George Orwell's birthday was yesterday. When I think about it, there are four giants who have shaped my political philosophy into what it is today: Thomas Paine, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and of course, Orwell. George Orwell was a fucking badass. I could happily write short bios on any of these people, but Orwell is the birthday boy, so he gets the honor.
In 1922, at the age of 19, Orwell followed in his father's footsteps and went to Burma (now Myanmar) to join the Indian Imperial police. In the five years he spent there, he grew to love the Burmese, and hate British imperialism. Years later, in 1936, he wrote an essay, Shooting an Elephant, about an incident that happened there. His two big novels are what Orwell is most known for, but his essays go extremely unappreciated. In Shooting an Elephant, he describes the psychology of the imperial relationship, and how easy it is for one to fall into it.
It opens:
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
He gets a call about an escaped elephant that had trampled and killed someone. As the only officer in the area, he grabs his gun and goes looking for it. Upon confirming that the story was true, he send an orderly to grab an elephant gun. A crowd begins to follow him. It grows bigger and bigger, until it's around a couple thousand people. They want to see him shoot an elephant.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of "must" was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
He shoots the elephant. He goes on with a agonizingly painful description of the elephant's death. I kind of wanted to post all of it in here, but it's almost a quarter of the entire essay, so you can just read it here if you want.
Orwell eventually resigned, and moved to Paris in 1928, where he struggled as a freelance writer. He destroyed most of his periodicals at this time, since no one would publish them. He resorted to taking menial jobs that barely provided him enough to eat as a plongeur.
“[A] plongeur is one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack... trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.”
Living among the poor had a profound impact on him. He moved to London, and voluntarily lived as a tramp among miners, beggars, and thieves to become more class conscious.
At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.
With books like Animal Farm and 1984, it's easy to understand what George Orwell was against -- totalitarianism -- but what he supported is never mentioned very much. And there's a reason for that. George Orwell was a socialist. He became a socialist when he was living in Paris and London, as he saw the realities of poverty firsthand. And it's always hilarious witnessing the reactions of people when they first find this out.
So the secret's out. Orwell was a socialist. Why? To fully understand this, we need to back up a second and talk about what pre-war European politics were like (spoiler alert: fucking insane).
See, there was a huge worldwide split among marxists when the communists came to power in Russia. It all centered on whether they should support the Soviet Union. One faction stressed that it was not marxism at all, it was merely another form of totalitarianism, and that it needed to be opposed just as much as the capitalists and fascists. The other faction was ecstatic when the Soviet Union was formed, they believed it was the beginning of a worldwide workers' revolution, just as Marx had predicted. Those who opposed the Soviet Union came to be known as the "socialists," while those who supported it became the "communists" (though, as Marx envisioned it, there really wasn't that much difference between communism and socialism at all). The Russian socialists would soon be purged by Stalin's regime.
It is within this political climate -- full of anarchists, and fascists, and communists, and socialists, and everything in between -- that Orwell found himself in Spain amidst civil war.
The Spanish Civil War is never taught here in the states, so here's a bit of background. (This is an extremely interesting period, here's a fantastic six part documentary series online if you want to learn more about it.) Spain was still being ruled by a monarchy in 1930. But it had almost no popular support by that point, and fearing a revolution, King Alfonso XIII stepped down from power. The Second Spanish Republic was formed. The 1931 elections saw Republicans and Socialists take most of the seats in parliament. Leftist radicalism was very potent in Spain at the time, and many workers' parties -- including the anarchists, the communists, and many socialists -- refused to take part in the new government. Left-leaning Republicans were torn between the conservatives' call for order, and the workers' demand for a more radical restructuring of their society. Right wing radicals were also present -- fascism was widespread within the military, and it was gaining support in the general population, especially among the Catholic Church and the former supporters of the monarchy.
The people of Spain became so split, that the new government was at risk of being torn apart. Political ideologies practically devolved into gangs, and people roamed the streets at night looking for people they disagreed with to beat up -- leftists sporting the clenched fist, fascists raising their stiff salute. Politically-motivated murders weren't uncommon. It came to the point where people could hardly look at one another without wanting to kill each other. It was a very dangerous and confusing time, and the fear of civil war became very real.
Foreshadowing the conflict, here's Salvador Dali's Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War). It shows a single figure attempting to hold itself together, while pushing itself away.
The Spanish military rose up in counterrevolution in July 1936, in an attempt to overthrow the government. The leftists and moderates put aside their differences and unified as an anarchist-communist-socialist-Republican front in order to combat the bigger threat of fascism. By this point, the Republican government was doing all it could simply to retain a presence. The workers were able to implement societies of their choosing, on a town-by-town basis.
Orwell had been following these events very closely, and he booked passage almost immediately when war broke out. John McNair of the Independent Labour Party quoted him: "I've come to fight against Fascism."
The culture he stepped into when he arrived in Spain was unlike anything he had ever seen. It overwhelmed and inspired him. He wrote an astounding memoir detailing his experience in the war, called Homage to Catalonia.
