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June 18, 2024
As The Battle For George Orwell's Soul Rages On: Today We Cannot Help But See The Echoes Of 20th Century Totalitarianism In The Modern Progressive Movement
Authors note: Orwell was a paradoxical man, contradictory, sometimes hypocritical. As his Vogue profile stated, fairly much a leftist, George Orwell was a defender of freedom, even though most of the time he violently disagreed with the people besides whom he fought.
Although a writer of the political left, Orwell has gained many fans on the political right ever since ‘Animal Farm’ was published. And over the decades, both the Left and the Right have claimed Orwell as their own.
Today the issue of freedom is far more used by the Right.
“For conservatives like myself,” Ed West writes, “when we see dictionaries changing the definition of a word literary overnight, or the total distortion of history to suggest it has always been so, when it is ‘normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children’ because they are the greatest fanatics, we can’t help but see the echoes of 20th century totalitarianism in the modern progressive movement, even if it is a soft totalitarianism and doesn’t come from the state, but from the media, the academy and tech companies.”
THE BATTLE FOR GEORGE ORWELL'S SOUL.....
No writer’s legacy and approval is so fought over as George Orwell, whose final – and most celebrated – work Nineteen-Eighty-Four was published seventy five years ago this month.
The most influential piece of political fiction in history, such is the success of the dystopian novel that its themes have been recited to death by columnists, often by people I imagine he would have loathed (including me).
Orwell’s nightmare became a particular focus of conservative commentators from the 1990s with the rise of ‘political correctness’, which might be seen as both a form of politeness and at the same time a way of policing opinions by changing the language. As Orwell’s Newspeak was described, it was to ensure that dissent cannot be voiced because ‘the necessary words were not available’. Newspeak, along with thought police and doublethink, has become a part of our political vocabulary, while even the proles have Big Brother to entertain them. No one can doubt that Orwell has won the final victory, and the struggle for the writer’s soul forms part of Dorian Lynskey’s entertaining and informative The Ministry of Truth, a biography of Nineteen-Eighty-Four which was published at the time of the last significant anniversary.
Lynskey, a hugely gifted writer who specializes in the relationship between arts and politics, is very much on the Left and sees the modern parallels with the Trumpian disdain for truth, although the great man himself is now often more cited by the Right. Indeed the anniversary was recently celebrated by the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs with a new edition and an introduction by my friend Christopher Snowdon.
Orwell was a paradoxical man, contradictory, sometimes hypocritical (aren’t we all?). In the preface to his book, publisher Victor Gollancz wrote that ‘The truth is that he is at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual. Similarly he is a frightful snob – still (he must forgive me for saying this), and a genuine hater of every form of snobbery.’
As Lynskey writes: ‘Until the end of his life, Orwell acknowledged that microbes of everything he criticized existed in himself. In fact, it was this awareness of his own flaws that inoculated him against utopian delusions of human perfectibility.’
Such awareness is surprisingly rare among intelligent journalists and commentators, especially when ideology takes a grip – and Orwell was introduced to this reality in quite brutal form.
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‘Huxley’s World State (the phrase a blatant dig at Wells) is kept in line not by the truncheon and the whip, but by drugs, hypnotism, entertainment, and a genetically engineered caste system, running from the Alpha-Plus elite down to the Epsilon-Minus laborers. With its skyscrapers, zippers, chewing gum, “sexophobes” and “feelies” (a tactile version of the talkies), the novel drew heavily on his travels in America, where he called Los Angeles the “City of Dreadful Joy.”’
Orwell had fond memories of being taught by Huxley at Eton in 1918 while still plain Eric Blair, and he admired the book, but was unconvinced of its tyranny of gratification: ‘There is no power-hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind. Those at the top have no strong motive for staying at the top, and though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, life has become so pointless that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure.’
Perhaps it was because Huxley spent 26 years in California while Orwell, having little interest in the United States, didn’t appreciate that pleasure could prove a greater danger than pain.
A far bigger influence was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, set in a surveillance society of the future under the ‘One State’ ordered on logic, with people only known by numbers. Indeed, Isaac Deutscher claimed that Orwell had plagiarized it, although Lynskey points to the substantial difference, the fact that much of Orwell’s book was written before the Russian’s novel was released, and that Orwell repeatedly tried to get the book published in English and for readers to ‘look out for’ it. ‘Surely not the kind of thing that plagiarists usually do.’
Zamyatin was exactly the sort of free-thinker who was repressed by the old regime and persecuted even more by the revolutionaries. In 1922 he was arrested and found himself in a cell on the very same corridor he had stayed back in 1905. For unknown reasons, since the dictator could be capricious, Stalin allowed him to emigrate rather than become among his statistics.
Independent minds were crushed in the new socialist paradise, while conformist drones flourished. Writers like Leopold Averbakh formed the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), ‘whose third-rate scribes thrived by denouncing the politically unreliable and grinding-out propagandistic dross like Minimus the pig in Animal Farm.’
