This piece does a good job of exposing Orlov’s true character:
A long time since I’ve seen Inside The Whale cited, very apt, I think. Orwell coined the phrase to imply that Left intellectuals, and expats enjoying their time in Paris (Henry Miller specifically), never really had to face the consequences of the actions they urged others to take.
Orwell comments on books about the Spanish Civil War, for example, that “almost all of them, right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to think, whereas the books about the Great War were by common soldiers or junior officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about.” (1)
Exactly the point Wagaman makes in the Sofa Force article I linked to elsewhere, and here it is again
Orwell goes on “I would not speak so lightly of murder… So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot… a public-school education - five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery … [then] university, a few trips abroad, then London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour - hardly even words.” (2)
(1) Orwell, G. (1940) Inside The Whale, in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters […], 1970, London, Penguin, p.549
(2) ibid. pp566-7
1 Like