This is a new podcast I am starting exclusive to Substack only.
George Orwell is one of the few people whose last names have come to describe an odious political condition, a particular dystopia and state of mind — Orwellian is how we describe the kind of censorship and cancel culture that thrives in what used to be traditional democratic states. Yet Orwell was his pen name. Eric Arthur Blair was a socialist who voted for the British Labour Party but he was never comfortable with socialism or the inevitable excesses of the state that would be used to enforce socialist dogma. He mocked the tendency of socialists to mandate what one ate, who one supported and ultimately how one thought.
Unlike a lot of socialists today — Canadian NDP leader Jagmeet Singh comes to mind — who are hermetically sealed from the working class and actually seem to despise people they would never care to interact with, Orwell lived and worked in poverty (Down and Out in Paris and London) and genuinely wanted to…
