This is a totalitarian state under a benevolent leader in which citizens are detained and arrested on the merest suspicion of espionage. But the benevolent leader is seen only on television; he never appears in public. Personal surveillance is unceasing and relentless: TV cameras that receive and transmit simultaneously are everywhere. The political-correctness police listen in on every conversation to match speakers to the profile of a potential saboteur. Ordinary citizens live in constant fear of arrest and imprisonment for terrorist activities.
No, this is not the implementation of the antiterrorist USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, which Congress just passed in the throes of the anthrax attacks without even reading it (see "Police State" Dec. 3), and whose very name evokes the memory of the late George Orwell's sci-fi masterpiece, 1984. It is the scenario of Orwell's book itself, written in 1948 and published in 1949. It is ironic that the character he calls Big Brother was not meant as a symbol for a U.S. administration but likely for the future of Britain under progressive socialism. What gives pause is that the book clearly satirizes the consequences of Fabian socialism exactly 100 years after its birth in the salons of London.
If Orwell's totalitarian state seems to be arriving about 20 years late, it is not because he mistargeted the book by naming it 1984. A careful review of the literary evidence reveals that he was aiming at the period immediately following the year 2000 but wanted to memorialize the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Fabian Society.
With Orwell's stark vision of a totalitarian society having for more than half a century sent shivers down the collective spine of the prestigious Western intelligentsia, one might assume in the roil of current events that scholars worldwide would be combing the pages of 1984 for triggering incidents of a kind that might lead to the predicted Orwellian world. Yet literary and social critics long have avoided coming to grips with the implications of Orwell's profound insight that socialism, despite its claim to benevolence, would deliver Orwell's 1984 by A.D. 2000.
The major facts about Orwell and the origins of 1984 lay as enshrouded in mystery as when his London publisher, Secker and Warburg, first brought out the book in 1949. In the beginning, he is supposed to have been a committed socialist, a close observer of the founders of the socialist Fabian Society, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of the famous socialist futurist H.G. Wells. Taking as a theme the strategy of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Cunctator, who famously delayed battle with the Carthaginians while exhausting them with endless harassments, the Fabians argued that the grand aim of socialism could be achieved bit by bit, through moderate increments, making small changes in society so as not to alarm the defenders of individual responsibility.
The Fabian Society was founded in 1884, according to its Website, and continues to play a prominent role through the Socialist International in developing the policies of the Labour Party in Britain, of which Orwell once was an active member, and of allied Clintonian liberals in the United States.
But when Orwell wrote 1984, it was more than a show of dislike for the Fabian socialists; it was humorous, biting, Swiftian satire against the socialist and liberal intellectuals. The leftist elites, then as now, praised the book for the wrong reasons. They applauded Orwell's resistance to the loss of civil liberties but refused, and continue to refuse, to see the book as a mirror held up to the totalitarian face of the left-wing intelligentsia. They tiptoe away from such questions as: Why choose the year 1984 as the title? Is it really just a science-fiction fantasy or is it political satire; and, if so, against whom is it directed? Finally, what are the likely sources of Orwell's dystopia?
The critics try to explain away the hot spots. The title, 1984, is said to be simply the reversal of the final two digits in 1948, the year he was writing the book. Some critics say it is not even a serious book but just derivative science fiction on par with Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a book Orwell had read in translation and reviewed for literary journals.
Indeed, even the latest of Orwell's authorized biographers get it wrong. Orwell led a much fuller, richer life than is acknowledged in, say, Peter Davison's 1996 biography, George Orwell: A Literary Life, or in Peter Huber's 1993 book, Orwell's Revenge. They see in 1984 both melodrama and a touch of satire. The satire, they say, is aimed against the Soviet Union (a safe target, now, even for socialists). They assert that Josef Stalin is Big Brother and that Stalin's Five-Year Plans buttressed by concocted statistics are other satirical targets of the book.
