It may not be the best literary diet for a twelve-year-old, to read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World one week, and George Orwell’s 1984 the next. Not at least if he wants to retain an innocent, rose-tinted view of the world. I certainly didn’t when I raced through those two books, emerging somewhat shellshocked by the experience.
The dystopia Orwell described saw the world divided into three blocs. He finished the book in 1948 (the title came from reversing the last two figures). That was just three years after the Second World War, which had been dominated by the Soviet Union fighting in alliance with the United States and the British Empire. At the end of the war, the Soviets had extended their control significantly westward, into Eastern and Central Europe. The British Empire was in decline, but both Britain itself and most of its former imperial holdings were closely bound to the United States.
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| A possible view of the world presented in Orwell’s 1984 Note who controls Greenland |
The second of these, clearly based on the old Soviet Union and just as oppressive as the Soviet state and Oceania, is ‘Eurasia’. That’s Russia extended westward to the Atlantic and including all of continental Europe.
Meanwhile, in the Far East, a third bloc has emerged, covering China and Japan and their neighbours, called ‘Eastasia’.
The three powers were in a constant state of war, in which Oceania allied with one or other against the third, but in a cynical but highly effective strategic move to guarantee their own survival, all three kept the fighting away from their homelands and concentrated mostly in Africa. There war would cause no damage at home while providing a distraction from domestic troubles.
Government in Oceania was provided through four ministries.
- Minipax, the Ministry of Peace, concerned with prosecuting war
- Miniplenty, the Ministry of Plenty, concerned with rationing
- Minitrue, the Ministry of Truth, concerned with propaganda
- And Miniluv, the Ministry of Love, the most frightening of them all, concerned with crushing all possible dissent, though its secret police (the thought police – another phrase of Orwell’s that has entered the general language), its inquisitors and its torture chambers.
At the heart of the regime is the lie. It’s perhaps best summarised by its three slogans, picked out in giant lettering on the side of the ministry building:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The lie doesn’t concern only the present and future. Minitrue also brings the past into line with present concerns. So when Oceania ends an alliance with Eurasia to fight Eastasia, and instead allies with Eastasia to fight Eurasia, it’s important for history to record that this was always so. Winston Smith, who worked in the ministry, saw people quickly adapting to the new ‘truth’ that:
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
At one point, Smith, who is increasingly at variance with the regime he serves and keeping a diary in which he illegally records his own opinions (behaviour officially classified as ‘thoughtcrime’), writes that he can understand how the system works, but not why. That will be made clear to him later by a senior member of the party:
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.
Of course, Orwell meant all this as a cautionary tale, a warning of how things might go if we weren’t careful to ensure they didn’t. As the actual year 1984 arrived, many of us felt some relief that, while there were clear trends towards the kind of authoritarianism Orwell had warned against, overall things weren’t too bad and democracy seemed reasonably secure.
Today, on the first anniversary of the start of Donald Trump’s second term as president, anxiety seems much more appropriate than relief.
He’s busy constructing himself an Oceania of his own. He’s produced an updated, though not improved, version of the Monroe doctrine, which he calls the Donroe doctrine, identifying the Americas as an exclusive domain of the US. He wants to add Greenland to it. Britain, as attached as ever to belief in a special relationship with the US even though it isn’t reciprocated by the Americans, may let itself be sucked in. After all, Brexit pulled the UK out of its association with its European neighbours, leaving it vulnerable to increased US domination.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin seems intent on building Eurasia. For the moment, it hasn’t gone as far or as fast as he might like, with only Ukraine invaded and proving a harder nut to crack than he’d hoped. But it’s clear that he’d be more than happy to move further westward just as soon as he can.
And the great winner in all the global posturing has been China, rapidly moving ahead of the US in key sectors such as green energy production, electric cars and, with increasing probability, even AI. At the same time, it’s growing its military power fast. Doesn’t that sound like a great core for a real Eastasia?
Internally, the latter day Eurasia and Eastasia are both despotically authoritarian and oppressive regimes. Now Trump is emulating them. He’s sending masked armed men into US cities not sufficiently devoted to his worship. We’ve seen them opening fire on civilians without justification, causing them serious injury or even, in at least one instance, death. And, as in Winston Smith’s Minitrue, this is all backed up by a tissue of lies that presents an innocent victim as a terrorist, and anyone who dares oppose Trump as a criminal.
Will there be military force deployed at polling stations in the November midterm elections, to intimidate possible opponents? Will they be seizing ballot results to ‘correct’ them to suit Trump? Will this be endorsed by Trump acolytes in an ever-increasing circle of compliant – or complicit – courts and media organisations?
Trump’s turning what Orwell meant as a cautionary tale into an instruction manual.
It feels to me as though we ought to pay a lot more attention to Orwell’s warnings. At last, some statesmen seem to be waking up. Gavin Newsom, governor of California, today warned that it’s time for European leaders to end their complicity with Trump. The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has called for the non-Orwellian powers to pull together to resist abuse by the superpowers of Russia, China and the US. And French President Emmanuel Macron has warned against the emergence of a world ‘where international law is trampled under foot’.
We need to hear a lot more leaders voicing that kind of message. And a lot more voters backing them, even if it implies new costs. Because the alternative would mean that Orwell only got the date wrong. Perhaps by as little as half a century.
If we’re not careful, 1984 from being a past date will become a future destiny.
Postscript
I need to put in a good word for 1984 (the year, not the book). That was when our youngest son was born. While he could sometimes drive us crazy, he brought us a lot of joy, a lot more often. It’s certain that Trump has brought us much more vexation and, for anyone but his billionaire paymasters, practically nobody any joy at all.
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| Nicky, our 1984 kid, asleep. A couple of years later |
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