Orwell's 1984: Was Orwell Right?

    Book Review
 Orwell: The War Commentaries

Tim Robbins' Patriot Act By Jordan Elgrably

Orwell's 1984: Was Orwell Right?

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. -- O'Brien in 1984

Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed. -- I. F. Stone

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.

     Organized Incitement to Hatred

The media in all countries are a vehicle for whipping up hatred against Goldstein-like figures. The aim of hate-week incitement is to divert attention from domestic problems, promote national unity, and, where necessary, motivate people to kill other people in wars. Hate-week campaigns in the Soviet Union direct invective against the Chinese and Western "imperialists." In China hatred is whipped up against the Russians, sometimes the Vietnamese, and, until recently, the Americans. Iran and Iraq use their media outlets to control history, including recent history, and to keep their respective captive populations in the psychological state of hatred required to maintain their current war. Other countries at war or on a war footing use similar tactics. Hate propaganda is used in the civil-war conditions which prevail in many multiracial societies such as Zimbabwe, Chad, Sri Lanka, Zaire, Ethiopia, Burma, Uganda and Cyprus, which are paying the price demanded by the fallacious belief that multi-racial societies are viable.

The most pervasive hate campaigns in the West are still directed against Hitler, who died almost forty years ago. Hitler is treated in the Western mass media as a Goldstein figure with no redeeming features. Hate sessions directed against Hitler and the Nazis are so pervasive that a visitor from Mars might think that World War II was still in progress. More than four hundred feature films have been produced since 1945 with negative stereotyping of Germans, as well as numerous television series and countless books. (By contrast, the Nazis made only two or three anti-Semitic feature films between 1933 and 1945.) Recent films include Sophie's Choice, Playing for Time, The Boys from Brazil, Marathon Man, and The Odessa File. Recent television series include Winds of War, Holocaust, Kessler, and The Secret War. Many more films, television series, and books are in the pipeline. The cumulative effect of this media avalanche of negative stereotyping of Germans is to incite ethnic hatred against people of German extraction of whom there are more than twenty million in the United States. Civil-rights, human-rights and church groups which have been quick to oppose racism and anti-Semitism have done almost nothing to stem this incitement to ethnic hatred.

The 18-hour Winds of War television saga is a good example of the docudrama blend of fact, fiction and fantasy ("faction") which is accepted by many viewers as objective history. The Winds of War film is an instructive example of gross distortion of history, of incitement to ethnic hatred, and of the use of the electronic media as a vehicle for propaganda. Winds of War was written by Herman Wouk, a devout Orthodox Jew. It's an American-Jewish version of the last world war in which the persecution of Jews is a dominant theme and war atrocities committed by the Allies, such as the terror bombing of cities, are almost completely ignored. A Washington Post reviewer wrote "if you miss the Winds of War you will be adding 18 hours to your life," while another critic called the series "essentially a cartoon, a child's history of the war with all the stock characters of a Hollywood propaganda movie."

Wouk tries to make the Jewish people the axis around which American and world history revolves. Without exception, he portrays Jews as warm, sensitive, admirable people who are innocent victims of mindless persecution. The Germans are stereotypes of evil who are barely recognizable as real people at all. The German people are portrayed as suffering from a national character disorder to explain why they admired and supported Hitler, who is portrayed by Wouk as a raving comic-book lunatic. If an 18-hour television series were to be shown at peak viewing time with comparably derogatory portrayals of Jews, there would be a massive protest about "anti-Semitism." The argument that films such as Winds of War are made because of popular demand is incorrect, since much of the demand is created by massive advertising and promotional campaigns, often as expensive as the films themselves.

The book Dealing in Hate by Michael Connors examines anti-German hate campaigns in both world wars. Falsehood in Wartime by Arthur Ponsonby deals with the Allied propaganda lies against Germany in World War I. Second World War propaganda lies are still being churned out on an almost daily basis. If the Germans had won the last world war, and had influence in the media, we would doubtless be having a series of hate sessions against England, America and Russia. If there is another world war, the victors will once again write the history books and cowardly court historians, acting as thought police, will ensure that the history of the war is not objective. Finally, to make a fairly trite but important point -- if the conditions described in Orwell's 1984 actually existed in the United States and Australia today, we would not be able to publicly attack official security agencies or query establishment history. Western countries are still the most free and, fortunately, freedom of speech is still widely respected.

