George Orwell

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George Orwell
Born	Eric Arthur Blair 25 June 1903 Motihari, Bengal Province, British India
Died	21 January 1950 London, England, UK
Political orientation	Democratic socialism (claimed) Anti-communism

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), commonly known by his pen-name George Orwell, was an essayist, who called himself a 'democratic socialist'. However, he was considered a left wing anti-communist due to his anti-communist views^{[better source needed]} which led him to even collude with imperial Britain in stark contrast to the anti-authoritarian virtues he claimed to espouse. Orwell was a member of the Indian Imperial Police in British-occupied Burma and worked for the British propaganda outlet BBC.^{[better source needed]}

Life

Blair was born in a wealthy British family in 1903. He worked as an imperial official in Burma. He died of tuberculosis in London in 1950.^{[better source needed]}

Prominent works

Homage to Catalonia

Orwell's first real seminal work was the 1938 Homage to Catalonia, a memoir of his personal experience serving with the Trotskyist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) in Revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.^{[better source needed]} Despite mostly an anarcho-communist region at the time, Orwell cites Revolutionary Catalonia as the basis for his hardline dedication to democratic socialism, as well as his self-proclaimed anti-authoritarianism. There is likely some ingenuousness in his words though, as the POUM was famously anti-Leninist and Orwell from this point forward dedicated most of his literary career to denouncing/"satirizing" Marxism-Leninism. It is to note that Orwell initially tried to get a trip to Spain through the Comintern-organised International Brigades. However, Harry Pollitt rejected him due to his lack of understanding party politics and lack of anti-fascist convictions.

It is said by Herbert Matthews, a New York Times journalist covering the Spanish Civil war, that "the book did more to blacken the loyalist cause than any work written by enemies of the Second Republic." Orwell himself admitted in a letter to a friend that the book was puff piece and that he lacked much knowledge and awareness of events. Thus when interviewing the exiled Spanish Prime Minister, Juan Negrin, Orwell declined to tell his true name. Negrin for his part concluded that Orwell was naive and unworldly.

Animal Farm

Animal Farm is a 1945 novella that is meant to be an allegory for the founding of the Soviet Union and Stalin's rise to power. In the story, a farm of animals chase out their drunken owner and establish their own self-governing farm. The pigs represent the party, the humans are the bourgeoisie, and the other farm animals are the proletariat:

• Mr. Jones: Nicholas Romanov
• Old Major: Karl Marx / Vladimir Lenin
• Snowball: Leon Trotsky
• Napoleon: Joseph Stalin
• Squealer: Vyacheslav Molotov
• Boxer: Alexei Stakhanov

A small group of pigs to effectively take all the power, and one particularly narcissistic pig named Napoleon sends guard dogs after the other pigs, making himself the undisputed ruler of the farm and oppressing his fellow animals into eventually acting just like humans. However, the book mainly criticizes not the revolutionaries, but the working class as a whole.

Orwell takes an aristocratic position and believes that the people are incapable of governing themselves. Most of the book is spent depicting the animals (besides the pigs) as dumb and incapable of reasoning. When the animals learn to read, the pigs can easily read and write, the dogs can read but only read the pigs' Seven Commandments, and most of the other animals besides Muriel the goat cannot read at all. When Boxer (a representation of the proletariat) tries to learn the alphabet, he can never get past the letter D. Many other animals cannot even get past A. The pigs never repress or manipulate the other animals because they are not smart enough to rebel against them.

The book is an allegory for how Stalin supposedly led the Soviet Union to become a shadow of its former self—an authoritarian capitalist state just like its enemies—and to this day the book is one of the most famous and respected pieces of anti-communist fiction. This book helped solidify Orwell's identity as an anti-communist leftist, and is also arguably what gave significant rise to the "not real socialism" argument for AES.

The novella represents socialism in one country as the animals arming themselves with guns, whereas Snowball proposes sending pigeons to other farms to start rebellions there. It never mentions the foreign invasions of Soviet Russia, which made it necessary for the USSR to defend itself. The animals are never smart enough to decide which option to support. After the revolution, the animals banned trading with humans, but Napoleon later created trade deals with them, which is supposed to represent the NEP. Squealer convinces the other animals that trading with humans was never prohibited.

