Isaac Deutscher 1955
1984 – The Mysticism of Cruelty
Source: Isaac Deutscher, Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays
(Hamish and Hamilton, London, 1955). Scanned and prepared for the
Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers. Orwell always referred to his
book as Nineteen Eighty-Four; we have kept here Deutscher’s numerical rendering of the title.
Few novels written in this generation have obtained a popularity as great as that of George Orwell’s 1984.
Few, if any, have made a similar impact on politics. The title of
Orwell’s book is a political by-word. The terms coined by him –
‘Newspeak’, ‘Oldspeak’, ‘Mutability of the Past’, ‘Big Brother’,
‘Ministry of Truth’, ‘Thought Police’, ‘Crimethink’, ‘Doublethink’,
‘Hate-week’, etc – have entered the political vocabulary; they occur
in most newspaper articles and speeches denouncing Russia and communism.
Television and the cinema have familiarised many millions of viewers on
both sides of the Atlantic with the menacing face of Big Brother and
the nightmare of a supposedly communist Oceania. The novel has served as
a sort of an ideological super-weapon in the cold war. As in no other
book or document, the convulsive fear of communism, which has swept the
West since the end of the Second World War, has been reflected and
focused in 1984.
The cold war has created a ‘social demand’ for such an ideological
weapon just as it creates the demand for physical super-weapons. But the
super-weapons are genuine feats of technology; and there can be no
discrepancy between the uses to which they may be put and the intention
of their producers: they are meant to spread death or at least to
threaten utter destruction. A book like 1984 may be used
without much regard for the author’s intention. Some of its features may
be torn out of their context, while others, which do not suit the
political purpose which the book is made to serve, are ignored or
virtually suppressed. Nor need a book like 1984 be a literary
masterpiece or even an important and original work to make its impact.
Indeed a work of great literary merit is usually too rich in its texture
and too subtle in thought and form to lend itself to adventitious
exploitation. As a rule, its symbols cannot easily be transformed into
hypnotising bogies, or its ideas turned into slogans. The words of a
great poet when they enter the political vocabulary do so by a process
of slow, almost imperceptible infiltration, not by a frantic incursion.
The literary masterpiece influences the political mind by fertilising
and enriching it from the inside, not by stunning it.
1984 is the work of an intense and concentrated, but also
fear-ridden and restricted imagination. A hostile critic has dismissed
it as a ‘political horror-comic’. This is not a fair description: there
are in Orwell’s novel certain layers of thought and feeling which raise
it well above that level. But it is a fact that the symbolism of 1984 is
crude; that its chief symbol, Big Brother, resembles the bogy-man of a
rather inartistic nursery tale; and that Orwell’s story unfolds like the
plot of a science-fiction film of the cheaper variety, with mechanical
horror piling up upon mechanical horror so much that, in the end,
Orwell’s subtler ideas, his pity for his characters, and his satire on
the society of his own days (not of 1984) may fail to communicate
themselves to the reader. 1984 does not seem to justify the description of Orwell as the modern Swift, a description for which Animal Farm provides
some justification. Orwell lacks the richness and subtlety of thought
and the philosophical detachment of the great satirist. His imagination
is ferocious and at times penetrating, but it lacks width, suppleness
and originality.
The lack of originality is illustrated by the fact that Orwell borrowed the idea of 1984,
the plot, the chief characters, the symbols and the whole climate of
his story from a Russian writer who has remained almost unknown in the
West. That writer is Evgenii Zamyatin, and the title of the book which
served Orwell as the model is We. Like 1984, We is
an ‘anti-Utopia’, a nightmare vision of the shape of things to come,
and a Cassandra cry. Orwell’s work is a thoroughly English variation on
Zamyatin’s theme; and it is perhaps only the thoroughness of Orwell’s
English approach that gives to his work the originality that it
possesses.
A few words about Zamyatin may not be out of place here: there are
some points of resemblance in the life-stories of the two writers.