     The Ministry of Truth and World War II

The attempt to portray the Second World War as a conflict between total good and total evil is slowly breaking down. Despite decades of brainwashing by the media, censorship of revisionist historians, and the cowardice of establishment court historians, a more balanced history of the origins and course of the war is slowly emerging. The Origins of the Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor establishes that Hitler did not plan the war and that the Allies bore important responsibility for the outbreak of the conflict. Germany's Economic Preparation for War by Burton J. Klein establishes that Germany was spending a smaller percentage of its GNP on war preparations than either Britain or France in the late 1930s.

The extent of Allied war crimes is slowly being documented. Bomber Command by Max Hastings shows that saturation bombing of cities was initiated by the British and that some 600,000 German civilians were killed in the levelling of German cities. A review of Hastings' book in the London Spectator was headlined "Devastating and Exterminating" and described the aerial destruction of German cities and the killing of 600,000 German civilians as "the greatest war crime of the Second World War."7 Other Allied war crimes such as bombing of Japanese cities, the execution of more than 12,000 Polish officers and other leaders at Katyn and elsewhere by the Soviets, have also been documented, although the Katyn massacre is still not widely known in the West. The forced repatriation of millions of Russians and other Soviet subjects back to the USSR, resulting in many deaths, has also been set out in books such as The Last Secret. The Nuremberg trials were illegal and yet another Allied crime. This is discussed in Failure at Nuremberg, Profiles in Courage by the late President John F. Kennedy, and Dönitz at Nuremberg by H. Keith Thompson.

However, for every book and film about Allied war crimes there are literally thousands of books and films about German and Japanese war crimes, particularly those dealing with the concentration camps. The greatest war crime of the war, the bombing of German cities, is never dealt with in films, apart from very rare exceptions such as Slaughterhouse Five.

The central allegation made against the Nazis is that they exterminated six million Jews during the war, mainly by gassing in gas chambers. This claim has been established as false by Professor Arthur Butz in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Dr. Charles Weber in The Holocaust, by Walter Sanning in The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, by Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich in The Auschwitz Myth, by Dr. Robert Faurisson in The Problem of the Gas Chambers, and by Professor Paul Rassinier in Debunking the Genocide Myth. Due to thought-police pressure and self-censorship by the media and book trade, these books are not readily available. These books demonstrate that there was no plan to exterminate Jews in World War II, no mass gassings in gas chambers, that fewer than 500,000 people died in concentration camps and that most Jewish deaths were due to diseases such as typhus. Numerous Jewish writers, including civil libertarians such as J. Cohn-Bendit, C. Karnoouh and J. Assons, accept the revisionist view of the Holocaust. Most academics dealing in modern European history are too cowardly even to investigate the revisionist evidence.

The Holocaust story is repeated ad nauseam to drum up emotional support for Israel, and Zionist Jews have accurately described it as "Israel's number one propaganda weapon." Anti-Zionist Jews such as Dr. Alfred Lilienthal describe the constant Holocaust drum-beating as "holocaustomania" and point out that the Holocaust has become a kind of new religion among Jews. Jewish intellectual Noam Chomsky described Dr. Rubenstein's reactions to Professor Faurisson's claims that there were no gas chambers as the reactions of a religious fanatic. The Holocaust is so important to Zionist Jews that Professor Friedlander has said that "the Revisionist School of historians, those who say the Holocaust never existed, that it is a Jewish invention, are more worrying than countries' political positions," while Professor H. Littell has said "you can't discuss the truth of the Holocaust. That is a distortion of the concept of free speech. The United States should emulate West Germany which outlaws such exercises." Despite cogent evidence that revisionists are censored and persecuted, one so-called intellectual recently stated that it is fashionable to claim that Hitler's gas chambers did not exist.8 A five-page attack in the Australian magazine Quadrant described revisionists such as Professor Butz, Professor Faurisson and myself as "lone wolf malcontents," the "John Hinckley Juniors of the intelligentsia," and possibly more evil than Himmler and Pol Pot.9 As is customary with such attacks, no right of reply was allowed.

     Down the Memory Hole

Chairman Mao, once the Big Brother of China, has almost vanished down the Chinese memory hole. He has been virtually written out of Chinese history. A similar fate has befallen Stalin in official Soviet history. Hitler, on the other hand, has not been written out of history. He is larger than life, appearing on our 1984-style telescreens on a regular basis as a Goldstein hate figure He is needed to assist in the portrayal of World War II as a war between total good (the victors) and total evil (the vanquished). Hitler is also useful for the Hollywood World War II industry which churns out a mind-boggling number of films and TV series about the war. Dr. Alfred Lilienthal has pointed out in The Zionist Connection that the three major television networks (NBC, ABC and CBS), the major film companies, book distributors, and influential newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as influential news magazines such as Time and Newsweek, are owned and controlled by Zionist Jews who use the evil Hitler image and the Holocaust as propaganda weapons for Israel.