It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ or ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.
Orwell wasn't alone. It wasn't at all uncommon for foreigners to travel to Spain to fight. National borders have never meant much to anarchists and socialists, and the war was seen as an international workers' struggle. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the George Washington Brigade were reserved for travelers from the United States. That black soldier up there is an unidentified American.
The fascist military was supplied by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Stalin eventually jumped in and gave the communist factions some supplies, but they were meager compared to Germany's powerhouse. The nations that would become the Allies were fruitlessly trying to prevent a second world war, so they were apathetic. FDR declared a neutrality policy, and forbid American business with either side. This went largely unenforced, and American corporations proceeded to sell arms and supplies to the fascists.
The fascists eventually won. You can watch that documentary series to find out how and why. People try to analyze the war and see what exactly went wrong, but in all likelihood, there probably wasn't much hope for victory to begin with. Orwell writes in Homage to Catalonia about the disorder, lack of training, and lack of decent weapons among the Republican troops. He writes that although the idea of full equality and lack of authority is good for a society in peacetime, it's nothing but chaos for a military in the middle of a war. If you tried giving someone an order, you'd have to stand there arguing with him for five minutes about why he needed to go do it. No one had the slightest idea of how to handle a gun. Spaniards always looked forward to fighting alongside foreigners, because they always knew how guns worked. And what guns they had were rusted to shit. Most hardly worked at all. Everyone was too caught up in the revolutionary spirit to actually care to learn how to fight. Put that kind of structure up against the horrific precision of fascism, and they never stood a chance. It's a good lesson.
In terms of an actual single event, most leftists agree that it was the Barcelona May Days that destroyed all hope of victory. That was when the Stalinist shitheads betrayed everyone and tried to seize power. They attempted to forcefully seize a telephone building in Barcelona that was run by anarchists. The anarchists fought back, and it sparked a city-wide conflict that lasted for five days. Orwell fought here. Gordon Bowker explains in his biography, "Although he did not think much of the Communists, Orwell was still ready to treat them as friends and allies. That would soon change."
Not long afterwards, upon returning to the front, Orwell was shot through the throat by a sniper's bullet. We nearly lost his two masterpieces right here, but the bullet just barely missed an artery, and he miraculously made a full recovery. During that recovery, the situation in Barcelona had deteriorated so much that the communists were in partial control. Many of Orwell's friends were being arrested and shot. The communists were beginning purges, and he and his wife knew they needed to get out of the country, fast. They barely escaped with their lives.
That event is what lost the war. General Francisco Franco assumed power and installed a fascist dictatorship that lasted until his death in 1975. World War II began immediately when Spain's civil war ended, so Spain did not take part in it, focusing instead on recovering and rebuilding. Using concentration camps or downright executions, up to 50,000 leftists were killed under Franco's regime. Armed resistance continued all the way up to 1965 (that's a good read). Upon Franco's death, Richard Nixon stated: "General Franco was a loyal friend and ally of the United States."
The socialist experiment in Spain wasn't allowed to survive for long. It was destroyed in the same way all modern democracies and social movements are destroyed -- by fascist counterrevolution. (As Trotsky said, "Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.") But this was the closest the world has ever gotten to a true socialist society. It gives us a brief glimpse of what the beginnings of a real socialism might look like. To this day, it's still looked back on in awe by modern socialists and anarchists; it's the "we were so close!" moment. It's viewed as a model to be emulated, so that one day, when we're ready, we can rise up and try again.
That model, for the most part, is known as "anarcho-syndicalism" -- basically, the merging of anarchism and socialism. It takes socialism's ideas surrounding community and mutual kindess, and adds anarchism's radical, paranoid distrust of all authority. It puts a lot of faith into the possibility that humanity is inherently good. This philosophy is probably around where Orwell eventually stood.
"In the end I worked out an anarchist theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone."
He writes of socialism in Homage to Catalonia:
I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.
I always have to laugh when he says "planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact," because that's basically the United States.
When he arrived back in England, he began tinkering around with the idea for Animal Farm.
“On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood.”
Orwell struggled to find a place that would publish it during the war. No one would go near anti-Soviet literature, so it was held off until 1945. In his preface for the book, Orwell complained of the British press suppressing his criticism of a World War II ally. Even today, it still holds up as an accurate description of western media.
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals...
...I know that the English intelligentsia have plenty of reason for their timidity and dishonesty, indeed I know by heart the arguments by which they justify themselves. But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The publisher never ran this preface in the book. To this day, it's still not published in most editions.
Animal Farm begins with three pigs -- Major, Snowball, and Napoleon -- plotting a revolution on the farm against Mr. Jones. Major dies, and the two younger pigs assume command. After kicking Mr. Jones off the farm, they adopt seven commandments of Animal-ism, including the all-important, "All animals are equal."
