A Trump anniversary needs an Orwell reminder

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.

A mix not designed to encourage an adolescent

It was 1984 that hit me particularly hard. The book introduced the notion of ‘Big Brother’ to the world: Big Brother is a man, who might be no more than a propaganda fiction, presented as the leader of Oceania, the nation where the book’s protagonist Winston Smith lives. Big Brother’s face is on posters at every street corner or on screens in people’s houses. The slogan associated with the face was ‘Big Brother is watching you’, another phrase that has entered mainstream English.

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.

A possible view of the world presented in Orwell’s 1984
Note who controls Greenland

It didn’t take a huge effort of imagination to conjure up the bloc Orwell called ‘Oceania’. It covers the Americas as a whole plus Britain and the whiter parts of its former empire. To defend itself against its rivals, it has become an authoritarian dictatorship, policing all thought, ostensibly because only such centralised power can defend against the other blocs.

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.

Nicky, our 1984 kid, asleep. A couple of years later

Words that echo

It’s such a pleasure to be visited by friends you haven’t seen for years. 

We’ve known Christiane and Jean, French friends who live near Marseille, for twenty years or so, though we hadn’t seen them for ages. With good friends like these, though, when you meet up again, it’s as though you’d never been apart. The conversation virtually picks up where you’d left it off.

One of the subjects that came up during this visit was the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus. You know, the man best known for his short but powerful novel, The Outsider. I recently re-read one of his books, The Plague, but after listening to Jean’s tribute to his remarkable compatriot, I felt it was time to go back to another I’d liked while I was studying French literature, oh, way back there in prehistory. 

That novel was The Fall. The Outsider and The Plague are set in Camus’s native Algeria, with the Mediterranean lapping at its shores. Sea bathing is one of the central symbols of the novels, whether you stay out – refusing communion with nature – or go in – communing with nature and other people (in The Plague, a night swim by the two protagonists is a key moment).

The Fall is different. It’s set in Amsterdam and the sea is grey and cold. Far from being an inviting place for communion, it’s alien, unattractive, awash with “the bitter water of my baptism”. The book is unusual, as it’s a second person narrative: all those references to ‘you’ can feel like a direct reference to us, the readers. And it’s about how we create barriers between ourselves and the rest of mankind, about cold alienation from other people, about a deliberate indifference or even hostility towards the possibility of communion.

But then, while I was re-reading the novel, or rather listening to the audible version, one passage struck me particularly hard.

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you well know, dreams of being a gangster and ruling over society by violence alone. Since that isn’t as easy as reading specialist novels might lead you to believe, one generally turns to politics and runs towards the cruellest of the parties. 

Orwell (left) and Camus
Outstanding writers with more than that in common

The words rang a bell. I got hold of George Orwell’s 1984 and went hunting through it until I found the following exchange from the interrogation of the central character, Winston Smith:

‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’ 

Winston thought. 

‘By making him suffer,’ he said.

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain… 

Later, the interrogator concludes:

There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. … But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

Not a feel-good vision of the future, but then as anyone knows who’s read 1984, it’s nobody’s idea of a feel-good book.

What struck me most, however, was the way that it presents, in a more extensive form, the same vision of the world that the speaker in Camus’ The Fall describes. There is a certain kind of man who seeks power through violence, who wants to plant a boot on a human face. It’s a pretty bleak view of power and how it’s likely to be used, and it seems to be shared by these two novelists.

That’s not surprising in writers who’d not that long before emerged from the stress of particularly vicious wars.

Orwell had served for a time in the Spanish Civil War, an experience he chronicles compellingly in Homage to Catalonia. Then he’d lived through the Second World War in Britain.

Camus had lived through the Nazi occupation of France. He edited, at huge danger to himself, the resistance newspaper Combat. Despite Gestapo oppression, at its height the paper was printing nearly 200,000 copies daily.

1984 was published in 1949. The Fall came out just seven years later. 

Both authors were tubercular. Both died depressingly young, coincidentally both at 46 years of age. In Orwell’s case, it was the TB that killed him; Camus died in a still more senseless way, in a car accident.

War, tuberculosis, the totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union (which was continuing) and in Germany (only recently defeated) might seem like the source of the shared bleakness of the books. That’s a conclusion too far, since there is a far more optimistic tone in Camus’s work overall: he does see an alternative attitude to life that can counteract the inclination to stamp a boot on a human face. The Fall is a denunciation of a man who represents the antithesis of the pursuit of communion Camus promotes in the other novels.

In any case, I’m not sure that the negativity both books portray merely reflects the times in which they were written. I mean, have the overthrow of Nazi Germany and the collapse of Soviet Russia, really dealt a massive, potentially fatal, blow to the regimes that want to crush through violence?

