, you know, it makes me think that
like if it had gone through and an anarchist press
had done it, I think in the long run, just
what it would have done for assuming it still would
have hit the same way, which I imagine it would, like,
just imagine what that would have done for anarchist literature.

Speaker 7 (30:53):
I know in general it would have made it mainstream.
I know, I'm so mad about this in retrospect. And
eventually Animal Farm found a publisher. It found an anti
Stalinist left his publisher called Secord and Warburg. And Warburg
of Secord and Warburg had been in Orwell's unit of

(31:13):
the Home Guard. I think Orwell had recruited him and
so it was part of that. Like, hey, yes, like
pro war socialists are going to try and like have
a socialist revolution with the Home Guard. That was a
total non starter, but it was like the fun idea,
you know, Yeah, made some good friends, made some friends
along the way. That's exactlytant. Yeah. Meanwhile, in May nineteen
forty four, the couple adopted a baby.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
His name is Richard. Not long after, the Nazis blew
up their house, but they survived. They weren't home during
the Blootz. Their house gets blown up, and Orwell had
to like dig through the rubble for his books and
kurt them away in a wheelbarrow. And as the war
wound down in early nineteen forty five, Orwell, as a

(31:54):
war journalist, headed off to Germany. But then tragedy strikes.
Eileen is home with Richard, who is ten months old,
and she wants to get a hysterectomy because of her
uterine bleeding problem. But she's a kneemic And actually, you
might be able to make better sense of this story
than me. She's anemic, and the doctors aren't sure that

(32:14):
they want to do it. They actually specifically recommend against it,
not without her spending a month in the hospital getting
blood transfusions, I think beforehand, but maybe afterwards she can't
afford that. She goes in for the surgery anyway, against
her doctor's recommendations, and she dies. It seems implied that
this was a response to the anesthesia, and the courts

(32:35):
determined there was no malpractice or anything. It was just
really shit luck. And also anesthesia in nineteen forty five
is not as good.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
Yeah, I mean just just surgical rates were worse, obviously,
and I wonder if there was some pretty heavy bleeding
during the surgery and there just wasn't enough blood product
on top of that, and along with the lack of
blood product and maybe having a bad reaction to some
sedative or something they gave, probably combined to Yeah, there's

(33:05):
so many things that could go wrong with surgery at
that point. Yeah, I mean, there's things didn't go wrong
with surgery now, right, I mean, we're much better than
we were in the forties.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, it was like the actually it's funny on the
on the you were you were the guest on the
episode about the ambulance or of paramedics. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And it was like, and those people were also the
folks who developed not the paramedics, but some of the
people who developed the paramedic practice were some of the
people who developed better anesthesia and stuff too.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
You know, yeah, you know that that episode you had
me on for the first paramedics in you in the
world after that episode, you inspired me to to reach
out to one of the main paramedics at the time,
Chief John Moon, who was still around and still practicing,

(33:56):
and I had him on the show and talked about it.
And he was the first person to intubate somebody in
the field, which just hadn't been done before. Usually that
there's someone just bagging them the whole time if they
have to, or giving them a suscitation, but no one
had been intubated in the field before. He was the
first person to do it. So that came like later
we're talking like, you know, seventies, like so sixty seventies

(34:18):
when these things start to happen, So things were much
worse at the time of these surgeries. It's terrible. It's
I mean, I'm and I know I always hate to
like look back at medicine and judge because I know,
like in forty years people are going to look back
the things we're doing rightly so and be like monsters,
monsters and the right because that's how medicine is supposed
to be. We're suposed to be getting better. It's supposed

(34:39):
to make look the things in the past look archaic.
But yeah, it's an unfortunate. It's an unfortunate surgery that
she had. I'm really curious to know if she was
having like, uh, what was the cause of her bleeding,
what was going on? But I'm sure there's there's no
good data on what it was or no good, no good,
nothing written down about it.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
And there's some books about her, and I've only read
summaries of those books, uh, in preparation for this episode,
you know, but like, yeah, it I'm not totally sure
or well, it happens like while he's en route to
Germany and he finds out and he turns around and
rushes back home. And he gets home and everyone is like, well,