The novella has had a permanent place on the curriculum of British schools since publication. Many study guides have been written to "help" students come to the "right" conclusion; that of anti-communism. These study guides, written to be succinct enough that they can be regurgitated on-demand by students, whose aim is not to seriously study the book but simply pass exams, exist to misinform students on Marxism and the Russian revolution. Recent studies have discovered that the 1954 animated film adaptation was entirely funded by the CIA to popularize falsehoods about Stalin and the Soviet Union. Between 1952 and 1957, the CIA sent millions of balloons carrying copies of Animal Farm into Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland.^{[better source needed]}

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel set in a dystopian version of the United Kingdom (referred to as Airstrip One). The novel is a thinly veiled panegyric to the plight of Trotsky, who is represented in the novel by the character Emmanuel Goldstein. His appearance in the book is almost identical to that of Trotsky, having "a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard." Goldstein is reviled by the ruling Ingsoc Party, which is supposed to be an allegory to Stalinism. Like Animal Farm, the superstate of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four is meant to represent the Soviet Union. For example, the USSR had purges in the 1930s, and Oceania had purges in the 1950s. After Orwell's death, the CIA created a government-funded film adaptation of the novel.^{[better source needed]}

In the novel, two-way televisions monitor all Party members, while the proles are left to their own devices and seen as subhuman. Orwell was against any advance in technology and had protagonist of the book, Winston, use a steel pen instead of an "ink-pencil." Orwell did not predict any new vices or drugs for his dystopian world and had all of his characters addicted to gin and tobacco. He also did not predict the use of robots instead of humans to spy on people.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is influential in political spheres due to concepts such as Newspeak (phrases such as wrongthink are often used by the far-right today) as well as the popularization of the ideas of Big Brother (totalitarianism) and mass surveillance. Ingsoc uses Newspeak (a limited form of English) as a tool of repression, limiting dissent by limiting and abbreviating the language's vocabulary. Orwell claims that abbreviations are "totalitarian" using examples of "Comintern" for Communist International and "Gestapo" for Geheime Staatspolizei. However, it was actually the liberal leader Winston Churchill who proposed creating Basic English as the international language.

Nineteen Eighty-Four also may have represented English fear of an Irish uprising. The main antagonist is named O'Brien, and Oceania's clocks use the Catholic 24-hour system.

Criticism

Orwell's allegorical criticisms of the Soviet Union were published during the Second World War, thereby providing propaganda against the USSR at a time where many socialists were defending it in the fight against fascism.

Fascist sympathies

In his review of Mein Kampf, released during the Second World War, Orwell admitted that he did not dislike Hitler and felt that Hitler, "can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to."

Orwell's list

Despite his claimed anti-authoritarian virtues, Orwell composed lists of personalities noted to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union. This list was given to the British government and remained a secret until 1996.^{[better source needed]} The list was highly antisemitic and homophobic, with labels such as "Polish Jew" and "Jewess" and labelled some non-Jewish people like Charlie Chaplin as suspected Jews. It also described civil rights activists as "anti-white."

Attempted rapist

…in 1921, Eric had tried to rape Jacintha. Previously the young couple had kissed, but now, during a late summer walk, he had wanted more. At only five feet to his six feet and four inches, Jacintha had shouted, screamed and kicked before running home with a torn skirt and bruised hip. It was “this” rather than any gradual parting of the ways that explains why Jacintha broke off all contact with her childhood friend, never to learn that he had transformed himself into George Orwell.

— Kathryn Hughes. (2007). Such were the joys

Incidentally, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the character Julia, who is heavily inspired by Jacintha Buddicom, serves as the love-interest of Winston Smith (the anti-hero of the story and Orwell's self-insert). Winston, who initially suspects Julia of being a Party spy, later admits that he seriously contemplated raping and murdering her.

Bitter Anti-Communist

[F]ighting with the loyalists in Spain in the 1930s… he found himself caught up in the sectarian struggles between the various left-wing factions, and since he believed in a gentlemanly English form of socialism, he was inevitably on the losing side.

The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain… From then on, to the end of his life, he carried on a private literary war with the communists, determined to win in words the battle he had lost in action…

Orwell imagines no new vices, for instance. His characters are all gin hounds and tobacco addicts, and part of the horror of his picture of 1984 is his eloquent description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco.

He foresees no new drugs, no marijuana, no synthetic hallucinogens. No one expects an s.f. writer to be precise and exact in his forecasts, but surely one would expect him to invent some differences. …if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction. …

To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.

