About George Orwell........

     "It was in Orwell's nature to be an ethically alert and active person; but he was also a skeptical rationalist, quick to spot the fake, the dishonest, the pretentious.  He had no patience with those who romanticize the poor.  He saw that poverty can debase people, turn them into monstrous exploiters of one another.  He had even less patience, naturally, with the wealthy and powerful, or the high falutin' academic world, or the self-important literary one, because he knew their sins of omission and commission were plentiful, and bore the additional responsibility that goes with privilege: not only a responsibility avoided but a capability shunned to extend help to others far less comfortable.  He ended up a loner, disgusted with Tory Britain, yet thoroughly troubled by England's postwar socialist crowd, among whom, he knew, could be found any number of self-centered, condescending, willfully manipulative, and tricky characters.  He had no great love for America's conquering materialism, but Lord, he saw Stalinist Russia to be Hell itself.  A cranky eccentric with respect to 'principalities and powers,' he had, nevertheless, become an increasingly celebrated writer, hailed at the end of his life, he himself knew, by the wrong crowd for the wrong reasons, for his anti-Stalinism was never meant to give courage to those who cared not a whit about the fate of working-class people in contemporary industrial societies."
-Robert Coles, Harvard Diary
as excerpted from the essay Orwell's Decency


thanks doug