Sunday 15 December 2019

was George Orwell Wrong: Part Two by Dave Jaffe

  Was George Orwell Wrong: Part Two




         As George Orwell was putting the finishing touches on his novel 'Nineteen Eighty Four', a communist revolution was about to sweep across China. British troops were clashing with mostly Chinese guerrillas in Malaysia. Communist led Vietnamese were fighting with French troops  who wanted to crush the Vietnamese struggle for independence from France. Meanwhile in Indonesia, Dutch armies were trying to suppress the Indonesian fight for freedom from Holland.
     So Orwell's dystopian novel wasn't about the future. It was about the present. As Dorian Lynskey wrote in  a very fine article on Orwell in 'The Guardian Weekly' in May 2019, "Orwell felt he lived in cursed times." He was right. Now the world has changed again. The Soviet Union has vanished. China has now embraced a type of capitalism. Yet new tyrants and right wing populists like Donald Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and president Duterte in the Philippines win elections and wield power.
    In China President Xi Jinping tightens the lid on his country's people. And in Russia, Vladimir Putin has gobbled up Crimea and parts of the eastern Ukraine. These two men are real tyrants. All over parts of the world, Orwell's prophesies once again seem to be coming true.
    "There are alternative facts," said U.S. president's Donald Trump's aide Kelly Anne Conway to justify her boss's lies. What she said is truly Orwellian. So was Orwell right? Is the world doomed to be run by tyrants and/or far right populists? Yet one trend denies Orwell's pessimism. "It is not wrong to rebel," said the brutal Chinese Communist dictator Mao Tse Tung.. A communist very like Orwell's Big Brother, Mao helped kill millions of Chinese. Still Mao's comment is now endorsed by millions of people.
     In '1984' Winston Smith and Julia are arrested and tortured. In Room 101. O'Brien, who is Winston's main torturer tells Winston that any hope of rebellion is futile.Winston says that 'the Proles' or working class will rebel. O'Brien denies this and finally Winston accepts O'Brien's verdict. He betrays Julia and ends his life a broken man, believing that any dissent in thought or action is hopeless.
      Here I believe Orwell was wrong. People do rebel against tyrants.. In 2015 and later black Americans protested against police who shot and killed unarmed African Americans. In France the yellow vest movement sprang up in 2018 to demonstrate against the crushing taxes that French president Emanuelle Macron slapped on poorer French people. And in 2019 protests against injustice have erupted around the world.
     "Iran gave a glimpse into what might have been the biggest anti-government in the 40 year history of the Islamic Republic," said a 'National Post ' story in November 2019. Hundreds of thousands of people in Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Hong Kong, Ecuador, Chile and many other places have taken to the streets to protest unjust rule. Hong Kong, Iraq, Algeria and Iran are basically tyrannies. Yet in these places protesters have frightened the ruling governments. They and others have given the lie to Orwell's pessimism. Here, Orwell, born Eric Blair was wrong.
     At this time, most  of the governments mentioned above are too entrenched to be overthrown.  Still, people do protest injustice and sometimes rebel. Orwell was wrong here. Yet on most other points he was right. This is why 'Nineteen Eighty Four' is still a best seller and will be for many years to come.

Saturday 7 December 2019

Was George Orwell Wrong? Part One by Dave Jaffe

Was George Orwell Wrong? by Dave Jaffe. Part One.




    In 1948 George Orwell was dying. The tall cigarette smoking author's body was racked by tuberculosis. Still, he continued  to work in the bitter cold of Scotland on his soon to be famous novel called 'Nineteen Eighty Four'.
     When it was published a year later Orwell was dead. Yet to-day 70 years after it came out, Orwell's novel  has once again climbed into the best seller's list. Its terms like Big Brother doublethink, Room 101, telescreen ,unperson, and memory hole live on long after Orwell's death. And the term 'Orwellian' has been used many times to describe total lies put out by brutal dictatorships and sometimes popular democracies.
     Quite a few people dished Orwell's book after it came out and for many years after that. The Marxist author Isaac Deutscher thought Orwell was a complete paranoid. The literary critic Walter Allen saw the book as a pessimistic novel written by an unhappy dying man. Raymond Williams who helped set up modern cultural studies dismissed the book.
      Others later on like Allan Bloom and the Czech novelist Milan Kundera thought 1984 was a poor novel. Anarchists like Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian preferred Orwell's memoir of his time in the Spanish Civil War called 'Homage To Catalonia'  to 'Nineteen Eighty Four'.
   "For every one artist there'll be ten critics" a visual artist said in the Vancouver art studio of 'Basic Inquiry' in the 1980's.  Critics continue to put down '1984' and yet it's still popular For Orwell's novel wasn't just about the future. It was close to the truth about the present he was living in.
     As he typed away, the world was dividing into two great power blocs, namely the United States on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. They had been allies in the fight against German Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese militarism. Yet now they were poised against each other. Both had combined to crush Hitler's German Nazi machine and now Germany lay in ruins though only after Hitler had killed close to 40 million people. Japan too was devastated and was defeated though it too had killed millions of people throughout East Asia.
     In The Soviet Union, dictator Josef Stalin was planning another  wave of murderous purges in the Soviet Union and thoughout his Eastern European satellites. Meanwhile in the United States, the federal government was setting up the Central Intelligence Agency and other secret organizations that would help overthrow dozens of governments around the world in the next fifty years.