(35:21):
you should probably unadopt that kid. I mean, you're like
a guy, you know, and orwell is a devoted father,
and he's like, the fuck, I will unadopt my child.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
That is a child.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
And his friends and family all pitch in to help him,
and he is a devoted father.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
His son is still alive. Oh wow, yeah, what are
you gonna say? Sorry, No, that's that would have really
taked I mean done with him. Yeah, he already did one.
That would have been two strikes, yeah, exactly. No, he
his son is still alive and as we were cord
this as we recorded, he's still alive. And he wrote

(36:03):
about his father's about eighty. He wrote about his father
Beneath that intellectual exterior beat a heart of deep paternal warmth,
and he was determined to continue to bring me up
as his son. And this and his writing actually about
his father kind of helped me understand some of the
stuff about how he doesn't address the personal things in
his life. And his writing.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Orwell was very British. He was very stiff, upper lip
about everything. He never talked about his emotions much. He
tried not to show them, and he didn't write or
talk about Eileen or her death because his private life
was private. He also kind of didn't talk about it
to his friends, which fucked him up.

Speaker 3 (36:40):
I'm sure.

Speaker 2 (36:41):
Yeah, his son is absolutely convinced he was destroyed by
Eileen's death, and so his own journals, Orwell's George Orwell's
journals were almost entirely about his garden, and what he
wrote about Eileen's death was Pollyantha roses on Eileen's grave
have all rooted well, wow, and it's like kind of sweet,

(37:03):
you know, It's like you're like, oh, you're a sisman
from Britain. You were not set up to understand your emotions.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
Yeah right, He's just swallow it down yea. Yeah, and
even then it found its way out. I mean that
like translates deeply to like tremendous sorrow.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, And so he kept living his life for a while.
He has a flat. His writing room is a wood
shop with a carpenter's bench with chisels, because making bookshelves
with no particular artistry is far more interesting in him
than almost anything else. He makes a bunch of like
toys for his kid, one of his richer's like first
memory is like his dad carving a.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
Toy for him.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
And then the reason is his first memory is because
Richard then falls and gets stitches in his head because
he's extending on a stool to see it. You know,
first memory, Yeah, totally. He enjoyed manual work as a
distraction from writing. He did his actual writing in the
living room on his typewriter. He never wore a suit
or a hat. He always wore shabby corduroys with patched elbows,

(38:14):
a shaggy tie, and unpolished shoes. He also wore trench
coat instead of a suit.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
His friend George Woodcock wrote about him having once escaped
from middle class conventions orwell, just did not find them
worth the trouble of resuming.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
Good for him, Yeah, good for him. When do you
do nineteen eighty four?

Speaker 2 (38:34):
So that's next.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Oh sorry, gotta keep cutting up.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
But before we get into one of the best writers
talking about the way that propaganda affects our brains, here's
some people.

Speaker 4 (38:45):
Who've paid us in order to have you listen to
what they have to say.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
And here back.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
So the other thing that he before, we'll get to
the nineteen four stuff in a minute. The other thing
he does during this eventful year nineteen forty five is
he throws himself into prisoner support for anarchists. On December twelfth,
nineteen forty four, an anarchist publisher called Freedom Press, the
one that had turned down Animal Farm, which is still around.