Zamyatin belonged to an older generation: he was born in 1884 and died
in 1937. His early writings, like some of Orwell’s, were realistic
descriptions of the lower middle class. In his experience the Russian
revolution of 1905 played approximately the same role that the Spanish
civil war played in Orwell’s. He participated in the revolutionary
movement, was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Party (to which
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks then still belonged), and was persecuted by
the Tsarist police. At the ebb of the revolution, he succumbed to a mood
of ‘cosmic pessimism'; and he severed his connection with the Socialist
Party, a thing which Orwell, less consistent and to the end influenced
by a lingering loyalty to socialism, did not do. In 1917 Zamyatin viewed
the new revolution with cold and disillusioned eyes, convinced that
nothing good would come out of it. After a brief imprisonment, he was
allowed by the Bolshevik government to go abroad; and it was as an
émigré in Paris that he wrote We in the early 1920s.
The assertion that Orwell borrowed the main elements of 1984 from
Zamyatin is not the guess of a critic with a foible for tracing
literary influences. Orwell knew Zamyatin’s novel and was fascinated by
it. He wrote an essay about it, which appeared in the left-socialist Tribune, of which Orwell was Literary Editor, on 4 January 1946, just after the publication of Animal Farm and before he began writing 1984. The essay is remarkable not only as a conclusive piece of evidence, supplied by Orwell himself, on the origin of 1984, but also as a commentary on the idea underlying both We and 1984.
The essay begins with Orwell saying that after having for years
looked in vain for Zamyatin’s novel, he had at last obtained it in a
French edition (under the title Nous Autres), and that he was
surprised that it had not been published in England, although an
American edition had appeared without arousing much interest. ‘So far as
I can judge’, Orwell went on, ‘it is not a book of the first order, but
it is certainly an unusual one, and it is astonishing that no English
publisher has been enterprising enough to reissue it.’ (He concluded the
essay with the words: ‘This is a book to look out for when an English
version appears.’)
Orwell noticed that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World ‘must be
partly derived’ from Zamyatin’s novel and wondered why this had ‘never
been pointed out’. Zamyatin’s book was, in his view, much superior and
more ‘relevant to our own situation’ than Huxley’s. It dealt ‘with the
rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised,
mechanised, painless world’.
‘Painless’ is not the right adjective: the world of Zamyatin’s vision is as full of horrors as is that of 1984. Orwell himself produced in his essay a succinct catalogue of those horrors so that his essay reads now like a synopsis of 1984.
The members of the society described by Zamyatin, says Orwell, ‘have so
completely lost their individuality as to be known only by numbers.
They live in glass houses... which enables the political police, known
as the “Guardians,” to supervise them more easily. They all wear
identical uniforms, and a human being is commonly referred to either as
“a number” or a “unif” (uniform).’ Orwell remarks in parenthesis that
Zamyatin wrote ‘before television was invented’. In 1984 this
technological refinement is brought in as well as the helicopters from
which the police supervise the homes of the citizens of Oceania in the
opening passages of the novel. The ‘unifs’ suggest the ‘Proles’. In
Zamyatin’s society of the future as in 1984 love is forbidden:
sexual intercourse is strictly rationed and permitted only as an
unemotional act. ‘The Single State is ruled over by a person known as
the Benefactor’, the obvious prototype of Big Brother.
‘The guiding principle of the state is that happiness and freedom are
incompatible... the Single State has restored his [man’s] happiness by
removing his freedom.’ Orwell describes Zamyatin’s chief character as ‘a
sort of Utopian Billy Brown of London town’ who is ‘constantly
horrified by the atavistic impulses which seize upon him’. In Orwell’s
novel that Utopian Billy Brown is christened Winston Smith, and his
problem is the same.