As Lynskey writes: ‘In the summer of 1928, he and Boris Pilnyak, the novelist who ran the Moscow branch of the VSP, were among several writers dispatched to collective farms to write inspiring fiction about the need to accelerate grain collection. The muse did not strike.’
Orwell was fascinated by the dishonesty which ideology would cause intelligent people to commit to. He ‘enjoyed retelling an anecdote he’d heard about a party member who was in the toilet of a New York café when the news broke and returned to his friends to find that the line had already changed: a possible inspiration for the Inner Party orator in Nineteen Eighty-Four who “switched from one line to the other actually in mid-sentence.”’
The news in question was Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, after which western communist parties switched en masse from a position of neutrality to the Allied cause.
Orwell’s wartime experience with the BBC would also shape his final work. He hated the radio, which he viewed as ‘inherently totalitarian’, but was brought in to do service for the broadcaster’s Indian Section. As Lynskey writes, he had a great brain for radio, producing huge numbers of ideas, and with his experience of the sub-continent, he understood that Indians would not appreciate obvious British propaganda and so focused on more implicit celebrations of democracy.
But he was unsuited to the role, his voice actively put off listeners, and Lynskey writes dryly: ‘His introduction for Voice’s launch episode was less an invitation than an apology: “I suppose during every second that we sit here at least one human being will be dying a violent death.” Still, on with the show. Enjoy Wordsworth.’
He resigned from the Indian Service in 1943, in part because he realized that no one was listening, but also because he wanted to work on Animal Farm. It almost never came to light after a V-1 struck their flat in Canonbury Square and Orwell retrieved a manuscript from the rubble.
He also secured work a foreign correspondent in Paris, where he had arranged to meet Albert Camus. Sadly, the French writer was sick, ‘thwarting what could have been a remarkable meeting between two natural rebels who put principles before political expediency and turned political writing into an art.’
Orwell’s last few years often seem as miserable as that of his protagonist. Just weeks before the war ended, his first wife Eileen died in surgery. His own health was in decline, although it was not until 1947, while working on Nineteen-Eighty Four on the island of Jura, that the tuberculosis which killed him would be diagnosed.
Animal Farm could not have come at a worse time, and several publishers turned it down for attacking an ally. Cape performed an uncourageous U-turn because they apparently realized it applied to the USSR and the use of pigs might offend the ‘touchy’ Russians. In the United States Angus Cameron, pro-communist editor in chief of Little, Brown, rejected it, while Dial Press said there was no market for ‘animal stories.’ Orwell found himself cancelled by Stalin, though not in the way the dictator cancelled his own citizens.
A very small detail says a lot about Orwell’s principles, that even when he hated a system and the people responsible, he tried to avoid being untruthful about it. Before publication he made a last-minute change to Animal Farm to reflect the fact that the autocratic Napoleon was not a coward. ‘I just thought the alteration would be fair to J.S. J.S may have been a murderous tyrant, but that was no reason to call him a coward.’
The book meant that Orwell suddenly had many conservative fans, a disconcerting experience for a writer of the Left, then as now. He was invited to lunch by Lord Beaverbrook, who he had described as ‘looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.’
Curiously, Ayn Rand wasn’t among these enthusiasts, calling Animal Farm ‘the mushiest and most maudlin preachment of Communism… I have seen in a long time.’ Which seems like a unique interpretation.
Animal Farm also brought Orwell two things he was unaccustomed to as an English writer: fame in America, and money. The writer was financially illiterate – many such cases! – and it was only now that he had to start dealing with the taxman, and as this quintessential socialist patriot put it: ‘No one is patriotic about taxes.’
Now came his final work, and it will perhaps give some comfort to authors that Orwell expected this ‘beastly book’ to bring in £500 in sales and wrote to a friend that ‘it isn’t a book I would gamble on for a big sale.’
Contrary to what some then believed, Nineteen Eighty-Four was not about the Attlee government even if ‘he used the physical furniture of post-war London to give Airstrip One a lived authenticity.’ Yet when his publisher Fredric Warburg first read it, he called it ‘a deliberate and sadistic attack on Socialism and socialist parties generally.’ He thought it would be ‘worth a cool million votes to the Conservative Party.’
Orwell was so sick by this point that he could not play a part in the unfolding great debate about his work, which was to take on a life of its own as conservatives, liberals and socialists fought over his legacy.
In 1954, less than five years after his death, a BBC television adaptation came out starring Peter Cushing as Winston Smith, who was to become one of four men to play both Doctor Who and Smith, the other being Patrick Troughton, John Hurt and Christopher Ecclestone (the sort of pub quiz-ready factoid I crave in a book).
The young Eric Blair, who would later become George Orwell, pictured standing at back, during police training in Burma in 1923 (Source: The Guardian). Orwell at the BBC (Source: Biography Online). George Orwell in Morocco (Source: Orwell Diaries 1938-1942). English Heritage blue plaque in Kentish Town, London where Orwell lived from August 1935 until January 1936 ( Source: Wikipedia via EncycloReader).
