Watching the news this week I couldn’t help but think of a famous quote by Author George Orwell.
A good friend of mine, Bill Wright, who lives in Florida sent me that quote and suggested I do a show on George Orwell, so here goes.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
Matthew Feeney, the director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Emerging Technologies wrote a great article on Orwell.
In October 1947, Eric Blair—known today by his pen name George Orwell—wrote a letter to the co‐owner of the Secker & Warburg publishing house. In that letter, Orwell noted that he was in the “last lap” of the rough draft of a novel, describing it as “a most dreadful mess.”
He completed it the following year, having transformed his “most dreadful mess” into “1984,” one of the 20th century’s most important novels.
Orwell was a master of the English language and his legacy lives on through some of the words he created. Even those who haven’t read “1984” know some of its “newspeak.”
“1984” provides English speakers with a vocabulary to discuss surveillance, police states and authoritarianism, which includes terms such as “Big Brother,” “thought police,” “unperson” and “doublethink,” to name a few.
The authoritarian government of Orwell’s Oceania doesn’t merely punish dissent severely—it seeks to make even thinking about dissent impossible.
When Inner Party member O’Brien tortures “1984’s” protagonist, Winston Smith, he holds up his hand with four fingers extended and asks Smith how many fingers he sees. When Smith replies, “Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!” O’Brien inflicts excruciating pain on him.
After Smith finally claims to see five fingers, O’Brien emphasizes that saying “five” is not enough. “ No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four.”
Orwell’s own name inspired an adjective, “Orwellian,” which is widely used in modern political rhetoric.
It’s usually our enemies who are acting Orwellian, and it’s a testament to Orwell’s talents that everyone seems to think “1984” is about their political opponents.
The political left sees plenty of Orwellian tendencies in the White House and the criminal justice system.
The political right bemoans “thought police” on college campuses and social media companies turning users into “unpersons.”
But politicians can lie without being Orwellian, and a private company closing a social media account is nothing like a state murdering someone and eliminating them from history.
Likewise, perceived academic conformity might be potentially stifling, but it’s hardly comparable to a conformity enforced by a police state that eliminates entire words from society.
Yet when U.S. government officials use terms such as “enhanced interrogation,” “alternative facts,” “collateral damage,” or “extremists,” they understand that what they’re describing is actually torture, lies, innocent civilian deaths, and political dissidents.
They prefer it if others, especially the press, used and believed in Orwellian language that dehumanizes enemies of the government and makes their horrific violence sound tolerable or even justified.
We see far more nefarious and barbaric distortions of language abroad. According to reports by activists and researchers, the Chinese state has put about 1 million people, including many Muslim ethnic groups in “re‐education” camps.
Reports reveal that the camps are hardly schools. They’re brutal indoctrination sites, with inmates forced to recite Communist Party propaganda and renounce Islam.
North Korea, the country that comes closest to embodying “1984,” has hampered its citizens’ abilities to think for themselves with a disheartening measure of success.
It’s hardly surprising that when Park read Orwell’s classic novel “ Animal Farm,” she felt as if Orwell knew where she was from.
Orwell was not a prophet, but he identified a necessary feature of any successful authoritarian government. To control you effectively, it can’t merely threaten death, imprisonment or torture. It’s not enough for it to ban books and religions.
As long as the state doesn’t dominate your consciousness, it’s under constant risk of overthrow.
We shouldn’t fear the U.S. turning into Orwell’s dystopian nightmare just yet.
But at a time when political dishonesty is rampant, we should remember “1984’s” most important lesson: The state can occupy your mind.
Another good article on this topic was written by:
Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and Director of the Orwell Foundation.
1984, with its disorientating first sentence, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”, defines the peculiar characteristics of modern tyranny.
Winston Smith, the protagonist, works as a censor in the Ministry of Truth in a constant updating of history to suit present circumstances and shifting alliances.
He and his fellow workers are controlled as a mass collective by the all-seeing and all-knowing presence of Big Brother. In 1984 television screens watch you, and everyone spies on everyone else.
Today it is social media that collects every gesture, purchase, comment we make online, and feeds an all knowing presence in our lives that can predict our every preference.
Modeled on consumer choices, where the user is the commodity that is being marketed, the harvesting of those preferences for political campaigns is now distorting democracy.
