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British Cold warriors and the War on Terror.

Article Excerpt
If they want to write about the war, the way is clear for



them ... They must be, or have been, part of it. --Evelyn Waugh

We all like to think we know how the dead would react to unforeseen situations. A sentiment once expressed by former Australian Prime Minister Sir Earle Page about another former Australian Prime Minister, recently deceased, is widespread: "If Ben Chifley were alive today," Page artlessly announced, "he'd be turning in his grave."

The temptation to voice such things, however absurd they are, could well be hard-wired in man's brain. Probably the temptation is strongest in persons familiar with those authors who during the 20th century opposed totalitarianism while almost all around them were its dribbling apologists. How would such authors react to present conditions?

In this respect, no-one will dispute Chesterton's, Belloc's, Waugh's and C.S. Lewis's courage. The trouble is these prophets now exercise almost no appeal save among a small, powerless minority of Christians. So leave out specifically devout scribes: any list of eminent anti-totalitarian, but non-religious, writers long based in 20th-century Britain would have to include George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and--probably at a lower intellectual level than the other two--Kingsley Amis (that's Sir Kingsley to you: Margaret Thatcher awarded him a knighthood for public-relations services rendered). On the strength of their work, it is logical to ask: what would these men have made of the Global War on Terror? Could they have supported it? To find answers, there can be no substitute for studying their actual output, as distinct from manipulative exegeses of that output.

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"Manipulative exegeses" especially applies to much Orwell-related comment, in which rival ideologues squabble over Orwell's legacy like Chinese commissars in the late 1970s mutually vociferating over Mao. An early instance of this is Norman Podhoretz's anachronistic attempt in the January 1983 Harper's to press-gang Orwell into the neoconservatives' ranks. (Podhoretz's fantasy gets Orwell's age wrong in its first sentence and goes downhill from there.) In 2006 various pro-Bush, pro-Israeli British social democrats published something called the "Euston Manifesto", several signatories repeatedly invoking Orwell. By a parallel process in America,...

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