Which highbrow literary reference is the most overused in journalistic commentary? Yeats’ “The Second Coming” would be a candidate — Joan Didion used it so evocatively in the late ’60s that it echos in newspapers every time “things fall apart” and the “centre cannot hold” (which is how the vast majority of 21st-century life has felt).
Or perhaps it’s Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s summary of Voltaire’s view (always incorrectly attributed to Voltaire himself) that “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” — rarely used for any concrete examples.
Locally, writers can’t get enough of Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country formulation of Australia’s leadership as “second-rate people who share its luck”, when a government they disagree with holds office.
All are sturdy and reliable bulking agents for any political writer seeking literary heft. But surely no writer has produced more phrases that can be “tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house” than George Orwell.
Earlier this week, for example, The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen recounted the plot of Animal Farm, and concluded:
Orwell might have been writing about the obvious dangers of the new religion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Two significant reports — one in Australia, the other in the UK — suggest the new DEI oppressors may be worse than the oppressors they want to replace.
Yep, after reading research by the Close the Gap research group — which argues Indigenous academics are judged by easier criteria than non-Indigenous scholars — Albrechtsen has concluded that this, if true, represents a similar horror and affront to our collective humanity as Soviet-era repression.
Albrechtsen’s invocation of the “all animals are equal but some are more equal than others” line echoes Peter Dutton’s rhetoric on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
In the past year in News Corp papers, Orwell has been invoked to describe:
- Labor’s misinformation bill (many times)
- Queensland drivers’ registration fees being used to pay for the Queensland government’s $3,000 zero-emission vehicles rebate
- Guardian Australia’s coverage of Stan Grant (Albrechtsen again)
- COVID-19 restrictions
- Former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian’s relationship with Daryl Maguire
- Labor’s “Nature Positive Plan”
- Gender Pay Gap Reporting (Albrechtsen again)
- Defence of Sam Kerr
- Pretty much everything that anyone on the modern left has ever thought
- LGBTQIA+ support for Gaza
- Referring to trans women as women
- Big W’s announcements of support for the Voice
- Supporters of the Andrews government’s ban on gas for new builds
- Labor’s opposition to small nuclear reactors
- The Albanese government’s silence on the 70th birthday of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation
- Calls for a ceasefire in Gaza (many times),
- Denials that US President Joe Biden is mentally declining
Thank Christ Anna Funder’s Wifedom detailed Orwell’s personal flaws, including misogyny and homophobia — if Orwell could be described as “woke” it might break News Corp apart at a cellular level like if the Ghostbusters crossed their proton pack streams.
Interestingly, this cavalcade of pieces drops down to single digits once you filter out results that fail to mention his political views.
Here’s Orwell in “Why I Write”:
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
Horrified by Western inaction at the military coup — backed by the fascist governments in Germany and Italy — against the left-wing government in Spain, Orwell involved himself in the Spanish Civil War first as a reporter, then as a soldier with a regiment of the Party of Marxist Unification. Though he never officially joined the party, he took a bullet in the throat for his troubles.
In his book about the war, Homage to Catalonia, he looks at Barcelona, seized and collectivised by its workers, and says: “There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”
And while Orwell’s critiques of the left intelligentsia, and their wilful blindness towards Soviet crimes, is catnip for News Corp commentators, they rarely mention, say, his consistent criticism of conservative appeasement of Hitler — from his review of Mein Kampf:
It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything.
And when they describe Orwell’s moral clarity and foresight, they rarely mention his calls for “classless, ownerless” society and “a fundamental shift of power” in “The Lion and The Unicorn”.
Further, we have to marvel at the sloppiness of some of these quotes. Extra marks for this one, which appears to weld together two different quotes frequently attributed to Orwell that aren’t actually found anywhere in his writing — Orwell did not say “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”, nor “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it”, so we’re not sure from where she sourced: “George Orwell was right when he said in a time of deceit, telling the truth becomes hate speech”.
But, hey it’s not like Orwell was a stickler for precise language or anything.
Any other overused literary references come to mind? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
