Understanding Orwell on the Lesser Evil

“Five years later, Orwell published an essay called ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War,’ in which he states, ‘War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.'”

George Orwell was a foreign fighter in the Spanish Civil War. From January to May 1937, he fought on the side of the democratically elected republican government, against the fascist insurrection led by General Francisco Franco. Five years later, Orwell published an essay called “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” in which he states, “War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.” Orwell understood that some things must be fought against, and there is no way to escape the fighting. That is why he saw right away the Spanish Civil War was not merely a small, localized conflict; the fascist countries were preparing for a global war on democracy, and the democratic countries, through their non-interventionist policies in Spain, were signaling they would not fight back. So, Orwell took it upon himself to go to Spain and fight back. From him I learned that if someone declares war on you, you are at war. It does not matter if you accept that you are at war. In fact, the surest way to lose a war is to refuse to acknowledge that you are in one. Cowardice guarantees the greater evil. I learned all this from reading George Orwell. But I did not learn it quickly. It took me 20 years to understand Orwell on the lesser evil.

The first time I read anything by George Orwell I was 14 or 15. My brother, a year younger than me, had read Animal Farm for school and recommended in the strongest possible terms that I read it as well. Our mother seconded his recommendation. I read it, and when I told my brother I had finished it he said something like, “Isn’t it great?” I said I guessed so, but I didn’t understand why the pigs were such d—s. My little brother then had to explain communism and satire to me. I had read Animal Farm without realizing it was anything more than a story about talking animals; I think I thought it was like a mean-spirited Dr. Dolittle. I remember standing in our mom’s kitchen later that day, listening as she and my brother discussed the nature of political revolution and other lofty concepts I had been ignorant of until that moment. While they talked, I stared at the tiny Penguin paperback on the kitchen table. How were they getting all that from a story about talking animals? I acted like I understood the book. But it was an act.

Orwell only started to make sense to me a couple years later when I read his essay “Politics and the English Language.” It was assigned to me in multiple classes during the second half of high school. I could see why. As soon as I read it, I felt like I had been handed the Rosetta Stone of the grown-up world. It was a step-by-step guide for making sense and being sensible. And it explained why adults so often seemed to be self-contradictory rationalizers: They let others do their thinking for them. But it also explained why I was so bad at school: I did not do my own thinking either. The bit that hit me the hardest came near the end: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” I knew as soon as I read this that I was an insincere student. I was constantly trying to convince teachers I understood what I was supposed to understand: why Gatsby was obsessed with the green light or why trenches were a deciding factor in World War I. But I did not know what I was talking about. So, I would smash together a bunch of parroted phrases and hope teachers did not see through me. They didn’t fall for it.