Yes definitely Jeff but even more than that list of books I would love to hear a description of the general approach Russ takes to organizing and selecting his reading material. He somehow consumes and really understands a tremendous amount of the best new reading material from a wide variety of perspectives.
READ BOOK Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom
Excellent podcast today. It was so informative and educational. Out of all the books discussed I only read 1984. I already look forward to the second listening. I know it will get Top 5 podcasts for 2017.
Thomas Ricks: Well, for me it actually began with a feeling I was sort of leaving journalism, I guess, becoming a full time book writer. And, I think it's part of my farewell to journalism: I went back and started reading a lot of 20th century journalists, serious[?] about who would be remembered and who will be forgotten--and most of them will because forgotten. And I went back and started with H. L. Mencken, and found Mencken's style anachronistic. Politics, really wrong. And his understanding of America very limited. So, I turned to S. J. Perelman--found him not funny. I turned to E. B. White, and found E. B. White's prose style extremely good, but his concerns kind of did not, not to my interests at all, it he [?] today. Hemingway--just found him a blowhard. And then I picked up Orwell--and George Orwell just stood out. It was such a fresh, new voice. There's a guy who died in 1950, yet he sounded like he was writing today in his prose style. And his concerns were the concerns of today: How do you preserve the freedom of the individual in an era of an intrusive state? And even more intrusive cooperation? What is freedom of expression? How do you define it? How do you preserve it? And that really intrigued me. And I went back and kind of re-read a lot of him, re-read his letters and diaries, which I'd not read. And as I was reading it occurred to me, 'Wow! This guy is kind of a left-wing parallel to another hero of mine, Winston Churchill.' And I began to see similarities in their points of view, even if, as you say, they are extraordinarily different people.
Russ Roberts: Their lives are entertaining to read about. I've read a lot about Churchill in WWII, and despite that I really enjoyed your account of his contributions in WWII and in our lives today. Your book is really an entertaining read. I couldn't put it down. It's very clear that Churchill is an important figure in the 20th century and today. Why is Orwell of equal importance? What's important about both of them for someone today who perhaps doesn't know as much history as someone else?
Thomas Ricks: What's extraordinary to me about Churchill is how he almost single-handedly in 1940 saved the West. He's the only person, I think, who as serving as Prime Minister would have absolutely refused to negotiate with Nazi Germany. Almost every other figure we know of at that point who could have been Prime Minister would have been inclined to a peace settlement; and the West would have been different than we know it today. A peace settlement probably would have given the Nazis free hand in Europe in exchange for Britain being allowed to keep its empire. Instead he said, 'Absolutely not. We are going to fight'--and fight, he says it explicitly upon the entry of the war, 'We are going to fight for the right of the individual to exist.' And Orwell, in the wake of that, comes along and explains the Post-War world, and explains what our concerns need to be. What strikes me today is that Orwell still feels like a contemporary figure. I maintained a Google search, a Google Alert on his name when I was writing the book. And every day there seemed 20 or 30, sometimes 40 or 50 Google hits for people writing about him around the world. In fact, I think he's almost been liberated by the end of the Cold War--people have come to see that he was not necessarily a Cold-War author, and that his books, especially Animal Farm and 1984, wherever[?] there was a governmental abuse, wherever people are in jail, saying, 'No, I demand my right to perceive facts myself and not simply told whatever line[?] the government is handing out.'
Russ Roberts: Let's talk about Churchill's opposition and unwillingness to negotiate that you mention, because I thought about it when reading your book, and you of course deal in passing with Chamberlain's 1938 Munich Agreement. And it's now fashionable, of course, to mock Chamberlain as an appeaser and a fool, because he came back and said, 'We have peace in our time.' But I think it's very hard for Americans, and it may be even hard for people in the United Kingdom today to remember what the mood in the United Kingdom was at the time. I looked up the numbers. The United Kingdom lost 700,000 people in WWI. That's deaths. It's not wounded. It's almost 2% of their population. So, it's the equivalent of America losing 6 million people in a war today. It's really--it's hard for us to realize the lack of enthusiasm that the British public had to fight Nazism, and to stand up to it. And that's totally understandable. In France, similarly, which had even more deaths, about the same, population--their surrender, which, again, Churchill and others have criticized and bemoaned. But I think it's hard for us to appreciate how people felt, that just 20 years earlier had been the most devastating and horrific experience of national loss up to that point. And Churchill somehow was immune to that. Churchill somehow rallied his people to fight when they really weren't in the mood. And that to me is his incredible achievement. Do you have any thoughts on why and how he was able to do that?