It attracted the largest television viewing audience since the Coronation; indeed the Queen herself watched and admired it, although many were less keen. One viewer complained to the BBC that ‘If that is what the world is going to be like, we might as well put our heads in the gas ovens now.’ Questions were asked in Parliament. The Daily Express headlined its coverage A Million NIGHTMARES. The only George Orwell in the telephone directory spent the evening fielding calls from angry viewers.
It was good news for the Orwell estate, at least, even if Orwell’s widow – second wife Sonia – was famously protective of his work. Before the BBC adaptation, the book had been selling 150 hardbacks a week; that rose to a thousand and the Penguin paperback sold 18,000.
Meanwhile the Guardian letter’s page was a ‘running battle’ between Orwell fans and the hard left. Communist R. Palme Dutt called it ‘the lowest essence of commonplace Tory anti-Socialist propaganda by an ex-Etonian former Colonial Policeman.’
Certainly ‘the play reinforced the novel’s political importance’, Lynskey writes, and The Daily Mail praised its exposure of ‘the beastliness of Communism.’
The book, understandably, was not so popular behind the Iron Curtain, which rather proved its point. An East German judge in 1958 sentenced a teenager to three years in jail for having a copy and called Orwell ‘the most hated writer in the Soviet Union and the socialist states.’
As the year itself approached many took to discussing what the book had got wrong and right. A 1978 article by David Goodman in The Futurist identified 137 separate predictions in 1984 and said 100 had come true. By 1984 itself, the experts were saying he was completely wrong.
More important than whether Orwell was right was whether he would approve. Norman Podhoretz wrote a piece, ‘If Orwell Were Alive Today’ that was typical of the genre. ‘Normally, to speculate on what a dead man might have said about events he never lived to see is a frivolous enterprise’, he acknowledged, ‘before gamely pressing on to insist that an octogenarian Orwell would have said that Norman Podhoretz was right.’
Both Left and Right, the National Review and Christopher Hitchens, claimed him as their own, Hitchens arguing that ‘Orwell was a conservative about many things, but not politics.’ Peregrine Worsthorne and Alfred Sherman said the book was anti-socialist. No it wasn’t, argued Bernard Crick and Tony Benn.
Such was Orwell’s power that by now, and rather bizarrely, even Soviet journals claimed him. Novoye Vremya presented Orwell’s book as ‘a grim warning to bourgeois-democratic society, which, as he pointed out, is rooted in anti-humanism, all-devouring militarism and denial of human rights.’ Literaturnaya Gazeta explained that Reagan was Big Brother and telescreens were the National Security Agency’s spying network. Another Soviet newspaper, Izvestiya, claimed that history had turned Oceania into ‘a fully realistic picture of contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism.’
This was happening at the same time that Latvian translator Gunars Astra was being sentenced to seven years in the gulag for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ – among his crimes being circulating a samizdat copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It’s hard to know what Orwell would have thought about anything, but it seems at least unlikely he would have approved of the Soviets claiming his legacy. Today he certainly seems more popular with the libertarian-inclined, and it’s hard to disagree with Snowdon that he would have been contemptuous of later communist experiments.
In his own time Allene Talmey described the author in a Vogue profile: ‘Fairly much a leftist, George Orwell is a defender of freedom, even though most of the time he violently disagrees with the people besides whom he is fighting.’
Today the issue of freedom is far more used by the Right, in part because libertarians are so hostile to state power but also because the Left is culturally hegemonic. Free speech, a rallying call of students in the 1960s, is now a right-coded subject.
For Lynskey, Trump and Trumpism is the obvious analogy. The American Caesar meets most criteria of Orwell’s definition of fascism: ‘something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class… almost any English person would accept “bully” as a synonym for “Fascist”.’
The greatest threat to truth is the erosion of the idea that there is a truth, for he writes: ‘When some listeners to Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds believed the radio play without checking other sources, they were motivated by excessive faith in the authority of the media. The modern spreaders of disinformation, however, are driven by too little.’
For conservatives like myself the ‘Orwellian’ parallels are elsewhere, even if we overuse the word to death: when we see dictionaries changing the definition of a word literary overnight, or the total distortion of history to suggest it has always been so, when it is ‘normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children’ because they are the greatest fanatics, we can’t help but see the echoes of 20th century totalitarianism in the modern progressive movement, even if it is a soft totalitarianism and doesn’t come from the state, but from the media, the academy and tech companies.
And what would a 120-year-old George Orwell think? I suspect that he would agree with me on everything.
About the Author
Ed West is a British journalist, essayist and author of several books, the latest being ‘Small Men on the Wrong Side of History’. He was previously the deputy editor of UnHerd, deputy editor of The Catholic Herald and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. He publishes articles on a Substack page titled ‘Wrong Side of History’ which you can subscribe to and follow HERE.
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