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Hitchens defends Orwell against critics on the Left who hated him—and still hate him, even today—for criticizing communists and thus giving political ammunition to conservatives. At the same time, Hitchens makes sure to fend off partisans on the Right who have sought to claim Orwell as one of their own. In particular, Hitchens does a nice job of showing how former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz misquoted Orwell to make him a pro-Yankee cold warrior when, in fact, he was ambivalent toward America. Rather than advocating a tight British alliance with the United States, as Podhoretz has him do, Orwell actually said in 1947 that "a socialist United States of Europe" seemed to be "the only worthwhile political objective today." Orwell was "conservative about a lot of things," Hitchens writes, "but not about politics."

Indeed, Orwell was a socialist of conservative temperament; he was his own man, quite unlike the typists who guard contemporary editorial pages. His "victory" lay in the fact that he thought for himself, usually arrived at the truth about something while doing so, and then stated that truth clearly. Orwell "matters" because his independence of mind, clarity of thought, and commitment to honesty wrought a body of work—fiction, reviews, and essays (he was a poor poet)—that is as "relevant" today as ever. As Hitchens points out, Animal Farm was being serialized not long ago in Zimbabwe's Daily News until an anti-tank mine destroyed that newspaper's presses. (The mine, "of the sort not available to ordinary citizens," was almost certainly linked to the thug dictator Robert Mugabe—who, presumably, was made uncomfortable by his association in readers' minds with Napoleon, the novel's dictatorial pig.)

Orwell still matters to Americans, too. Re-reading him in the days before I wrote these words, I was surprised at how often his descriptions could be transposed to our own time with only slight alteration:

To the British Working class [American Christians] the massacre of their comrades in Vienna [Sudan], Berlin [Pakistan], Madrid [Egypt] or wherever it might be seemed less interesting and less important than yesterday's football match.
—"Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943)

And then … the whole farm burst out into Beasts of England [the PC slogan "diversity is strength"] in tremendous unison. The cows [journalists] lowed it, the dogs [politicians] whined it, the sheep [theologians] bleated it, the horses [professors] whinnied it, the ducks [graduate students] quacked it.
—Animal Farm (1946)

Hitchens' own reading of Orwell began some decades ago. There we find young Christopher, son of a naval officer, at an English boarding school writing a comparison of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Orwell's Animal Farm and turning the paper in, late, to a certain Reverend Collingwood, "my old English master." This piece of work, says Hitchens, was "the first decent essay I ever wrote."

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