Orwell understood that oppressive regimes always need enemies. In 1984 he showed how these can be created arbitrarily by whipping up popular feeling through propaganda.
But in his description of the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ he also foresaw the way in which online mobs work.
Obliged to watch the violent film, (as everyone is), Winston Smith observes “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in…A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current”.
Now political, religious and commercial organizations all trade in whipping up feelings. Orwell uncannily identified the willing collusion in hate that such movements can elicit: and of course Winston observes it in himself. So, by implication might we, in ourselves.
Then there is Orwell’s iconic dictator Big Brother: absurd and horrifying in equal measure.
Orwell’s writing is rooted in the struggles between the giant ‘-isms’ that disfigured the 20th Century. He fought against Fascism as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War (believing pacifism was a luxury paid for by other people) but realized the hollow promise of Communism, when the anti-Stalinist group he was fighting for was hunted down by the pro-Stalin faction.
He witnessed first-hand the self-deception of true believers. Today there is another set of ‘-isms’, such as nationalism and populism who operate through the mobilization of that most dangerous of feelings, resentment.
And everywhere you look in the contemporary world, ‘strong’ men are in positions of power. They share the need to crush opposition, a fanatical terror of dissent and self-promotion. Big Brothers are no longer a joke but strut the world.
But the greatest horror in Orwell’s dystopia is the systematic stripping of meaning out of language. The regime aims to eradicate words and the ideas and feelings they embody. Its real enemy is reality.
Tyrannies attempt to make understanding the real world impossible: seeking to replace it with phantoms and lies. Winston Smith’s first audacious act of dissent had been to hide from the all-seeing camera and write a diary – to compose his own account of himself and his inner world.
He knows that the acts of writing and describing mark him out for the death penalty if he is discovered. When he is finally broken by torture he agrees that “two plus two equals five.” He had discovered that they could indeed “get inside you”, and “Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out”.
The terror in 1984 is the annihilation of the self and the destruction of the capacity to recognize the real world.
So exactly who was George Orwell?
Orwell was a British journalist and author, who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’.
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25th, 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant.
He was educated in England and, after he left Eton, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in 1927 and decided to become a writer.
In 1928, he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described his experiences in his first book, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, published in 1933.
He took the name George Orwell, shortly before its publication. This was followed by his first novel, ‘Burmese Days’, in 1934.
An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s he had begun to consider himself a socialist.
Late in 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist.
Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. By now he was a prolific journalist, writing articles, reviews and books.
In 1945, Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ was published. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell’s name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life.
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases – such as ‘Big Brother is watching you’.
By now Orwell’s health was deteriorating and he died of tuberculosis on 21 January 21st, 1950.
In 1946 Observer editor David Astor had lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century.
Orwell knew he was dying and raced to finish his book.
Probably the definitive novel of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature.
“Orwellian” is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.
The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting story that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell’s book. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war.
The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, “The Last Man in Europe”, had been incubating in Orwell’s mind since the Spanish civil war.
His novel, started to come together during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard.
Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was “convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world” at Tehran.
Orwell had worked for David Astor’s Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent.
The editor professed great admiration for Orwell’s “absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency”, and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell’s creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm.
As the war drew to a close, the interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated “fairy tale”.
There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell’s flat was wrecked by a German buzz bomb.
The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became key to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow.
In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anesthesia during a routine operation.
Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his London flat, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife’s premature death.
Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura.
In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was “almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage”.
It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century.
Ironically, part of Orwell’s difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. “Everyone keeps coming at me,” he complained to Koestler, “wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc – you don’t know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again.”
On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island came with its own price.
Years before, in the essay “Why I Write”, he had described the struggle to complete a book: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand.
Trust me, having written a book of my own, I know where he is coming from.
From the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950, his health declining steadily, and now diagnosed with TB, Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on June 8th, 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognized as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice.
After the book was published, Orwell’s health continued to decline.
He lingered on into the new year of 1950 and in the early hours of January 21st, he suffered a massive hemorrhage in the hospital and died alone.
If you haven’t done so, I encourage my listeners to read 1984.
Are we currently creating the nightmarish world that Orwell created in his book? I leave you with this passage from 1984:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”