For the main motif of his plot Orwell is similarly indebted
to the Russian writer. This is how Orwell defines it: ‘In spite of
education and the vigilance of the Guardians, many of the ancient human
instincts are still there.’ Zamyatin’s chief character ‘falls in love
(this is a crime, of course) with a certain I-330’ just as Winston Smith
commits the crime of falling in love with Julia. In Zamyatin’s as in
Orwell’s story the love affair is mixed up with the hero’s participation
in an ‘underground resistance movement’. Zamyatin’s rebels ‘apart from
plotting the overthrow of the state, even indulge, at the moment when
their curtains are down, in such vices as smoking cigarettes and
drinking alcohol'; Winston Smith and Julia indulge in drinking ‘real
coffee with real sugar’ in their hideout over Mr Charrington’s shop. In
both novels the crime and the conspiracy are, of course, discovered by
the Guardians or the Thought Police; and in both the hero ‘is ultimately
saved from the consequences of his own folly’.
The combination of ‘cure’ and torture by which Zamyatin’s and
Orwell’s rebels are ‘freed’ from the atavistic impulses, until they
begin to love Benefactor or Big Brother, are very much the same. In
Zamyatin:
The authorities announce that they have discovered
the cause of the recent disorders: it is that some human beings suffer
from a disease called imagination. The nerve centre responsible for
imagination has now been located, and the disease can be cured by X-ray
treatment. D-503 undergoes the operation, after which it is easy for him
to do what he has known all along that he ought to do – that is,
betray his confederates to the police.
In both novels the act of confession and the betrayal of the woman the hero loves are the curative shocks.
Orwell quotes the following scene of torture from Zamyatin:
She looked at me, her hands clasping the arms of the
chair, until her eyes were completely shut. They took her out, brought
her to herself by means of an electric shock, and put her under the bell
again. This operation was repeated three times, and not a word issued
from her lips.
In Orwell’s scenes of torture the ‘electric shocks’ and the ‘arms of
the chair’ recur quite often, but Orwell is far more intense,
masochistic-sadistic, in his descriptions of cruelty and pain. For
instance:
Without any warning except a slight movement of
O'Brien’s hand, a wave of pain flooded his body. It was a frightening
pain, because he could not see what was happening, and he had the
feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him. He did not know
whether the thing was really happening, or whether the effect was
electrically produced; but his body had been wrenched out of shape, the
joints were being slowly torn apart. Although the pain had brought the
sweat out on his forehead, the worst of all was the fear that his
backbone was about to snap. He set his teeth and breathed hard through
his nose, trying to keep silent as long as possible.
The list of Orwell’s borrowings is far from complete; but let us now
turn from the plot of the two novels to their underlying idea. Taking up
the comparison between Zamyatin and Huxley, Orwell says: ‘It is this
intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism – human
sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is
credited with divine attributes – that makes Zamyatin’s book superior
to Huxley’s.’ It is this, we may add, that made of it Orwell’s model.
Criticising Huxley, Orwell writes that he could find no clear reason why
the society of Brave New World should be so rigidly and elaborately stratified:
The aim is not economic exploitation... There is no power-hunger, no sadism, no hardness of any kind.
Those at the top have no strong motive for staying on the top, and
though everyone is happy in a vacuous way, life has become so pointless
that it is difficult to believe that such a society could endure.’ [My
italics]
In contrast, the society of Zamyatin’s anti-Utopia could endure, in
Orwell’s view, because in it the supreme motive of action and the reason
for social stratification are not economic exploitation, for which
there is no need, but precisely the ‘power-hunger, sadism and hardness’
of those who ‘stay at the top’. It is easy to recognise in this the leitmotif of 1984.
In Oceania technological development has reached so high a level that
society could well satisfy all its material needs and establish
equality in its midst. But inequality and poverty are maintained in
order to keep Big Brother in power. In the past, says Orwell,
dictatorship safeguarded inequality, now inequality safeguards
dictatorship. But what purpose does the dictatorship itself serve?
The party seeks power entirely for its own sake...
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a
dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the
revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of
persecution is persecution... The object of power is power.
