The Year of George Orwell
Cranston, Maurice
Intellectuals of the Left may well greet the year 1984 with a special sort of satisfaction. The world, they will say, has not turned out to be at all as bad as that depicted in George...
...Wanting to find out more about the refugees from the war in Afghanistan, I arrived in Islamabad shortly before midnight on a cool evening late last summer...
...Is he to be reproached for not having suggested in detail how much that might be...
...The train from Lahore goes only as far as Rawalpindi...
...Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics...
...The liberal and left-wing press refused to publish his work...
...By this he meant the real working people, not the "working classes" of Marxist theory...
...and for intellectuals Orwell had no time at all...
...There again, I think, Professor Nisbet is correct...
...No one who could write like that could be ignored, especially someone with Orwell's indisputable left-wing credentials...
...He proved the sincerity of his socialism by going to Spain to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War...
...The artist had then escaped from the patron, and had not yet been captured by the bureaucrat...
...Orwell, a lonely anti-totalitarian socialist, was fortunate at that juncture in capturing public attention with his broadcasts on the BBC...
...After an hour of polite conversation-interrupted by numerous phone calls and docmnent signings--it was arranged for me to visit some of the refugee camps in Peshawar, the provincial capital of the Northwest Frontier Province...
...Orwell also believed in state management of the economy...
...The intellectuals reacted to Orwell with their usual complacency...
...One of the most perceptive contributors to Mr...
...He said, for example, of the left-wing intelligentsia in England that they were "Bolshevik commissars, half-gangsters, halfgramophone, escaped Quakers, vegetarian cranks, and back-room Labour Party crawlers...
...Why deny that Hitler is a kind of Socialist...
...Orwell had at that time the utmost difficulty in making his views known...
...The choice of hotels--between the Islamabad Hotel and the Holiday Inn-seemed a tidy symbol of modern-day Pakistan's dichotomies...
...Although he was of middle-class origins, and had been educated at Eton, Orwell had not only volunteered for Spain, he had chosen to live among the poor in London and Paris and the industrial North...
...He had to rely on the impact of his books...
...It would not be much good talking like this to Orwell--the "spirit of the cold war" was exactly what he wanted to keep alive...
...Besides, he insisted, all questions about the improvement of democracy were dwarfed by the overwhelming threat of a totalitarian conquest by force and by stealth...
...Before, it was a town, at best, surrounded by cool mountains and an expansive prairie...
...Walzer's proposal is to drop the word "totalitarianism" so far as the regimes of the present world are concerned...
...Professor Nisbet notes that Orwell acknowledged the past to be "an indispensable foundation of freedom...
...laid-out bureaucracies and vacant lots reminiscent of an industrial park near Houston...
...And now they can say of 1984 that it was not only part of his delirium, but inaccurate as prediction...
...and in 1984, written after the war had been won, he compounded his offenses by producing a novel in which totalitarian socialism was depicted as triumphant in the English-speaking West...
...Intellectuals pretended that they were struggling for democracy against fascism...
...Johanno Strasser, suggests how this threat that Orwell dreaded takes shape today: The menace hovering over the eighties is not total dominance by some fanatical party elite, but rather the progressive undermining of democracy by the silent dictatorship of forces inherent in our reality...
...His enterprise resembles that of the equally stalwart radical theorist, Professor C.B...
...Orwell has always been detested on the Left with peculiar intensity, because h~ was himself a man of the Left...
...What were those left-wing credentials...
...Several showed the region: Iran and Afghanistan to the west...
...Irving Howe has had the excellent idea of commemorating Orwell's novel by inviting a group of critics, considered to be representative of both left- and rightwing opinion, to contribute to a symposium.* Mr...
...His life was one of the utmost frugality, and he was a tireless champion of the rights of working people...
...But has he...
...Twelve miles from Rawalpindi, the fading British way station between Kabul and Delhi, it appears at the end of a four-lane parkway, rather the way Washington, D.C., surfaces on the ride in from Dulles International Airport...
...I have never met a genuine working man who accepted Marxism," Orwell once said...
...a taxi brought me the rest of the way...
...True to form, I was greeted warmly and served lukewarm tea with milk...
...This is not to say that he turned into a man of the Right...
...He was not a political theorist, but a moralist and journalist, "trying to make political writing into an art...
...Poor old George," the left-wing intellectuals said in the 1940s, "he's just a sick man...
...he asked...
...Now it is Islam's first suburb, a grid of neatly Matthew Stevenson writes for a number of national magazines...
...I chose the Islamabad, as it was nearer the ministry of public affairs, and the following day went next door to a small cluster of shops where, over a drug store, I found the department that handles press credentials for anyone wanting to visit the refugees...
...Officials in traditional Pakistani cotton suits sat behind tired wooden desks...
...Orwell might protest that providing blueprints of social democracy was none of his business...
...In 1938 he published, in Homage to Catalonia, his account of what that war was all about...
...No existing system satisfies his definition, so the menace of totalitarianism is removed, as it were, by sleight of hand...
...On the walls, in military fashion, were a number of maps, all seemingly charting Pakistan's proximity to danger...
...Norton...
...These "quintessentially conservative themes," as Nisbet calls them, are central to Orwell's writing...
...In short, Orwell believed in just as much socialism as could be reconciled with freedom...
...the rulers of Russia today are very much like oldfashioned oligarchs--heavy, suspicious, uninspired, brutal . . . . Russia today is a dictatorship, resting on popular apathy, the hollow shell of a totalitarian regime...
...10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 mind here, and the left-wing contributors to his collection do not much help him...
