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George Orwell died in 1950 after having written a number of enduring political novels.
One of them, Animal Farm, was rejected by a publisher
because “We don’t print children’s books.”
While writing 1984, a dystopian novel that gave full
treatment to the logical outcome of a society well soaked in the brine of
totalitarianism, Orwell, then suffering a fatal bout of tuberculosis, retired
to the remote island of Jura. He was -- among a slew of writers clamoring
for public notice, the better to sell books -- a modern version of the Desert
Monks of the 3rd century AD. One needs a certain amount of solitude
and focus to turn the fables of modernity on their ears.
The book, published in June 1949, was Orwell’s ninth
completed in his lifetime. Orwell was a pre-postmodern democratic socialist,
and 1984 centers on the ravages of an authoritarian state modeled on
Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. Beneath the surface, all models of the totalistic-state
are the same, never mind that Hitler and Stalin, following Hitler’s attack on
Russia later in World War II, made the two best-buddy world conquerors
irreconcilable enemies at war’s end.
Orwell described 1984 as a satire and a display of the "perversions to which a
centralized economy is liable… What it is really meant to do is to discuss the
implications of dividing the world up into 'Zones of Influence’ (I thought of
it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran
Conference), and in
addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of
totalitarianism."
Politics and the English Language, published in (1946), is a late production.
Orwell is concerned
in the essay with the political uses of language: “Political language – and
with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to
Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all
in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to
time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless
phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting
pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other
lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.”
To use a term he
would be the first to condemn as meaningless and feeble, Orwell “pulls no
punches” when he condemns political speech as non-visual imprecision: “…
political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and
sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the
inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the
huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the
roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectification of frontiers. People are
imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to
die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of
unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things
without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some
comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say
outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good
results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
“While freely
conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the
humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain
curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant
of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been
called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete
achievement.”
Postmodern
journalists should pay attention. Politically charged words are instruments
designed to portray falsely the reality that lies “right under our noses,” as
Orwell said in a different context. And the most difficult thing journalists
are called upon to do is first to see
the reality that lies right under their noses and then to cast it into words
that adequately portray the living reality of the images before them, the realities, that dance before their
senses.
This is not an easy
task because, once you have accepted a meaningless political word-salad or a
reality defying hyperbole or a politically charged half-truth, your commitment
to a false representation actually distorts any related future reality. False
reality travels on a fictional highway to which there is no exit. A lie, Mark
Twain is said to have said, “can travel half way around the world while the
truth is still putting its boots on.”
Those who believe
Orwell does not speak to the postmodern progressive world should busy
themselves counting the ‘verbal refuse” in this New Yorker interview with John Mearsheimer -- Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the
Crisis in Ukraine: For years, the political scientist has
claimed that Putin’s aggression toward Ukraine is caused by Western
intervention. Have recent events changed his mind?
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