Some aspects of popular history are shrouded in secrecy and receive little publicity. Thus, collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists in World War II, revisionist evidence about the treatment of Jews during that war, the role of Subhas Bose in the struggle for Indian independence, massacres by the Soviets at Katyn, Vynnytsia and elsewhere, and the sinking of the passenger ships Wilhelm Gustloff, General Steuben, and Goya, in each case with greater loss of life than the Titanic, are seldom mentioned in the controlled media of the West. Collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists is established by Jewish writers in books such as Perfidy by Ben Hecht, The Holocaust Victims Accuse by M. Shonfeld, Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt and Zionism in the Age of the Dictators by Lenni Brenner. The massacre of Polish leaders by the Soviets in 1940 is documented in Katyn by Louis Fitzgibbon, while the massacre of some 10,000 Ukrainians at Vynnytsia is covered in The Crime of Moscow in Vynnytsia. The sinking of three passenger ships in the Baltic in 1945 with more than 18,000 deaths, mainly German women and children, is dealt with in The Cruelest Night by Dobson. Anne Frank's Diary, A Hoax by Ditlieb Felderer, which proves that Anne Frank did not write the famous "diary," has been given the silent treatment by the media. In case after case, historical truth has been consigned to the memory hole.

There has also been a fairly successful cover-up in relation to the American entry into the Pacific war in 1941. The largest ethnic group in America is of German origin. Resistance from this and other groups had to be overcome to get the United States into the First and Second World Wars. The attack against the Lusitania was used as a pretext for entry into World War I. The attack against Pearl Harbor was the excuse for entry into World War II. Both of these attacks involved gross deception of the American public. The Watergate cover-up was nothing compared with the cover-up over Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt incited the attack with an oil embargo, and knew that the attack was coming. It was not a surprise attack. The Pacific war began in deception and cover-up and ended the same way. The Japanese offered to surrender prior to the bombing of Hiroshima on condition that the office of Japanese Emperor be retained, and after the bombing the war was concluded with that condition accepted. Why then was Hiroshima bombed? Most people's understanding of the Pearl Harbor attack is based on popular portrayals such as the docudrama film Tora, Tora, Tora, which presents the attacks as a surprise. The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor by Rear Admiral Theobald, which examines the days immediately preceding the attack, shows that it was not a surprise. It shows instead that Washington authorities had ample foreknowledge of the time and place of the Japanese attack, and that the failure to warn General Short and Admiral Kimmel was due to Roosevelt's order that no warning be sent lest their preparations for defense might deter the Japanese from attacking. Theobald also shows that Pearl Harbor was denied a "Purple" decoding machine lest the commanders there might independently decode Japanese messages and take steps to ward off the attack.

Similar deceptions were used by the U.S. government in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the bombing of Cambodia, and in military interventions in the Middle East, Central America and Grenada.

Some of Simon Wiesenthal's activities have likewise gone down the memory hole. His wartime collaboration with the Nazis was discussed by the former Chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky, himself of Jewish origin, and others. Wiesenthal's criminal "Nazi hunter" role in persecuting innocent individuals such as Frank Walus and wrecking their lives has been amply documented but has received only minimal media coverage.

     Down With Big Brother

Control of the past, Big Brother surveillance, and the use of "doublethink" are much more extensive in Communist and many third world countries than in the United States, western Europe or Australia. People in the West can help combat Big Brother control in Communist and other quasi-totalitarian countries by supporting Amnesty International and by helping human rights groups in those countries. Unfortunately, effective human rights groups can be established only in countries where basic civil rights are already relatively secure. Individuals who attempt to establish such groups in repressive countries are often persecuted and imprisoned.

Although civil liberties are entrenched in the West, there are still some areas of concern. Control of the past, the central issue of Orwell's 1984, remains pervasive, especially with regard to World War II history which is, to use Napoleon's phrase, "lies agreed upon by the victors." The lies are repeated to justify the carnage of the war and to explain the Allied policy of unconditional surrender in the war. The six million Holocaust allegation, the hoax of the twentieth century, is used as a propaganda weapon to promote support for Israel. Uncritical support for Israel, particularly by the United States, could contribute to starting World War III.