(39:20):
It's been around since like the eighteen eighties or something.
It's like one of the longest running presses period. I mean,
there's it's England, so there's probably presses that go back
to eighteen or like eight sixty four or anything. I
don't know whatever, But anyway, Freedom Press gets raided as
well as five houses, and because they've been running an
anti war newspaper called War Commentary, and they get imprisoned

(39:41):
for running an anti war newspaper. Now, George Orwell, he's
pro war as fuck. He has sold his literary reputation,
as he's talked about, and he's been arguing with his
anarchist friends for years. At this point, George Woodcock wrote
about it. Quote Orwell, who had been attacking the anarchists
in his Partisan Review articles, declared closed season on them

(40:04):
as soon as they became the victims of an immoderate
exercise of authority, because yeah, he's pro war, but he's
really pro free speech and he likes the anarchists. He
just disagrees with them.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah, yeah, it seems reasonable. Yeah, now he shouldn't. They
should not be arrested for that. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:23):
So a few months after the anarchists all arrested, this
group called the Freedom Defense Committee was set up basically
to fight for free speech for anti war dissenters, and
George Orwell asson the vice chair of this organization. This
is the only official position he will ever hold in
any civil organization in his life, because he hates bureaucracy,
but fortunately anarchist bureaucracy is like kind of more chaotic

(40:45):
and lucy goosey, so it's like more up his alley,
but he's still arguing about it. It's still kind of
bureaucratic for him, and he like kind of bristles at it.

Speaker 3 (40:57):
And the anarchists are two organs nice for him or
yeah some ways.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah, And so he finances this group an animal farm
is doing really well, and for the first time in
his life, he's doing really well financially. So he throws
a ton of the royalties from animal farm towards getting
anarchist out of jail, and to me, that is really fitting.
The other thing he does is he sets up a
trust fund for his son, and like most of his

(41:23):
money is going into this trust for his son. He
lives super modestly, you know. Yeah, And some people will
argue and I kind of buy it that he's like
he didn't know he was about to die, but he
like knows his health is kind of fucked.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
Yeah, you know, so he's like forties. As a man
in his forties, I feel that that's always on your mind.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
Yeah, totally. How do I make sure my kids are okay,
and like, yeah, exactly, Yeah, And he's an interesting man
at this point. He has friends among everyone he considers
to be basically on some level fighting for a free world.
He's friends with the Labor Party, including British intelligence agents
and anarchists, and obviously those two groups don't like each other.

Speaker 3 (42:03):
M hm.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
He won't abide a fact. He want to buy two groups.
He want to buy fascists and he won't to buy
Party communists, but he actually fights for the free speech
of both of those groups. He believes that fascist and
communists should be heavily socially shamed, and that everyone should
know their ideas are evil, but that they shouldn't be
locked up for having terrible ideas, only acting on them.

(42:25):
And considering he has thrown grenades into fascist trenches, I'm
willing to believe him that he is suitably anti fascist
to hold that position. He has the cred I think
he's the he is the guy to make this argument. Yeah,
but he's still organizing against them. When the last big
leftist bookstore that wasn't under communist control gets bought out

(42:46):
by a communist chains store, that sentence blew my mind too.
If that blew your mind a little bit. That blew
my mind a little.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
Bit well as you to repeat it.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
Yeah, when the last big leftist bookstore that wasn't under
communist control got bought out by a communist chains store
like Orwell, starts plotting with his anarchist friends to start
an actual leftist bookstore that would be like pluralistic and
basically just like not you know, not stal not under
control Stalin. Yeah, and he also financed an anarchist literary journal.

(43:17):
This does not make him an anarchist. I just as
an anarchist, I'm going to find the places he overlaps
with us more than other people. Right, you know, he
could do the same thing where he could other groups
of people that he also was heavily involved with, right, Yeah,
But he likes his friends and he wants to fight
the communist stranghold on the left, you know. And at
this point his life is kind of winding down. It

(43:37):
sometimes seems like he knows it. He starts spending even
more time in bed Sick. He moves up to an
island in Scotland called Jura and to live that good,
good rural life, and he like first just for the summers,
and he starts wintering there. Everyone's like, could you please
fucking not winter there? You're always sick.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
I was going to say, can you go back to
like Algeria, Morocco or it was warm.

