1984 George Orwell

Many of the predictions made by George Orwell in his book 1984 in relation to "Big Brother" surveillance, corruption of language and control of history have already come about to a great extent in Communist countries and to some extent in the West. The powers of security police in Western countries to intercept mail and tap phones have often been extended, police agencies keep numerous files on law-abiding citizens, and more and more public officials have the right to enter private homes without a warrant. Many government departments keep computerized information on citizens and there is a danger that this information will be fed into a centralized data bank.

Attempts by law enforcement agencies to obtain more information through informer schemes, through new law enforcement agencies, and through new techniques such as computerization of information, are understandable, but the cumulative effect of such Big Brother activities is to make countries such as the United States, Britain and Australia increasingly totalitarian societies. The corruption of language described in 1984 is widespread in the media today, with "Newspeak" terms such as democratic, socialist, fascist, war criminal, freedom fighter, racist and many other expressions being used in a deliberately deceptive, propagandistic way to whip up mass hysteria or simply to ensure that people can never achieve even an approximation of the truth.

Control of the Past
The fact that almost all media commentary, book reviews and feature articles about the book 1984 have ignored the crucial role of controlling the past indicates that Orwell's prophecy has already been partially fulfilled. The central theme of his book, the control of history, has already been largely written out of references to his book and has disappeared down the memory hole.1

The book's hero, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth rewriting and falsifying history. The Ministry writes people out of history -- they go "down the memory hole" as though they never existed. The Ministry also creates people as historical figures who never existed. Big Brother, who controls the State of Oceania, uses "thought police" to ensure that people in the inner and outer Party are kept under control. Oceania is at perpetual war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. Alliances between these three states change without rational explanation. "Hate weeks" are organized against Goldstein, the leader of an alleged underground opposition to Big Brother, and hate sessions are organized against either Eurasia or Eastasia. O'Brien, a member of the inner Party, pretends to Smith that he is part of the Goldstein conspiracy against Big Brother. He asks Smith what he would most like to drink a toast to. Smith chooses to drink a toast, not to the death of Big Brother, the confusion of the Thought Police, or Humanity, but "to the past." Both Smith and O'Brien, the main characters of 1984, agree that the past is more important. Unfortunately, almost all of last year's media commentary about Orwell's greatest book ignored the importance of the past and control of the past as a theme in 1984. The extent of censorship of history is indicated by suppression of the fact that Orwell originally considered giving the title 1948 to his book because of widespread Big Brother tendencies already in the year 1948, including control of history.2 It is also indicated by the suppression of the fact that Orwell queried the allegation that there were gas chambers in Poland.

Orwell wrote that

indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be doubt about the most enormous events... .The calamities that are constantly being reported -- battles, massacres, famines, revolutions -- tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. Probably the truth is undiscoverable but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion ... 3

Because of his experience in the Spanish civil war that media reports of the conflict bore no relation to what was happening, Orwell developed a great skepticism about the ability of even a well intentioned and honest writer to get to the truth. He was generally skeptical of atrocity stories.

It should be noted that Orwell worked for the BBC for a time, and the Ministry of Truth is modeled to some extent on the BBC. Orwell noted that the BBC put out false hate propaganda during World War II, and controlled history by censoring news about the genocidal Allied policy of leveling German cities by saturation bombing. Orwell's beliefs about the control of the past, including the recent past, also derived from his experiences in the Spanish civil war, where he found that "no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain for the first time I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts."4

The popular perception of history is based on brainwashing by the mass media, indoctrination by the education system, peer group pressure, self-censorship and television "docudramas." Docudramas such as Winds of War; Tora, Tora, Tora; Gandhi; Gallipoli; and Holocaust, which pervade people's 1984-like telescreens, are a blend of fact and fiction. They give a clear and believable, but usually completely misleading view, of historical events. Such devices to indoctrinate and mislead people are not new. Shakespeare's docudramas, such as Richard III, served a similar purpose. The pervasiveness of television and widespread literacy make people more susceptible to brainwashing by Big Brother agencies than was possible in the past. The twentieth century is the century of mass propaganda. Due to different systems of propaganda, people in different countries such as Russia, China, and the United States will have quite different beliefs about history. The "Winston Smiths" in Communist countries who query approved history are likely to be more harshly treated than their counterparts in the West.

Book Censorship and Treatment of Dissidents
Many of the books mentioned in this essay are, for a variety of reasons, including direct censorship, trade boycott and self-censorship by booksellers, distributors and librarians, difficult to obtain. (However, many of them can be ordered from the Institute for Historical Review.) Obtaining banned books and access to restricted information plays a major role in Orwell's best-known work. One of the most important developments in 1984 is when Winston Smith obtains a book by Goldstein which had been effectively banned by the Thought Police. Pressure from people with a thought-police mentality inhibits freedom of speech in my own country, Australia, and has helped to restrict the circulation of some books. Extreme cases of book censorship in the West have occurred in West Germany, where Professor Helmut Diwald was forced to delete revisionist portions from his History of the Germans. Retired judge Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich had his book on Auschwitz seized, and the University of Tuebingen, which had granted him his law degree, deprived him of it, ironically under a law passed by the Nazis. In Sweden, Ditlieb Felderer's writings were also recently seized and he was imprisoned for the "thought crime" of querying the Holocaust. His arrest and detention should alarm all people concerned with civil liberties. Mr. Felderer, who has questioned the extent of alleged German war atrocities and pointed out the extent of Allied war atrocities, including one million civilian deaths from saturation bombing of German and Japanese cities, was jailed because of his writings. Following the precedent of Soviet authorities in dealing with dissident thinkers, he was forced to undergo psychiatric examinations. The jailing of Felderer for querying the establishment version of history and his harassment by psychiatrists is clearly an attempt to intimidate him and other free thinkers who have dared to ask challenging questions about the past. The harassment or persecution of Felderer is part of a worldwide attempt to silence revisionist writers. An unsuccessful effort was made to silence Professor Robert Faurisson, a French revisionist historian, by court proceedings in 1983 involving potential penalties of $200,000, while moves are currently being made, supported by some so-called historians, to remove Professor Arthur Butz from his teaching position at Northwestern University. Canadian postal authorities denied the use of the postal system to revisionist publicist Ernst Zündel for a time. Various West German writers have been imprisoned, while a French revisionist was assassinated a few years ago. Many civil libertarians, such as the distinguished Jewish intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Alfred Lilienthal, have protested against the attempts to silence revisionist historians, while other so-called civil libertarians have been strangely silent, preferring to defend only the civil liberties of those whose views they agree with.