...but when Hitler attacked the USSR in 1941 and the Communists became patriots again, Orwell had serious problems in finding a publisher for Animal Farm, his marvelous satire on the Soviet system, written at a time when Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and all the other high-minded leaders of the West were hailing Stalin as good old Uncle Joe...
...Harper & Row, $10.95/$3.50 paper...
...It is no part of Professor Nisbet's argument, however, to claim that Orwell was a conservative in the full sense of that term: "liberal democratic socialist--albeit salted with skepticism-probably comes closest to describing his political views...
...Macpherson, who redefined the word "democracy" not long ago in such a fashion that virtually every regime in the world today could claim to be democratic...
...In looking back over the past forty years and contemplating the world as it now is, there is much to confirm Orwell's understanding of the nature of the totalitarian threat to liberty and his vision of the methods it would use to accomplish its ends...
...Orwell himself wrote in a letter in 1945, "I belong to the left, and must work inside it...
...The Spanish Republic had fallen into the hands of power-seeking totalitarians, who were even more eager to exterminate "anarchists" and "Trotskyites" than they were to defeat Franco's insurgents...
...and when Orwell developed a severe form of tuberculosis (which killed him in 1950), this was felt to confirm the diagnosis...
...Orwell has been proved to be wrong...
...Any socialist who criticized them, they assumed, must have something wrong in his head...
...and he would see no reason to rewrite 1984 in 1984...
...General Azhar, a sturdy man in his late fifties, welcomed me in what had been the living room in a ranch-style house...
...Only the strategic use of paperweights kept it from scattering in the jetstream created by the ceiling fans...
...But he mistrusted state planning of culture and the arts...
...So few people actually live there that one can't help wondering if, when the American embassy was sacked in 1979, the demonstrators were bused in for the performance...
...In 1984, it is the simple decent chap Winston Smith who resists totalitarianism, long after the intellectual elite has been corrupted...
...the Soviet THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 I 1...
...The totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin are of the past...
...Howe himself, in his introductory essay, makes the point that Orwell's "idea of a totally controlled society in which a self-perpetuating elite rules through terror and ideology no longer strikes us as either a dim horror or a projection of the paranoid mind," and yet Mr...
...In an age of mealy-mouthed equivocation, he revived the art of plain speaking and direct writing...
...he regarded the intellectual class as a sinister new aristocracy, rooted not in the law but in "word and symbol...
...B u t , of course, reasonable people are not going to have Orwell written off so briskly, and Mr...
...The golden age of the artist," he wrote, "was the age of the capitalist...
...The world, they will say, has not turned out to be at all as bad as that depicted in George Orwell's novel, 1984...
...Paper the consistency of newsprint was stacked everywhere...
...Fortunately the very power of his writing ensured that his books were read...
...Howe's symposium, Dr...
...Islamabad is a new city in the fashion of Brasilia and Canberra, capitals that have sprung fully formed from an architect's drafting table...
...Orwell maintained that the real struggle must be between democracy and totalitarianism...
...he was disinclined to write for the conservative press...
...Totalitarianism," writes Professor Walzer reassuringly, "has failed" and is "doomed to failure...
...The office was a replica of so many on the subcontinent...
...The truth of the matter is that 1984 was never meant to be an exercise in prediction...
...OrweU would almost certainly agree with this...
...Unfortunately, Mr...
...The socialist totalitarian regime of his utopia--or nightmare-does not dominate the West...
...P a k i s t a n ' s capital, Islamabad, is a patch of tranquillity on the Asian mainland...
...Still, Professor Robert Nisbet, in what is by far the best essay in this book, detects a strong element of conservative insight in Orwell's view of the world, and with this judgment one cannot disagree...
...Orwell's socialism was both positive and negative...
...The date is immaterial...
...The novel is prophetic only in that it points out the way the world is going, and suggests the forms totalitarianism will take...
...F i r s t , however, I was scheduled to meet General Said Azhar, the high commissioner for Afghan refugees, whose office in Islamabad is literally on the edge of town...
...Controlled by the Communists and their fellow travelers, the government was using the rhetoric of revolution to prevent a revolution from taking place...
...His most recent book is Jean-Jacques: The Early Life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (W.W...
...In writing Animal Farm, Orwell had been guilty of an indiscretion...
...Fascism, he pointed out, had a great deal in common with Communism...
...he saw the proletariat uprooted from tradition and moral code "played upon by their masters," and he interpreted the totalitarian state as "an outcome, and not a reversal, of socialized mass democracy...
...Marxism was an invention of intellectuals...
...Howe in the end opts for the radical side by saying that "the evidence of h i s t o r y . . , comes down strongly against Orwell's vision of the future...
...The greatest danger does not threaten us from reactionaries from unenlightened powers of the past, but from the most modern achievements of our technological and economic lifestyle...
...Professor Walzer comes to the cheerful conclusion that the Soviet system is just another form of "authoritarianism," although he is somewhat ungracious towards those "conservatives" who persist in drawing a distinction between "totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism" in order, as he puts it, to revive "the spirit of the cold war...
...He believed in the goodness of ordinary people...
...Howe does not say what evidence of history he has in _9 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century, edited by Irving Howe...
...1984 does not mean the possibility of relapsing into barbarism...
...It means the possibility of perverting progress--because progress has lost the gauge by which to measure what is both feasible and humane...
...What he called "the eye-opener of the Hitler-Stalin pact" of 1939 proved his point that socalled "Right" and-"Left" totalitarians had much that was fundamentally in common...
...Professor Michael Walzer, who can always be relied upon to defend a radical position as well as it can be defended, uses one of the ploys which (as readers may remember) OrweU condemned as a typical intellectual's stratagem, namely linguistic innovation...
...The Republican government, he argued, was not defending socialism, or promoting revolution...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