Challenging the official version of anything may be a civic responsibility and even great fun, but it is still difficult for those who dispute the establishment version of history to have their views heard. The best way to combat Big Brother control of the past is to ask questions and challenge the claims put out by the high priests of sanctioned history repeatedly. People should ask, for example, whose interests are served by the repetition of particular atrocity stories? What real evidence is there for various mass murder allegations? Who controls the media? And so forth.

Citizens should support bona fide civil liberties groups and actively oppose government measures restricting basic freedoms. Freedom of speech is a basic civil liberty and people should fight to retain it. They should defy group pressure, think for themselves and speak out. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Notes

1. See, for example: New Society, 12 May 1983; Commentary, May 1983; New Republic, December 1982; Commentary, March 1983; Harper's January 1983.
2. New Society, 5 October 1978.
3. Orwell, Notes on Nationalism.
4. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia.
5. R.C. Majumdar, Three Phases of India's Struggle for Freedom.
6. ibid.
7. The Spectator, 29 September 1979.
8. Quadrant, (Australia), August 1983.
9. Quadrant, October 1981. See also: New Statesman, November 1979, and Commentary, December, 1980.

Reproduced From:  The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Book Review

Orwell: The War Commentaries

• Orwell: The War Commentaries, edited and with an introduction by W. J. West. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986, 253 pp., $18.95.

George Orwell, too, had feet of clay.

This will come as no surprise to some, of course. There are at least a few who know already, and a much smaller number who have long known, that no human being ever lives fully up to the standards and expectations of another -- not even when the actions on which he or she is to be judged are severely restricted to a narrow and circumscribed realm, like the realm of literature or the realm of philosophy or, as in the present case, the realm of intellectual integrity.

One problem with expecting intellectual integrity from someone is that intellectual integrity is by no means universally recognized as a thing to be desired. At bottom, intellectual integrity means consistency of thought. And consistency of thought has had its prominent detractors for more than a century.

"A foolish consistency," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1841, "is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do."

"If you are bound to your past hour," Max Stirner wrote three years later, "if you must babble today because you babbled yesterday, if you cannot transform yourself each instant, you feel yourself fettered to slavery and benumbed." "If I am required to be consistent," Stirner complained, "would I not be bound today and henceforth to my will of yesterday?... My creature -- to wit, a particular expression of (my) will -- would have become my commander.... Because I was a fool yesterday I must remain such my life long."

"Do I contradict myself?" Walt Whitman asked in 1855. "Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large-I contain multitudes."

"The question is," Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty declared in 1872, "which is to be master" -- words, or the human beings who invent and use them?

"Consistency," said Oscar Wilde, "is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

Still, most of us -- especially those idealistic youngsters among us who are most susceptible to Orwell's peculiar charm and therefore most likely to adopt him as a kind of secular saint persist in seeing virtue in "practicing what you preach."

Those who know Orwell best, however, know that it is not at all clear what ideas we should expect him to have practiced, because it is not at all clear what ideas he held. Those who knew him in life agree that he had a quality of great earnestness and sincerity about him, and this quality certainly comes through for most of us in his best writing. But if you look at Orwell's oeuvre as a coherent whole, you soon find yourself uncertain as to exactly what he did believe.

This uncertainty is only complicated further by the fact that Orwell expressed himself so often through the mode of fiction. It is much more difficult to be confident as to just what a writer is trying to tell you if he dramatizes his message in a story rather than putting it before you straightforwardly in expository prose. This is why, today, both conservative cold warriors like Norman Podhoretz and democratic socialist peace advocates like Irving Howe claim with equal certainty that if Orwell were alive today he would be on their side.

Even in his journalism, however, Orwell is hard to pin down. As his friend and biographer George Woodcock writes, "he was mainly concerned with the implementation of those fairly general ideas which he brought together under the heading of 'decency,' ideas like brotherhood, fair play and honest dealing which he had absorbed from writers like Dickens."

"What concerned him much more deeply than political programs," Woodcock continues, "were...general principles of conduct, particularly conduct affecting other men." To Orwell, "it was important to tell the truth. It was important to preserve the objectivity of history. It was important, above all, to create a world in which every man's right to self-respect would be jealously preserved."

