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Their dishonesty fell into two main patterns. They willfully blinkered themselves against the fact, obvious to Orwell, that British society and ultimately the socialist movement itself rested on imperialist exploitation and the comparative prosperity it conferred on worker and capitalist alike. Dishonesty also expressed itself in the left by a simultaneous clamor for a "strong line" against Hitler (read "war") and demands for peace and disarmament. The British intellectuals, wrote Orwell in August 1941, "for ten dreadful years have kept it up that Hitler is merely a figure out of comic opera. All this reflects is the sheltered condition of English life."
In the war against fascism, he preferred a patriot like Churchill to the antifascist pacifists, whom he skewered on a couplet: Which will sound better in the days to come,
"Blood, toil and sweat" or "Kiss the
Nazi's bum."
His refusal to be any party's dog made a political pariah of him and a near pauper (he was unable at the height of his powers to get more than a $60 advance for a book). Doubtless today he would be equally unpopular for pointing out the moral obliquity of those doves on Viet Nam who became hungry hawks in the Israeli-Arab war.
To Orwell, political issues were moral issues. He understood that peace and social justice would descend on the world, if at all, from a moral impulse, and where was that impulse to come from? Not from the "self-justifying complacent hypocrisy of the boiled rabbits. . .of the left intelligentsia." The real problem of the West, as he saw it, was to preserve mankind's ethical values— honor, mercy, justice, respect for others —in the face of an almost universal disappearance of a belief in the immortality of the soul. Being naturally a good man, he was a good humanist, but being a logical man, he saw that others were not. When people ceased to be Christians they did not necessarily become good humanists but superstitious fanatics and political madmen.