Source: How Orwell used wartime rationing to argue for global justice | Aeon Ideas
At the level of the planet as a whole, Londoners and New Yorkers and Sydneysiders who proclaim ‘We are the 99 per cent’ are in fact much more likely to belong if not to the 1 per cent, then certainly to the top 10 per cent. … As the economist Branko Milanovic has been insisting for decades, inequality within nations, bad as it is, pales in comparison with inequality between nations. Yet even those of us who find global inequality troubling and ultimately indefensible hesitate to raise the subject. … George Orwell did … Orwell recognised that, at a global scale, underpaid and downtrodden English workers were exploiters.
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His job was to mobilise support for Britain’s anti-Nazi war effort, and to get that support from the victims of British colonialism. … he talked about rationing: in particular, about the popularity of rationing among the English. … it seems most likely that he did so because he knew it was something India needed to hear. There could be no anti-fascist solidarity unless the exploited Indians could believe that a more just distribution of the world’s resources was possible