"It was when he talked to me about the state," Woodcock recalls, "that Orwell seemed particularly confused. On one side he was still influenced by the traditions of the sahib class into which he had been born, traditions of dedicated public service coupled with the wielding of unchallenged authority. But he also cultivated an anti-authoritarian strain of thought that was never far from the surface in his reactions to established government. So there were occasions when he would speak...of extensive and disciplined nationalization of industries, of state control over wide sectors of social life. But at other times -- and here I felt his real inclinations were emerging -- he seemed to envisage a decentralized society...with a great deal of room for individual initiative. Similarly, he would argue that authors should be state-supported, and at other times appear to contradict himself by maintaining that the less a writer had to do with any organized body, the better for him and his work."

Of course, Woodcock is speaking here of Orwell's conversation, not his published work. But as he makes clear in his classic study The Crystal Spirit (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), from which the foregoing quotations have been extracted, it was in Orwell's conversation that his work, especially his journalism, originated.

One would have a conversation with Orwell during the 1940s, Woodcock writes, "and then, a week or two later, one would find that this conversation had become part of his writing and formed the basis for one of his highly readable essays.... I think it was this close relationship between his talk and his writing that enabled Orwell to be at once such a prolific and such a generally successful journalist. Once an idea had taken shape and even a degree of polish in conversation, it was a fairly simple matter to write it down. Some of Orwell's articles, as he admitted rather shamefacedly, were actually typed out immediately and published in their first draft, without any substantial revision."

Still, it is his less definite, more ambiguous novels that reach the widest audience and win Orwell most of his most fervent disciples. To the young reader who has just discovered Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm, it seems obvious that Orwell is a crusader for truth, individual liberty and the use of the English language -- or any language -- to express truth and convey beauty rather than to subvert thought and perpetuate tyranny. And for such a reader, the biggest revelation of Orwell: The War Commentaries is likely to be the news that this fighter for truth and justice spent a good part of World War II as a propagandist for the British government, using the English language to mislead and to preserve the undeserved loyalty of a foreign people, a people long oppressed by the British government, a people whose freedom from British domination was a cause he had long given many readers and friends plenty of reason to believe that he fervently supported.

The people in question were the people of India, and Orwell's job was to research, write, and in a few cases to deliver on the air, weekly radio "commentaries" -- news summaries would be a more accurate term -- on how the war was going up to the time of broadcast. The summaries were written for the Indian section of the Eastern Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and were beamed into India from December 1941 through mid-March 1943.

As has been noted, Orwell often worked out the ideas for his more topical writing in conversation. Also, like many other great writers, he tended to write not just for the eye and the intellect, but also for what might be called "the mind's ear." He wrote, that is, with attention to the sound and rhythm, as well as the sense, of his sentences. Orwell was, therefore, a natural for the medium of radio.

But why was he given this particular assignment by the BBC? Radio was, of course, the television of the 1940s. Television itself existed at that time. The BBC itself had pioneered regularly scheduled television broadcasting in the 1930s. But too few people owned television sets at the outset of World War II for the technology to have much potential as a source of information for the general population, and the war temporarily halted the process by which the manufacture of sets and their placement in homes had been steadily accelerating. For almost everyone alive at the time, the fastest way to learn of events that had just taken place halfway around the world was to listen to the radio.

This is not to say that radio did for World War II what television did for the Vietnam War. Listeners in the early 1940s were not able to hear the battles of the war as they occurred. The news they received from their radio sets was often several days old and was often based on reports which broadcasters had no way of checking. Nevertheless, radio represented a major improvement over the newspapers on which people had had to rely for information during World War I. Thanks to radio, civilian populations during World War II were better informed than civilian populations had ever before been during wartime.

They were also better proselytized. The Axis powers had realized early on that radio could facilitate the dissemination of propaganda as well as the dissemination of "straight news." Aiming broadcasts into enemy territory had much more potential than dropping leaflets from the air.

Among the Axis broadcasts aimed at undermining the British war effort during 1941 and 1942 was a series directed at India from Berlin and masterminded by the exiled Indian nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose. It was these broadcasts which Orwell was specifically assigned to counter.

India was a major source of military manpower for the Allies, particularly in its African campaigns. It was also something of a powder keg -- a country in which an already strong nationalist movement was commanding more and more public support. The British could ill afford to fight a civil war in India at a time when the battle against the Axis powers was already severely taxing its resources. Nor did the British want to risk losing or even weakening their control of India at such a crucial moment. The major figures in the Indian nationalist movement -- men like Gandhi and Nehru -- were committed to non-violence, and an independent India under their leadership might therefore be neutral in the war. This would deny the Allies access to an important source of troop strength.