Orwell wondered whether Zamyatin did ‘intend the Soviet regime to be
the special target of his satire’. He was not sure of this:
What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any
particular country but the implied aims of the industrial
civilisation... It is evident from We that he had a strong leaning towards primitivism... We is in effect a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again.
The same ambiguity of the author’s aim is evident also in 1984.
Orwell’s guess about Zamyatin was correct. Though Zamyatin was
opposed to the Soviet regime, it was not exclusively, or even mainly,
that regime which he satirised. As Orwell rightly remarked, the early
Soviet Russia had few features in common with the super-mechanised state
of Zamyatin’s anti-Utopia. That writer’s leaning towards primitivism
was in line with a Russian tradition, with Slavophilism and hostility
towards the bourgeois West, with the glorification of the muzhik and
of the old patriarchal Russia, with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Even as an
émigré, Zamyatin was disillusioned with the West in the
characteristically Russian fashion. At times he seemed half-reconciled
with the Soviet regime when it was already producing its Benefactor in
the person of Stalin. In so far as he directed the darts of his satire
against Bolshevism, he did so on the ground that Bolshevism was bent on
replacing the old primitive Russia by the modern, mechanised society.
Curiously enough, he set his story in the year 2600; and he seemed to
say to the Bolsheviks: this is what Russia will look like if you succeed
in giving to your regime the background of Western technology. In
Zamyatin, like in some other Russian intellectuals disillusioned with
socialism, the hankering after the primitive modes of thought and life
was in so far natural as primitivism was still strongly alive in the
Russian background.
In Orwell there was and there could be no such authentic nostalgia
after the pre-industrial society. Primitivism had no part in his
experience and background, except during his stay in Burma, when he was
hardly attracted by it. But he was terrified of the uses to which
technology might be put by men determined to enslave society; and so he,
too, came to question and satirise ‘the implied aims of industrial
civilisation’.
Although his satire is more recognisably aimed at Soviet Russia than
Zamyatin’s, Orwell saw elements of Oceania in the England of his own
days as well, not to speak of the United States. Indeed, the society of 1984 embodies
all that he hated and disliked in his own surroundings: the drabness
and monotony of the English industrial suburb, the ‘filthy and grimy and
smelly’ ugliness of which he tried to match in his naturalistic,
repetitive and oppressive style; the food rationing and the government
controls which he knew in wartime Britain; the ‘rubbishy newspapers
containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational
five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex'; and so on. Orwell knew
well that newspapers of this sort did not exist in Stalinist Russia, and
that the faults of the Stalinist press were of an altogether different
kind. Newspeak is much less a satire on the Stalinist idiom
than on Anglo-American journalistic ‘cablese’, which he loathed and with
which, as a working journalist, he was well familiar.
It is easy to tell which features of the party of 1984 satirise
the British Labour Party rather than the Soviet Communist Party. Big
Brother and his followers make no attempt to indoctrinate the working
class, an omission Orwell would have been the last to ascribe to
Stalinism. His Proles ‘vegetate’: ‘heavy work, petty quarrels, films,
gambling... fill their mental horizon’. Like the rubbishy newspapers and
the films oozing with sex, so gambling, the new opium of the people,
does not belong to the Russian scene. The Ministry of Truth is a
transparent caricature of London’s wartime Ministry of Information. The
monster of Orwell’s vision is, like every nightmare, made up of all
sorts of faces and features and shapes, familiar and unfamiliar.
Orwell’s talent and originality are evident in the domestic aspect of
his satire. But in the vogue which 1984 has enjoyed that aspect has rarely been noticed.
