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April 25 - May 1, 2020
It’s a sad commentary on our age that we find Dystopias a lot easier to believe in than Utopias: Utopias we can only imagine, Dystopias we’ve already had. —Margaret Atwood
December 1948. A man sits at a typewriter, in bed, on a remote island, fighting to complete the book that means more to him than any other. He is terribly ill. The book will be finished and, a year or so later, so will the man. January 2017. Another man stands before a crowd, which is not as large as he would like, in Washington, DC, taking the oath of office as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. His press secretary later says that it was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.” Asked to justify such a
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“Orwell was successful because he wrote exactly the right books at exactly the right time,” wrote the philosopher Richard Rorty.
We value him despite his flaws because he was right about the defining questions of fascism, communism, imperialism and racism at a time when so many people who should have known better didn’t.
To quote Christopher Hitchens, one of Orwell’s most eloquent disciples: “It matters not what you think, but how you think.”
When the hosts of InfoWars, the website notorious for disseminating outrageous conspiracy theories, routinely cite Orwell, you know that doublethink is real.
Orwell wrote about fascism in 1936: “If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon.” Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book designed to wake you up.
Socialism in Britain, he wrote, “smells of crankishness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.”
“The Spanish Civil War is one of the comparatively few cases when the most widely accepted version of events has been written more persuasively by the losers of the conflict than by the winners,” wrote the historian Antony Beevor.
During the long weeks of stalemate, however, his eccentric side emerged. This is a man who refused to shoot a retreating fascist because the man was struggling to hold up his trousers after a toilet visit and was therefore “visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him,” yet was so alarmed by a rat that he blasted it with his rifle, thus alerting the enemy and triggering a fierce firefight which ended up destroying the militia’s cookhouse and two of their buses.
Orwell spotted the fat Russian known only as “Charlie Chan.” This alleged agent for the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, told anyone who would listen that the violence was an anarchist putsch designed to undermine the Republic and aid Franco. “It was the first time I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies,” Orwell wrote, “unless one counts journalists.”
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”
Silone, he wrote approvingly, “is one of those men who are denounced as Communists by Fascists and as Fascists by Communists, a band of men which is still small but steadily growing.”
Why did Orwell criticise communism so much more energetically than fascism? Because he had seen it up close, and because its appeal was more treacherous. Both ideologies reached the same totalitarian destination but communism began with nobler aims and therefore required more lies to sustain it.
The ex-communists had broken out of the syllogism that bound so much of the left to Stalin: I believe in socialism; the USSR is the only socialist state; therefore I believe in the USSR. Orwell’s rebuttal was twofold: firstly, no ends, however utopian, can be justified by such grotesque means; secondly, Stalin’s Russia was not truly socialist because it denied liberty and justice.
“I was guilty of the most heinous offence: puncturing noble delusions,”
Even though the word dystopia (literally “the not-good place”) was used by John Stuart Mill in 1868, it lay dormant for close to a century, eclipsed by Jeremy Bentham’s cacotopia (“the bad place”) or by anti-utopia, until finally catching on in the 1960s. Orwell’s novel has become synonymous with a word he never used.
To Bellamy, like Orwell fifty years later, socialism was a tremendous product with terrible salesmen.
One person’s utopia was, of course, another’s anti-utopia. As Clement Attlee wrote, “We should most of us be very unhappy in each other’s paradises.”
In Addison Peale Russell’s Sub-Coelum: A Sky-Built Human World, the “unfit” are sterilised while “unchaste” women are jailed for such crimes as drinking, whistling and bad grammar.
Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are awkward literary twins. Most readers discover them around the same age, in a kind of two-for-one deal on classic dystopias, and therefore see them as rival prophecies, as if both authors were, at the same point in time, given the same brief to predict the future, and now we have to decide which was the more accurate. Pleasure or punishment? Sex or death? A hit of soma or a boot in the face? Who got it right?
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, chocolate is a symbolic commodity: when Julia procures some for Winston, it’s an act of love; when Winston steals some from his sister, it’s a dire betrayal.
If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.”
Zamyatin questioned the revolution. In one daring passage, I-330 explains why another revolution is always possible by asking D-530, as a mathematician, to tell her the final number. “But, I-330—that is ridiculous. The number of numbers is infinite; which final one do you want?” “Well, which final revolution do you want then? There isn’t a final one. Revolutions are infinite.”
The new literary doctrine, “Soviet realism,” was essentially a form of utopian fiction. Its purpose, observed the American journalist Louis Fischer, was “to treat the present as though it did not exist and the future as if it had already arrived.”
The Soviet official Gyorgy Pyatakov, executed in 1937, said that the true Bolshevik “would be ready to believe that black was white, and white was black, if the Party required it . . . there was no particle left inside him which was not at one with the Party, did not belong to it.”
Nationalism, he explained in “Notes on Nationalism,” written while he was in Europe, “is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakably certain of being right.”
Orwell listed dozens of examples of people believing emotionally satisfying lies, dismissing inexpedient truths, applying outrageous double standards, and rewriting events. These are the psychological ingredients for doublethink, or “reality control,” defined in Nineteen Eighty-Four as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it
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In a 1944 column about pamphlets, Orwell noticed that across the political spectrum, “Nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a ‘case’ with complete disregard for fairness and accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them . . . To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable.”
