George Orwell and the Cold War: A Reconsideration

Murray N. Rothbard

Rothbard’s 1986 scholarly essay, published in Reflections on America, 1984: An Orwell Symposium, contests Norman Podhoretz’s recruitment of Orwell for neoconservative Cold War politics. Its central claim is that Orwell’s opposition to Soviet communism cannot be separated from his warning that permanent international confrontation sustains domestic tyranny:

It is my contention that the cold war, as pursued by the three superpowers of Nineteen Eighty-Four, was the key to their successful imposition of a totalitarian regime upon their subjects.

The essay moves from the political machinery of the novel to American Cold War practices, then through literary scholarship to Orwell’s postwar journalism. Rothbard interprets the novel’s shifting alliances and peripheral wars as a system of mutual preservation among ruling oligarchies. The superstates avoid destroying one another while maintaining fear sufficient to justify propaganda, surveillance, and regimentation. War serves less to defeat an external enemy than to secure obedience at home.

Rothbard applies this model polemically to the United States: military superiority coexists with recurring alarms about Soviet strength, while defense intellectuals rationalize expanding procurement. Reversals in the treatment of Germany, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union illustrate how strategic alignments overwrite established moral classifications. Political language performs a corresponding transformation:

Every government, no matter how despotic, that is willing to join the anti-Soviet crusade is called a champion of the "free world."

The examples make Orwell relevant as a critic of Western state power, not simply as an authority against communism. Rothbard also draws on arguments that military spending sustains employment and political tenure. Yet the analogy has limits: a contemporary report he quotes observes that actual superpowers cannot reliably control peripheral conflicts, which may escalate into nuclear confrontation.

The essay’s interpretive pivot is its account of Nineteen Eighty-Four as an intensification of existing conditions rather than a literal prediction. Drawing on Raymond Williams, John Atkins, Jeffrey Meyers, and Bernard Crick, Rothbard connects Orwell’s superstates to James Burnham’s managerial oligarchies, wartime diplomacy, and familiar practices of wartime Britain. Orwell’s response to American readings of the novel supplies especially important evidence. In the statement issued in his name, quoted by Rothbard, the danger encompasses both socialist and capitalist societies:

Specifically, the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the USSR and the new weapons, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and the most publicized.

This passage relocates the source of totalitarianism from a single ideology to the institutions and habits generated by preparation for total war. Orwell’s continued democratic socialism therefore matters: Rothbard rejects the inference that the novel represents a conversion to the politics later advocated by Podhoretz.

The final movement reconstructs Orwell’s arguments from 1945–47. In “You and the Atom Bomb,” expensive weapons concentrate power, whereas accessible weapons can distribute it. Nuclear monopoly may stabilize rival empires while depriving their subjects of effective resistance. Rothbard quotes Orwell’s stark formulation:

The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of equality.

Deterrence here prevents decisive war without producing freedom or genuine peace. Rothbard traces this conception through Orwell’s criticism of Burnham’s preventive-war advocacy and his assessment of possible postwar settlements. The most likely outcome becomes a durable hierarchy of armed superstates, each sustaining internal domination through isolation and manufactured hostility.

Rothbard acknowledges that Orwell’s alternatives were uncertain and his positions sometimes inconsistent. Anticommunism occasionally drew him toward preventive war or American backing for a socialist European federation; hope for Soviet liberalization persisted alongside these impulses. Calling the contrary tendencies “aberrations,” Rothbard gives interpretive priority to Orwell’s sustained fear of militarized oligarchy. The essay’s distinctive contribution is thus to read permanent Cold War not merely as the setting of Orwell’s totalitarian world, but as a principal mechanism of its reproduction.