Vladimir Putin seems to embody the attitudes of the interrogator in Orwell’s 1984. What can Putin hope for in his war on Ukraine? He can’t be after money. He’s spent years corruptly amassing a huge personal fortune, but that’s surely just a safety net, in case he ever has to get out, isn’t it? While he stays in power, he can have anything he would otherwise have to buy, simply by announcing his desire. Not just his needs but his wants are fully catered for. The cruelty of his regime is surely just the naked exercise of power. He can’t think it’s good for anyone inside or outside Russia.

And what about Donald Trump? When he talked recently about the need to suspend items of the US constitution to enable him to continue to exercise power, what was he expressing but the would-be autocrat’s resentment at being denied the right to rule as his will dictates?

Camus and Orwell were superb authors. That’s a good enough reason to read these books. We should, however, avoid thinking that they’re addressed only to their contemporaries. 

They express warnings we’d do well to heed today.

Brexit: some of the people apparently fooled all of the time. And happy with it

“No one in this world,” H L Mencken claimed, “so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Mencken wasn’t particularly charitable and the judgement is harsh, but the Brexit vote and its consequences do seem to confirm his point. Or at least Lincoln’s view that you can fool some of the people, all of the time.

The pro-EU campaign was unfortunately led by a number of the weakest politicians we’ve had in Britain for decades: David Cameron and George Osborne for the Tories, Jeremy Corbyn for Labour. The first two came up with dire predictions of what would happen after a Brexit vote, which have naturally not been fulfilled – we’re still in the EU, for Pete’s sake, how could a disaster have happened already? And even when things start to slip, nothing happens that fast in economics. Even the crash of 2007-2008 took pretty much a year to develop fully.

As for Corbyn, he said practically nothing throughout the entire campaign, which at least has the merit of making him immune from being disproved by events.

On the other side of the fence, there were Labour figures such as Gisela Stuart MP, campaigning with the anti-immigrant lobby though she’s German-born herself, renegade Labourites like David Owen who split Labour in the eighties, the hard right like Nigel Farage of UKIP or nearly-as-hard right of the Conservative Party, such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (the latter so disloyal, to rebels and loyalists alike, that not even the Tories can stomach him in government any longer).

As the devil has the best songs, so the Brexiters had the best campaign. They travelled up and down the country in a battle bus emblazoned with slogans pledging that Brexit would save “£350 million a week” that could be used for the NHS.

Economical with the truth, effective for the campaign
The battle bus with the £350m claim

The figure was a lie and plenty of people pointed it out. But the lie took hold and many voters believed it and passed it on. Fool me once, they say, shame on you. The Leave campaigners certainly fooled enough people once to feel that shame, but clearly don’t: in fact, lying served them so well that they’re using the tactic again.

The campaign has morphed into “Change Britain” but the usual suspects are back: Gove, Johnson, Stuart and Owen are heading the organisation once more. What are they saying about that £350 million pledge?

It’s brilliant! They’re saying absolutely nothing at all. Dead silence. To admit it was a con trick would be out of the question and I didn’t expect it. But simply to pretend it never happened is pure George Orwell.

Instead they’re now offering to fund agriculture, poorer regions of the UK, scientific research and the universities out of savings generated by Brexit. In other words, to replace the funding that the EU currently provides and which we’d continue to receive if we didn’t leave.

There can be only one judgement of that pledge: it’s worth exactly the same as the one they made before. There’s zero chance of its ever being honoured. That’s not a problem, though: these are promises not intended to be fulfilled. They’re only intended to suck in the gullible again. And just watch: the gullible will lap them up.

Fool me twice, they say, shame on me. Plenty should feel that shame but just like the con artists themselves, they’ll know no shame. Because they don’t even know they’re being fooled.

Some of the people, you see. All of the time.

A mark of our times: the password bane

Have you read Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s brilliant, harrowing and entertaining account of his time in the International Brigades in Spain’s Civil War?

At one point, he talks about the tricky problem of passwords.

The difficult passwords which the army was using at this time were a minor source of danger. They were those tiresome double passwords in which one word has to be answered by another. Usually they were of an elevating and revolutionary nature, such as Cultura – progreso, or Seremos – invencibles, and it was often impossible to get illiterate sentries to remember these highfalutin’ words. One night, I remember, the password was Cataluña – heroica, and a moon-face peasant lad named Jaime Domenech approached me, greatly puzzled, and asked me to explain.

‘Heroica – what does heroica mean?’

I told him that it meant the same as valiente. A little while later he was stumbling up the trench in darkness, and the sentry challenged him:

’Alto! Cataluña!’