Orwell was less interested in the personalities of Hitler and Stalin, about whom he wrote surprisingly little, than in the reasons why so many ordinary people followed them. One was the decay of consensus reality. He described how newspaper readers, faced with genuine confusion and outright dishonesty, surrendered the idea that the truth was attainable at all: “The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.”
For Orwell, the story’s point of no return comes when the other animals allow the pigs to monopolise the milk and apples, an episode which represents the crushing of the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, the last stand of democratic socialism in Russia. “If people think I am defending the status quo,” he told Macdonald, “that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.” Animal Farm would not be half as sad without the knowledge that things could have been different.
The anecdote gives the impression that Orwell was the doomiest man in London, but he held no monopoly on pessimism. In his introduction to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley predicted a worldwide epidemic of totalitarianism, lulling populations into servitude with drugs, sexual promiscuity and genetic engineering. He decided that his novel’s six-hundred-year countdown to dystopia had been far too rosy: “To-day it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. That is, if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval.” That same
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If you suppress the rights of your political enemies, he thought, then you can be sure that one day they will suppress yours.
As he told Woodcock: “no one should be persecuted for expressing his opinions, however anti-social, & no political organisation suppressed, unless it can be shown that there is a substantial threat to the stability of the state.”
“Fairly much a leftist, George Orwell is a defender of freedom,” wrote Allene Talmey, “even though most of the time he violently disagrees with the people beside whom he is fighting.” Not a bad capsule description.
Orwell resisted any attempt to have the book “mucked about.” He flatly refused to let the US Book-of-the-Month-Club publish an edition minus the appendix and Goldstein’s book, even at the risk of losing, Warburg estimated, around £40,000 in sales. Anyone who thought these essayistic sections were disposable because they didn’t advance the story didn’t grasp Orwell’s purpose at all. Even before Nineteen Eighty-Four was out, people seemed determined to misunderstand it.
While Orwell lay in bed, the post-war order took shape. In April, a dozen Western nations formed NATO. In August, Russia successfully detonated its first atom bomb in the Kazakh steppe. In October, Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China. Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia.
Philosophically, Julia represents a third way to live under Ingsoc. O’Brien claims there is no such thing as objective truth; Winston insists there is; Julia maintains that it doesn’t matter.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was published by Secker & Warburg on June 8, 1949. In Blackpool, the Labour Party held its annual conference. In Paris, foreign ministers were deadlocked over the future of Germany. In Washington, President Truman reaffirmed US support for South Korea. That morning’s edition of the London Times carried a front-page report of a press conference by General Jan Smuts, the former prime minister of South Africa and a prominent supporter of the United Nations: “Mankind was living in a spiritual twilight, and none knew whether dawn or dusk would follow.”
Orwell’s life overlapped with the public life of his final novel by just 227 days.
When Orwell wrote that “Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives,” he was unwittingly foreseeing his own fate.
Accustomed to being outcasts—Koestler called them “that bunch of homeless Leftists . . . whom the Stalinites call Trotskyites, the Trotskyites call Imperialists, and the Imperialists call bloody Reds”—the members of the Noncommunist Left were now in demand and swimming in government money.
The historian Ted Morgan defined McCarthyism as “the use of false information in the irrational pursuit of a fictitious enemy.”
Pinochet’s takeover, and the subsequent “shock treatment” recommended by economist Milton Friedman, had a sinister allure—Chile’s Big Brother spoke of “scrubbing our minds clean.” Visiting the country in May for The Daily Telegraph, Peregrine Worsthorne advised readers to be “more openminded,” because despite the murders, tortures and disappearances, Pinochet’s junta wasn’t as bad as all that. “All right, a military dictatorship is ugly and repressive,” he wrote, clearing his throat. “But if a minority British Socialist Government ever sought, by cunning, duplicity or corruption, terror and
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Isaac Asimov insisted that Orwell would be “proved wrong” about computers and space travel, neither of which happen to feature in the book. An ad for Olivetti Computers had a similarly nonsensical take: “According to Orwell, in 1984 man and computer would have become enemies. But his pessimistic outlook was wrong.” In fact, Orwell wasn’t even trying to foresee technological progress in functioning democracies. But you’d need to have read the book to know that.
One newspaper asked Orwell’s son, Richard Blair (now thirty-nine, like Winston Smith), what his father might have made of Orwellmania. “I believe,” he said, “that he would have been very dismayed by the way that people have interpreted Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
Orwell didn’t say much about Nineteen Eighty-Four, but what he did say, very firmly, was that it was not a prophecy. A satire, a parody and a warning, yes, but not that. As he spelled out in his 1949 statement to Francis A. Henson, “I do not believe that the kind of society which I described necessarily will arrive, but I believe . . . that something resembling it could arrive.” Clearly, it had not.
By definition, a country in which you are free to read Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the country described in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Handmaid’s Tale sold over one million copies in its first two years. A film, based on a screenplay by Harold Pinter, followed in 1990. Atwood has since regularly been asked if the book was a prediction. Her answer could apply equally to Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Let’s say it’s an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen.”
The Sun’s “20 Things You Never Knew About George Orwell” contrived not to mention the word socialism once.
