Big Brother Watching:

The Predictions of Orwell

Rolando Perez Betancourt, Granma Diario, May 28, 2003

Without ceremony from those who, during the Cold War,
exalted him as if he were a god of letters, Englishman
George Orwell reaches his 100th birthday. Orwell was the
great critic of the Soviet State and of fascism, and his
sublime obsession was to transform political literature
into art.Complex and contradictory, on occasions profound, on others
naively schismatic starting from a utopian concept of
independence, Orwell won the mistrust of conservatives and
anarchists, of Stalinists and social democrats.
Nevertheless, his two final novels, Animal Farm (1945) and
1984, published in 1949, one year before his death from
tuberculosis, made him a standard-bearer for international
anticommunism. As he made clear in his work, The Lion and
the Unicorn (1941), Orwell wanted the triumph of English
socialism for his country, free of Soviet influences.

To compete with that "alien model," for which there was no
lack of sympathizers in Europe, he wrote Animal Farm, a
satire about animals that was aimed directly against
Stalin, the person he considered responsible for deviations
in the Russian revolution.

However, the completion of the novel coincided with the
Soviet defeat of the Germans, and no English publisher
wanted to risk publishing something that went against the
ovations and gratitude of half the world.

Finally, an edition of 25,000 copies appeared in England,
and the novel crossed the Atlantic to the United States.
Great surprise! The 1946 American edition sold around
600,000 copies. The New Yorker, always sparing with its
praise, proclaimed that the book was "absolutely masterly,"
drawing comparisons with Voltaire and Swift and
recommending that we begin thinking of Orwell as an author
of the first order.

As Orwell's American biographer Michael Shelden wrote,
"Animal Farm had an impact on the popular imagination at a
time when the Cold War was beginning to make itself felt.
For many years, anticommunism used the book as a propaganda
tool distorting the spirit in which Orwell had conceived
it."

At the height of the war, Orwell had written, "I believe
that if the USSR were conquered by some foreign power, the
working class everywhere would become discouraged, at least
for the moment, and the capitalist cretins who never
stopped suspecting Russia would feel encouraged....I do not
want to see the USSR destroyed and I think that I would
have to defend it if necessary."

The loudly trumpeted anticommunism of the Cold War, about
which Shelden speaks, also advanced the novel 1984. Weighed
down by the propaganda, many people who had not read it
assumed that the book was an attack on the socialist ideas
of Marx, and talked about an "Orwellian universe" and other
distorted concepts foreshadowed by the constant battles of
the global right.

However, it is clear that 1984 is not an anticommunist
novel, but rather a work aimed against totalitarianism of
whatever stripe. The work describes a gloomy and oppressive
future dominated by thought police. It takes place in
London, where Winston Smith is a functionary in the
Ministry of Truth responsible for "correcting" historical
facts so that they always coincide with what is wanted by
the leaders.

They are lords of half the world, with designs on
subjugating the universe and whose principal slogans are
"War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is
Strength." All this is controlled by television monitors,
the eyes and ears of the government -- Big Brother determined
to know everything and to eliminate the slightest privacy.

More than 50 years have passed since Orwell wrote this
cautionary book and after the febrile anticommunist
exaltation, it is scarcely mentioned in recent times by
those who glorified it. One has to be suspicious.

Today, a neoliberal totalitarianism with a leader from the
North seeks to dominate the world and in it, the three
previously mentioned slogans fit like a ring on a finger.
Big Brother lies like the witch in Snow White and then
transmits on his screens whatever suits him. He creates
super ministries of espionage, searches libraries to see
what citizens are reading, controls telephones and other
means of communication, and accuses those who do not
support militaristic adventures of being unpatriotic.

Two days ago, Tim Robins and Susan Sarandon were cut off as
they talked on the "Today Show" about freedom of expression,
while the contracts of other critics have been cancelled as
in the case of actor Sean Penn.

Big Brother buys (according to the AP) "access to data
banks of hundreds of millions of inhabitants in Latin
American countries," calls into his service the phantoms of
McCarthyism, and coins the maximum slogan with no room for
shading: "Those who are not with us are against us."

Orwell called his novel 1984, and there are plenty of
indications to suggest that he was only off by 20 years.

[Thanks to Robert Sandels for translation.]