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Orwell devoted the rest of his life to arresting this process, against formidable odds. He took on not only Nazis and Stalinists and all advocates of the expedient lie but the solipsism of much modern philosophy and literature. Theories that reality is simply the spider web of word spinners left him aghast; that way lay the dictatorship of the speaker and, ultimately, the abstract, ominous slogans of Nineteen Eighty-Four: WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
The first and best defense against such totalitarian gibberish, Orwell argued, is common sense. A person with a basic understanding of what the words freedom and slavery actually mean must reject a sentence that equates them. He wrote: "In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit." The alternative method promises treachery: "When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning."
There was nothing donnish about Orwell's interest in language. He realized that the manipulation of speech could be every bit as deadly as the bearing of arms. He reminded all who would listen that Hitler had risen to power in Germany through persuasion; that Stalin had obscured massive crimes through the smokescreen of invective. He also warned, on the eve of World War II, that matters could deteriorate: "The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of 'human nature,' which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that 'human nature' is constant . . . The radio, press-censorship, standardized education and the secret police have altered everything. Mass-suggestion is a science of the last twenty years, and we do not yet know how successful it will be."
Still, Orwell never allowed this innate pessimism to overwhelm his talent or his energies. With Europe flaring into war, he took time from his political comments to write essays on Charles Dickens, Henry Miller and the literary and social merits of English boys' magazines. Oddly, these are the pieces that have aged the least. It is as if survival depended on the small things, like childhood pleasures, and not the large things, like war.