Speaker 5 (43:57):
You know.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
But he like he moves up there and he spends
his time chopping wood and fishing with his son and
like carving toys for his son, and he like gets
a little bit of peace here at the end of
his life. The wars are over. He's lost his wife,
but he's got his kid, and he keeps fucking up
his health by being too active. Whenever they release him
from the sick word, because I'll spend like months of

(44:19):
a time down with ammonia or whatever, right, and they'll
like release him from the sick word, and they'll be like,
if we let you go, are you just going to
go back to the fucking island and chop wood? And
he's like, probably, I like the one they don't lie
to us, Okay, Yeah, he's pretty honest about it, I think.

Speaker 3 (44:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
And at one time he almost drowns when his boat capsizes,
and that was not good for his health, Oh my god.
And the other thing he does is he writes nineteen
eighty four, he's getting sicker and sicker. He catches friend
of the Pod tuberculosis in nineteen forty seven, and he
Fevershly writes this novel like Fevershly kind of literally in
this case, he it's the most important thing he's going

(45:01):
to do with his life. And in terms of impact
on society, it was I genuinely think this book helped
bring multiple generations of people towards recognizing the problems of
detalitarianism and how it can creep in anywhere. He also
wrote about writing. He was actually not known as like
Orwell the novelist. He was known as Orwell the political

(45:22):
commentaor and essayist, and also like movie reviewer and book
reviewer and like cultural critic and stuff like that, who
also wrote some books.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
You know.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
He wrote about writing. He believed in writing and plain
language without jargon. Author Christian Williams puts it, Orwell is
not renowned as a deep thinker, partly because deep thinking
has become confused with difficult writing. That is to say,
with writing that is difficult to read. It is in
fact harder to produce smooth, clear prose, but readers are
prone to assume that if they do not struggle over

(45:58):
a passage, then the writer must not have either They're
just as likely to suppose or a certain type of
reader is anyway that if a piece of writing is obscure,
it is always necessarily profound.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
And that I know as a great breakdown for a
simple person like myself. Yeah, who wants to read more
stuff but wants to be able to do it without
always struggling, hurt in your brain and hurting my brain
to get through. I know, sometimes you have to. Just
sometimes you have to. That's that's what has to happen.

(46:33):
But that shouldn't always be the case. To get great
thoughts and to hear read beautiful words, you.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
Know, Yeah, if we should say our ideas as simply
as they can be said without dumbing them down right,
you know. And I didn't even I got that for morewell,
and I'd kind of forgotten. He wrote an essay in
nineteen forty six called Politics in the English Language, and
it's about how to write persuasively and well. In it,

(47:04):
he lays out six rules for writing, which I think
are useful to any writer today, so I'm going to
read them. One never use a metaphor simile or other
figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Two.
Never use a long word where a short one will do. Three.
If it is possible to cut out a word, always
cut it out.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Four.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
Actually he cut out the word voice out of that sentence,
but since the listener isn't necessarily a writer, I actually
think it is an important word for context. So that's
shout it that is. Yeah. Five, Never use a foreign phrase,
a scientific word, or a jargon word, if you can
think of an everyday or English equivalent. And this one

(47:46):
people use to be like always xenophobic, right, And I
genuinely don't believe he's being xenophobic here. I genuinely believe
he's talking about communicating clearly to people who can read. Yeah,
his writing as best as possible.

Speaker 3 (47:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Six, break any of these rules sooner than write anything
outright barbarous. And I'm certain he would consider ZENOPHOBI even
those that barbaras is actually kind of a kind of
has a xenophobic originally. Yeah, yeah, well barbar being like,
oh they don't speak like us, But like, I'm certain
that he would have considered xenophobia to be like an

(48:22):
example of being outright barbarous.

Speaker 3 (48:24):
You know.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
Another thing that happens here at the end of his
life is what anyone listening this far, who's on the
far left of the more authoritarian type, has been mad
at me for not talking about what he is infamous for.
In some circles, it's called Orwell's List. I'm assuming you
live in a beautiful world where you haven't heard of
Orwell's list. You've heard of Orwell's list.

