George Orwell

Into the Twenty-first Century

Thomas Cushman, John Rodden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317259220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The year 2003 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell, one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. Orwell's books are assigned today in over 60, 000 classrooms annually. In this book essays by prominent writers and scholars explain why his impact continues in a world much changed from his own. The essays explore new aspects of Orwell's life and work and his continuing relevance for the interpretation of modern social, political, and cultural affairs. Thematic topics include: the use and abuse of 1984; ideas, ideologues, and intellectuals; biography and autobiography; literary and stylistic analyses; and the reception of Orwell's work abroad. The volume is an ideal secondary source for those who continue to be influenced by Orwell's insights and for teachers of Orwell's work. Contributors: Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Rose, Ian Williams, Morris Dickstein, John Rodden, Thomas Cushman, Ronald F. Thiemann, Lawrence Rosenwald, Todd Gitlin, Erika Gottlieb, Dennis Wrong, Daphne Patai, Jim Sleeper, William Cain, Lynette Hunter, Margery Sabin, Vladimir Shalpentokh, Miquel Berga, Gilbert Bonifas, Robert Conquest.

II

Ideas, Ideologies, and Intellectuals

4

George Orwell and the Liberal Experience of Totalitarianism

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

George Orwell didn’t make it into 1950 before expiring. Nonetheless, his identity thereafter has been subject to theft and appropriation. His essay on Dickens begins by saying, “Dickens is a writer worth stealing.” Orwell is closer in time and in some ways in life to Dickens than we are to Orwell. And Orwell died, in a sense, a Dickensian death. He died partly of poverty, ill health, neglect, and the unavailability of drugs that he could have had if he had been better informed. He lived to be forty-six in the twentieth century and yet as we enter the twenty-first century there must be a good answer as to why we are so preoccupied with him.

I am going to give this conundrum my very best shot and I am going to start by reading a short extract from Saul Bellow’s novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Mr. Sammler describes himself, exiled as he is in New York, lucky to be alive, very conscious of his luck, as a Polish Oxonian. He makes the mistake of accepting an invitation to speak at Columbia University and I would say from the date, timing, and context that this was in the late 1960s. He decides to speak about what he knows best, the utopian theories that governed Europe in the interwar period. He associates these with the names of R. H. Tawney, Harold Laski, John Strachey, George Orwell, and H. G. Wells. He gives his best shot at telling the students what they missed and what they don’t yet know. This is as far as he gets. I am quoting now from Saul Bellow.

Telling this into the lighted, restless hole of the amphitheater with the soiled dome and caged electric fixtures until he was interrupted by a clear loud voice. He was being questioned. He was being shouted at.

“Hey.”

He tried to continue. “Such attempts to draw intellectuals away from Marxism met with small success….”

A man in Levis, thick bearded but possibly young, a figure of compact distortion was standing shouting at him.

“Hey! Old Man!”

In the silence, Mr. Sammler drew down his tinted spectacles, seeing this person with his one effective eye.

“Old Man! You quoted Orwell before.”

“Yes.”

“You quoted him to say the British radicals were all protected by the Royal Navy. Did Orwell say that? British radicals were protected by the Royal Navy.”

“Yes I believe he did say that.”

“That’s a lot of shit.”

Sammler could not speak.

“Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It’s good he died when he did and what you’re saying is shit.” Turning to the audience, extending violent arms and raising his palms like a Greek dancer he said, “Why did you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He’s dead. He can’t come.”

Sammler later thought that some voices had been raised on his side. Someone had said, “Shame. Exhibitionist.”

But no one really tried to defend him. Most of the young people seemed to be against him. The shouting sounded hostile. Feffer was gone….

And he was not so much personally offended by the event but struck by the will to offend. What a passion to be real. But real [Bellow’s italics] was also brutal and the acceptance of excrement as a standard. How extraordinary? Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency? All this confused sex excrement militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth showing, Barbary ape howling. Or like the spider monkeys in the trees, as Sammler had once read, defecating into their hands and shrieking, pelting the explorers below.¹

Now, I know that Saul Bellow had had some bad experiences in the academy, as had his friend Allan Bloom, and I know that Bellow has written well about them. I have often quarreled with him about his tendency to exaggerate or to be self-pitying about that kind of intolerance, that kind of philistinism. These days I have to carry around with me a kind of thermometer. I usually prefer to park it in the armpit, just checking my pulse and my temperature all the time to see if I am going to become an old curmudgeon. And I have occasion to use this thermometer several times a day for symptoms of encrustation and curmudgeonhood. But I have to tell you that it gets worse.

