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.