The situation naturally devolves into infighting and power struggles. The novel examines the dangers within revolutions -- how easily they can be highjacked, how the leadership can so quickly turn their backs on the original principles, and become corrupted by indifference, greed, and power.
Animal Farm was a huge success, and Orwell become highly sought after as a writer. He really hit his stride during and after World War II.
In Politics and the English Language, he writes:
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
In Notes on Nationalism:
“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side… .
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.”
In 1949, a year after Gandhi's death, Orwell wrote an essay (Reflections On Gandhi) respecting what he fought for, but criticizing the philosophy of pacifism.
Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.
In Pacifism and the War (1942), Orwell writes:
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.
He continues:
As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.
In Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool:
Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.
In 1949, Orwell released his magnum opus. It was written as he was dying of tuberculosis.
1984 is a masterpiece. It's a terrifying vision of a dystopian police state, locked in perpetual warfare with two other superstates. Winston starts to become a danger to the Party when he begins to think. And remember. He falls in love (forbidden by the Party), and finds the courage to join a revolutionary organization called the Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party.
It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same — everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same — people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.
"The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men." He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: "How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"
Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.
"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."
1984 is my absolute favorite novel ever written. Ultimately, it's about modern man's struggle to stay in possession of his own mind. It's about those who wish to control his mind. It's about man's ability to see, his freedom to say what he sees, his right to react in whatever way he sees fit, and the continuous struggle for those in power to prevent any of those things from ever happening.
A few months after 1984 was released, Orwell received this letter from Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World:
Wrightwood. Cal.
21 October, 1949
Dear Mr. Orwell,
It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual's psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.
Partly because of the prevailing materialism and partly because of prevailing respectability, nineteenth-century philosophers and men of science were not willing to investigate the odder facts of psychology for practical men, such as politicians, soldiers and policemen, to apply in the field of government. Thanks to the voluntary ignorance of our fathers, the advent of the ultimate revolution was delayed for five or six generations. Another lucky accident was Freud's inability to hypnotize successfully and his consequent disparagement of hypnotism. This delayed the general application of hypnotism to psychiatry for at least forty years. But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
Thank you once again for the book.
Yours sincerely,
Aldous Huxley
In January 1950, only seven months after the book's publication, an artery burst in Orwell's lungs, killing him.
If you don't believe there are comparisons to be made from 1984 to modern society, then you need to be paying more attention. The book is not an instruction manual, you're not going to see armed troops goose-stepping through your front yard. That's been done already, it's too obvious. People would catch on pretty damn quick. No, it's the little things we need to be afraid of -- our state of foreverwar against 60% of the world's nations; manipulation of media by the state; government infiltration of political groups, and Gestapo-style assassinations of political leaders; the assassination of citizens without due process; indefinite detention without due process; the construction of spy centers that will be able to hold yottabytes of data legally mined from citizens. One doesn't even have to turn to Afghanistan to see our perpetual war. It's been going on since the end of World War II. The Cold War gave us a permanent war economy, as does the so-called War on Terror. Right now, over half of the entire U.S. budget is dedicated to the military. It surpasses both World War II and Cold War levels. It is bigger than the next 26 countries combined. Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is not meant to be won. It's meant to be sustained.
The manipulation of language, doublehthink -- "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them..." -- is very real. One simply has to talk to a Republican voter to notice this. But Democrats are becoming victims as well. A lot of Obama-supporters I've talked to are at least aware of their president's war crimes. But they blow it off as "he's not perfect," or "at least he isn't a Rethuglican." There aren't any contradictions there. But more and more, I'm seeing Democrats come out in support of Obama's drone war. They support his assassinations of American citizens. They support the bombing of Libya, or the continuation of the foreverwar in the Middle East. I don't know how these people can look at themselves in the mirror and not want to smash what they see. They're Bush supporters who opposed Bush.
Today, simply saying the name "Orwell" is a powerful act. It's a name that has become an entire definition in itself: Orwellian. There are many other words and phrases he contributed to the English language: "Newspeak"; "doublethink"; "thoughtcrime"; "four legs good, two legs bad"; "all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others"; "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past"; "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."
The man was so dangerous that Animal Farm and 1984 were both banned in the Eastern Bloc until the fall of the Berlin Wall. 1984 was nearly banned in the UK and US in the early 1960s. If you've never read one or both of them, you can pick them up in a single volume on Amazon for $15. Christopher Hitchens wrote in his introduction:
I have dwelt somewhat on the circumstances in which these works were written and published, because they illustrate another point. It took courage, physical and moral, to write these books and to fight for their right to be read. Orwell's life was a struggle in which the distance between what he said and what he meant was as near to nil as made no difference. He was a participant as well as a witness. He suffered a good deal in making the discovery, but he has assisted us in realising that, while the drive to power and corruption and cruelty is certainly latent in human beings, the instinct for liberty is innate as well. This battle takes place within ourselves as well as in the world we inhabit, and these books are weapons of self-respect as well as of self-defense.
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