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that one, and indeed, at the
time, there must have seemed no necessity to. To stave off defeat, Britain had mobilised its industry under state control – had done so, it turned out, rather more thoroughly than the Nazis
– and, with the war won and the country broke, even the Royal Family carried ration books without protest. So a measure of justice had been achieved.
    In hindsight, the postwar British society that began with the foundation of the National Health Service
was
the socialist revolution – or, to put it less dramatically, the
social-democratic reformation which Orwell had gradually come to accept as the only workable formula that would further justice without destroying liberty. The Welfare State began with shortages of
almost everything, but at least the deprivations were shared, and for all its faults, British society, ever since World War II, has continuously been one of the more interesting experiments in the
attempt to reconcile social justice with personal freedom. (The Scandinavian societies might be more successful experiments, but not even they find themselves interesting.) If Orwell had lived to a
full span, he would have been able, if not necessarily delighted, to deal with the increasing likelihood that his dreams were coming true. Even as things were, with only a few years of life left to
him, he might have given a far more positive account, in his post-war journalism, of how the British of all classes, including the dreaded ruling class, were at long last combining to bring about,
at least in some measure, the more decent society that had haunted his imagination since childhood. But he was distracted by a prior requirement. His own war wasn’t over. It had begun all
over again. There was still one prominent social group who had learned nothing: the left-wing intellectuals.
    The last and most acrimonious phase of Orwell’s battle with the left-wing intelligentsia began not long after D-Day. As the Allied forces fought their way out of Normandy, a piece by
Orwell landed on a desk in America.
Partisan Review
would publish a London Letter in which Orwell complained about the Western Russophile intellectuals who refused to accept the truth
about Stalinist terror. Clearly, what frightened him was that, even if they did accept it, Soviet prestige would lose little of its allure for them. For Orwell, the Cold War was already on, with
the progressive intellectuals in the front rank of the foe. Orwell was the first to use the term ‘cold war’, in an essay published in October 1945 about the atomic bomb – the very
device that would ensure, in the long run, that the Cold War never became a hot one. At the time, however, he saw no cause for complacency.
    But unreconstructed
gauchiste
pundits who would still like to dismiss Orwell as a ‘classic’ Cold Warrior can find out here that he didn’t fit the frame. For one thing,
Orwell remained all too willing to accuse the West of structural deficiencies that were really much more contingent than he made out. When he argued, in the pages of
Tribune
, that the
mass-circulation newspapers forced slop on their readership, he preferred to ignore the advice from a correspondent that it was really a case of the readership forcing slop on the newspapers. He
should have given far more attention to such criticisms, because they allowed for the possibility – as his own assumptions did not – that if ordinary people were freed from exploitation
they would demand more frivolity, not less.
    To the end, Orwell’s tendency was to overestimate the potential of the people he supposed to be in the grip of the capitalist system, while simultaneously underestimating the individuality
they were showing already. In his remarks on the moral turpitude of the scientists who had cravenly not ‘refused’ to work on the atomic bomb – clearly he thought they should have
all turned the job down – there was no mention (perhaps because he didn’t yet know,