All these same considerations made Axis propagandists eager to make what they could of the Indian situation by encouraging the more militant nationalists. Not only could they create problems for the Allies by helping to bring about independence for India, they might also create some solutions for themselves. India, was, for example, rich in certain natural resources which were crucial to the war effort, but which the Axis powers sorely lacked. The most notable of these was rubber -- a commodity whose scarcity in Germany led the Reich to invest vast resources in the development of synthetic substitutes. And even if an independent India were neutral in the war, it might well look favorably on trade with nations that had aided its quest for freedom from the British.

For this reason, the German government was happy, early in the 1941, to provide sanctuary to Bose, a major leader of the more militant Indian nationalists and a recent escapee from imprisonment by the British. By the end of that year, the Reich was providing Bose with more than sanctuary. It was financing both his Berlin -- based Free India Radio news service and his plan to build an "Indian Army of Liberation in the West" by retraining Indian prisoners of war then being held in Germany and Italy. This special fighting force was to be used eventually to liberate India from British control. The idea for such an Army of Liberation may seem fanciful to some readers today, but in fact it grew to a size of some 3500 men before the Allied victory ended its existence.

Much of this historical background information is to be found in the Introduction, the Appendix and the notes which W.J. West had provided for Orwell: The War Commentaries. (The Appendix, which is especially helpful, includes the text of several of Bose's broadcasts over Free India Radio.) But for much of it, I was forced to turn to other sources, including West's earlier volume, Orwell: The Lost Writings (New York: Arbor House, 1985), a collection of mostly literary scripts Orwell wrote for the BBC during the same period. (Both volumes are compiled from materials recently uncovered by West in the BBC archives.) Time and again, the reader of The War Commentaries is referred to the earlier volume for supplementary information. On occasion, he is referred to the earlier volume even for essential information -- information without which it would be impossible to assess the importance, the truthfulness or the purpose of Orwell's news summaries. This may be an effective strategy for selling two books instead of one, or for saving the publisher money on the price of paper for the second volume, but it is an annoyance and a disservice to the serious reader.

Nor is this the only fault the serious reader will find with this book. There are also a few curious, apparent lapses of scholarship. At one point, for example, when Orwell refers in a news summary dated 4 April 1942 to the "paid Indian mouthpieces" of the Japanese, West notes that this is "one of Orwell's very rare references to his main opponent, Subhas Chandra Bose and his supporters." In fact, however, Subhas Chandra Bose did not move his operations to Japan, or begin working closely with the Japanese on common goals, until nearly a year later. Orwell's reference was probably to another Bose, Rashbehari Bose, a militant Indian nationalist who had made his home in Japan since around the time of World War I.

The most important failure of West's book, however, lies not with its editor's scholarship, but in the fundamentally uninteresting character of its contents. Pieces that were written to be read aloud on radio and then forgotten are seldom effective in printed form, especially if they are, as in the present case, for example, highly repetitive. A radio writer cannot assume that the audience this week was also listening the week before, and he certainly cannot assume that all his listeners have tuned in faithfully every week from the beginning of his broadcasts. Therefore, he repeats certain essential items of information week after week, script after script, so that those who have just tuned in can understand what is being said. In a book, such endless repetition is deadening. One can only bear being told about the potential importance to the Japanese of the Burma Road as a supply route so many times before the impulse to skip and skim becomes irresistible.

Moreover, these pieces contain almost no political analysis -- no "commentary," in the strict sense of that word. The analytical content of all 49 pieces collected here, if out together, would scarcely fill one page. In part this may be the result of censorship. Each of Orwell's scripts had to be submitted to a censor before being broadcast. Also, analysis seems not to have been a part of Orwell's job in preparing these scripts. They appear to have been intended primarily as news reports. They are "slanted," of course, in the sense that they obviously regard the Allied cause with favor. But their slant becomes evident more through simple sloganeering than through any kind of thoughtful discussion of issues.