Speaker 3 (48:45):
I have not, and I'm a little worried, but I'm ready.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
It sounds bad. Orwell's obsessive list maker, and he kept
like lists on everything. It was like ten flowers I
want to grow. Or he would have fucking loved modern internet,
right buzzy, Yeah, he would have. He would have probably
worked for some BuzzFeed articles. Like he was a working
class in not working class, but he was a working writer,
you know. And one thing he did privately was keep

(49:10):
track of whom he's suspected to be secretly in bed
with the Kremlin, either Soviet spies or just Stalinists. He
used the word communists. One of his friends was this
Labor Party woman, Celia Kerwin, and she was trying to
coordinate leftist propaganda against Stalinism. So she like asks orwell, like, hey,
can you write some leftist anti Stalinist stuff for us?

(49:33):
And he's like, no, I'm sick of shit, Like I'm
not doing that. I'm too sick. But then he thought
it over and he sent her a list of thirty
eight names. This was a list of people to not
ask to write anti Soviet propaganda because they're probably pro Soviet,
like secretly and tankies today make a huge deal out

(49:55):
of this, and it's like not good to provide a
list of aims to the government of suspected communists in
the nineteen forties, right, Yeah, can we understand it in context?
I can. It was nothing bad happened to any of
these people. They were just not asked to write anti

(50:16):
Soviet propaganda, right.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
And it seems like it's being compared to like McCarthyism
in the US, which I don't know much about what
was happening in Britain at that time. So that was
I feel like it wasn't to this extreme that we had.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
Yeah, and it didn't go out to the intelligence community
more broadly that we're aware of. It might have. It
might have been turned into let's go spy in all
these people, right, you know, but as far as I
can tell, these were people that he did not believe
would be good at writing anti Soviet propaganda because they
were secretly pro Soviet.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable thing. Yeah, I mean
the people like if if you have audience members who
are upset about that, I'm sorry, I apologize. I'm sure
there's some nuance to it that I'm missing, But seems
like it was a pretty reasonable thing in context for
him to do.

Speaker 4 (51:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yeah, And it's like it's one of those things where
was like, yeah, probably he shouldn't have done it. I
don't know, but I'm not. The way it's made out
is just like he's a snitch who provides lists of communists,
like keeps track of the communists and gives them to
the government, which is like technically true and a brilliant
example of the way that Orwell is taken out of

(51:33):
context by everyone.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
You know, I mean you who do you think takes
him out of context the most? Of all the people
who take him out of context? What bothers you the most?

Speaker 2 (51:44):
Oh, okay, what bothers me the most is when the
right wing try and have him. And actually we're going
to talk a little bit more about how that happened
and how it's not like his fault, but he could
have taken some better steps around it. Three months before
he died, he marries a woman named Sonia Brown. Now
they get married in the hospital room. People like to

(52:06):
argue about her, implying she was kind of gold digging
to marry this famous man who's dying. Others say that
she was crucial to making his last days pleasant and
that they were in love. There were people gold digging
on him when he was dying. I don't know if
she was among them. I think in some way she
might have been politically gold digging. We'll talk about that
in a second. There's a lot of people who were like, wow,

(52:26):
while I was alone with orwell, he told me in
private that I get twenty five percent of all the
money from his books from now on because he had
like set up a company, Like he got told to
set up a company to manage his copyrights, right, And
I don't know whether those people were grifting him or not.
And like there's like a whole thing about his financial

(52:50):
legacy that I only half care about. So I only
half read about sure Tuberculosis killed George Orwell and January
twenty first, nineteen fifty, when he was forty six years old.
He wanted an Anglican burial, although he wasn't really religious.
His son, Richard, was raised by his aunt, Avril Dunn
and her husband, who was a Scottish wounded veteran named
Bill Dunn. He wrote in his will that no one

(53:12):
should write a biography of him. I hope you'll forgive me,
George that see what was broken a long time ago.
And I tried not to be total biography. But immediately
after he died, the right wing started using Orwell's legacy
in the Cold War, Cold War being a phrase that
George Orwell invented.

