1984 Revisited

 

George Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1949, portrayed a totalitarian world of the future. According to former MI6 officer John Coleman, Orwell was attached to MI6 and was simply fictionalizing what he knew was to come.

When the actual year 1984 rolled around, the world didn’t look just the way Orwell’s book envisioned; therefore some criticized the book as a failed prophecy. However, events have increasingly vindicated Orwell and silenced his critics. For those who will complain he missed on the year, we point out that (A) the vigilance of freedom-loving people has forced the Establishment to reset its timetable more than once; and (B) if you read Orwell’s novel carefully, it’s not even certain that the year is 1984 – that was simply what the people were told by the government, which controlled all information.

Let’s explore ways 1984 has been fulfilled:

• In 1984, citizens are under constant electronic surveillance by the Thought Police, not only in the city streets, but through their home televisions, which cannot be turned off. To quote the book:

With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police . . . .252

Today, through computers connected to the Internet, and through cell phone traffic, the government can keep the bulk of the population under surveillance, in the name of “security” under the Patriot Act. This may even be happening through televisions. Years ago, I thought: “Orwell got it wrong. TVs receive, but they don’t transmit!” Certainly the TVs of the 1950s didn’t transmit, but with the enforced upgrading to digital television, it is increasingly apparent that televisions will probably transmit soon, if they are not doing so already. See, for example, “Is Your TV Spying on You?” at http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427405/is-your-tv-spying-on-you/. Orwell was well ahead of the game.

• In 1984, all people of the world fall under three regional governments – Oceania (where the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, lives), Eurasia and Eastasia. This is reminiscent of the regional approach to world government (European Union, North American Union) now unfolding.

• Just as we have described, power is in a pyramidal structure. At the top of the pyramid is an Antichrist-like figure, Big Brother.

At the apex of the pyramid is Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration.253• Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where newspapers, periodicals, books, and other literature forms are continuously changed according to the government’s wishes. For example, if the Times reported Big Brother had made a speech predicting something, which later did not happen, the Times would be subsequently corrected so that it appeared Big Brother had made the correct prediction.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.254While current society has not advanced to this extreme, history has been altered, changing the true nature and records of wars, revolutions, the United Nations, trade treaties, the Federal Reserve, and even the effectiveness of vaccines.

Furthermore, electronic data is increasingly replacing hard copy information. In the Internet age, newspapers and magazines are struggling to stay in print. Newsweek is no longer published in hard copy. If all information eventually becomes electronic, it will be very easy for bureaucrats to change what back copies of newspapers and magazines say – exactly as in Orwell’s novel.

• Although everything in Oceania is in short supply (except that reserved for the elite “Inner Party” members), the government’s economics ministry is termed “The Ministry of Plenty.” This reminds one of the “Security and Prosperity Partnership” borne out of NAFTA, which claims we are enjoying “prosperity” while millions of jobs are slashed and we drown in inflation. In 1984, the Ministry of Plenty spews out falsified statistics:

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture . . . . 255

Even today, the U.S. government fudges statistics to make the realities look brighter. For example, the June 23, 2008 The New American exposed how the government has continuously altered methods of determining the Consumer Price Index, inflation’s main barometer. For example, under Richard Nixon, food and energy costs were simply eliminated from the “core CPI.” Later:

In 1983, the Reagan administration decided that rising real estate costs were causing the CPI to be overstated, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) substituted an “Owner Equivalent” measurement, basing housing costs on what homeowners might get if they were renting their houses. Homes were labeled an investment, and the cost of buying a home (like other investments) was no longer included in the CPI.

The Bush, Sr., Clinton, and Bush, Jr. presidencies each further modified how CPI is determined, each change serving to lower it. The end result of all these tweaks is that the U.S. now reports an annual inflation rate of some two percent, whereas true inflation is closer to ten percent. This enables the government to cheat senior citizens out of their Social Security, making payment increases based on the distorted CPI, rather than the actual rising costs the elderly face.

• In the culture of 1984, the truth is reversed. Two of the government’s main slogans are “WAR IS PEACE” and “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.” Today, many of yesterday’s truisms have also been reversed. For example, homosexuality, once understood as perverted, is now construed as “normal”; abortion, previously a crime, is today a “right”; advocates of traditional family values, once mainstream, are now “extremists.”

• 1984 says:

It was always at night – the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.256

Many film fans are familiar with the 1995 Sandra Bullock thriller The Net, about a woman who no longer “exists” after her identity is destroyed by the cyber-manipulations of the movie’s villains. And today, many have been victims of real-world identify theft. Like money and information, the more your identity becomes electronic, the more it becomes erasable. Orwell warns us that someday identity loss may become a function of government.

• We have mentioned that the Establishment has created much of the “popular” music and literature via the Tavistock Institute. In 1984, Winston hears a woman singing a song as she hangs clothes on a line:

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless songs published for the benefit of the proles [the poor] by a sub-section of the Music Department [at the Ministry of Truth].257

• Winston’s secret lover, Julia, also works in the Ministry of Truth, where she had

been picked out to work in Pornosec, the subsection of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girl’s School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.258• Oceania was continually at war, the wars never being actually won (sound familiar, Americans?). Bombs would sometimes drop on London (where Winston lived), rousing the people to patriotism. But the bombs “were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself.” 259 Shades of 9-11?

• The war ministry (called the Ministry of Peace) was working on means of “producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves.” 260• Oceania had a language called Newspeak. It restricted vocabulary to very few words. Each successive Newspeak dictionary deleted more words. The eventual result was to eliminate ideas unacceptable to the state, since words for those ideas no longer existed. Orwell pointed out that ultimately an older document, such as the American Declaration of Independence, would become unreadable gibberish. Is this unlike today, when “dumbing down” has left American public school students less and less able to read books of the past?

• In the novel, Winston is exposed as a thought criminal and imprisoned by the Ministry of Love (the secret police). In view of the concentration camps FEMA is now reportedly preparing, certain aspects of Winston’s torture are worth mentioning.

The following exchange occurs between Winston and his torturer, O’Brien:

[O’Brien:]“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?”

“To make them confess.”

“No, that is not the reason. Try again.”

“To punish them.”

“No!” exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. “No! Not merely to extract your confession, nor to punish you. Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured?”

O’Brien continues:

“You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant; in fact it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And, above all, we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.”

After many tortures, Winston still retains a shred of independent thinking. To finish breaking him, the Thought Police bring him to the place every prisoner dreads – Room 101. Room 101 is different for every person. It contains their greatest horror. In Winston’s case, he has a primal fear of rats. His head is placed in a two-compartment cage. The furthest compartment is filled with hungry sewer rats. If the connecting door dropped, the rats would devour Winston’s face. At this point, Winston completely loses it – he is broken.

How did the Thought Police know Winston’s darkest fear was rats? Because they had monitored his conversations. Likewise, the government today could know a person’s greatest fear, by simply monitoring his emails and phone calls. Compiling a profile of nearly every person would be easy.

At the book’s end, the Thought Police have turned Winston free – because he no longer constitutes any threat. He believes every bit of propaganda coming from the telescreen. He gazes at Big Brother’s image. And the book closes with these words: “He loved Big Brother.” If I may freely translate, he worshiped the Antichrist.

James Perloff

Truth Is a Lonely Warrior: ...