[006] Two Minutes Ragebait

Ignorance is NOT strength.

Here’s your fun fact for the day:

George Orwell never actually said this.

Yes, it’s a paraphrase of 1984’s thesis on war. Yes, the idea appears in the book, buried inside a fictional text written by a fictional author named Emmanuel Goldstein. But the quote as popularly shown was never written or spoken by Orwell himself.

You know what he did say, though?

“When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist. After all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.”

That’s not a call to arms. It’s a line from Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War.

In 1936, George Orwell went to Spain to fight fascism with a rifle. He arrived with idealism and a willingness to use violence, but soon found himself disillusioned. The front lines were relatively quiet. There was constant infighting among various leftist factions. Propaganda ran rampant.

“I had seen newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.”

In the middle of 1937 he survived a sniper’s bullet through his neck. Spain soon began falling to the Fascists so he and his wife, Eileen, escaped back to England after he recovered. Orwell published Homage to Catalonia the following year.

The memoir was his sixth book, and he wrote three more before passing away at only 46 years old: Coming Up For Air, Animal Farm, and (of course) 1984.

13 years passed between the moment that a bullet exited George Orwell’s neck and the moment that he actually died. He published Animal Farm a week after the bombs fell in Japan and he wrote 1984 in a sanatorium while suffering through the final stages of a 12-year battle with tuberculosis. Orwell fought fascism to the very end, but he never again fought it with violence.

He was a man lived through the most horrifying escalation of warfare and weaponry in the modern era. The war that waged through the most critical portions of his life began with bayonets and ended with a nuclear bomb. Nevertheless, he placed his faith in the power of the written word.

A bullet can end a dictator, but words can end a dictatorship.

A knife can expose an authoritarian’s organs.

Words expose the systems that make their ascension possible.

Unfortunately, those are the parts that never seem to die.