George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June, 1903 in British India. He worked in the Imperial Police in Burma, until he left to pursue life among the working classes in Paris, to research for his first novel, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’.
The alias ‘George Orwell’ was born at this time, mainly because he feared a poor reception of Down and Out would damage his literary ambitions.
In 1936 he travelled to the depression-hit areas of the industrial North of England in order to research a long essay. The trip, Orwell’s first real encounter with ordinary working class people, instilled in him a vague belief in socialism.
At the end of the year, prompted by the outbreak of civil war in Spain, he traveled to Barcelona and joined an anarchist militia, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). It was during his healing behind the lines after being shot in the throat, that the POUM was formally accused of being pro-fascist, by the Stalinist Government forces, and its members thrown into jail and shot. Orwell escaped and returned to England, but the experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist.
The Spanish Civil War played the most important part in defining Orwell’s politics. Having witnessed the success of the anarcho-syndicalists in Anarchist Catalonia, he said “I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.”
Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC during World War Two. In 1943, he became editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine.
In 1945, Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ was published. A political novel set in a farmyard but based on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution. ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ was published in 1949. By now Orwell’s health was deteriorating and he died of tuberculosis the next year.
‘1984’
Orwell was fascinated by the capacity of totalitarian regimes to attempt to control minds, by manipulating language. Orwell had already set forth his distrust of totalitarianism and the betrayal of revolutions in Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm. Down and Out, and Coming Up For Air both celebrate the individual freedom that is lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Throughout history tyrants have enslaved people; but remained unable to enslave the mind. With modern mass media and government, Orwell thought, it might be possible to enslave minds. This was the central theme of his final novel, which for a title he chose the year he wrote it, with the last two digits swapped.
The world of 1984 is a futuristic description of life in England after a socialist revolution, in a state of constant war, no one is free, and everyone is ignorant. The society parallels Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany. There are similarities: the betrayed-revolution; the subordination of individuals to ‘the Party’; and the rigorous distinction between inner party, outer party and everyone else, and joycamps, which are a reference to concentration camps or the Gulag.
The party’s slogans ‘War is peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is strength’ are analysed in a fictional book that appears in the novel. The slogans embody the Party. Through constant war, the Party can keep domestic peace; when freedom is brought about, the people are enslaved to it, and the ignorance of the people is the strength of the Party. And through their constant repetition, the terms become meaningless.
The Party’s power – as in all totalitarian systems, can be seen to be dependent on those who view it as an oppressive force; those who desire to resist it. If the Party’s power is to continue to exist, those who desire to resist – regardless of whether they intend to or not, must be eliminated. However, if all the resistors are eliminated then the Party’s power would disappear. Therefore, if it is to remain powerful, the Party must also create dissidence, if only to destroy it.
Orwell’s theorised government used a complex system of thought control, or ‘reality control’. As Orwell explains in the book, the Party could not protect its iron grip on power without exposing its people to constant propaganda. Yet knowledge of this brutality and deception within the Party itself could lead to disillusioned collapse of the state from within. Newspeak was the method for controlling thought through language; Doublethink was the method of controlling thought directly, to champion belief over rational thought.
Doublethink means to hold two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind at the same time, and accepting both of them. In the case of Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist, it meant being able to work at the Ministry of Truth deleting inconvenient facts from public records, and then believing in the new history which he himself had written.
Through doublethink, the Party was able to not only bomb its own people and tell its citizens that the bombs were sent by the enemy, but all Party members – even the ones that launched the rockets themselves – were able to believe that the bombs were launched from outside.
Together, these tools hid the government’s evil not only from the people, but also from the government itself. The phrase “two plus two makes five” is used throughout the book as a representation of an illogical statement, especially one made and maintained to suit an ideological agenda. Winston Smith, uses it to consider the possibility that the State might declare “two plus two makes five” as a fact; he ponders that if everybody believes in it, does that make it true?
The Thinkpol were the secret police of the novel whose job it was to uncover and punish thoughtcrime. The Thought Police used psychology and omnipresent surveillance to find and eliminate members of society who were capable of the mere thought of challenging ruling authority
Some believe governments may be currently enforcing laws that implement a de-facto kind of thoughtcrime legislation. Hate crime laws that mandate harsher penalties for people who commit crimes out of racism or bigotry. Opponents of those laws claim that all crimes are committed out of an element of hate, so that defining a specific subset of laws as ‘hate crimes’ is meaningless, and that these very laws in fact imply the inequality of citizens before the law.