Thomas Ricks: It's fascinating to me. Britain, even today, is the most class-ridden society in all of Europe. But it was even more stratified by class back then. And you are right: The working class disproportionately bears the impact of the German bombing, because East London and Southeast London are being hit very hard. Much harder than West London--where the rich lived. And in addition, a lot of the rich had decamped to their country homes. Meanwhile, in the fighting in the air, over their heads, the British aircraft are piloted overwhelmingly by the sons of the middle class. The RAF--the Royal Air Force--was kind of disdained. It wasn't the Navy. It wasn't the Army. It was this new force that kind of had an air of petroleum and engine lubricants to it. It was seen as not quite done. These people were a little bit like chauffeurs up in the air. And at the end of the Battle of Britain, Churchill asked that the numbers be pulled together; and said, 'My God. The aristocratic class was not present in this battle.' Very few of these pilots were from the upper class. 'These are the middle class,' he says. And, to quote him, 'And they deserve to run the country, now.' And it really struck me, reading that, that Margaret Thatcher was his heir in so many ways, that Thatcher--the daughter of a middle class or lower middle class grocer really inherited the mantle that Churchill described during the Battle of Britain.
Thomas Ricks: Who never really recovered and flailed around politically. And died a failure. Orwell, likewise--Orwell is intriguing to me as a writer because he has grown to be so influential today and so important today--spent most of his life unknown except really till his last two books come out in the late 1940s. In the 1930s, he is a minor and very mediocre novelist. His early novels are almost unreadable. I like one of them, Burmese Days, but that's because it's more of a memoir, really, than a novel. His naturalistic, imaginative novels--oddly, I tried to read, because I said, like, 'Tom, you're writing a book about Churchill and Orwell: You better read these.' I tried and I tried, and I find them unreadable: Coming Up for Air, A Clergyman's Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. But then he goes off, in 1936, to see the Spanish Civil War. Very quickly becomes involved with the fighting. He is associated with the Left, which is to say, with the Republican Government that was fighting the Fascist and Nationalist rebels. He gets involved in street fighting in Barcelona, in which the Soviet-dominated security [?] apparatus is trying to wipe out anti-Soviet Leftists. Remember that the first people the Communists try to kill are not the Right--they are the Socialists. Then he is shot to the throat, in May of 1937. He's on the front line. It's dawn. He is a squad leader, and he is checking out his men. And the sun is behind him, silhouetting him. He is tall. He's over 6 feet. And he's perfectly silhouetted for a sniper from the other side--who fires a bullet. Catches him right in the throat--probably aimed for his head and the bullet probably sank a little bit. And through extraordinary luck, the bullet passes through his throat but doesn't hit the windpipe--which would have killed him--the carotid artery, which would have killed him--or his spine, which would have killed him. He goes and angles between all of these; comes out the [?]. Orwell sinks to the ground, realizing he's been hit. When he's told it's a shot to the throat, he thinks, 'I'm a goner.' He's never heard of anybody surviving that kind of wound. In his first thought, he says conventionally enough that he'll never see his wife again. I mean, he's sorry for that. And his second thought is: 'I will miss this world because after all I get along in it so well.' He goes home, after all this. And he sits down and reads all the British newspapers, Left and Right, about the [?] of the war. And now the great revelation: They are both lying. He'd expected the Right to lie, because he was a Leftists. He's shocked when he finds the Left-wing newspapers are also lying. And, kind of, we think about fake news nowadays: He comes back and he says, 'The news being reported here about what's going on in Spain, is fake.' And that begins his great political transformation, in the same way that Churchill was transformed by his anti-Nazi, anti-appeasement stance throughout the 1930s. 2ff7e9595c
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