B.P. Terpstra
If George Orwell were alive today he’d be censored by today’s Orwellian press-police. As America’s poshest-acting, bisexual neo-conservative, Christopher Hitchens points out in Why Orwell Matters (pages 79-80):
It is true on the face of it that Orwell was one of the founding fathers of anti-Communism; that he had a strong patriotic sense and a very potent instinct for what we might call elementary right and wrong; that he despised government and bureaucracy and was a stout individualist; that he distrusted intellectuals and academics and reposed a faith in popular wisdom; that he upheld a somewhat orthodoxy in sexual matters and moral matters, looked down on homosexuals and abhorred abortion; and that he seems to have been an advocate for private ownership of guns.
But for real hard evidence:
He also preferred the country to the town, and poems that rhymed.
Orwell even had some nice things to say about F.A. Hayek, when he reviewed The Road to Serfdom in the Observer. Therefore, it can’t be stressed enough that he wouldn’t be a Fairfax lead columnist or a celebrated Melbourne University Press author today. The blood running through his veins was just too unapologetically independent.
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