1984 is a document of dark disillusionment not only with
Stalinism but with every form and shade of socialism. It is a cry from
the abyss of despair. What plunged Orwell into that abyss? It was
without any doubt the spectacle of the Stalinist Great Purges of
1936-38, the repercussions of which he experienced in Catalonia. As a
man of sensitivity and integrity, he could not react to the purges
otherwise than with anger and horror. His conscience could not be
soothed by the Stalinist justifications and sophisms which at the time
did soothe the conscience of, for instance, Arthur Koestler, a writer of
greater brilliance and sophistication but of less moral resolution. The
Stalinist justifications and sophisms were both beneath and above Orwell’s
level of reasoning – they were beneath and above the common sense and
the stubborn empiricism of Billy Brown of London town, with whom Orwell
identified himself even in his most rebellious or revolutionary
moments. He was outraged, shocked and shaken in his beliefs. He had
never been a member of the Communist Party. But, as an adherent of the
semi-Trotskyist POUM, he had, despite all his reservations, tacitly
assumed a certain community of purpose and solidarity with the Soviet
regime through all its vicissitudes and transformations, which were to
him somewhat obscure and exotic.
The purges and their Spanish repercussions not only destroyed that
community of purpose. Not only did he see the gulf between Stalinists
and anti-Stalinists opening suddenly inside embattled Republican Spain.
This, the immediate effect of the purges, was overshadowed by ‘the
irrational side of totalitarianism – human sacrifice, cruelty as an
end in itself, the worship of a Leader’, and ‘the colour of the sinister
slave-civilisations of the ancient world’ spreading over contemporary
society.
Like most British socialists, Orwell had never been a Marxist. The
dialectical-materialist philosophy had always been too abstruse for him.
From instinct rather than consciousness he had been a staunch
rationalist. The distinction between the Marxist and the rationalist is
of some importance. Contrary to an opinion widespread in Anglo-Saxon
countries, Marxism is not at all rationalist in its philosophy: it does
not assume that human beings are, as a rule, guided by rational motives
and that they can be argued into socialism by reason. Marx himself
begins Das Kapital with the elaborate philosophical and
historical inquiry into the ‘fetishistic’ modes of thought and behaviour
rooted in ‘commodity production’ – that is, in man’s work for, and
dependence on, a market. The class struggle, as Marx describes it, is
anything but a rational process. This does not prevent the rationalists
of socialism describing themselves sometimes as Marxists. But the
authentic Marxist may claim to be mentally better prepared than the
rationalist is for the manifestations of irrationality in human affairs,
even for such manifestations as Stalin’s Great Purges. He may feel
upset or mortified by them, but he need not feel shaken in his Weltanschauung,
while the rationalist is lost and helpless when the irrationality of
the human existence suddenly stares him in the face. If he clings to his
rationalism, reality eludes him. If he pursues reality and tries to
grasp it, he must part with his rationalism.
Orwell pursued reality and found himself bereft of his conscious and
unconscious assumptions about life. In his thoughts he could not
henceforth get away from the Purges. Directly and indirectly, they
supplied the subject matter for nearly all that he wrote after his
Spanish experience. This was an honourable obsession, the obsession of a
mind not inclined to cheat itself comfortably and to stop grappling
with an alarming moral problem. But grappling with the Purges, his mind
became infected by their irrationality. He found himself incapable of
explaining what was happening in terms which were familiar to him, the
terms of empirical common sense. Abandoning rationalism, he increasingly
viewed reality through the dark glasses of a quasi-mystical pessimism.
It has been said that 1984 is the figment of the imagination
of a dying man. There is some truth in this, but not the whole truth.
It was indeed with the last feverish flicker of life in him that Orwell
wrote this book. Hence the extraordinary, gloomy intensity of his vision
and language, and the almost physical immediacy with which he suffered
the tortures which his creative imagination was inflicting on his chief
character. He identified his own withering physical existence with the
decayed and shrunken body of Winston Smith, to whom he imparted and in
whom he invested, as it were, his own dying pangs. He projected the last
spasms of his own suffering into the last pages of his last book. But
the main explanation of the inner logic of Orwell’s disillusionment and
pessimism lies not in the writer’s death agonies, but in the experience
and the thought of the living man and in his convulsive reaction from
his defeated rationalism.
‘I understand how: I do not understand why’ is the refrain of 1984.
