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Comrades,
It
is an honour to stand here this evening, in this building
which is dedicated to the ideals of the enlightenment
and the constant cultivation of the independent mind,
this outpost, separate from the careerism of the academy
and the internal rigidities of the tribal jerk, of
what the Czech humourist Jan Werich called the “struggle
against stupidity, the only human struggle that is
always in vain, but can never be relinquished.”
This
building takes sides, as did the man who we are gathered
here today to mark the 100 years since his birth.
George Orwell discomfited his friends, betrayed his
class, treated women like chattel, loathed “pansy
poets”, dissed “vegetarians, sandal wearers,
feminists and other cranks” and touted for British
Intelligence. He played fast and loose with the facts.
His great epics of reportage of the 1930s included
more invented and distorted facts than the entire
fictional career of Jason Blair of the New York
Times.
We
should honour this man. He had a greater duty, an
attachment to the truth that inspired two generations
of dissidents in the moral swamp that passed for intellectual
life in the Peoples’ Democracies, aka the Soviet
Empire. As Orson Welles said of Jimmy Cagney, “it
isn’t real, but it’s true.”
Someone
else inspired by Orwell was the author of the then-definitive
denounciation of the theory and practice of Stalinism,
The Great Terror, published in 1968. Around
the same time, Robert Conquest penned in verse:
Moral
and mental glaciers melting slightly
Betray the influence of his warm intent.
Because he taught us what the actual meant
The vicious winter grips its prey less tightly.
Not
all were grateful for his help, one finds,
For how they hated him, who huddled with
The comfort of a quick remedial myth
Against the cold world and their colder minds.
We
die of words. For touchstones he restored
The real person, real event or thing;
-And thus we see not war but suffering
As the conjunction to be most abhorred.
He
shared with a great world, for greater ends,
That honesty, a curious cunning virtue
You share with just the few who don’t desert
you.
A dozen writers, half-a-dozen friends.
A
moral genius. And truth-seeking brings
Sometimes a silliness we view askance,
Like Darwin playing his bassoon to plants;
He too had lapses, but he claimed no wings.
While
those who drown a truth’s empiric part
In dithyramb or dogma turn frenetic;
-Than whom no writer could be less poetic
He left this lesson for all verse, all art.
Around
the same time, another seeker after truth was less
concerned with the stitch-ups, the tortures and the
vanishings from history that occurred in Moscow and
Barcelona in 1937, than with the shifty rationalisations
among the liberal imperialists who intellectually
underwrote the “savage American assault on a
largely helpless rural population in Vietnam.”
Noam
Chomsky was taking his fellow members of the academy
to task for shirking their responsibilities. “It
is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the
truth and to expose lies”, he wrote in 1967,
and that responsibility is greater than the rest of
the citizenry:
“Intellectuals
are in a position to expose the lies of governments,
to analyse actions according to their causes and
motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western
world at least, they have the power that comes from
political liberty, from access to information and
freedom of expression. For a privileged minority,
Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities
and the training to seek the truth lying hidden
behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation,
ideology, and class interest through which the events
of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities
of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than …
the ‘responsibilities of peoples’, given
the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.”
Chomsky
famously believes that the adage of ‘speaking
truth to power’ is a crock, itself a device to
comfort the afflicted, while leaving the comfortable,
comfortable. Power already knows the truth. It does
not need to be told what it is doing already. Since
Plato, the role of intellectuals, priests, teachers,
journalists, columnists and backbench MPs is to spread
the Word, and the Word is Good, and some truths are
‘not ready for the public’ to think about,
all by themselves, so the public need some help.
Sometimes
the facts are selected, some are withheld and some
are invented. It depends on whose power interests
we are talking about. Orwell was largely concerned
about the state getting its mucky fingers on the past
through the medium of the present day’s mediators.
Perhaps that is why, when Horizon magazine
asked some writers in 1946: “Do you think the
state or any other institution should do more for
writers?” Orwell’s response was a terse
warning: “The less truck a writer has with the
state, or any other organised body, the better for
him and his work.”
