To: Ilaine who wrote (66770 ) 1/18/2003 7:01:33 PM From: Win Smith Respond to As long as you're butchering Orwell and citing Hitchens, you might be interested in this.But in Hitchens's view, attempts by the right to appropriate Orwell are illegitimate. In 1950, Henry Luce's Life magazine acclaimed the newly published 1984 as a warning against the dangers of the New Deal—a reading that Orwell publicly refuted. And in an essay entitled "If Orwell Were Alive Today," published in the year 1984, Commentary Magazine editor Norman Podhoretz invoked Orwell in support of Reagan's nuclear policy and of U.S. hegemony in general. To do so, Hitchens demonstrates, Podhoretz pulled fragments of Orwell's sentences out of context and attributed to them a meaning far from, if not opposite to, what Orwell had intended. . . . You also criticize the groups that have tried to appropriate Orwell as one of their own—particularly Cold War-era conservatives and English nationalists. Is it an irony that someone so dedicated to directness and transparency in his writing would be misread in so many different ways? theatlantic.com
