It's the 50th anniversary of George Orwell's prescient "1984," to
which end "The Sunday Times" published a curious review by Robert
Harris on May 31st: http://xrl.us/beut2o
To the Sunday Times:
Odd that Harris finds the need, in praising "1984," to take a whack at
Churchill—which he does with singular inaccuracy: ‘Given that only
five years previously Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had divided up
the world into “zones of influence” at the Teheran conference,’ Harris
writes, ‘[Orwell’s] vision did not seem entirely fantastic.’
What is fantastic is where people get such notions. “Zones of
influence” came up not at Teheran but at the Moscow ("Tolstoy")
conference between Churchill and Stalin a year later, with the Red
Army now far advanced in eastern Europe. Its only effect was to allow
Churchill to save Greece from a red revolution (temporarily; Stalin
had another go a few years later). And the only reason we even know
about the Moscow agreement was because Churchill freely described it
in his war memoirs.
Mr. Harris might have more accurately quoted Orwell’s view of
Churchill, which FINEST HOUR publishes our spring issue, in a deft
article on Orwell and Churchill by Robert Pilpel:
“...whether or not 1940 was anyone else’s finest hour, it was
certainly Churchill’s...One has to admire in him not only his courage
but also a certain largeness of geniality....The British people have
generally rejected his policies, but they have always had a liking for
him...the tough and humorous old man whom they would not accept as a
peacetime leader [in 1945] but whom in the moment of disaster they
felt to be representative of themselves.”
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