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Orwell, whose Orwell? On the centenary of his birth, the complexities and contradictions of St George need to be acknowledged, but so too does his status as a radical and revolutionary.

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W.B. Yeats is said to have fainted when--at a state occasion marking his birthday--he was honoured by a thousand Irish boy scouts reciting in unison 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'. The event has always stood as the example of colossally missing the point. The thought that it may now have competition is occasioned by a dip into one of the great publishing projects of the 1990s, the Collected Works of George Orwell. Volume Thirteen begins with item 1438, 'BBC Talks Booking Form 1.9.42 Cedric Dover, Anniversaries of the Month, broadcast 8.5.42' handwritten note: Mr Dover will be taking one of four parts in this feature'. This is one of hundreds of items of BBC paraphernalia faithfully recorded in the collected works of a man whose qualification for such an honour is due in part to the way he shaped our imagination of the cult of personality. The booking forms, rosters, payment slips presumably qualify because they contain a sentence or two that the master may have hurriedly scrawled. They are less collected works than veronicas, fragments of the hem he has touched along the way. Even the most exhausting bibliographer of any other author would hesitate to include them. But fifty years after his death, and a hundred after his birth, George Orwell has been lifted out of the Category of 'author'. He became a secular saint some time ago; in the lead up to and aftermath of the Iraq war he has become something more, a quasi-deity. Everyone appeals to him as an arbiter, ransacks him for quotes--this writer included--to buttress a point. For a long time, this side or that would claim his support: 'if he were alive today ...". When that became discredited, it was done in a double negative fashion: 'we cannot know what Orwell would have thought were he alive today, but going by his writings we can say that ...' and so on. The more he is invoked as a gold standard of political decency, truthfulness and steadfastness, the emptier the gesture becomes. A writer who tried to show how the dead speech of cliche acts as a barrier to clear thinking has become the standard recourse to prop up a lazy paragraph:

It's a toss up between George Orwell's 1984 and the language of the Vietnam War to describe yesterday's series of statements from the major stakeholders in Australian "Bernie' magnesium.

In George Orwell's Animal Farm the mantra was 'two legs bad, four legs good'. In health care in Australia, the mantra now is 'community dependence bad, corporate dependence good.'

(collected by Jonathan Pearlman, SMH)

More importantly, Orwell's words are often quoted to advance arguments that have no relation to the original context. Thus Pamela Bone argued against the anti-war movement prior to the invasion of Iraq:

Orwell wrote: "the majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point'.

In fact most of the Iraq anti-war movement weren't pacifist, and Orwell's writing on pacifism was largely concerned with a situation in which one's own country was under immediate threat of invasion.

Most notorious, perhaps, was 1980s neoconservative Norman Podhoretz's 1984 version of the 'had Orwell been alive today' argument, in which he suggested that Orwell would have been a neoconservative--i.e. as flaky as the one-time Trotskyist, literary self-advancer and subsequent Reaganite Podhoretz himself.

As Robert Manne pointed out recently, few of those on the Right who have invoked Orwell's name as an opponent of totalitarianism--especially in the 1980s--have sought to mention that he remained a democratic Socialist (Orwell's capitalisation) to his death. This aspect of his writings has received more attention recently, chiefly because socialism is no longer even faintly on the radar as an organised alternative. Christopher Hitchens's book, Why Orwell Matters, has gone some way to correcting this, though it is mostly concerned with nominating Orwell's true heir on the Left, and not finding far to look. Quoting Orwell even at his most vituperative and ephemeral seems to have a strange, blinding effect on the quote-wielder--it is always someone else who is in Orwell's sights. Thus, this tail-end of a New York Post article:

'... Maybe George Orwell was right when he said there are some things so stupid only an intellectual can believe them.

Ronald Radosh is professor emeritus of history at CUNY and a Hudson Institute adjunct fellow."

It would be easiest done to ignore this...