Review by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Churchill & Orwell – The Fight For Freedom
by Thomas E. Ricks
Published 1st June 2017
Royal Hardback, £25
352 pages, with 26 b/w photographs
ISBN 9780715652374
Churchill and Orwell, the two great thinkers who indelibly marked post-war history, are titans of their age, each standing in political opposition to the other, but each committed to the preservation of freedom. However, in the late 1930s they occupied a lonely position: democracy was discredited in many circles and authoritarian rulers, fascist and communist, were everywhere in the ascent. Churchill and Orwell had the foresight to see clearly that the more salient issue was human liberty – and that any government that denies its people basic rights is a totalitarian menace and has to be resisted.
Churchill and Orwell proved their age’s necessary men. The glorious climax of Churchill & Orwell is their drive in the 1940s to triumph over the enemies of freedom. Churchill may have played the larger role in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis, but Orwell’s reckoning with the menace of authoritarian rule in Animal Farm and 1984 (which Churchill admired so much he read it twice) would define the stakes of the Cold War for its 50-year course, and they continue to inspire to this day.
With Orwell’s 1984 at #1 on Amazon and so many other bestseller lists and the intricacies of freedom in national and international politics thrust into the limelight once more, Churchill & Orwell elucidates the extraordinary men behind a victory hard won, and as important to our lives today as it ever has been.
‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ ~ George Orwell
‘We seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his rights to worship his god, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution’ ~ Winston Churchill
Thomas E. Ricks is the bestselling and award-winning author of The Gamble, The Generals, and the no. 1 international bestseller Fiasco – ‘the most authoritative account of how the Bush administration and the US Army created a disaster in Iraq’ (Max Hastings, Sunday Times). He is a former writer for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and has covered military operations across the globe. He now contributes to the New York Times, Washington Post and New Yorker, and has appeared on the BBC, Sky News and in the Guardian and other UK press. He is also contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prize-winning blog The Best Defense.
Today probably more than ever Orwell's books “Animal Farm” and “1984” are important. In “Animal Farm” we find the idea that all are equal but some more equal than others and this is exactly how the neoliberals operate today while “1984” presents us with the nightmarish scenario of an all pervasive totalitarian surveillance state. While it is claimed that Orwell was aiming at the Soviet Union of the day with it today it more appears like a scenario that we are sleepwalking into right this very moment in our neo-liberal capitalist societies. Neo-liberalism is but one side of the coin the other side of which is fascism.
While in their day Churchill & Orwell, especially the latter, were concerned with the rise of totalitarianism that is to say Hitler (& Stalin), today totalitarianism is on the rise again in the guise of neo-liberalism.
Personally I do believe that Orwell may have been mistaken as to Stalin – or why would Stalin still be loved by the Russian people today – and much if not indeed all of what may have happened was more due to Stalin's lieutenants rather than Stalin himself and he, Stalin, may have trusted his lieutenants far too much than was good.
When the author praises the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Lech Wałęsa so much as change makers he is either not aware of who and what they were or is mislead or otherwise confused. Both were not mere dissidents but paid agents of the Western intelligence services, and the same goes for Václav Havel. His name best be not mentioned to many young and not so young Czechs today.
This is a book for anyone interested in politics, especially how today's neo-liberalism is headed towards a totalitarian system, by increments in such a way that most people do not even realize it and call anyone pointing this out conspiracy theorists.
© 2017