Winston Smith knows how Oceania functions and how its elaborate
mechanism of tyranny works, but he does not know what is its ultimate
cause and ultimate purpose. He turns for the answer to the pages of ‘the book’, the mysterious classic of crimethink,
the authorship of which is attributed to Emmanuel Goldstein, the
inspirer of the conspiratorial Brotherhood. But he manages to read
through only those chapters of ‘the book’ which deal with the how. The Thought Police descends upon him just when he is about to begin reading the chapters which promise to explain why; and so the question remains unanswered.
This was Orwell’s own predicament. He asked the Why not so much about
the Oceania of his vision as about Stalinism and the Great Purges. At
one point he certainly turned for the answer to Trotsky: it was from
Trotsky – Bronstein that he took the few sketchy biographical data and
even the physiognomy and the Jewish name for Emmanuel Goldstein; and the
fragments of ‘the book’, which take up so many pages in 1984, are an obvious, though not very successful, paraphrase of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed.
Orwell was impressed by Trotsky’s moral grandeur and at the same time
he partly distrusted it and partly doubted its authenticity. The
ambivalence of his view of Trotsky finds its counterpart in Winston
Smith’s attitude towards Goldstein. To the end Smith cannot find out
whether Goldstein and the Brotherhood have ever existed in reality, and
whether ‘the book’ was not concocted by the Thought Police. The
barrier between Trotsky’s thought and himself, a barrier which Orwell
could never break down, was Marxism and dialectical materialism. He
found in Trotsky the answer to How, not to Why.
But Orwell could not content himself with historical agnosticism. He
was anything but a sceptic. His mental make-up was rather that of the
fanatic, determined to get an answer, a quick and a plain answer, to his
question. He was now tense with distrust and suspicion and on the
look-out for the dark conspiracies hatched by them against the decencies of Billy Brown of London town. They were the Nazis, the Stalinists, and – Churchill and Roosevelt, and ultimately all who had any raison d'état to defend, for at heart Orwell was a simple-minded anarchist and, in his eyes, any political movement forfeited its raison d'être the moment it acquired a raison d'état.
To analyse a complicated social background, to try and unravel tangles
of political motives, calculations, fears and suspicions, and to discern
the compulsion of circumstances behind their action was beyond
him. Generalisations about social forces, social trends and historic
inevitabilities made him bristle with suspicion. Yet, without some such
generalisations, properly and sparingly used, no realistic answer could
be given to the question which preoccupied Orwell. His gaze was fixed on
the trees, or rather on a single tree, in front of him, and he was
almost blind to the wood. Yet his distrust of historical generalisations
led him in the end to adopt and to cling to the oldest, the most banal,
the most abstract, the most metaphysical and the most barren of all
generalisations: all their conspiracies and plots and purges
and diplomatic deals had one source and one source only – ‘sadistic
power-hunger’. Thus he made his jump from workaday, rationalistic common
sense to the mysticism of cruelty which inspires 1984. [1]
In 1984 man’s mastery over the machine has reached so high a
level that society is in a position to produce plenty for everybody and
put an end to inequality. But poverty and inequality are maintained
only to satisfy the sadistic urges of Big Brother. Yet we do not even
know whether Big Brother really exists – he may be only a myth. It is
the collective cruelty of the party (not necessarily of its individual
members who may be intelligent and well-meaning people), that torments
Oceania. Totalitarian society is ruled by a disembodied sadism. Orwell
imagined that he had ‘transcended’ the familiar and, as he thought,
increasingly irrelevant concepts of social class and class interest. But
in these Marxist generalisations, the interest of a social class bears
at least some specific relation to the individual interests and the
social position of its members, even if the class interest does not
represent a simple sum of the individual interests. In Orwell’s party
the whole bears no relation to the parts. The party is not a social body
actuated by any interest or purpose. It is a phantom-like emanation of
all that is foul in human nature. It is the metaphysical, mad and
triumphant, Ghost of Evil.
Of course, Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. But the
warning defeats itself because of its underlying boundless despair.