Recently in Tucson, Arizona, I was invited to speak at the opening of the local arts theater on my film about the crimes of Henry Kissinger—the war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against the U.S. Constitution. There was a showing of the film The Trial of Henry Kissinger and then I was asked to respond to what was a pretty large and enthusiastic audience. And then someone got up (this was about the beginning of February 2003) and said to me from the front row, “By what right does our U.S. government go around the world deposing elected governments?” And I thought, well, we’re still talking about Henry Kissinger so I can’t be sure of the tone of the question. So I asked him, “May I ask you which episode you mean?” He might have been referring to Chile in 1973 or Greece in 1967 or Indonesia in 1965. And he looked at me as if I were stupid and said, “I mean the government of Saddam Hussein, which was an elected government.” So I said, “You don’t do it enough honor actually. It not only recently had a referendum which had 100 percent vote in favor of Saddam Hussein but it also recorded what had been hitherto unprecedented, 100 percent turn out. So you’re perhaps not praising the Baath party sufficiently.” You can always try irony. If it doesn’t hurt them it doesn’t hurt you.

What did I get for saying that? He said, “That’s more than you can say of George Bush.” In a split second it taught me to think, well you’re going to meet every now and then someone who thinks that Saddam Hussein was democratically elected and George W. Bush wasn’t. Get used to it. I am used to that. I became aware that this remark had been drowned in applause. It wasn’t the remark, in other words, it wasn’t the stupidity of the remark, it was the warmth and generality of the applause in Tucson, Arizona, where a point against Saddam Hussein became a point at my expense and at the expense of the president. And it gave me to worry very much. I’ve had to worry about the same point since.

In early 2003 the San Francisco Chronicle featured the front-page headline “U.S. Occupation Forces Have Deprived the Iraqi People of Their 20th of April Annual Holiday.” The 20th of April holiday celebrates the birthday of Saddam Hussein; it is a compulsory holiday, a holiday of fear, a holiday on which any teacher who doesn’t bring her students to the square and make them clap is in real danger for her life. But the San Francisco Chronicle finds yet another violation of Iraqi rights. They have lost their national holiday on April 20th. A deadpan headline.

There are people who say that North Korea may be evil now but it wasn’t evil until George W. Bush said it was. It only began to behave badly after it had been upset and offended by a speech that called it by its right name. This seems to me to be extraordinary. What Orwell teaches us, among other things, is that certain key words are in our lexicon for a reason. They are in our vernacular for a reason. Evil is one of them. Some people commit cruelty for its own sake. Some people do it gratuitously; they do it because they like it. And we have to have a word for it. I tried to advise the president in the Washington Post a few months ago that he would have done better in his first speech on this matter to describe his foes as an “axis of lesser evil,” because at least then he would have had a chance of getting half of the Democratic party on his side right there. Evil can be used. It turns out we need it. The word evil is in our language for a reason, but it can only be used in relativist terms. That is what we are up against.

There is a reason to pay tribute to Orwell. I would like to disagree very respectfully with Daphne Patai’s essay. When some of us invoke the name of George Orwell in contemporary politics for contemporary reasons we do so not in the hope of acquiring his reputation for honesty and courage. After all, a moment’s thought will tell you that I can lay no such claim. And no one would believe me if I tried to emulate someone who took such risks and was willing to endure such hardship for his convictions. There’s another reason, which I would describe as a literary reason, why Orwell remains alive to us. His favorite texts, ones that he could usually quote from memory and often did so with very small mistakes, were the canonical works of William Shakespeare, the prayer book of Archbishop Cranmer, and the King James Bible. Those texts too contain phrases, thoughts, simple offhand descriptions that come to us when we need them, that stay in our cortexes because of the exquisite care with which they were composed. No one saying “I do not believe that the powers that be are ordained of God” is expecting to have it believed by the audience that he has made up this term himself or is claiming the mantle of St. Paul. He is arguing about a proposition, the wording of which everybody knows. And in my view, the reason for the enduring legacy of Orwell is precisely that. And here’s the contradiction: when we try to struggle against totalitarianism, not just as a system or a threat but in our own minds and the bad habits it inculcates, we also strive to avoid the obvious. We strive to avoid catchphrases and stale phrases. Orwell pointed out two beauties I remember offhand about Nazism: the jackboot has been thrown into the melting pot, and on another occasion: the fascist octopus has sung its swan song. The people who use slogans of this kind have ceased to think about the meaning of words. These are examples of what the French used to call the langue du bois—the wooden tongue. Claud Cockburn, Orwell’s great enemy and great antagonist in Spain and father of Orwell’s leading critic in the United States, when he worked for the Daily Worker saw that one article in the magazine in a communiqué from Moscow said that the leading organs of the party should begin to penetrate the backward parts of the proletariat. In response, the editors said, “that’s from Moscow, you can’t change that.” The fear that people have not just of recognizing totalitarianism as a threat or calling evil by its right name arises in part because if these threats are true and if these evils are existent, they themselves may be called upon to witness or to fight or to do something about it.

