He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two. For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
— George Orwell, 1984.
GEORGE ORWELL’S world-famous book 1984 has probably been quoted more often in the last two years than ever before — and this bleak examination of life in a Communist-style, global dictatorship as experienced by one man is justifiably considered prophetic.
Are we living in the incipient stages of a real life version of Orwell’s 1984?
Terms such as “alone together, “asymptomatic transmission,” “anti-vaxxer,” “breakthrough cases,” “stop the spread,” and “stay safe” seem to have come right out of a medical version of Orwell’s Newspeak, the incessant propaganda that surrounded the inhabitants of the land of Oceania. The strategy of his fictitious dictatorship — to present oppression and dehumanization as good and necessary — is all too real to us today.
Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, referred to “Crimestop.” This occurs when the mind stops just before it commits a thoughtcrime, before even entertaining the idea that something the government has said is untrue. Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, and his mistress, Julia, commit Crimestop when they privately question the bomb attacks occurring in London. Julia is convinced they are false flags. But this is a thoughtcrime most people banish before it is even allowed to enter the mind’s front door.
Here is my question:
If Orwell’s book, first published in 1949 by Secker and Warburg, is such an accurate depiction of a treacherous world Superstate and its terrifying “boot on the human face,” why has it been promoted so heavily for many years? “Time included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, and it was placed on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list, reaching number 13 on the editors’ list and number 6 on the readers’ list. In 2003, it was listed at number eight on The Big Read survey by the BBC.” [Wikipedia] The book is on many high school and college reading lists. Almost every student who graduates from college has read it at some point. Movies have been made of it and they have by now been seen by many millions of people. The book has been widely available in Communist China since the 1970s. Blair’s birthplace is a national monument in England. The British Foreign Office and the CIA both promoted Orwell’s work, ostensibly because it was anti-Communist.
So has this heavy promotion helped many people to know and resist Orwellian totalitarianism?
I propose that Orwell’s book is promoted for other reasons.
Regardless of the author’s intentions and its undeniable brilliance as a literary work, the book is useful for propaganda purposes. Yes, it is subtly conducive to the mental enslavement Orwell so rightly opposed.
Orwell’s book is a work of the imagination, not a prophecy, a prediction or a blueprint. Nevertheless, it has so often been interpreted as these things. It is reasonable then to look at the areas in which the author did not foresee the future.
[To be continued tomorrow….]