The esteemed professors writing the major interpretive biographies of Orwell identify the character Emmanuel Goldstein, the book's traitorous leader of the Brotherhood, with Soviet apostate Leon Trotsky. Another dubious theory is that Orwell got the material for the melodramatic novel from his personal experiences while writing and producing programs for the Overseas Service of the government-run British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) and as a journalist during the war, working for the press baron Lord Astor. These low-level journalistic jobs, they intimate, never gave him access to classified information.
At first glance, the just-a-writer-working-for-the-wartime-BBC explanation appears credible; but on examination it may reveal the real truth. The biographers ignored the research of W.J. West, which puts an end to the dumb-journalist theory. West rummaged through the BBC archives and found 11 scripts for a show hosted by Orwell and broadcast by short-wave to the Indian subcontinent. It was called "A.D. 2000."
West reports that Orwell, who had served in the imperial police in Burma and chronicled his adventures in Burmese Days and in the essay, "Shooting an Elephant," enjoyed a distinguished reputation in India. As a result, the BBC asked him to produce programs about the glorious future of A.D. 2000 under British rule. For this series, Orwell interviewed celebrated futurists, scientists and technologists, getting live responses to questions about the future of agriculture, science and technology. For another BBC broadcast, Orwell produced an analysis of one of his favorite books, Jack London's 1908 novel, The Iron Heel, a fanciful description of the perfect fascist state, Asgard, which reaches its full power to crush the people in ... 1984.
A further source of information for the book 1984 that appears never to have been adequately examined is the matter of Orwell's job during the war. Another Orwell biography, Bernard Crick's George Orwell, A Life, accepts at face value his claim that he got bored in September 1943 and just up and left BBC. Or was that an official cover story?
Certainly the account does not ring true. Orwell was a skilled writer and a supreme patriot who wrote the stirring, down-home narrative The Lion and the Unicorn to describe the plight of the British nation struggling against Adolf Hitler. What patriot could just leave in the middle of a war? It seems more likely that for years he worked for a branch of British intelligence (as did his second wife), was working undercover and had signed an oath never to reveal operations in which he participated.
The question to ask then is whether Orwell all along was an undercover participant in Britain's secret propaganda effort against communists and fascists. At the beginning of the war the BBC for which Orwell worked was part of the British Ministry of Information, which produced both "white" and "black" information services. After internal fights, most "black information" was put into another unit, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). Orwell's friend Richard Crossman, a Fabian socialist and later a prominent postwar Labour Party minister, was head of the German division of the PWE propaganda-warfare unit.
A cadre of researchers has insisted that Orwell never worked undercover for British overseas intelligence, or MI6. But an equally vocal contingent says he in fact worked for MI5 -- British counter-intelligence. Their theories have earned such plausibility that The Economist put them on the cover of the magazine. Indeed, the definitive edition of Orwell's complete works gives documentary evidence that at the end of his life Orwell was spying on left-wing friends and reporting to the government which of them were most likely to fall under the sway of Soviet communism.
So did the title 1984 have any special meaning in Orwell's mind, or did he do something so unimaginative as simply reversing the last two digits of 1948, the year he wrote the book? One theory, put forth by William Steinhoff, an American professor, in his book George Orwell and the Origins of 1984, points the finger at Orwell's fascination with London's description of a fascist state that achieves flower in calendar year 1984.
Interesting. But it makes more sense to look to socialism rather than fascism as the butt of Orwell's satire, especially after Animal Farm, his 1945 satire of socialist revolution. Then, in the microfilm files of The Times of London for 1947 (when Orwell was working on his first drafts of 1984), this reporter turned up an account of the progressive-socialist Fabian Society belatedly celebrating that year as its 75th anniversary, three years late because of the war.
Now Orwell was an occasional platform speaker for the Fabians and a close observer of the Webbs. Yet Orwell also was a truth-teller. In writing a satire that portrays a Ministry of Truth vigorously promoting lies, he well may have been pondering the logical outcome of applying the principles of the Fabian Society as the world might be during its centenary celebration. The Fabian logo was the turtle, not the hare. Fabians believed they could be successful in taking over national governments incrementally even if it took 100 years. So why wouldn't Orwell take them at their word?