There is an element of denial in the refusal to admit that the threat has arisen in the first place. Orwell puts one on one’s guard against that tendency to euphemism and he does it in phrases that are memorable and that are drawn from the great wellsprings of English writing. His atheism was Protestant, in other words. He believed that the struggle for a Bible that was in English and understood by the people was a great struggle for free speech and that the inner part, the priesthood, should never possess or have exclusive claim on what was sacred in order to make it more profane. And those of us who are journalists are always striving to avoid the cliché or the obvious retort.

John Burns of the New York Times, whom I regard to be the exemplar of the journalist in this day, recently had to write from Baghdad about that Saddam referendum. John avoids the obvious whenever he can, but he had to use the word Orwellian. He had no choice but to use the word Orwellian when describing this referendum and its turnout, its result and the hysteria, the self-loathing humiliation. The sadomasochism involved in conscripting people one last time to abase themselves at the foot of a statue of the image of a mediocre and wicked human being. I will quote what I wrote myself from North Korea a few years ago. I am quite well up on evil countries and axis countries. I’ve been to most of them, and I am probably one of a few people who have been to Iraq and North Korea in the recent past. I’ll quote some of what I wrote from Pyongyang.

In the closing months of the twentieth century, I contrived to get a visa from North Korea. Often referred to as ‘the world’s last Stalinist state’, it might as easily be described as the world’s prototype Stalinist state. Founded under the protection of Stalin and Mao, and made even more hermetic and insular by the fact of a partitioned peninsula that so to speak ‘locked it in’, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea still boasted the following features at the end of the year 2000. On every public building, a huge picture of ‘The Great Leader’ Kim Il Sung, the dead man who still holds the office of President in what one might therefore term a necrocracy or mausolocracy. (All other senior posts are occupied by his son, ‘The Dear Leader’, Kim Jong II—‘Big Brother’ was a perversion of family values as well.) Children marched to school in formation, singing songs in praise of aforesaid Leader. Photographs of the Leader displayed by order in every home. A lapel-button, with the features of the Leader, compulsory wear for all citizens. Loudspeakers and radios blasting continuous propaganda for the Leader and the Party. A society endlessly mobilized for war, its propaganda both hysterical and—in reference to foreigners and foreign power—intensely chauvinistic and xenophobic. Complete prohibition of any news from outside or any contact with other societies. Absolute insistence, in all books and in all publications, on a unanimous view of a grim past, a struggling present, and a radiant future. Repeated bulletins of absolutely false news of successful missile tests and magnificent production targets. A pervasive atmosphere of scarcity and hunger, alleviated only by the most abysmal and limited food. Grandiose and oppressive architecture. A continuous stress on mass sports and mass exercise. Apparently total repression of all matters connected to the libido. Newspapers with no news, shops with no goods, an airport with almost no planes. A vast nexus of tunnels underneath the capital city, connecting different Party and police and military bunkers.

There was, of course, only one word for it, and it was employed by all journalists, all diplomats and all overseas visitors. It’s the only time in my writing life that I have become tired of the word ‘Orwellian.’²

I was once arrested in Czechoslovakia in the old days. And I thought, whatever I do, I am not going to use the name Kafka. I’m just not going to do it. I am going to be the first reporter from Prague who doesn’t do it. And then the secret police smashed into this secret meeting I was attending and said, “OK, everyone freeze; you’re under arrest.” They took us one by one and I said, “Well, can I know what the charges are, why we’ve been arrested.” They said, “No, we’re not telling you.” And I thought, damn, now I have to do it. They make you do Kafka. North Korea makes you do Orwell. Winston and Julia would never find a private flat for a moment of squalid delight in North Korea. There would be no chance. And there is no reason at all not to notice how often this comes up.

In Zimbabwe recently, where collectivized farming is being used to reward the members of the ruling party with stolen property, the local African opposition paper reproduced without comment for seven days, chapter by chapter, Animal Farm. On the seventh day their offices were blown up by a land mine that is only available to the Zimbabwean army. What strikes me is the fact that Animal Farm was reprinted without comment and that nobody failed to get the point or needed it rammed home.

On my last trip to the Middle East, I was reading a local Arabic newspaper, in translation I’ll add, but I saw yet again the Ministry of Education had renewed the ban on the publication of Animal Farm because in Animal Farm not only are there pigs but there are pigs who drink alcohol. You might say that that was a keyhole criticism of Animal Farm or you might think that this regime had a particular reason for wanting to stop publication, but believe me a book that is to us a cliché in the sense of being a children’s story is still a story with explosive possibilities. It is censored for excellent reasons across vast tracts of the known world. Author to author tributes are not that refulgent sometimes an...