Things
have changed a bit, since then. The situation has
gotten both better and worse. The spread of democracy
and western liberal values, particularly over the
past 15 years, mean that a free press and free universities
are becoming the norm in most states, worldwide. Those
two values are at the minimal treshold for membership
of the European Union, thus slum populist democracies
like Turkey and Romania are cleaning up their act
in the hope of joining the rich man’s club. In
states going the other way, towards totalitarianism,
the treatment of the press is a reliable indicator
of power’s attitude towards the aspirations of
the people. We have seen this in Zimbabwe, in many
of the states in what used to be Soviet Central Asia,
in Belarus, in the gunsights of US forces in Iraq
and the Irish government’s appalling castration
of the Freedom of Information Act.
The
bad news is the concentration of media power in corporate
hands, unaccountable to anybody who may wish to change
its operating ideology of International Monetary Fundamentalism.
Fewer and bigger corporations control more of the
broadcast and print media, and the result is a retarding
of the voices and views we can see or read.
Shareholders
are there to be bribed by dividends, and not worry
about the downsizing (very Orwellian) of newsrooms.
Instead of international stories that may nudge one’s
conscience or consciousness, we get branded telethons
of celebrities with products to plug us all into,
as we devour live sport from the camera angle of our
choice in the vain hope that the incarcerated saddoes
in the Big Brother house either shag or shoot each
other so we can switch off, and read a book, or something.
The weird thing about Big Brother is that it
turns us, the viewer (the voyeur) into Big Brother.
We can see them, all the time, checking their thoughts
for criminal tendencies, such as wanting to have a
proper conversation about something real.
I
mean, can you imagine Twat A turning to Dupe B and
saying: “Jesus, it’s almost July and my
uncle is gonna be marching at Drumcree in defence
of his civil and religious liberties. I hope the peelers
or the fenians don’t crack his head open.”
Or, “Did I ever tell you that the reason why
I am such a pathetic attention seeker and went into
this fish bowl is that my tyrannical father used to
bugger me and my drunken shrew of a mother ignored
my pleadings?” Or. “That Tony Blair is a
lying cur.”
However.
Another good sign is the internet, a force for incredible
good in the world and the side of globalisation that
the green black & red left tend not to dwell upon,
despite depending on it for their international (and
internationalist) support base. Chomsky may not get
out much on CNN, NBC, ABC, the BBC or Fox News, but
he is more widely read than ever.
The
internet has given some encouragement to those of
us in this behavioural sink who try to cling on the
such universal human values as the right to know everything
we want to know, to read stuff that we don’t
want to hear, and to laugh at ourselves. The Portadown
News and the Blanket websites are glimmers
of encouragement among a provincial-minded media that
is largely happy to tell us what we want to hear.
Much print media in Northern Ireland fits the criteria
set out by Marshall McLuhan 40 years ago. “People
don’t read a newspaper”, he wrote, “rather
they slip into it like a warm bath.”
Salam
Pax, the Baghdad Blogger, made a mockery of the Saddam-ite
terror gang’s attempt to muzzle its own people.
When Comical Ali’s goons tried to censor Al-Jazeera,
the satallite warriors told the Baathist thugs to
go and fuck themselves, in so many words, silencing
all transmissions from Iraq for 24 hours until the
cretins caved in, just in time for the arab public
to witness the ignominious collapse of the rotten
house of Hussein (may Allah spit on his grave, soon).
Al-Jazeera
did not speak truth to power. For the first time arabs
and muslims could have their television set tell some
truth to them, after decades of lies and self-serving
nationalism served up to them by their wastrel rulers.
Al-Jazeera passed the Chomsky test, and our rulers
couldn’t handle that truth, especially when it
showed the reality of modern war; namely that smart
Western bombs kill children, and dumb Iraqi bullets
kill British and US troops. When remembering George
Orwell, we should pause for a moment and pay silent
homage to the journalists killed by that most mendatious
of Orwellian terms, ‘friendly fire’, just
as we should remember Farzod Barzoft, the Observer
journalist hanged for spying by Saddam, justified
at the time by the Pope’s guest Tariq Aziz, and
ignored by the British and American governments of
the day.
