Perhaps appropriately, in the light of my last post (see below) about President Obama's inauguration, tomorrow, January 21st, is the 59th anniversary of the death of Eric Arthur Blair, better known to history under the nom de plume George Orwell.
Orwell is perhaps best known for his anti-totalitarian works Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both are rightly regarded as masterpieces. Perhaps the most enduring testimony to Animal Farm's importance was that a Soviet agent working for the publishers, Jonathan Cape, induced them to renege on their agreement to publish it! The two books have been described as 'prescient' in their forecasting of the control techniques of totalitarian societies. It's particularly disturbing to notice elements of those techniques in use even in modern democratic societies.
Nevertheless, my favorite book by Orwell is Homage To Catalonia. It's a searing memoir of his service in the Spanish Civil War. His experiences there were to lead him to the deep-rooted suspicion of Stalinist Communism that later gave rise to his two more famous works. To my mind, the real George Orwell shines through Catalonia in a way that is masked in his later works. The reasons for his subsequent distrust of any and all totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Communist, become very clear. In a 1943 essay, Looking Back On The Spanish War, he wrote:
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'Science'. There is only 'German Science', 'Jewish Science', etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened'--well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five--well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs--and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can't come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn't come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.
Sobering thoughts - particularly written, as they were, in the middle of the greatest war ever experienced by humankind, involving the two great totalitarianisms of Fascism and Communism, and waged on every continent except the Poles.
Perhaps we should close with another Orwell quote - one that's well worth remembering.
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside . . . The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom of the mind which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own.
Peter
Excellent essay.
ReplyDeleteThank you.