Issue No. 598
Culture
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8 - 14 August 2002 Issue No. 598 Culture |
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Plain Talk
I was pleasantly surprised when, after writing last week about re-reading Swift, Defoe and Orwell, I found an article in this week's Independent Review in the form of an imaginary critique by Orwell of the BBC television series Big Brother. I have also just read a review of the newly published biography, Orwell's Victory, by Christopher Hitchens. Orwell is in vogue.
The Review article begins with the story of the Roman Emperor Maximus Severus who tortured his slaves, hurling them into the river to be drowned or eaten by crocodiles, or setting them impossible tasks. These sadistic orders were tolerated -- indeed enjoyed -- by the emperor's retinue, until he ordered that a hole be cut into the wall of the slaves' sleeping quarters so that they could be seen by passers by. His retinue laid down their weapons and refused to serve him any longer. Such is the importance of privacy, a privilege of civilised life.
Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty Four is about totalitarianism, which means "marching feet, lifted torches, Tommy guns squirting from the roof tops, but it also means something much worse than that: the idea of someone opening up a window into your soul", writes the reviewer.
Big Brother is always watching you and, so goes the fictitious critique, "to anyone who knows their Swift, Big Brother's message will be deeply reassuring. Men are not quite beasts, of course, but they are near enough to being beasts to be reminded of the fact often."
True, Orwell's Big Brother disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but, looking around at some Asian and African countries one realises that other brothers are still there, ever watching over people, denying them privacy and harshly governing them.
Hitchens's new biography of Orwell is the latest in a line of such books. Orwell seemed to have a genuine fear of totalitarianisms. Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four create such a convincing image of Stalinism and of life in a communist state that they "attained the status of reality in the public mind".
Orwell has come under heavy attack not only from the Left, but also from such writers as Salman Rushdie and Edward Said. What is really significant is that he was simultaneously opposed to fascism, communism and imperialism. His anti- imperialism stand came as a result of his experience in Burma where "watching his fellow countrymen maltreat the Burmese, he realised that the vital first step for exploiters is to pretend the exploited are not human."
Orwell volunteered on the side of the anarchist militia in Spain and fought against Franco's fascists. He thought he was on the same side as the communists but the anarchists were hunted down by Stalin's agents and several of his comrades were killed or imprisoned. It was then that he realised the nature of totalitarianism -- that "it could invent truth and history as it chose." So he decided to take up arms in the battle against the system. His understanding of the tyranny became uncanny. The Polish poet Czelaw Milosz, who watched the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe from the inside recalls that the party bosses "were fascinated by Nineteen Eighty Four because it described their methods so accurately. They were puzzled how someone who had never lived in Russia could have such insight into its life".
Orwell had a number of ideas about political and economic reform. His ideal was a society of free and equal human beings. He believed in the nationalisation of industries, but private property could survive. Incomes should be equalised with the highest not exceeding the lowest by more than 10-1. All hereditary privileges would go and private education would be abolished.
His political and reformist writings notwithstanding, Orwell will always be remembered as the man who prophetically wrote about the dangers of totalitarianism.
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