In
the preface written for the Ukranian edition of Animal
Farm, Orwell gives a potted version of his life,
his colonial background, how he became a socialist
“out of disgust” with class oppression rather
than “any theoretical admiration for a planned
society”, his Damascane moment in Spain where
the Stalinist purges threatened him and his wife and
where many of his POUM comrades were killed by other
‘anti-fascists’, and his disgust at his
return to England to find “numerous sensible
and well-informed observers believing the most fantastic
accounts of conspiracy, treachery and sabotage which
the press reported from the Moscow trials’…
And so for the last ten years I have been convinced
that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential
if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.”
In
a preface written for the first English edition, but
not published until 1972, the “renegade liberal”
gets it in the neck for holding a “tendency to
argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian
methods”, the extremists in defence of liberty
who in wartime advocated the internment of suspicious
foreigners and British fascists and would soon mutate
into cold warriors or fellow travellers. “For
all I know, by the time this book is published my
view of the Soviet regime may be the generally-orthodox
one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange
one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance.
The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one
agrees with the record that is being played at the
moment.”
This
is a hard test, much more difficult than it appears
to the sensitive souls who write op-eds, do slabber
spots for the radio or read mind-flattering magazines
like Fortnight, or the New Statesman
(who refused to publish Orwell’s account of the
events of the mini-Terror in Barcelona), or Horizon,
or Gangrel, for which Orwell wrote these words
in 1946: “I knew that I had a facility with words
and a power of facing unpleasant facts.” He tested
his own beliefs and preconceptions and those of his
friends. As Conor Cruise O’Brien admitted 15
years later, “you knew that certain things he
said were true, because you winced when you heard
them.”
Who
can claim that wince-making quality these days, and
in this neck of the woods?
Take
the ‘debate’ over Iraq.
Was
it invaded? Certainly.
Was the UN bypassed and international law trashed?
Sure.
Are the Iraqi people liberated from a murderous
and racist kleptocracy? Absolutely.
Was it about oil? Damn right.
Were the chemical and biological weapons a real
threat? Obviously not.
Are the other local despots very, very worried?
You bet.
Should Tony Blair and the US neocons used a better
excuse for toppling their former client dictator?
Yes, and there was no shortage of excuses.
Are we now subjects of the most powerful empire
known to man? Get used to it.
All
of the above reasons were trotted out with predictable
selectivity by opponents and supporters of the war,
all made sincerely and with minimal thought, as the
left bleated, the ex-left demanded liberally armed
intervention and the right crowed their triumphal
distortions. All claimed Orwell’s spirit during
the row, and it is pointless to try and conscript
his ghost, but one is tempted to think of one of his
favourite Revivalist hymns:
Dare
to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone;
Dare to have a purpose firm,
Dare to make it known.
Instead,
the level of debate continues to be marked by glib
we-told-you-so pieties from peaceniks sneering at
the looting of the Baghdad museum of antiquities,
and the shifting and shifty rationales for invasion
by the war party animals.
A
half-honest reflection by a literate individual would
instead surmise that the colours of truth and justice
are shades of gray. For example, the juggling of two
statistics; the (perhaps) 3,000 civilians killed while
being liberated versus the average of 1,200 civilians
killed by Saddam’s system every week.
In net terms, that justifies cluster bombs and friendly
fire, but who would want to want to play with that
bloody abacus?
We
in the west profited from our arming and logistical
support in the 1980s. We got cheap oil and the mad
ayatollahs were contained. We turned a blind eye in
1988 to the gassing of the Kurds we betrayed since
the 1920s, and continue to betray in Turkey. We owed
them a favour. We also owed the Iraqi Shia for our
treachery when they rose up in 1991. It was a debt
of honour signed with the blood of upwards of 300,000
murdered by Saddam as our boys went home to ticker
tape parades in 1991. Call me a blood wet liberal,
but that debt was worth paying.