Speaker 3 (53:31):
I didn't know that. I didn't either want.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
To start this. I mean I always knew all of this.
I don't have to do research. I know everything well clearly.
People like often act like I know everything, and I'm like, no,
I just read a lot of books over the course
of a week, like shrink it down to six to
nine thousand words.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
It's pretty beautiful.

Speaker 2 (53:55):
And Sonia, his widow, worked for the Propaganda Department into
the British Foreign Office, and they got Animal Farm translated
into sixteen languages, and then she, because she now owns
the rights to his work, she married him. This is
my conspiracy mindedness. I don't know enough about her. My
like instinct is that she was like, I'm a British

(54:17):
intelligence person and I want to use or what I
was writing. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (54:22):
You say, they don't know. Oh man, she could.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
Have been amazing and fine, I don't know, but she
certainly had very different politics than I do because she
I mean, yes, she gets Animal Farm translated into sixteen languages,
and then she sells the rights to Animal Farm to
the fucking CIA in the United States. What who made
it into a feature length cartoon cartoon? Yeah, there's the

(54:49):
movie version of the nineteen fifty four version of Animal
Farm is animated. So the first feature length animated film
produced in England.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
Actually, well, yeah, I think I have vague recollections of
seeing that somewhere at some point.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Yeah, produced by the fucking CIA. That's awesome. Yeah, And
so I'm like, but you know what, Orwell might have
done that himself if he lived. I want to hold
him as like he was with thoughts, but he clearly
worked with the government for anti communist propaganda. That was
clearly something he believed in doing and did numerous times.

Speaker 3 (55:25):
Yeah, it's probably was something again that he didn't like.
But he might have been like, all right, they seem
to be firmly against this group of people. I am
firmly against right.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
The CIA might have been a step too far for him.
It might not have been. I don't know, someone knows.
People try to use him to be like he would
have been pro Brexit, and there's like a lot of
bunch of like orwell scholars who were like, oh, well,
he liked England, which is true. He was actually kind
of a patriot. He believed in like the better parts
of what he saw in the English character, and so
he hated colonialism partly for what it did to Britain.

(55:58):
That wasn't his primary concern, but you know, yeah, I
think And so people were like, oh, you would hated
the EU or and wanted Brexit, but I'm pretty sure
he wrote extensively about wanting to set up basically the EU,
and he was like, no, we should all come together
to like make sure nothings don't happen again and stuff
and like have like a I think even called the

(56:18):
European Parliament. I didn't include this in the script because
I didn't do enough deep research onto it. So I
don't think he would have been pro Brexit, but people
like to argue about it.

Speaker 3 (56:26):
M h.

Speaker 2 (56:27):
And these days you have Elon Musk and other evil
motherfuckers calling things Orwellian or well might have shot those people.
Who's to say everyone wants to claim or Well, everyone
loves Orwell everyone but one group, the authoritarian left. They
hate him with a fiery passion. That hatred was reciprocated.
It's part of why I like him. He actually wrote

(56:50):
explicitly about his words getting taken out of context. He
wrote about animal farm, for example, quote I meant the
moral to be that revolutions only affect improvement when the
masses are alert and know how to chuck out their
leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.
The turning point of the story was supposed to be
when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves.

(57:10):
And then in PARENTHESESI rights kronstat, which I did a
whole six parter about, which was when the Soviets really
finally betrayed the rest of the revolution and took power
or they kind of did it all along with that
was like the final battle kind of it. If people
think I am defending the status quo, that is, I

(57:32):
think because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there
is no alternative except dictatorship or lase fare capitalism. And
so I do know he would have been fucking miserable
about what has happened to animal farm and what has
happened to his works to be used not for socialism
but for capitalism.