‘Valiente!’ yelled Jaime, certain that he was saying the right thing.

Bang!

However, the sentry missed him. In this war everyone always did miss everyone else, when it was humanly possible.

Passwords are not quite so dangerous these days but, sadly, they are ubiquitous. Far from concerning only the military, they affect us all. And the worst of it is that we have so many. Every card has its own, doesn’t it? And don’t you dare forget it. Have you ever stood at a supermarket till, at the head of a long queue, racking your brain for that number you’d completely memorised and, naturally, never written down, while the display points out you’re on your third and last attempt and the other shoppers are all looking at you with undisguised disdain and impatience?

Nor is it just cards. You have PINs and code for every on-line service, computer, tablet and, of course, phone.

Mobile phones are a wonderfully convenient invention. Now people I don’t want to talk to can catch me more or less anywhere I go. I no longer have to wait to be home to be hassled by somebody trying to sell me insurance I don’t want.

It’s also wonderful that phones will even update their own operating systems, and even do it overnight if you like, so you don’t have to pay any attention to them while they do it.

Unfortunately, that’s when the password curse hits you.

Oh no! What a nightmare.

Because since the phone has restarted, it won’t accept your thumb print any more. So this time you have to remember a passcode you chose, an immensely memorable string of numbers which has now completely slipped your memory and which, naturally, you didn’t write down.

The birth and death year of some historical character you couldn’t forget? No, that was last time. The first eight figures of pi? No, that was the time before. The Avogadro constant? No, you have no idea what that even is.

So you end up staring at a screen that is entirely unmoved by your fury and exasperation but simply keeps dumbly demanding the same lost code. Appalling. Especially as you know there’s no way around it: there’s no one to ask, no help to solve the problem, no escaping the dilemma that you either remember the code eventually or you’re stuck.

It’s not as bad as in Homage to Catalonia, since nobody shoots at you, accurately or inaccurately. But if it’s not that bad, the mobile phone and its humble passcode still provide one of the great banes of our lives today.

Where sex is linked with obligation. And gratitude

George Orwell is perhaps the best known exponent of the idea that language can so deeply affect ideas that someone who can cut certain words out will make certain thoughts impossible. 

It’s a highly dubious proposition – after all, I’ve discovered recently in the course of some translation work, that it’s practically impossible to translate the neat French term ‘acharnement  thérapeutique’ into English, although the idea – of excessive zeal in pursuit of medical treatment of a patient who is unlikely to benefit from it – exists just as much in the English-speaking world and we can think as much about it, or as little, as the French. Lacking the expression, we just use some longer form of words that says the same thing.

Even so, there’s something extremely appealing in the concept of ‘Newspeak’ in Orwell’s 1984 with its ambition to produce a language in which it is actually impossible to think critically about the government. Appealing in the sense of ‘interesting’, that is – I'm not pretending it would be attractive to see it happen. In any case, even if it's hard to believe that it could ever be wholly possible, I can understand why it would stimulate a fine thinker writing in a world which had only been free of Hitler for two years and was still having to live with Stalin.

In any case, at a more limited level, it’s certainly true that linguistic habits can influence thought. That’s what lies behind the move towards ‘political correctness’ which isn’t entirely as laughable as its most outspoken critics suggest. There was something slightly odd about a situation where in English we had titles for women which indicated their marital status, but not for men. In my own lifetime, it has been amusing to see how the word ‘Ms’ has gone from being regarded as a laughable barbarism to being widely accepted.

Orwell - something to the idea that language affects thought?

That kind of gender-specific linguistic usage is just the kind of thing we can perhaps tackle by linguistic means. It’s particularly strong in languages that use grammatical gender, of course, a fact turned to good account by the character of Jim in Truffaut’s masterpiece Jules et Jim, when he summarises the incompatibility between France and Germany with the statement that the Moon is feminine and the Sun masculine in French, while in German it’s the other way round. Not sure how significant that really is, but in the context of the film it feels as though it ought to be.

So it’s been fascinating to discover how something as simple as gratitude is handled in Portugal. Firstly, you don’t offer thanks in this country – you declare yourself to be under an obligation. ‘Obrigado’, I would say. It’s probably quite a good way of thinking of things – gratitude is an obligation, isn’t it?

Interestingly, Danielle would have to describe herself as obrigada. Being an adjective the word agrees with the gender of the subject.

So a Portuguese woman expresses her thanks, and therefore her sense of obligation, differently from men.  Whether that means they honour their obligations differently, and whether the difference applies only to Portugal, I leave it to others, much better qualified than I am, to determine for themselves.