Orwell
was, naturally, a product of his times, his class,
his reading and the things he saw. The times they
have a-changed, and the complacency that reigned in
the West from the Fall of the Wall until September
11th 2001 have distanced us from the passions of the
era in which Orwell dwelt (and partly shaped). The
period 1917-1991 was stuffed full of the brightest
lights shining from different corners. Rereading the
missives of a random few, one is taken aback by the
combination of knowledge and sheer passion: Leon Trotsky,
Arthur Koestler, EP Thompson, Simone Weil, Isiah Berlin,
Antonio Gramsci, Conor Cruise O’Brien, WH Auden,
Raymond Aron, Rosa Luxemburg, Michael Foucault, Frantz
Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Melvin Lasky, Noam Chomsky…
What
marks Orwell out from all of the above is the attachment
to a prepackaged Higher Cause. He had the knowledge
of how the great competing systems worked, and that
seemed to drive his passion. As Mary McCarthy noted
in an astute 1969 review of his collected essays and
letters “Blair-Orwell detested and resented every
form of power; in politics, he loved rubbing his opponents'
noses in reality, the opposite of the corporate or
individual will, just as in language he hated abstraction,
the separation of mental concepts from the plurality
of the concrete.”
The
distillation of his experience among the tramps, the
miners, the imperial policemen, the intellectuals
and the murderous attentions of the Comintern in Barcelona
in 1937 were two essential and utterly timeless essays
that should be compulsory reading for any student
of politics, literature, media, theology or science.
The
Prevention of Literature and Politics and the English
Language were respectively published in January
and April 1946. They were written at the end of the
greatest test of the century’s belief systems,
The War, as it would be called in shorthand before
the hi-tech dupes of Islamic Fascism flew us into
the war we are living through right now. (Orwell once
famously opened one of his greatest essays with the
line: “As I write, highly civilised human beings
are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” A current
version might go: “… highly civilised human
beings are flying at me…”)
The
Prevention of Literature starts by assaulting
his friends, rounding upon the speakers at a rally
for freedom of speech whose “net effect …was
a demonstration in favour of censorship.” He
loathes the “continuous war atmosphere”
that “conspires to turn the writer, and every
other kind of artist as well, into a minor official.”
Economics and politics have conspired to turn those
“rebels” who should be most questioning
into opponents of “the idea of individual integrity.”
The
essay is a ferocious assault upon the temptations
and ghastly effects of totalitarianism, presciently
pointing out the “schizophrenia” such a
state depends upon to survive. In 1978, Vaclav Havel
would pen a bitterly funny equivalent chunk of samizdat
entitled The Power of the Powerless that would
energise the dissidents of Poland as well as Czechoslovakia,
based upon the lies such systems depend their subjects
to tell themselves; that lying to yourself about your
state (personal and nation) is alright because
everyone else knows that it is a lie. “It might
be possible for large areas of one’s mind to
remain unaffected by what one officially believed”,
thought Orwell.
A
case in point was Erich Honeker, the late assassin-in-chief
of the former German Democratic Republic, who spent
his final, brokenhearted days in the Chilean embassy
in Moscow (Oh irony! Compounded!). In 1993, I met
an ex-member of the politbureau of the Staatspartei
of the GDR at, appropriately enough, a conference
of the European Network of the Unemployed. A true
believer in what most Ossies called ‘former
times’, but smart enough to learn from change,
I asked him when he realised the game was up. He told
me that in 1987, the Stasi had taken aside the handful
of the politbureau that could handle the scariest
fact about the 17 million citizens of East Germany:
That two million had risked ruin and persecution by
openly applying for exit visas to the west. As far
as Honeker was aware, only 5,000 had dared make such
a public declaration of ‘treason’. Remember
that this man had put up the Berlin Wall in 1961 to
prevent ungrateful citizens escaping westwards “like
thieves in the night”, to quote the excuse in
the (discarded) East Berlin Museum of the German People.