Simplification of language
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. The appendix chapter describes the development of Newspeak, and explains how the language is designed to standardise thought. The underlying theory of Newspeak is that if something can’t be said, then it can’t be thought. One question raised by this is whether we are defined by our language, or whether we actively define it. This can be seen by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s proposition, ”The limits of my language mean the limits to my world.”
Orwell bases this system on his critical view of the quality of written English in his time, citing examples of dying metaphors and meaningless words, and that the end result of this language corruption is the literary and vocal system used in 1984. In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell wrote about the importance of clear language, arguing that vague writing can be used as a powerful tool of political manipulation because it shapes the way we think. In that essay, he provides five rules for writers:
- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you often see in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Orwell states that in this system, sentences consists less and less of words chosen for their meaning, and more of pre-constructed phrases ”tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”
He added that this literary corruption was firmly entrenched into political speech of his day (which arguably is no different today) and that ”writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” He gave the examples of British rule in India, and the Russian purges. He continued that because political language must hide these government atrocities, it must contain many euphemisms and ”sheer cloudy vagueness.”
”Defenceless civilians are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called PACIFICATION. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called TRANSFER OF POPULATION. ”
Such turns of phrase are needed if a speaker wants to name things without calling up pictures in the minds of his audience. Thus, Orwell summarised, ”Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Furthermore he predicted that as simplification of language is present in totalitarian systems, the German, Russian and Italian languages will have deteriorated as a result of their totalitarian rule. This indisputably happened in Maoist China when the communist party actually changed the language – officially to improve the literacy rate, but also to reduce power that bourgeois intellectuals held.
Although Orwell didn’t accuse governments as responsible for the direct debasement of language, they easily exploit it for their own purposes, in the aim of removing all words of possible opposition. Therefore, because thought is linguistic, you can’t think what you can’t say, so it becomes impossible to criticise the regime because all critical vocabulary no longer exists.
Ideology and Terror
Hannah Arendt argues that all forms of pre-totalitarian terror; tyranny, despotism, dictatorship, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements, have a clear goal, and usually cease once the objectives have been achieved. For example, a tyrant exercises terror in order to eliminate his opponents and thereby secure and consolidate his power whereas the chief goal of revolutionary terror is to establish a new order. The totalitarian dictator, on the other hand, only commences his rule once the regime has eliminated all its real enemies.
The totalitarian state is a movement. No winding down, no stability, no return to the past can be allowed, or the whole regime will collapse as its need will be constantly questioned. Everything must be kept in motion – including the secret police, whose members are constantly being shifted and are never allowed to stay in one area too long.
The totalitarianism system seeks total power and to so it politicizes every aspect of personal existence – destroying the concept of ‘the private sphere’ as well as the public sphere. This is the reason why Arendt argues that ideology and terror are essential to totalitarian rule. Totalitarian states collectivise the people who live under it in order for them to serve the state, but because of our individuality, most people are not too happy to give up their freedom. So two methods are used to create an atmosphere of fear to convince the people to willingly hand it over: state terror and ideology.
The purpose of terror is not to kill vast numbers of people – but to instil fear into the survivors and remove their ability to resist against the government whether premeditated or not – not just in action, but even in thought.
Ideology compliments the policy of terror, by eliminating the capacity for rational thought by those who carry out the orders of the government, ensuring no potential opposition can come from within the government itself.
To Arendt, totalitarianism is the total domination of a particular people through a combination of simplistic ideology and constant terror. All traditions, all values, all political institutions are destroyed and all behaviour, public or private, is controlled directly by the state, or indirectly through fear of punishment. In an ordinary dictatorship such as Mussolini’s, thousands of people were arrested for political crimes, but most of these were acquitted by the Italian courts. In Nazi Germany there were no acquittals. To be arrested was to be convicted – and to be convicted was to be removed from the face of the earth.
That is the difference between dictatorial and totalitarian terror.
The Uncreative Journalist 