Gandhi and Bose
Henry Ford said that history is bunk, while Dean Inge noted that historians have the power denied to almighty God of altering the past. These statements are relevant to the film Gandhi, which was mainly financed by the government of India and which won numerous best-film, best-actor and best-director awards. It is widely accepted as an accurate biographical portrayal of Mohandas K. Gandhi. The film portrays the Indian political leader as a saintly figure virtually without fault and suggests that he and his campaign of non-violent resistance to British rule was the reason India gained independence in 1947. The portrayal of Gandhi in the film of that name is a massive distortion. The film ignores Gandhi's tyrannical habits, his hypocrisy, his appalling treatment of his wife and children, his bizarre fixation on bowel functions, and his support for violence in various wars. The film ignores Gandhi's views that sexual attraction between men and women is unnatural and that he demanded celibacy between even married members of his entourage. He was so fanatical about his views on sex that he disowned his son Harilal for wishing to marry, and repeatedly tested his own will by sleeping nude with young women. The film Gandhi ignores the Mahatma's elitist attitudes. He is portrayed as a champion of freedom and individual rights, but in real life he was steadfastly opposed to granting additional rights to India's millions of Untouchables. The film's portrayal of Gandhi as a pacifist is incorrect. He supported the British military in the Boer War and World War I. The so-called pacifist gave his approval to men who, as he put it, were "using violence in a normal cause." He gave his blessing to the Nawab of Maler Kolta when he gave orders to shoot ten Moslems for every Hindu killed in his State. Gandhi's hypocrisy and double standards (not mentioned in the film) are also indicated by his opposition to modern medicine and his refusal to allow his wife to receive a life-saving shot of penicillin when she was dying of pneumonia. When he contracted malaria shortly afterwards, however, Gandhi accepted for himself the alien medicine of quinine, and when he had appendicitis he allowed British doctors to operate to save his life.

Perhaps the most serious distortion of history in the Gandhi propaganda film is the total suppression of the role played by Subhas Chandra Bose in the events leading to the independence of India. (This subject was examined in detail by Mr. Ranjan Borra in an essay published in the Winter 1982 issue of The Journal.) At the time that India attained independence, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee regarded the armed insurrection led by Bose as a far more important factor leading to independence than Gandhi's activities. However, Bose is not even mentioned in the Gandhi film. The eminent Indian historian, Dr. R.C. Majumdar, wrote: "There is... no basis for the claim that the civil disobedience movement (led by Gandhi) directly led to independence. The campaigns of Gandhi... came to an ignoble end about fourteen years before India achieved independence."5

There is ample evidence to substantiate the fact that the armed assault on British India by Bose and his Indian National Army (INA) during World War II was the decisive factor that forced the British withdrawal from the Asian sub-continent. The exploits of this army, when they became known, undermined the loyalty of the Indian soldiers, or sepoys, of the British. These men were the mainstay of colonial rule in India. Bose and the INA ignited the spark of a potential military revolt within the country, which the British dreaded above all else. This forced their decision to quit India honorably, while there was still time. As Majumdar wrote: "In particular, the revelations made by the INA trial, and the reaction it produced in India, made it quite plain to the British, already exhausted by the war, that they could no longer depend upon the loyalty of the sepoys for maintaining their authority in India. This had, probably, the greatest influence upon their final decision to quit India."6

Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
The changing alliances between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia described in 1984 are similar to the changing alliances between the United States, Russia, and China. The state of perpetual war described by Orwell is also reflected in the three hundred wars since 1945, the thirty-seven armed conflicts under way in 1980, and recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Central America, and Grenada. Perpetual civil war also seems to prevail in various multi-racial societies.

"Doublespeak" propaganda terms are used in these conflicts. "Peace-keeping forces" are used to make war, invasions such as in Grenada are described as "landings," planning for aggressive war is described as "defense strategy." The book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace edited by Harry Elmer Barnes describes the permanent war economy of the United States, the trickery employed by the U.S. government to enter World War I and World War II, and the censorship of dissident historical views by the media, the book trade, libraries, the curricula sections of education departments, and book reviewers. The Dynamics of War and Revolution by Lawrence Dennis discusses the need for preparation for perpetual wars to overcome unemployment, boost profits, and use up excess capital. Foreign markets are secured through war and foreign aid. Huge loans are made which cannot be paid back by debtor nations such as Poland and Brazil.

The role of international banks in financing wars and revolutions has been documented in numerous books, few of which are available in bookshops or libraries. Dr. Anthony Sutton documented the link between international finance and the Russian Revolution in Wall Street and the Russian Revolution. The American Red Cross mission to Moscow in 1917 had more financiers than medical doctors. Wall Street banks helped finance the revolution. This has been almost entirely swept under the rug by historians since it cuts across conventional ideas about the political left and right. Uncovering the Forces of War by Conrad Grieb deals with the role of international financiers in simultaneously bankrolling both sides in wars.