Orwell writes, for example, that the war is an effort by "the free nations of the world" to "put an end to Fascist aggression." One wonders if the Soviet Union qualified in those days as one of "the free nations of the world." We know that Orwell and other BBC propagandists were under explicit pressure to soft pedal or avoid any criticism of the Stalin regime, which only a short time before, during the period of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, had been a favorite target of official criticism by the British. West quotes at length from an official memorandum that established guidelines for writers like Orwell on this issue. It delineates important "differences" between the Soviet and German styles of dictatorship which supposedly justify cooperating with the one and working indefatigably for the destruction of the other. This memo is curiously reminiscent of more recent attempts by certain conservatives to explain why we should fight to the death against "totalitarian" regimes but be willing to ally ourselves with "authoritarian" regimes, no smatter how repressive they may be.

In other scripts Orwell writes of the virtual unanimity of public support for the Allied cause. He informs his listeners that opposition by Americans "to the idea of being involved in a war abroad, and specially in Europe," which had been common before the United States entered the war, "has entirely disappeared," and that "the ordinary people" of England "would welcome greater sacrifices" if they would aid the war effort. As West notes, these comments bear a certain resemblance to the government broadcasts in Nineteen Eighty-four, with their incessant talk of the happiness with which the common people accept sacrifice as the price of Oceania's victory against whatever nation is its enemy of the moment.

It is well known that the World War II-era BBC was Orwell's model for the satanic Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-four. Why did Orwell consent to do the work of an institution which he regarded as having within it the seed of so monstrous an evil? As George Woodcock explains it, Orwell was "a thorough English patriot, dedicated to defending the people and the countryside of England even if he had little use for most of its existing institutions." Also, Woodcock writes, "he believed that the left-wing libertarian socialism which he had adopted in 1936 could only survive if the Nazis were defeated." W.J. West concurs with this image of Orwell and adds that while he "believed passionately that India ought to be given her freedom at the earliest possible moment," he "also saw clearly that there were far greater dangers for the Indian people in domination by a non-English-speaking totalitarian power than in the mere continuation of British rule for a few more years, or even until the war ended."

Orwell told George Woodcock in 1942 that "I doubt whether I shall stay in this job much longer, but while here I consider that I have kept our propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been." He resigned the following year, and took a job as literary editor of a left-wing London paper, The Tribune. The work he had done for the BBC, as this collection makes clear, was by no means "disgusting." It was, however, consistently mundane and virtually without intellectual content. Orwell completists and serious students of World War II propaganda will want to own this book. Most general readers, however, will probably want to pass it by. It won't afford them much entertainment or edification, and it may well undermine any delusions they have about the purity of heart and the intellectual integrity of the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.

About the author

JEFF RIGGENBACH is a radio producer and commentator whose articles on literature and politics have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and New Libertarian.

Reproduced From:  The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Tim Robbins' Patriot Act By Jordan Elgrably

AlterNet Posted on March 2, 2006

After his incandescent plays about the death penalty ("The Exonerated") and the media in Iraq ("Embedded"), it seemed inevitable that actor-writer-director Tim Robbins would continue to fearlessly produce politically charged theater.

In his newest production by Los Angeles' Actors' Gang ensemble, a corrosive play based on George Orwell's novel "1984" and adapted by Michael Gene Sullivan, director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Big Brother is here and torture is us.

The Actors' Gang show differs markedly from previous Orwell adaptations in that Sullivan and Robbins focus on the book within the novel, written by Big Brother's enemy No. 1, Goldstein, who argues that capitalism uses continual warfare as a means of economic exploitation and control.

"That's essential to this production," says Robbins, who directs the play. "That's where the meat is for me, because it rings so true now." Writing in 1948, Robbins points out, Orwell was not looking at the future, but "reflecting on the world around him … In fact, what he contends is that what war has really become is a way to keep the elite minority in power and to deplete the resources of the economies in the post-industrial age."

Indeed, the Actors' Gang production reveals Big Brother to be an elite minority, controlling and exploiting the masses through perpetual warfare. (Wasn't it just the other day that Rumsfeld called the war on terrorism "the long war," and the Bush administration asked Congress to appropriate $439 billion for next year's defense budget?)

Speaking of government control, Robbins marvels at how Orwell the novelist did not allow Big Brother's omnipotence to concern itself with the downtrodden majority. "Brilliant how prescient he was. When you reread the book, there's a passage where they don't care about 85 percent of the people who are proles -- they're so stupefied by poverty and overwork, and pacified by entertainment and by lotteries, that they're never going to be a problem … What Big Brother has to monitor and be concerned with is the other 15 percent of people who are in the upper rungs of society."

During a recent performance of the play, which opened Feb. 11 and runs through April 8, the audience appeared both entertained and disturbed by the parallels with current events: a national security apparatus eavesdropping on American citizens; the military's use of torture in prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo; and "rendition" -- the Bush administration's euphemism for kidnapping suspected terrorists and sending them off to regimes in Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia for months, even years, of interrogation.

