George Orwell

To the Editors:

While I am in full agreement with Hilton Kramer [in “An Orwell for the Nineties?”, November 1991] that the distopia Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four can only be Stalinist Russia—the best proof of this being, I think, the fervid embrace of the book by countless writers and intellectuals of what was only yesterday the Soviet bloc—the use Mr. Kramer makes of this approaches the Orwellian. Armed with Nineteen Eighty-Four and Michael Shelden's new biography of Orwell, he uses the books to assert once again the neoconservative goodthink that there is (or was) a singular anti-Communism—the one espoused by himself and his political kin—and not a variety of anti-Communisms, including ones quite distant in approach and temperament from his own.

Mr. Kramer would have us imagine, I suppose, an Orwell of the 1980s issuing position papers from his office at the...

 

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