In the middle of 1948, George Orwell fought a battle to the death. The British writer who had fought in the Spanish Civil War was dealing with the manuscript of a bold, politically controversial work, and with his increasingly deteriorating health. “I am not satisfied with the book,” he wrote to his agent. “I think it’s a good idea, but the execution would have been better if I hadn’t written it under the influence of tuberculosis.” Widowed and with a four-year-old son, Orwell had taken refuge on the Scottish island of Jura, in a house without electricity, with his typewriter, radio, and minimal comforts. After completing the manuscript in difficult conditions, he was admitted to a sanitarium. “I should have done this two months ago,” he told David Astor, his editor at The Observer, “but he wanted to finish that damn book.”
In all probability the most gravitating political novel of the 20th century, 1984 it was published in June 1949. Months later, in January 1950, Orwell lost his fight against tuberculosis. 70 years after his death, however, Orwell’s intellectual victory seems undeniable.
Without being an accomplished stylist and with resources closer to craftsmanship than great art, Orwell distinguished himself for his courage, honesty, and intellectual nonconformity. His two novels, Rebelion on the farm and 1984, and the report Homage to Catalonia are warnings against totalitarianism. Conservative in his tastes and politically leftist, he wrote against imperialism, fascism and Stalinism.
Orwell’s heritage has permeated our culture: some of his phrases and concepts have taken root in the collective conscience and are frequent in public debate, such as Big Brother, the Thought Police, the Two Minutes of Hate and the Ministry of True. His surname was even transformed into an adjective: Orwellian is perhaps the most appropriate expression to describe repressive environments.
In the history of the 125-year-old New York Public Library, the most requested book is Orwell’s 1984. Similarly, in our country, the dystopian novel is one of the most requested in the Digital Public Library during quarantine. In turn, Paramount Studios announce the filming of 2084, a new film version from 1984 adapted to the aesthetics of The Matrix.
In the midst of the pandemic, the idea of a Big Brother who watches over and restricts freedoms thanks to technology, is one of the fears that authors such as Yuval Noah Harari have expressed. Likewise, his concepts related to language and consciousness are associated with today’s cultural wars.
“Who controls the past against the future. And whoever controls the present controls the past, ”Orwell wrote lucidly. Eventually, the phrase acquires renewed validity in these days of historical revisionism. In the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as in Chile last year, street protests brought down historically problematic statues.
In the current polarized debate in the United States, where 150 artists, academics and writers wrote an open letter in favor of freedom of expression and against dogmatism in public discussion, Orwell’s lessons reach new readings. The letter published in Harper’s magazine alerted to a censorship environment in publishers, media and universities, with academics and writers fired for spreading ideas deemed inappropriate.
Signed by ideologically diverse authors such as Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, JK Rowling and Francis Fukuyama, the text responds to a moment of great influence on social networks, where the arguments are usually replaced by anger or intimidation.
In his essay Press freedom, intended as a prologue to Rebelion on the farm and which remained unpublished until 1972, Orwell describes an analogous situation: “If publishers strive not to publish books on certain subjects, it is not for fear of prosecution, but for fear of public opinion,” he wrote. “The sinister thing about literary censorship in England is that it is mostly voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts can be kept in the dark, without the need for an official ban. ”
Certainly, Orwell’s ideas do not only affect the left: with the advance of right-wing populisms and the spread of “alternative facts”, “post-truth”, fake news and xenophobic campaigns, for many they made sense again the manipulations of the truth and the two minutes of hate. “I think Donald Trump would have amused Dad in an ironic way,” said Richard Blair, Orwell’s son, in 2017. “You may have thought, ‘There goes the kind of man I wrote about all those years ago.'”
Born in Burma in 1903 as Eric Blair, an Eton scholarship student, Orwell joined the Burmese imperial police, where he learned about the evils of colonialism and felt very close to “the oppressed.”
Similarly, in the Spanish Civil War, where he fought on the side of a socialist faction, he experienced the evils of Stalinism. Orwell was shot in the neck, putting him on the brink of death. Although he never fully recovered from it, the most painful wound was observing the persecution of those suspected of Trotskyism and anarchism, as well as the manipulation of history.
“In a time of peace, I could have devoted myself to writing ornate or merely descriptive books … But the way things are, I have been forced to become a kind of pamphleteer,” he noted. “Every line I have written since 1936 I have created, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and in favor of democratic socialism.”
He also had the ability to observe the persuasive power of Nazism. In your comment of Mi lucha noted: “While socialism, and even capitalism, have told the people: ‘I offer you to have a good time’, Hitler says to his people ‘I offer you fight, danger and death’, and the result is that the nation throws itself at his feet. “
Even with the ethical virtues of his work, Orwell encountered overwhelming opposition, even among those on the opposite side of Stalinism. The most emblematic case is that of the poet and editor TS Eliot. Even with his conservative position, Eliot considered it inconvenient to publish Rebellion on the farm. In his letter of rejection he argues that the point of view, “which in general I understand to be Trotskyist”, does not seem “the correct one” from which to “criticize the political situation of the present moment” and, finally, “it is not convincing”.
But after its edition, in 1945, the book achieved wide resonance. Orwell’s satisfaction, in any case, was not complete: in March, while he was in Paris as a correspondent for The Observer and a year after adopting his son Richard, his wife Eileen died in hospital.
With its corrosive maxim that “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others,” the account found mixed reactions. In the prologue, Orwell foresaw hostile responses: “I am sure that the reaction it will provoke in most English intellectuals will be very simple: ‘It should not have been published.'”
With his health increasingly precarious, Orwell spent his last years shaping his most famous novel. In it, Winston Smith is an official in the Ministry of Truth, devoted to news and fine arts. They complete the government, led by Big Brother, the Ministry of Peace, dedicated to War; the Ministry of Love, responsible for order, and the Ministry of Abundance, in charge of the economy.
In the Ministry of Truth not only is history rewritten, the new language is also elaborated. “You don’t understand the beauty of the destruction of words. Don’t you know that the new language is the only language in the world whose vocabulary is reduced every day? ”Says an official to Winston. “Don’t you see that the ultimate goal of the new language is to narrow the scope of thought? In the end, we will make the crime of thought literally impossible, because there will be no words to express it. ”
When published in 1949, the Daily News wrote that 1984 was an attack on British Labor. Orwell publicly denied it. His goal, he said, is “to show the perversions of which a centralized economy is capable, which have already been partly realized under communism and fascism.”
“Those regimes are gone, but Orwell’s book continues to define our nightmares,” says Dorian Linksey, author of the essay. The Ministry of Truth (2019).
Often rejected by the left and claimed by the right, 1984 became a controversial and mythically contoured work, as Umberto Eco has said. With his plea for freedom, he has identified generations. “During the Cold War, it was a book on totalitarianism. In the 1980s, it became a warning about technology. Today, it is primarily a defense of the truth, “says Dorian Linksey.
Christopher Hitchens, perhaps his most eloquent intellectual heir, in his book Why Is Important Orwell considers that the right’s attempts to appropriate its legacy are not legitimate. “He was conservative about many things, but politics was not among them,” he wrote. For Hitchens, Orwell’s great legacy is his opposition to ideological conformity. “What he illustrates, from his commitment to language as a partner in truth, is that ‘opinions’ don’t really matter; what matters is not what you think but how you think, and that politics is relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of lasting. ” And among them, of course, an idea that appears today on the front of the BBC building, in London, where he worked between 1941 and 1943: “If freedom means something, it is the right to tell people what they don’t want hear”.
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