Speaker 3 (57:52):
Every group will mis represent a historical figure to their
own ends, for sure. Yeah, but no seems to be
more oblivious and do it incorrectly than the far right. Yeah,
it's just it's amazing, like it, I know it's a joke,
but the people who like are shocked that rage against

(58:12):
the machine was like maybe not into their thing, or
that the again, the show The Boys was making fun
of them all along, like like it's it seems like
a joke, but there really are people who just don't
see it. They don't see like these they No, one
seems to be more oblivious than the far right.

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Yeah, I think you're right, or they're just like because
I think overall actually Orwall has this thing where he
said at one point there's no intellectuals on the right.
There used to be, but the last one died in
like nineteen thirty eight or whatever. I don't remember exactly
the quote, but like he clearly didn't think much of
the right wing from an academic or intelligency at point

(58:57):
of view or whatever. Yeah, And I think that overall
the right wing is like not as good at culture.
They do it. Some amazing cultural stuff has come from
the right wing right, like, they are sometimes very good
at it, But overall, I would argue that the broad
left is does a better job of it, whereas the

(59:19):
right wing tends to like instead be better at like
political power and violence.

Speaker 3 (59:23):
You know, you argue it's more important to power.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
Yeah, if you kill all of your opponents, then you
don't have any opponents anymore, right exactly, Yeah, right, Yeah,
And so I think in some ways they got to
snipe our work, you know, right.

Speaker 3 (59:41):
I mean it's like you don't find very many I mean, honestly,
it's hard to find really funny right wing people, like
the right wing like artists, it's hard to find ones
they're really funny. You can probably find some they're really smart.
I think that's that's for sure a given. But and
certainly some musicians that are there are talented, but it's

(01:00:06):
hard to find really funny people. I mean, you get
like comedians who are like somehow ashamed and go right
sort of as like a weird response, like Louis c k.
They do something bad and then they kind of like
steer into it, you know. Yeah, but I don't think
Louis c K ten fifteen years ago would have ever
considered himself on the right wing, you know, or conservative.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
When I get you get into this thing where it's
like I feel like overall, the edge lord as a
political construct, you know, like the person who's like edgy
on purpose and pushing the boundaries actually used to be
kind of a left wing construction, like all throughout the
nineteenth century of a lot of this like literature that's
like all blood and amorality and you know whatever, and

(01:00:52):
it's like leftist. And then at some point we've started
to see that switch where the edge lord is now
like kind of but more of a right wing construction.
It's like more often a right wing construction than it
used to be. And so like the edgy centrist, it's
how you end up with, Like, what's that comedian who
I actually like but I don't remember.

Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
He's dead.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
He smokes a lot. Fuck George Carlin, Yeah, George Carlin.
You know he's like this like edgy, anti authoritarian, right. Yeah,
and now the right wing is a little bit like
trying to have him as their guy.

Speaker 3 (01:01:27):
He's not absolutely so that that's hurtful.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
Yeah, yeah, me as a great sketch Politics in America.
I'll show you politics in America. One man holding up
both puppets. Oh, I like the puppet on the left. Well,
I like the puppet on the right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
Like, I don't know that bit, but I'll google it afterwards.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
Yeah, it's good. It's just yelling. He's like, you have
the same fucking puppet. Shut up America, go back to sleep.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
He's you know, you see, like even on smaller levels,
like just if you online, like the right wing trolls,
all they do is basically use some variation of things
they've learned from seeing people on the left respond to things,
and then they just co opt them and make it
sort of weirdly racist. That's just like the little trick

(01:02:17):
that they use every time. And yeah, it's very, very
frustrating and it's very but it's really nice to do
this deep dive on Orwell because he is so ubiquitous
in pop culture and he's influenced so many things, and
he's used every day from like you know, Apple ads
in the past to like HEDD movies to like, you know,
Elon Musk now on Twitter, like you're saying, calling everything

(01:02:40):
that he doesn't like or welling in. It's like it's
constantly used. It's really nice to hear what a little
bit more about what the person was actually into.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Yeah, and he was imperfect and absolutely committed to the
left and overall tried to be better and like believed
the end of the day his socialism. He didn't he
didn't believe in common decency because he was a socialist.
He believed in socialism because he believed in common decency.

