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Thomas E. Ricks - Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

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Thomas E. Ricks Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

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New York Times Bestseller
A dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, who preserved democracy from the threats of authoritarianism, from the left and right alike.

Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930sOrwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If theyd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the 20th century they would be considered two of the most important people in British history for having the vision and courage to campaign tirelessly, in words and in deeds, against the totalitarian threat from both the left and the right. In a crucial moment, they responded first by seeking the facts of the matter, seeing through the lies and obfuscations, and then they acted on their beliefs. Together, to an extent not sufficiently appreciated, they kept the Wests compass set toward freedom as its due north.
Its not easy to recall now how lonely a position both men once occupied. By the late 1930s, democracy was discredited in many circles, and authoritarian rulers were everywhere in the ascent. There were some who decried the scourge of communism, but saw in Hitler and Mussolini men we could do business with, if not in fact saviors. And there were others who saw the Nazi and fascist threat as malign, but tended to view communism as the path to salvation. Churchill and Orwell, on the other hand, had the foresight to see clearly that the issue was human freedomthat whatever its coloration, a government that denied its people basic freedoms was a totalitarian menace and had to be resisted.
In the end, Churchill and Orwell proved their ages necessary men. The glorious climax of Churchill and Orwell is the work they both did in the decade of the 1940s to triumph over freedoms enemies. And though Churchill played the larger role in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis, Orwells reckoning with the menace of authoritarian rule in Animal Farm and 1984 would define the stakes of the Cold War for its 50-year course, and continues to give inspiration to fighters for freedom to this day. Taken together, in Thomas E. Rickss masterful hands, their lives are a beautiful testament to the power of moral conviction, and to the courage it can take to stay true to it, through thick and thin.

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ALSO BY THOMAS E RICKS The Generals American Military Command from World War - photo 1
ALSO BY THOMAS E. RICKS

The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today

The Gamble

Fiasco

A Soldiers Duty: A Novel

Making the Corps

PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New - photo 2

PENGUIN PRESS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

Copyright 2017 by Thomas E. Ricks

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Photograph credits appear .

ISBN: 9781594206139 (hardcover)

ISBN: 9780698164543 (e-book)

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Dedicated to all those who seek to preserve our freedoms

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 THE TWO WINSTONS O n December 13 1931 a fifty-seven-year-old - photo 3

CHAPTER 1
THE TWO WINSTONS

O n December 13, 1931, a fifty-seven-year-old English politician, still a member of Parliament but quite unwelcome in his own partys government, stepped out of a taxi on New Yorks Fifth Avenue. He was in New York to begin a speaking tour in an attempt to recover some of the small fortune he had lost in the stock market crash two years earlier. Being English, and perhaps distracted by his troubles, he looked the wrong way down the avenue, and did not see the automobile that, traveling at about thirty miles per hour, knocked him to the pavement and dragged him for a spell, cracking some ribs and slashing open his scalp. Had he died, he would be remembered today by a few historians specializing in early twentieth-century British history. But he did survive. His name was Winston Churchill.

Almost six years later, on May 20, 1937, another Englishman awoke before dawn and moved out of his uncomfortable quarters in a trench on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War in northeastern Spain, not far south of the Pyrenees Mountains. Though serving as a soldier, he really was a writer, a minor author of mediocre novels that had not been selling well. He considered himself a leftist, but in his latest work, in which he had turned to journalistic sociology, studying the poor of England, he had caused a minor fuss and perhaps lost a few friends by criticizing socialists. Still, in Spain he was serving as a member of the progovernment socialist forces of the Spanish Republic. He was a tall man, and as he moved along the west-facing trenches to check on the members of his squad, his head was silhouetted by the sun to the east, rising behind him. A Nationalist sharpshooter about 175 yards away spied him and fired a copper-plated 7mm bullet. It was a well-aimed shot, sending the bullet through the base of the Englishmans neck, where it just missed a carotid artery. Stunned, he fell to the ground. He knew he had been hit, but in his shock could not tell where. Informed that he had been shot through the neck, he composed himself to die within minutes, because he had never heard of someone surviving such a wound. Had he expired then, he would not be remembered today except perhaps by a few literary specialists in minor mid-twentieth-century English novelists. But he did not die. His name was Eric Blair, but his nom de plume was George Orwell.

On the surface, the two men were quite different. Churchill was more robust in every way; born twenty-eight years before Orwell, he outlived him by fifteen years. But in crucial respects they were kindred spirits. In their key overlapping years in the middle of the century, the two men grappled with the same great questionsHitler and fascism, Stalin and communism, America and its preemption of Britain. They responded with the same qualities and toolstheir intellects, their confidence in their own judgments even when those judgments were rebuked by most of their contemporaries, and their extraordinary skill with words. And both steered by the core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of thought, speech, and association.

Their paths never crossed, but they admired each other from a distance, and when it came time for George Orwell to write 1984 , he named his hero Winston. Churchill is on record as having enjoyed the novel so much he read it twice.

Despite all their differences, their dominant priority, a commitment to human freedom, gave them common cause. And they were indeed vastly dissimilar men, with very different life trajectories. Churchills flamboyant extroversion, his skills with speech, and the urgency of a desperate wartime defense led him to a communal triumph that did much to shape our world today. Orwells increasingly phlegmatic and introverted personality, combined with a fierce idealism and a devotion to accuracy in observation and writing, brought him as a writer to fight to protect a private place in that modern world.

One hazard in taking a dual approach to the two men is that Churchill is such a loud and persistent presence. Look at any key event of the 1940s and he is there, participating in it, or speechifying about it, and then some years later, writing about it. Debating Churchill was like arguing with a brass band, a member of a British Cabinet once grumbled. The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed that Churchill saw life as a pageant, with himself leading the parade. I must say I like bright colours, Churchill once wrote. I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.

Together in the mid-twentieth century these two men led the way, politically and intellectually, in responding to the twin totalitarian threats of fascism and communism. On the day that Britain entered World War II, Churchill stated, It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man. Orwell expressed the same thought in his plainer style: We live in an age in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist, he fretted two years later.

Orwell and Churchill recognized that the key question of their century ultimately was not who controlled the means of production, as Marx thought, or how the human psyche functioned, as Freud taught, but rather how to preserve the liberty of the individual during an age when the state was becoming powerfully intrusive into private life. The historian Simon Schama has described them as the architects of their time. They were, Schama said, the most unlikely of allies. Their shared cause was to prevent the tide of state murder that began rising in the 1920s and 1930s, and crested in the 1940s, from continuing to rise.

One day in the 1950s one of Churchills grandsons poked his head into the old - photo 4

One day in the 1950s, one of Churchills grandsons poked his head into the old mans study. Is it true, the child inquired, that you are the greatest man in the world? Churchill, in typical fashion, responded, Yes, and now bugger off.

The Great Man theory of history is much denigrated today. But sometimes individuals matter greatly. Churchill and Orwell have had lasting impacts on how we live and think today. These two men did not make the prosperous liberal postwar Westwith its sustained economic boom and its steady expansion of equal rights to women, blacks, gays, and marginalized minoritiesbut their efforts helped establish the political, physical, and intellectual conditions that made that world possible.

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