When such a proportion of the citizenry were willing
to defy the schizophrenia of daily life and honestly
confront the lies of power, the sense of failure of
those in the know among the GDR’s ruling class
was soul-crushing.
Hoenker was told the truth two years later, in person,
by Gorbachev in June 1989, as they publicly kissed
into being and out of reality the 40th anniversary
of the German workers’ state, like a cliched
scene in a bad mafia movie. That is why, when the
protests started in Dresden that September, the apparat
knew that the example of Tiananmen Square could not
apply. The game was up.
As
a corrective to the habits of the totalitarian mind,
Orwell penned Politics and the English Language
around the same time as the above essay. “The
point is that the process is reversible… If one
gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly,
and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards
political regeneration; so that the fight against
bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive
concern of professional writers.” The essay is
a How-To guide to avoiding writing the bulk of political
language which “is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearanace
of solidity to pure wind.”
Orwell
uses an initial tactic for which he is usually overlooked;
humour. He takes apart some examples of “bad”
writing from the political and intellectual press
of his day, deconstucting each so that some or all
are shown as failing various tests.
Dying metaphors, (Ring the changes on, toe
the line, etc - “a sure sign the writer is not
interested in what he is saying”),
Operators, or verbal false limbs (render inoperative,
be subjected to, etc, “the elimination of simple
verbs”),
pretentious diction (“except for the useful
abbrevations ie, eg and etc, there is no real need
for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current
in English”),
meaningless words (“human, dead, natural
in art criticism; freedom, patriotic, justice, in
political discourse”).
It
goes beyond the mechanics of writing, and adds on
the question why one should want to write in the first
place. “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence
that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions,
thus:
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And
he will probably ask himself two more:
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”
To
do all that, of course, requires an independent mind,
uncluttered by party lines and prepackaged causes.
This
is a form of ‘policing language’ that is
miles away from the ninnying nannies of political
correctness on US campuses or the victims’ industry
in Northern Ireland. It is a form of self-discipline
that frees, rather than oppresses, the imagination.
“All issues are political issues, and politics
itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred,
and schizophrenia.” Avoid the pitfalls of bad
language, and you can think through politics with
a mind less cluttered by cliches and evasions: “Let
the meaning choose the word, and not the other way
about.”
During
that summer of 1946, after the publication of Animal
Farm, Orwell could look back on his writing since
Spain as wanting “to make political writing into
an art.” He believed that he had finally succeeded
with Animal Farm, and informed readers that
“I hope to write another (novel) fairly soon.
It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure,
but I do know with some clarity what kind of book
I want to write.” The book was published in June
1949, six months before he died of Tuberculosis. The
title came from inverting the last two digits of the
year in which he wrote 1984.
It
is true-ish that 1984 did not happen in 1984.
Much of it was happening in 1948 in Prague, Warsaw
and the Gulag. It was going on in 1984 in Guatemala,
Iran, East Timor, the psychiatric hospitals of Leningrad
and mining villages in the north of England. It is
still being lived in Zimbabwe, North Korea, Belarus,
Tibet, West Papua, Palestine, in the minds of the
Talibanate of the Islamic world, the “for us
or against us” mentality of the Warriors on Terror,
the propaganda of corporate globalisation and the
monocultural ghettos of loyalist and republican Belfast.
Before
being stolen by IBM and sugary drinks advertisers,
‘Think’, ‘Free Your Mind’ and
‘Believe nothing, question everything’ used
to be useful advice. Reclaim the clichés (as
well as the streets). In an age without ideologies,
Orwell is the perfect starting point, not for understanding
a world unforseeable half a century ago, but for the
templates for resistance to the ordered thinking of
the New World Order.
Thank
you.
John O’Farrell edited Fortnight magazine from
1995-2002. He is now a full time campaigner on European
issues. He can be contacted at jofarrell@utvinternet.com.
Thanks and acknowledgements to The Yoke, which published
parts of this in late 2002.
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