Orwell's Birthday

I really need to read George Orwell, who would have been 111 years old today if he were still living.

Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.

 Writing in 1943, about Christmas and utopia, in the Tribune. The essay is called "Why Socialists Don't believe in Fun." Thanks to Paul Thomas for the reminder about Orwell's birthday and this essay.


Photo by ceridwen from the Wikimedia Commons.