AT the 23rd meeting of the New Right in London on September 26, 2009, Jonathan Bowden gave a speech on George Orwell’s novel 1984. He makes many interesting observations, but his most important one is that Orwell’s book depicts totalitarian rule by intellectuals.

An excerpt:

Another interesting insight is the relationship that people have with their children. Orwell prefigures the world of bourgeois chaos where parents are frightened to discipline their own children, and which we increasingly see in liberal humanist societies. The parents are preyed upon by the young. One of the first, and great, scenes is with the Parsons family who live just up the corridor in the block, cause the Parsons boy is a terror. He accuses everyone of being, “You’re a thought criminal!” he says, “You’re a nasty little vanguard against the Proletariat elite!” He screams that at everyone he meets. And he’s got a pop-gun, he says “You’re gonna burn, you’re gonna burn, you’re going to the camps! You’re going down [unintelligible]”

And his mother’s terrified of him because to discipline him is to engage in the possibility of a counter-revolutionary act. So he knows that he’s got his parents where he wants them by this endless sort of Young Pioneers brigading sort of behavior. And it’s a way of corralling the older generation into conformity. Orwell’s instinct for particularly Left totalitarian forms of power is very acute here considering that, except for a small period in Spain, he’d never really been subjected to them.

The other thing which is very interesting, and which Orwell knew extraordinarily well partly because of his time at the BBC, was the penchant intellectuals have for propaganda. Intellectuals adore the idea that they are independent spirits who are highly individualistic and always love gainsaying what anyone else has said to them. In actual fact, Orwell believed that most intellectuals are craven, and deeply conformist, and extraordinarily group oriented.

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