George Orwell o el horror a la política

George Orwell is best known as a novelist and author of two masterpieces, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. In them, Orwell masterfully captured the essence of the Soviet regime: systematic rewriting of the past, liquidation of the notion of independent truth, degradation of language and logic, permanent instability of living conditions, unlimited torture of the body and mind, etc. . But Orwell's work cannot be reduced to an anti-communist war machine, as a certain liberal or neoconservative reading would have us believe today. As Simon Leys teaches in this book, Orwell was a novelist and critic of Russian totalitarianism, but also a war correspondent, a revolutionary militiaman in the Spanish Civil War, a tireless defender of democratic socialism, a journalist and perhaps the inventor of the "non-fiction novel" genre, some of whom years before Norman Mailer or Truman Capote... Quite the opposite of a "man of letters": in him words and actions were never dissociated. Orwell defined himself as a "political writer, giving equal weight to each of the two words." Against the hijacking of reality at the hands of stereotypes and clichés, he conceived his theory and practice of writing as the invention of truth and complication of reality through literature. Yesterday, today, that is its relevance and its critical force. Initially published to salute the Orwellian date of 1984, this essay soon sold out. Many readers pressured its author for years to republish it. Leys reread himself almost twenty years later, he found that the topic had not lost any relevance and that his own perspective remained essentially identical.