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heard some remarkable stuff from a man who had expended so much ink on insisting that the British would have to quit India. Orwell told them the truth: that they had a better chance with the
British than with the Japanese. He also scripted weekly summaries of the war’s progress. Writing on the tenth of January, 1942, he remarked on a tonal shift in Germany’s official
pronouncements:
    Until a week or two ago, the German military spokesmen were explaining that the attack on Moscow would have to be postponed until the spring, but that the German armies
     could quite easily remain on the line they now occupied. Already, however, they are admitting that a further retreat – or, as they prefer to call it, a rectification of the line
     – will be necessary . . . Before the end of February, the Germans may well be faced with the alternative of abandoning nearly all their conquests in the northern part of the Russian
     front, or of seeing hundreds of thousands of soldiers freeze to death.
    It was an optimistic forecast for 1942, but it all came true in 1943, and it showed two of Orwell’s best attributes operating at once: he had a global grasp, and he was able to guess the
truth by the way the other side told lies. The broadcasts make such good reading today that you almost feel sorry he ever stopped. From these indirect sources, you can surmise something of what was
going on deep within his mind, and when he started writing journalism again he retroactively filled in some of the gaps. From the realization that the violent socialist revolution would not take
place, he was apparently moving towards the conclusion that it should not. Reviewing a collection of Thomas Mann’s essays published in English translation in 1943, he praised Mann in terms
that would have been impossible for him before the war: ‘He never pretends to be other than he is, a middle-class Liberal, a believer in the freedom of the intellect, in human brotherhood;
above all, in the existence of objective truth.’ While careful to point out that Mann was pro-socialist, and even excessively trustful of the USSR, Orwell went on to note, approvingly, that
‘he never budges from his “bourgeois” contention that the individual is important, that freedom is worth having, that European culture is worth preserving, and that truth is not
the exclusive possession of one race or class.’ For Orwell, who had once preached that bourgeois democracy existed solely in order to bamboozle the proletariat into accepting its ineluctable
servitude, this was quite a switch.
    At no time did Orwell come quite clean about having rearranged the playing field. Near the end of 1943 he conceded that he had been ‘grossly wrong’ about the necessity of a
revolution in order to stave off defeat. But to concede that he had been ‘grossly wrong’ about his view of society was beyond even him, and no wonder. It would have been to give away
too much. By now he was always careful to say that he wanted a
democratic
socialism, and was even ready to contemplate that reconciling a command economy with individual liberty might be a
problem: but he still clung tenaciously to the socialist part of his vision, in his view the only chance of decent treatment for everyone. Piece by piece, however, he was giving up on any notion
that his socialist vision could be brought about by coercion, since that would yield liberty for no one. If he had lived long enough, his fundamental honesty might have given us an autobiography
which would have described what must have been a mighty conflict in his soul. As things are, we have to infer it.
    His socialist beliefs fought a long rearguard action. In that same year, 1943, he gave
The Road to Serfdom
a review tolerant of Hayek’s warnings about collectivism, but there was
no sign of Orwell’s endorsing the desirability of free market economics. Orwell was still for the centralized, planned economy. He never did quite give up on