The world needs more Orwell

Jon sent me a link to this post by Nick Packwood, which serves to remind me that I still need to get caught up on my Orwell readings. (And to think that I wouldn't go near the man's work when I was in school . . . ah, the idiocies of youth.)

Decades later, George Orwell's "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" includes a little something to annoy everyone [. . .] So much to consider — including a precursor to that famous boot "stamping in a human face — forever" — and I am tempted to put quotation marks around the whole book. I will limit myself to one quote. This passage was written in 1941 but could have been written yesterday.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most 'anti-Fascist' during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia — their severance from the common culture of the country.

Update: When I originally posted this, a couple of minutes ago, I omitted a link that Nick included in the original. Now that I've read the article, I'd have to say that this sounds like a must-read book:

The first in a projected multivolume chronicle of the years from 1945 to 1979 called Tales of a New Jerusalem, this sparkling book — deeply and imaginatively researched, written with bounce, and informed by the wryest sensibility — charts the evolution of British society during the depleted and dingy years 1945–1951. As Britain shifted from desperate war to bankrupt peace, its Labour government set about building the first welfare state and attempting in myriad ways to uplift the country and its people, a project fraught with the painful collisions between political idealism and people’s daily lives and aspirations.

"Austerity" — a condition and set of policies dictated by the government’s need, owing to a gigantic balance-of-payments deficit with the United States, to limit consumption to wartime levels and divert labor and material to the export trade — meant a home front without a war. Food, clothing, and coal would now in some cases be even more sparingly apportioned than they had been when the war was on; the British would not go completely "off ration" until 1954. With wit and ingenuity, Kynaston mines opinion surveys, radio shows, advertising slogans, parliamentary reports, and above all letters, diaries, and memoirs to evoke the gray tinge that permeated postwar life — the shabby frocks, the sallow faces, the grubby train compartments, the dreary meals ("all winter greens and root vegetables and hamburgers made of grated potato and oatmeal and just a little meat," the food writer Marguerite Patten recalled).