George Orwell Killed in Spanish Civil War

[David T]

"After his return to the front, he was wounded in the throat by a sniper's bullet. At 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m), Orwell was considerably taller than the Spanish fighters[76] and had been warned against standing against the trench parapet. Unable to speak, and with blood pouring from his mouth, Orwell was carried on a stretcher to Siétamo, loaded on an ambulance and after a bumpy journey via Barbastro arrived at the hospital at Lérida. He recovered sufficiently to get up and on 27 May 1937 was sent on to Tarragona and two days later to a POUM sanatorium in the suburbs of Barcelona. The bullet had missed his main artery by the barest margin and his voice was barely audible. It had been such a clean shot that the wound immediately went through the process of cauterisation. He received electrotherapy treatment and was declared medically unfit for service..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

"No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients-- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." https://books.google.com/books?id=OJkLDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA204

Suppose Orwell had died fighting for the POUM? It's not like his work would be totally unknown today--there would still be the early novels, The Road to Wigan Pier, etc.--but apart from specialists in interwar British literature or in the British Left of the 1930's, would anyone pay much attention? At least those Communist Party members who died in Spain had a powerful organization to help make their work famous. There weren't very many British fans of the POUM, apart from the ILP.

Would more attention be paid to other anti-totalitarian novelists like Koestler or to other dystopians like Zamyatin? No, it doesn't work that way. The success of Orwell's late novels probably focused more attention on works of an analogous nature by other writers than they would otherwise have received.

 

[Nivek]

I would say nothing of value was loss but his novels did have good prose

 

[Kerguelen]

I remember reading that it was Orwell who coined the term "Cold War" during the 1940's. Maybe the conflict between communism and capitalism gets called something else.

 

[Pseudo]

I don't get shown an animated CIA-funded adaptation of Animal Farm in school and there's no counterpoint to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

 

[A Piece of History]

As much as I love Orwell's work, (Animal Farm is one of my favourite books), I don't think we would lose much, aside from all of the Orwellian terminology from Nineteen Eighty Four. What did Orwell contribute to history, aside from being one of the 20th Century's most revered writers?

 

[overoceans]

I don't get shown an animated CIA-funded adaptation of Animal Farm in school and there's no counterpoint to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

I don't think of the two books as even really in the same thematic universe, let alone one being a counterpoint to one the other. BNW is sort of the whole "OMG, science is gonna enslave us all and we won't even know it!!" thing. 1984, by contrast, is a standard attack on political dictatorships of the mid-20th Century.

A counterpoint to Brave New World would be a world where everyone foregoes medical and psychiactic technology out of some commtment to untainted humanity, and dies young and painfully of birth defects, diseases, and depression. The counterpoint to 1984 would be a world where the people think they know the better than their masters, rise up and ovethrow the Party, and then promptly get themselves invaded by Eastasia, who really ARE just as bad as the Ministry Of Truth said they were.

 

[Pseudo]

I don't think of the two books as even really in the same thematic universe, let alone one being a counterpoint to one the other. BNW is sort of the whole "OMG, science is gonna enslave us all and we won't even know it!!" thing. 1984, by contrast, is a standard attack on political dictatorships of the mid-20th Century.

A counterpoint to Brave New World would be a world where everyone foregoes medical and psychiactic technology out of some commtment to untainted humanity, and dies young and painfully of birth defects, diseases, and depression. The counterpoint to 1984 would be a world where the people think they know the better than their masters, rise up and ovethrow the Party, and then promptly get themselves invaded by Eastasia, who really ARE just as bad as the Ministry Of Truth said they were.

One is a world where social order is kept by indulgence and consumption and the other is a world where social order is kept by repression and privation. That's the counterpoint I'm thinking of.

 

[Lillith]

I remember reading that it was Orwell who coined the term "Cold War" during the 1940's. Maybe the conflict between communism and capitalism gets called something else.

It wasn't, It was a south carolinian representative if I remember correctly.

 

[Mark E.]

When Orwell published 1984, Huxley congratulated him because it gave new relevance to Brave New World. The two books would become a one-two punch against government controlled societies. Otherwise, BNW retains too much of a satirical reputation and attracts much less attention. Maybe, though, it gets some cult following after the emergence of the Summer of Love (1967), hippie drug culture, etc.

I'm not sure how it did/does in Britain, but in America, Animal Farm doesn't get so much juvenile attention. I think the intent was to read it to young children and when they get old enough, they realize "Snowball is Trotsky!" Most Americans don't read it until they already know what it's about.

 

[overoceans]

When Orwell published 1984, Huxley congratulated him because it gave new relevance to Brave New World. The two books would become a one-two punch against government controlled societies. Otherwise, BNW retains too much of a satirical reputation and attracts much less attention. Maybe, though, it gets some cult following after the emergence of the Summer of Love (1967), hippie drug culture, etc.

I'm not sure how it did/does in Britain, but in America, Animal Farm doesn't get so much juvenile attention. I think the intent was to read it to young children and when they get old enough, they realize "Snowball is Trotsky!" Most Americans don't read it until they already know what it's about.

I read Animal Farm before I knew about its political implications, after being told that it was just about animals rebelling against human cruelty. Suffice to say, it was pretty confusing when the pigs started having ducks ripped to shreds by the guard dogs.

 

[Fries]

I remember reading that it was Orwell who coined the term "Cold War" during the 1940's. Maybe the conflict between communism and capitalism gets called something else.

Bernard Baruch coined it in 1948.

 

[David T]

Bernard Baruch coined it in 1948.

"The expression "cold war" was rarely used before 1945. Some writers credit the fourteenth century Spaniard Don Juan Manuel for first using the term (in Spanish), when dealing with the conflict between Christianity and Islam as a "cold war". However he used the term "tepid" not "cold". The word "cold" first appeared in a faulty translation of his work in the 19th century.[1]

"At the end of World War II, George Orwell used the term in the essay "You and the Atomic Bomb" published October 19, 1945, in the British newspaper Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear war, he warned of a "peace that is no peace", which he called a permanent "cold war".[2] Orwell directly referred to that war as the ideological confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.[3] Moreover, in The Observer of March 10, 1946, Orwell wrote that "[a]fter the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire."[4]

"The definition which has now become fixed is of a war waged through indirect conflict. The first use of the term in this sense, to describe the post–World War II geopolitical tensions between the USSR and its satellites and the United States and its western European allies (which in practice acted as satellites of the opposing force) is attributed to Bernard Baruch, an American financier and presidential advisor.[5] In South Carolina, on April 16, 1947, he delivered a speech (by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope)[6] saying, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war."[7] Newspaper reporter-columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency, with the book Cold War (1947).[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_war_(general_term)#Origins_of_the_term

It is possible that Baruch had no idea that Orwell had used the term, and that through Baruch and Lippmann it would have become popular even if Orwell had never used it.