A Review of the Greatest Book Review Ever Written
How Orwell Diagnosed Fascism's Emotional Appeal.
There is a peculiar aroma that wafts up from our cultural compost heap every few years, and it tends to rise precisely when civilisation seems poised to eat its own tail. It’s the stench of Westerners, drunk on comfort, who grope toward fascism like a pervert thumbing through a medical text, insisting all the while that their tastes are wholly humanitarian.
Nowhere is this perversion more clinically dissected than in George Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kampf, the greatest book review ever written in the English language, in my humble, yet dependable, opinion.
Orwell, who had trudged through the blood-soaked terrain of the Spanish Civil War, grasped something that still eludes today’s social media radicals and milquetoast revolutionaries: that fascism, unlike its antiseptic liberal critics, peddles what democracies refuse to market - sacrifice, struggle, and meaning. Blood, toil, tears, and sweat, though in our time, the anti-modernist Left is not so foolish as to imagine this is a tax they should ever pay. That tab will be picked up, as ever, by the conveniently expendable other.
I was recently convinced, against better judgment, to date a young woke type - convinced only because she named George Orwell as one of her favourite writers. I felt, after that, how wrong could it really go? Few authors write with the intellectual honesty of the man born Eric Blair. A major reason I admired Orwell was that he was a socialist who routinely trained his pen on other socialists. Why waste energy critiquing the Right if you’ve no intention of voting for them? Better to make your own side electable through thoughtful, unsentimental critique. Orwell convinced me of that approach, a clarity that, regrettably, seems to have eluded far too many of us.
Fascism is hard to define. It lacks a central text or canonical thinker and tends to congeal around a charismatic authoritarian who may or may not be a homicidal maniac. But if fascists are elusive, defining the anti-fascist could be trickier, especially today, where large swathes of the contemporary Left view the end of Jewish autonomy and the defence and preservation of Islamist death cults as central to their moral mission. Orwell, however, as his Mein Kampf review makes plain, remains the unassailable model.
Orwell wrote that review in March 1940 for The New English Weekly, a modest but intellectually ambitious periodical then edited by A. R. Orage, a man previously associated with guild socialism and social credit theory. Britain was at war, but the full horror of Hitler’s genocidal ambitions had yet to come into view. Mein Kampf had already been circulating in the English-speaking world for some years, often in heavily abridged translations that curiously softened or obscured its true intent. Most reviewers, when they bothered at all, dismissed it as the deranged ravings of a crank. Winston Churchill, prescient as ever, urged the public to take it seriously.
H.G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds, who started his political life as a Fabian socialist, famously dismissed Hitler as a “man of the caves.” He saw Mein Kampf as the grunted ravings of a political Neanderthal. Wells’ condescension typified a failure among liberal rationalists to understand fascism’s emotional, and specifically irrational, pull. The very thing Orwell would so devastatingly expose.
Dorothy Thompson, the formidable American journalist and one of the first Western reporters expelled from Nazi Germany, reviewed Mein Kampf with bracing seriousness. She warned her readers:
“When Hitler says he will kill the Jews, he means it.”
Her review was deemed alarmist and largely ignored by the liberal establishment.
It took Orwell to pierce the matter’s core, and not just the ideology, but the appeal of it. What was it that made one heed the call of the barker and enter the striped tent? While men like Wells scoffed at fascism’s absurdities, and Marxists dismissed it as capitalist stagecraft, Orwell dared to ask the essential question: What emotional itch does this man scratch? And in doing so, he composed not merely a review, but a diagnosis of the 20th-century soul.
In one of his most prescient lines, Orwell writes:
“Hitler... has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war... has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain... Hitler... knows that human beings don’t only want comfort... they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice.”
You will not find a keener analysis of the fascist impulse anywhere in 20th-century literature. Orwell understood, with grim precision, that the draw of fascism lay not in its promises of wealth or stability, but in its emotional pornography - the pageantry of heroic resistance, death, transcendence.
And this mental pathogen is still in circulation today, not in jackboots and armbands, but in the chardonnay-soaked seminar rooms of the West’s universities and NGO boardrooms.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the contemporary cult of “resistance.” Not real resistance - not the French Maquis, not the Warsaw Ghetto fighters - but a mythologised “resistance” adored by latte liberals and their fascist-curious cousins. These are people who’ve never heard a shell burst within a café, let alone collected up strewn body parts, yet who speak in reverent tones of Palestinian “struggle” and an “occupied” Gaza, where theocratic sadists like Hamas now stand in for moral legitimacy.
These people know nothing of war and even less of politics. What they know is theatre. And in this theatre, Hamas isn’t a death cult that executes dissenters and fires rockets from hospitals; it is a symbol. A cudgel with which to beat Israel - Israel, that inconvenient outpost of modernity, pluralism, and Jewish agency.
The bourgeois leftist, like the fascist Orwell anatomised, finds something orgasmic in the fantasy of self-sacrifice - so long as someone else is doing the bleeding. They fetishise rubble they’ll never sleep under, cheer on wars they’ll never fight, and elevate as sacred those whose politics, if enacted, would see them stoned for who they sleep with or murdered for what they fail to believe.
The two-state solution died, first and foremost, in the mind of the Western Left. Why? Because compromise is boring. It doesn’t sell posters or poetry. Because “peace” means surrendering the operatic myth of endless resistance - of blood, of glory, of meaning.
And Orwell saw it all coming. The libido of struggle, when unmet by real risk, curdles into moral cosplay. Today, we see western radicals, insulated by privilege, sipping biodynamic wine in the Berkshires or tweeting from Westminster and Wellington, who’ve found their sacred cause in Gaza - not for peace, not for dignity, but for the fantasy of heroic resistance they’ve never once had to embody.
Hamas, with its martyr posters, chants, and funerals, offers all the aesthetic trappings of struggle, with no tangible commitments. It is resistance as opera. And Orwell understood, better than anyone, that fascism is not the opposite of the leftist impulse, but the repressed fantasy of its failed branch. That is the shameful truth: that the hedonistic progressive, robbed of real hardship, may one day envy the fascist, precisely because he bleeds.
Israel, for all its faults, represents everything these armchair revolutionaries loathe: military competence, unapologetic survival, and Jews who stand as equals. It is a nation not ashamed to defend itself. A people who, having absorbed history’s worst traumas, refuse to become a metaphor again.
Orwell’s review, then, is no literary footnote. It is a mirror held up not only to Hitler and his supporters, but also to us. To the comfortable, liberal West, cosy in its assumed safety, and now, frankly embarrassed by its endurance. A society so desperate for absolution, it seeks atonement through the blood of distant strangers.
Orwell ends his review, chillingly, by conceding:
“Hitler may be a lunatic, but he is also a leader of men... it is probable that if he survives this war, he will be regarded as one of the great men of his age.”
He hoped, of course, that Hitler would not survive. But the insight remains: charisma built not on ideas, but on myth and martyrdom, is the narcotic of the disaffected. And that is why Orwell’s review endures. Because it didn’t settle for lazy condemnation. It asked the unaskable:
Why does this work?
And worse still:
Why do we secretly want it to?