When asked about the world he had described in 1984, Orwell responded that he was not saying such a future would occur, but that a future something like it could happen because that was the direction in which the world was going.
So why would this Swiftian satire be unleashed against the gentle Fabian socialists? One reason is that they weren't all that gentle. The redoubtable Webbs had traveled in 1932 to Stalin's Soviet Union with Fabian playwright George Bernard Shaw to see socialism at work, and they were Potemkinized if not directly recruited by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police that preceded the KGB. The gushing Webbs claimed to have seen no evidence of famine, hardship or slave camps.
In 1933 they published an account of their trip titled Soviet Russia: A New Civilization. Two years later they put out a revised edition even more obsequious, to which they added an exclamation point, as in Soviet Russia: A New Civilization! According to the archives of the Soviet intelligence services, the book was entirely written by the NKVD. The aging Webbs now were working to create in England a replica of the Soviet Union, and Orwell was watching them.
When the Webbs lived at Passmoor Corners, they kept a large picture of Stalin prominently on the wall of an alcove. In 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith climbs the stairs to his flat, on each landing of which hangs a poster of Big Brother. And the first Fabian pamphlet appeared on April 4, the date on which 1984 begins. More provocatively, Orwell labels the party in power by the six letters INGSOC, an acronym that brings to the eye a grammatical present-progressive tense that suggests English progressive socialism.
I once inquired through a literary agent who was a friend of Sonia Orwell, the writer's second wife, whether 1984 might be a satirical polemic directed at the Fabians. She giggled nervously and remarked that perhaps that was right. And the Fabian Society once more has catapulted itself into the picture because, upon the death of Sonia Orwell, rights to George's estate fell under control of -- the Fabian Society. According to representatives of HarperCollins, the Fabians will be in control of the 1984 copyright and name through the year 2025 and will do their best to block unauthorized investigative research about Orwell's anti-socialist works.
The deepest twist of Orwell's satire is that Sidney Webb, cherubic-faced as he was, large-headed, always intellectual, is the physical model for Emmanuel Goldstein, who wrote "The Book" within the story line of 1984. Goldstein is the primal traitor against Big Brother. As a member of Parliament, Sidney was disparaged for being Jewish, though he was not. Again there are some interesting parallels. In 1984, Orwell refers to brainwashed and fuzzy-headed intellectuals, such as Webb, conversing in a private language called "duck speak" -- bringing to mind webbed feet.
Another parallel appears in the experience of Sidney Webb as Lord Passmoor in Parliament. When he rose to speak in his annoying monotone, back benchers (in the rude fashion of English parliamentary tradition) arose at times to bleat like sheep or goats. Indeed with his pince-nez spectacles balanced precariously on his prominent nose, Webb did resemble a billy goat -- at least to certain members of Parliament. In 1984, when the traitorous Goldstein appears on the telescreen, party members hiss and toss books at his image. Then, amid the riotous chaos, comes the baaing sound of a herd of sheep that grows and grows, filling the screen. A wolf in a sheepskin is part of the shield of the Fabian Society.
All of which suggests that Orwell's 1984 was written as a forecast scenario for the year 2000, but titled 1984 to bring to mind the centenary of the Fabian Society. Orwell's satirical approach assumes that the leaders of future governments would be Fabian successors of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, whom H.G. Wells with arcane foresight referred to as the global "New Machiavellians."
These are a breed of international socialists who might be recognized in 2000 as, say, Hillary and Bill Clinton and British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.
DAVID GOODMAN IS A NEUROSCIENTIST WHO WROTE THIS ARTICLE FOR Insight.
COPYRIGHT 2001 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
Bibliography for: "Orwell's 1984: the future is here: George Orwell believed the stark totalitarian society he described in 1984 actually would arrive by the year 2000, thanks to the slow, sinister influence of socialism"
David Goodman "Orwell's 1984: the future is here: George Orwell believed the stark totalitarian society he described in 1984 actually would arrive by the year 2000, thanks to the slow, sinister influence of socialism". Insight on the News. FindArticles.com. 10 Apr, 2012.
COPYRIGHT 2001 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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