— Isaac Asimov. Review of 1984

Ironically, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is mostly projection, based on Orwell’s own job at the British Ministry of Information during WWII. (Orwell: The Lost Writings)

• He translated news broadcasts into Basic English, with a 1000 word vocabulary (“Newspeak”), for broadcast to the colonies, including India.
• His description of the low quality of the gin and tobacco came from the Ministry’s own canteen, described by other ex-employees as “dismal”.
• Room 101 an actual meeting room at the BBC.
• “Big Brother” seems to have been a senior staffer at the Ministry of Information, who was actually called that (but not to his face) by staff.

By his own admission, his only knowledge of the USSR was secondhand:

I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers.

— George Orwell. (1947). Orwell’s Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm

Nineteen Eighty-Four is supposedly a cautionary tale about what would happen if the Communists won, and yet it was based on his own, actual, Capitalist country and his job serving it.

Colonial Cop

I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. … As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting.

— George Orwell. (1936). Shooting an Elephant

Hitler Apologist

I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.

— George Orwell. (1940). Review of Adolph Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”

Orwell not only admired Hitler, he actually blamed the Left in England for WWII:

If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. …and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

— George Orwell. (1941). England Your England

Plagiarist

Nineteen Eighty-Four

It is a book in which one man, living in a totalitarian society a number of years in the future, gradually finds himself rebelling against the dehumanising forces of an omnipotent, omniscient dictator. Encouraged by a woman who seems to represent the political and sexual freedom of the pre-revolutionary era (and with whom he sleeps in an ancient house that is one of the few manifestations of a former world), he writes down his thoughts of rebellion – perhaps rather imprudently – as a 24-hour clock ticks in his grim, lonely flat. In the end, the system discovers both the man and the woman, and after a period of physical and mental trauma the protagonist discovers he loves the state that has oppressed him throughout, and betrays his fellow rebels. The story is intended as a warning against and a prediction of the natural conclusions of totalitarianism.

This is a description of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was first published 60 years ago on Monday. But it is also the plot of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a Russian novel originally published in English in 1924.

— Paul Owen. (2009). 1984 thoughtcrime? Does it matter that George Orwell pinched the plot?

Animal Farm

Having worked for a time at The Ministry of Information, [Gertrude Elias] was well acquainted with one Eric Blair (George Orwell), who was an editor there. In 1941, Gertrude showed him some of her drawings, which were intended as a kind of story board for an entirely original satirical cartoon film, with the Nazis portrayed as pig characters ruling a farm in a kind of dysfunctional fairy story. Her idea was that a writer might be able to provide a text.

Having claimed to her that there was not much call for her idea… Orwell later changed the pig-nazis to Communists and made the Soviet Union a target for his hostility, turning Gertrude’s notion on its head. (Incidentally, a running theme in all every single piece of Orwell’s work was to steal ideas from Communists and invert them so as to distort the message.)

— Graham Stevenson. Elias, Gertrude (1913-1988)

Snitch

“Orwell’s List” is a term that should be known by anyone who claims to be a person of the left. It was a blacklist Orwell compiled for the British government’s Information Research Department, an anti-communist propaganda unit set up for the Cold War.

The list includes dozens of suspected communists, “crypto-communists,” socialists, “fellow travelers,” and even LGBT people and Jews — their names scribbled alongside the sacrosanct 1984 author’s disparaging comments about the personal predilections of those blacklisted.

— Ben Norton. (2016). George Orwell was a reactionary snitch who made a blacklist of leftists for the British government

CIA Puppet

George Orwell’s novella remains a set book on school curriculums … the movie was funded by America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

The truth about the CIA’s involvement was kept hidden for 20 years until, in 1974, Everette Howard Hunt revealed the story in his book Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent.

— Martin Chilton. (2016). How the CIA brought Animal Farm to the screen

Many historians have noted how Orwell’s literary reputation can largely be credited to joint propaganda operations between the IRD and CIA who translated and promoted Animal Farm to promote anti-Communist sentiment. The IRD heavily marketed Animal Farm for audiences in the middle-east in an attempt to sway Arab nationalism and independence activists from seeking Soviet aid, as it was believed by IRD agents that a story featuring pigs as the villains would appeal highly towards Muslim audiences.

See Also

Quotes:George Orwell