Orwell saw totalitarianism as bringing history to a standstill. Big
Brother is invincible: ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a
boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ He projected the spectacle
of the Great Purges on to the future, and he saw it fixed there for
ever, because he was not capable of grasping the events realistically,
in their complex historical context. To be sure, the events were highly
‘irrational'; but he who because of this treats them irrationally is
very much like the psychiatrist whose mind becomes unhinged by dwelling
too closely with insanity. 1984 is in effect not so much a
warning as a piercing shriek announcing the advent of the Black
Millennium, the Millennium of damnation.
The shriek, amplified by all the ‘mass-media’ of our time, has
frightened millions of people. But it has not helped them to see more
clearly the issues with which the world is grappling; it has not
advanced their understanding. It has only increased and intensified the
waves of panic and hate that run through the world and obfuscate
innocent minds. 1984 has taught millions to look at the
conflict between East and West in terms of black and white, and it has
shown them a monster bogy and a monster scapegoat for all the ills that
plague mankind.
At the onset of the atomic age, the world is living in a mood of
Apocalyptic horror. That is why millions of people respond so
passionately to the Apocalyptic vision of a novelist. The Apocalyptic
atomic and hydrogen monsters, however, have not been let loose by Big
Brother. The chief predicament of contemporary society is that it has
not yet succeeded in adjusting its way of life and its social and
political institutions to the prodigious advance of its technological
knowledge. We do not know what has been the impact of the atomic and
hydrogen bombs on the thoughts of millions in the East, where anguish
and fear may be hidden behind the façade of a facile (or perhaps
embarrassed?) official optimism. But it would be dangerous to blind
ourselves to the fact that in the West millions of people may be
inclined, in their anguish and fear, to flee from their own
responsibility for mankind’s destiny and to vent their anger and despair
on the giant Bogy-cum-Scapegoat which Orwell’s 1984 has done so much to place before their eyes.
* * *
‘Have you read this book? You must read it, sir. Then you will know
why we must drop the atom bomb on the Bolshies!’ With these words a
blind, miserable news-vendor recommended to me 1984 in New York, a few weeks before Orwell’s death.
Poor Orwell, could he ever imagine that his own book would become so prominent an item in the programme of Hate Week?
Notes
1.
This opinion is based on personal reminiscences as well as on an
analysis of Orwell’s work. During the last war Orwell seemed attracted
by the critical, then somewhat unusual, tenor of my commentaries on
Russia which appeared in The Economist, The Observer and Tribune. (Later we were both The Observer’s correspondents
in Germany and occasionally shared a room in a press camp.) However, it
took me little time to become aware of the differences of approach
behind our seeming agreement. I remember that I was taken aback by the
stubbornness with which Orwell dwelt on ‘conspiracies’, and that his
political reasoning struck me as a Freudian sublimation of persecution
mania. He was, for instance, unshakably convinced that Stalin, Churchill
and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world, and to divide it
for good, among themselves, and to subjugate it in common. (I can trace
the idea of Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia back to that time.) ‘They are
all power-hungry’, he used to repeat. When once I pointed out to him
that underneath the apparent solidarity of the Big Three one could
discern clearly the conflict between them, already coming to the
surface, Orwell was so startled and incredulous that he at once related
our conversation in his column in Tribune, and added that he
saw no sign of the approach of the conflict of which I spoke. This was
by the time of the Yalta conference, or shortly thereafter, when not
much foresight was needed to see what was coming. What struck me in
Orwell was his lack of historical sense and of psychological insight
into political life coupled with an acute, though narrow, penetration
into some aspects of politics and with an incorruptible firmness of
conviction. [George Orwell, ‘As I Please’, Tribune, 26 January
1945 – Deutscher is not mentioned by name, and where the article has
been reproduced no reference to him is given; see The Collected Essays and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3 (Harmondsworth, 1984), p 369; George Orwell, Collected Works, Volume 17 (London, 1998), p 30; Orwell in Tribune (London, 2006), pp 235-36 – MIA.]
