On June 8, 1949 George Orwell’s classic
dystopian novel of totalitarianism
triumphant Nineteen
Eighty-—usually called simply 1984— published in London.
Eric Arthur Blair a/k/a Orwell was at the time a 45 year old English writer who had been born to a civil servant in India. After
a largely unhappy public school
education back home—a private, residential academy to Americans—he returned to the orient as a policeman in Burma.
He was an outsider among his British colleagues there, preferring to
explore the country, learn the language and culture. He was soon sympathetic to the colonial people and alienated
from his own Empire and career.
In the mid 1920’s Blare left the
service and moved to Paris, the
scene of a well-known expatriate community
of writers and artists. Even there, he spent
more time with the French working class than with the self-exiled intellectuals. After
returning to England, he based himself mostly
at his parent’s comfortable suburban
home while making frequent forays
into the poverty stricken London East
End. He tried to live the life of the poor at intervals, for instance as a Kentish
hops picker.
Blare began to write about his experiences while teaching
school. His first book Down and Out in Paris and London
an account of his life as a self-described
tramp was published in 1933 under the nom de plume Orwell
to avoid embarrassment to his
family.
He published a novel and then a memoir of his Burma years in America but was only slowly establishing
himself as a writer. He knocked around London working part time in a bookstore, rooming with old friends, and then taking a walking tour of the industrial
north, then in the depths of the Depression. He
attended meetings of both Oswald
Mosley’s Black Shirt fascists who deeply offended him
and of the Communists whose cause
appealed to him even as
their authoritarian methods left him
queasy. The result of that
trip was The Road to Wigan Pier, published by the Left Book
Club in 1937. It contained a frank
avowal and defense of Socialism while describing his journey from a middle class upbringing to it.
But he was not uncritical of the left and raised questions
about barriers to a truly egalitarian
society. His publisher was so afraid that those critiques would not be met well by the left, that he inserted his own apologetic forward
in the printed edition.
By the time the book came out Orwell
had traveled to Spain to fight
fascism. Arriving in Catalonia he enlisted in the militia of
the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista—POUM, a Trotskyist
Communist Party that was then in coalition with the anarcho-syndicalist
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Unified
Socialist Party of Catalonia, a wing of the Spanish Communist
Party, which was backed by Soviet Union. All were fighting Federico
Franco’s Falange forces under a supposedly
united Republican banner.
Catalonia and its capital Barcelona were the most secure ground of the
Republic. The coalition, largely led by the CNT was firmly in control, well-armed,
and the economy, including a vigorous industrial sector and agriculture had been re-organized in workers and
peasants co-operatives. The province was able to send
troops to other fronts and
provide arms and food to the cause. It was the heart of the Republic,
operating along non-authoritarian
communal lines.
Orwell’s experiences in Spain would forever change the idealistic young man.
In his first winter there, he was posted
to a quiet sector and experienced mostly discomfort and boredom. He yearned to get into the
fight. Returning to Barcelona he decided to ask for a transfer to
the International Brigade so that he could get to the front around Madrid. But in May
of 1937 street fighting broke out in
the city as the Communists attacked POUM, who it labeled as “objectively
fascist” for supporting
revolutionary reform of society even as the war was
pursued. In this they were allied
with the CNT. But on other issues they clashed with the Anarchists. Orwell laid low during the fighting, aghast at the breach of solidarity as the war
against fascism still raged at the front.
He decided to return to the with the
Aragon front with the POUM militia rather than wait for the call from
the Communists, who he now deeply
mistrusted. There he was wounded
in the throat by sniper fire. After nearly bleeding to death,
he was evacuated back to Barcelona
where his wife managed to join him from England.
There the situation had deteriorated even further. The Communists had gotten the upper hand and had outlawed POUM. They were rousting and imprisoning members, especially international volunteers like Orwell. He had to go into hiding.
In July Orwell and his wife managed
to escape across the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean village of Banyuls sur Mer, France and
from there to England. He escaped just
in time. On July 15 he was charged
in abstencia by the Communist Tribunal for Espionage &
High Treason along with POUM leaders with “rabid Trotskyism.” His trial was held in October. Had
he been in attendance he would have been found
guilty and executed. Orwell was recovering in French Morocco at
the time and noted that the trials were “only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist
trials and from the start every
kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities, has been circulated
in the Communist press.”
Orwell’s health was nearly broken by his experience, as he was
nursed back to health he processed his experience in writing.
He had now concluded that authoritarianism of the left and right were mirrors of each other and equally
evil.
Homage to Catalonia was published in 1939 and was immediately attacked by the British Communist press and much of the
left that was still sympathetic to them. The opinion at home was
the Communists were the heroes of the Spanish Civil War and that POUM
and the CNT had sabotaged the war effort by demanding immediate
revolutionary reform instead of concentrating on the war effort. In fact,
as Orwell recognized the Communists had concluded
that it was better to lose the war in Spain than allow a successful alternative
revolutionary system to arise. The book sold poorly. It is now considered a classic by the libertarian left.
With Britain’s entry into World War II, Orwell struggled to join the effort. He was rejected by the military and for most active work because he had contracted tuberculosis in Spain. It took until 1942 to get a post with the BCC in charge of cultural programing to be aired in India to counter Japanese propaganda there. He was not comfortable as a bureaucrat and left the service after two years to concentrate on writing his parable of fascism, Animal Farm.
Orlwell's barn yard fable of fascism was his fist critical and popular success.
Animal Farm was Orwell’s first commercial success and sales helped make him financially secure for the first time since his youth. But his health continued to deteriorate. He worked desperately on the manuscript for Nineteen Eighty-four.
In this future world Britain was just part
of one of three warring totalitarian regimes that between them control the world. England is now Airstrip One of Oceania which
is at war with Eurasia and Eastasia. Oceania is
supposedly led by Big Brother, the hero of the revolution
which followed an earlier worldwide war whose image is
everywhere along with the admonition
that “Big Brother is Watching.”
But Big Brother may not even exist—he may just be a figurehead. The official
ideology of Oceania is EnglishSocialism or IngSoc in the official language New Speak. But
the system is socialism in no recognizable way. Instead, it
is a total surrender of the individual to the state enforced by constant surveillance.
Protagonist—hero is too strong a word—Winston Smith is
a minor functionary in the Ministry
of Truth whose growing doubts
about the system make him yearn for rebellion. As Animal Farm was about fascism, Nineteen
Eighty-four was clearly an extrapolation of Stalinism. The book was a success. In some ways it stoked the Anti-Communism that
was sweeping the West, particularly America.
But the real enemy was
totalitarianism of any sort. In America anti-Communism was veering dangerously close to totalitarianism itself.
Enforced conformity and the unchecked power of the security establishment were
the hallmarks of post-war America.
Orwell, his health finally collapsing entirely, only tasted the beginning of the
influence his novel would have. He died on January 21, 1950 in
London.
73 years after the fact, the technology of the surveillance state
described by Orwell has become a
reality. A new hobgoblin—terrorism—is now the excuse to unleash that technology on the citizenry. Surveillance
cameras are everywhere, the cell phones in everyone’s pockets become personal tracking devices, the National Security Agency seems
to have the power and the capability to monitor
all Americans’ phone usage, e-mail, and
computer web surfing habits.
Now in the
era of alternative facts and Trumpian double talk, New Speak is fast becoming reality as well.
As a popular Facebook meme has it, “1984 was meant to
be a warning, not a blueprint.”
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