(01:03:08):
And it's just the fact that he's willing to go
after the left when they're evil as well as the
right that like leaves him open to this misinterpretation. And
I think it's because people are afraid of nuanced They
want black and white stories with good guys and bad guys.
I mean, this is a story where his anarchist friends
are kind of being idiots, you know. I mean, I
don't know, I don't I think I probably would have

(01:03:30):
been pro war in World War Two. I don't know,
Like I didn't live in England at the time, but
like overall, I'm like, could we please just kill the
Nazis and figure out the rest later, you know, right,
And they shouldn't have turned down animal farm probably and whatever.
But it's like, you know, like like he just believed
in what he believed in and he tried to do
it and he had he was emotionally stunted by being

(01:03:54):
kind of a motherfucker and by yeah, I should poison
you masculinity and Britishness and colonialness.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:05):
Yeah, But that's the story of George orwell as as
I understand it. There's a million stories about him. They're
all different.

Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
This is mine.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
That was very very cool. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:04:22):
So where are you at in terms of imposter syndrome
and still just kind of like fuck that guy? It's
a great question. Okay, if you're still like this guy.
I was still I wrote him off for years. I'm
still at fuck this guy. Yeah, but he had imposter syndrome,
But also fuck this guy.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):
Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, I mean he might have said
the same thing.

Speaker 5 (01:04:46):
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:04:46):
I wish he'd fucking written about how he actually felt
about ship so I had a better fucking sense of
that stuff, you know. Yeah, but he didn't. That's my
problematic fave. Yeah, that was the original subtitle. This was
George Orwell pro problematic fave. Probably I'm gonna go with

(01:05:08):
George Orwell and the War for Common Decency and then
subtitle it Marvel talking about a problematic fave.

Speaker 5 (01:05:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
Yeah, No, listener will already know what happened because it'll
be in your podcast app.

Speaker 3 (01:05:21):
You're in the future, I know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
But if people have a podcast app, is there anything
that they can do with it?

Speaker 3 (01:05:27):
Oh? You know what you could do with it? After
you listen to these episodes, you should check out my podcast,
The House of Pod. It is a fun look at
things in public health and medicine and where it intersects
with things like popular culture or the news. And I
think you'll enjoy it. And I'm gonna keep begging Margaret

(01:05:49):
to come onto my show as well, so you might
hear her as well on it. In the near future.
You can definitely hear some episodes with Sophie and other
people who've been on this podcast are also regular guests
on the House of Pod And you'll like it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:09):
Hell yeah. And if you're listening to this when it
comes out, you probably have like one day left to
back my Kickstarter. And if you're late, it's too late.
They only make books that the No, it's a book.
You can get it where we get books. It might
be in pre order if it's before September twenty four,
twenty twenty four. If it's after that, it's in print somewhere.
Unless it's not unless you're listening to this three hundred

(01:06:29):
years in the future, in which case, congratulations. And I'm
impressed at the longevity of digital media. And I hope
that you all are alive. I don't have a lot
of faith in you, but being alive. Really that's our fault. Sorry, sorry, sorry,
the future. We should have tried harder.

Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
We blew it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
Yeah anyway, unless we did. I mean, if you're listening,
we didn't blow it. Totally true, you're alive to hear it.
I hope your underground tunnels are nice. You're You're welcome.

Speaker 3 (01:07:01):
Future.

Speaker 2 (01:07:02):
I might help dig those tunnels. We'll see, we will see.
You all next week. What's the World?

Speaker 5 (01:07:09):
Bye Bye, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool
Zone Media, visit our website.

Speaker 3 (01:07:22):
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.