1984. By George Orwell

1984

George Orwell

Signet Classic. First published 1949.

I finally got around to reading this famous book, with its continuing contributions to political discourse and the language of such discourse - 'Big Brother is watching you!' A novelized description of a dystopia, it is narrates a sort of love story set in an exaggerated version of the then-contemporary state of Stalinist Russia, and many countries behind the 'iron curtain'. One such state also formed the geography of the book 'Rates of Exchange' which I described earlier in this blog. Of the countries today, North Korea, presumably, and Myanmar when I visited it in 2005 (and until recently) probably come closest to the grey socialist world described in this book. The country in the book is Britain, or rather Oceania, a kind of amalgamation of what is termed the 'free world' in contemporary western media. The state is ruled by a mysterious and anonymous oligarchy, which disciplines the middle class to a frightening extreme, and uses it to rule over the 'proles', a large underclass than lives in a firmly controlled state of wretched poverty. The aim of the discipline is to control the very thoughts of the middle class so that it really believes as absolutely true all the contradictions it is fed. The very language is mutated (Newspeak) so that the political and social contradictions cannot be recognized or described as such. Thus a hero one day could in an an instant be classified as an enemy, and the 'people' would not only accept that, but see no contradiction at all. The way this state of mind is achieved is by indoctrination of the young and torture of the older population, many among whom would remember the difference between the 'truth' yesterday and the 'truth' the next day. To me, this particular mechanism appears inefficient and wasteful. A far better way of achieving such thought control is practiced in many parts of the so-called 'free world' today. Consider, for example, Israel. History is being rewritten there on a daily basis, and, on the back of the enormous military power of USA and the rest of victors of World War II, the Palestinians, who are actually the victims of a systematic, six-decade long effort to deny them basic human rights, are being cast as the villains of global politics. Or consider the following very mild critique of capitalism. (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/work-good-or-bad/)

"...who decides what is of real value? The capitalist system’s own answer is consumers, free to buy whatever they want in an open market. I call this capitalism’s own answer because it is the one that keeps the system operating autonomously, a law unto itself. It especially appeals to owners, managers and others with a vested interest in the system. But the answer is disingenuous. From our infancy the market itself has worked to make us consumers, primed to buy whatever it is selling regardless of its relevance to human flourishing."

I suppose this very reasonable analysis would raise howls of protest from capitalists and their 'running dogs'. Or consider many of essays by Noam Chomsky on this very issue. Chomsky has been largely neutralized by the simple process of designating him an 'extreme leftist'. In an afterword to the book, written in 1961, Erich Fromm presents a much more detailed argument why '1984' has current (even in the sixties!) application not just to Soviet Russia, but perhaps even more so to America and Western Europe, except that here the brain-washing is not carried out by torture, but something more pleasant and much more insidious - Reader's Digest, Hollywood, Walt Disney, et al.

Orwell himself is described as a socialist, so presumably he was attacking totalitarianism, as represented by Stalinism (and perhaps the then-recent memory of Hitler's Germany) rather than the principles of socialism, which he appears to support. Funnily enough, I found the atmosphere described in Ayn Rand's 'Fountainhead' and, especially, 'Atlas Shrugged' very similar to the one described in '1984'. Of course Rand pretends to describe a economic-political system far different from Stalinist Russia. I suppose, since the world is round, if you go far enough to the right, you actually land up on the left, and vice versa.