Robbins' production is stark and something of a departure, the director feels, from the company's usually buoyant, satirical performances.

"This is not so much satire," he points out, "as it is a drama, and we think we found the humor in it." Humor in a hapless Winston Smith, who is tortured for nearly two hours onstage? No one said it wouldn't be twisted: ear-splitting music and electrodes are part of the interrogation arsenal; the play's humor, such as it is, comes unexpectedly and is short-lived.

Telescreens, naturally, are everywhere.

Much about this theatrical "1984" feels ominously real -- nothing like the 1984 Michael Radford film that depicted a totalitarian futuristic society. Robbins is planning his own film version, to be shot in New York, "essentially the way it looks now. No big special effects, no futuristic imaginings; just the way it is."

"It's more about the mind and self-censorship," he continues. "Orwell writes about acquired self-censorship, the idea that Big Brother is present if you allow him to be present. There are many people living in fear, and that's really what he was writing about -- totalitarianism of the mind."

Robbins balks when asked about critics who accuse him of agitprop. "It seems that anytime someone questions something from the left, or from a progressive point of view, there is an immediate rush to label it 'political,' as a way I think to marginalize it as a work of art. I find that offensive."

Robbins has stuck his neck out repeatedly over the years, with repercussions for both himself and his family -- he has two children with actor and activist Susan Sarandon; when the couple spoke out against the Iraq war, they received death threats and had major public appearances cancelled.

Robbins accuses the entertainment industry of being far more conservative than we are led to believe. "I'll bring up the most crucial time in the last ten years, right before the Iraq war; Hollywood was essentially silent about that. I had many people tell me 'Now's not the time to protest.' Well, if now's not the fucking time, when is the time?"

But exercising his First Amendment rights, Robbins insists, has not hurt his career. "It doesn't hurt you to use your freedom," he says, "and if it does, then why have freedom? They told me before the first Iraq war, 'Don't go down to Washington and protest; it's going to hurt your career.' And the next two years brought Bob Roberts and The Player, and afterwards Shawshank Redemption and Hudsucker Proxy; after this war I won an Oscar for Mystic River.

Doublethink and Newspeak are still prominent features of Robbins' 1984, and never has this nightmare had more resonance than today, when the neo-conservative agenda of the Bush administration has capitalized on fear-mongering and division as a form of mass control. Robbins argues that throughout the Reagan-Bush years, through Clinton and until today, right-wing talk radio and other media have waged an effective campaign against the left and the Democratic party, while fostering hatred of Americans by Americans.

"Well, now they've got it all," he says. "They've got the executive, they've got the Congress, they've got the judicial for the most part, and things are worse. And sooner or later, if Joe Sixpack doesn't figure this out, that he's been lied to for the past 25 years …"

"I'm not the enemy," Robbins says. "I've been advocating for the American worker, for peace and justice. That's not the enemy. The enemy is people who make you believe that hatred is necessary in this country, because all your hatred is doing is buoying up and keeping in power people who do not have your best interests at heart, people who will not represent you in Washington. They will close down your factories and sell off the jobs to the highest bidder in China. How un-American is that? But somehow these people are aligned with God and country, and this illusion has been sold for the past 25 years. It's very clever, very effective propaganda."

If today's citizenry lack a sufficient culture of dissent, Robbins says, it may be the result of too much comfort. "People believe they're comfortable … We're locked into our telescreens and we believe; we buy into the culture of entertainment and distraction and advertisement."

Few celebrities in Robbins' position of power are making themselves heard beyond the pale of mass entertainment. With the recent exception of George Clooney, the list of progressive entertainers willing to speak out publicly is still painfully short.

Could the Bush administration be spying on outspoken Americans with a liberal agenda?

Says Robbins, "Certainly I think the reason they are being so secretive about [wire-tapping] is they've fallen into that Nixonian trap. They're so paranoid about their own lies and deceptions that they feel like they have to monitor their opposition."

If "1984" is 2006, and torture is what Americans do to extract information from the enemy, Robbins still refuses to play his cards close to the vest, to avoid Big Brother's scrutiny. The government may be watching him, he says, but "paranoia is a sign that you're losing the battle."

Jordan Elgrably is artistic director of the Levantine Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

The Actor's Gang:

http://www.theactorsgang.com/