George Orwell's Alarm
JR., C. W. Griffin
George Orwell's Alarm by C. W. GRIFFIN JR. TVTITH THE advent of 1967, we have " passed the halfway point between the 1949 publication 1984 by George Orwell and Doom-year itself. A fresh surge of...
...Almost as readily, they approve 400 times as much for the socially irrelevant space program...
...Despite its competence, The Crystal Spirit is inferior to Richard Rees' shorter book, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory...
...to be misunderstood is the fate of all prophets...
...Since Orwell wrote 1984, the Central Intelligence Agency has grown from a relatively innocent infant into a quasi-totalitarian monster...
...This paranoic delusion entails a compounding of myths: (1) that the revolutionary fighting of the National Liberation Front, a demonstrably indigenous South Vietnamese effort, is basically aggression from the north...
...The cynical pessimism of 1984 is an appropriate response to the mid1960s by anyone who stakes a serious claim to being more than half conscious...
...As a contemporary example of this principle, consider the following advice issued to traveling scientists in several Federal agencies' form letters: "The purpose of this briefing is to alert you to the interest of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union and its satellites in all methods of gathering information necessary to the furtherance of their nation's interest . . . Their methods, which include technical surveillance (use of electronic devices, wire taps, and infrared devices), clandestine photography, and mail censorship, are contemptible to those of us who are accustomed to life in a free society because their methods make free use of any immoral or indiscreet behavior on the part of the individual...
...for once he was insufficiently cynical...
...Although Gladwyn Jebb makes no such blatant error in Halfway to 1984, a slender book assessing world prospects for that year, he betrays a shallow comprehension of what Orwell was trying to do...
...Moreover, in assessing 1984, Woodcock largely ignores the crucial question: Has the alarm sounded by Orwell in 1949 become more urgent in 1967...
...That Orwell's purpose in 1984 has been grossly misinterpreted is only natural...
...On August 6, 1964, he had denied before the same committee that the United States was "acting specifically under the SEATO treaty...
...With the burden of proof totally on them, Administration spokesmen have produced no evidence whatever for their claim that China is the true villain in Vietnam—the prime mover behind the North Vietnam "aggression...
...We were outraged by the Ethiopian war, not only because it represented naked aggression, but because the spectacle of well-armed Fascist bullies slaughtering outgunned, sheet-clad natives offended our sense of fair play and decency...
...The high pay offered for this noble work resolves most doubts about its morality...
...military intervention in South Vietnam...
...the book stands or falls on the validity of his social and political projections...
...Overt deception plays as big a part as fantastic theorizing in the Administration's efforts at self-justification...
...89 pp...
...The draft, temporarily discontinued during the time Orwell was writing 1984, has become an established institution, rotten in its new inequities, in a nation that once was a haven for Europeans fleeing militarism...
...This passage may display a supremely subtle sense of bureaucratic humor...
...1984 is a satire of the world as Orwell saw it in 1948...
...Bombing, napalming, and crop-poisoning issuing in the slaughter, impoverishment, and uprooting of non-combatant villagers are innocently swallowed by the euphemism, "pacification...
...Yet without protest or debate, they cheerfully appropriate 2,000 times as much for the development and production of weapons whose destructive power exceeds any conceivable rational purpose...
...To insure their own status they keep the "proles" in poverty and, through continuing warfare, deliberately destroy the production that could make their lives tolerable...
...As Senator J . William Fulbright has reminded us, in Vietnam we are succumbing to the same "fatal arrogance of power" that dimmed the brief light of Athens' pioneering democracy...
...In February, 1966, however, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization suddenly became the Administration's basis for invoking U.S...
...The debasement of language as a basic concomitant of totalitarianism was a perennial Orwell theme, and our present Administration has contributed more generously than any predecessor to this cause...
...Little, Brown & Co...
...Columbia University Press...
...by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge...
...When socialism aids the rich, as in the Federally-financed, billion-dollar supersonic transport program, a boondoggle for elite air travelers, it squares with rugged individualism...
...As well as anything I know, my childhood memories of Mussolini's attack on Ethiopia in 1935 display the demoralizing effect of the Vietnam adventure...
...As the basis of this mysterious commitment the Administration used to cite a 1954 letter from President Eisenhower to the late South Vietnamese premier, Ngo Dinh Diem...
...Beyond all reasonable doubt, it has...
...The rulers of his Oceania admit that power is an end, not a means...
...Throughout history a primitive, subconscious form of doublethink has helped conservative moralists to reconcile things like the Crusaders' atrocities with the teachings of their pacifist prophet...
...George Orwell's Alarm by C. W. GRIFFIN JR...
...economic support, conditioned on "needed reforms" never undertaken by Diem or any succeeding premier...
...Today it is Americans who are callously slaughtering helpless natives, inevitably if not purposefully...
...What enables conservatives to maintain their pose as amiable, well-meaning people is the schizophrenic device of doublethink...
...In 1984 we too have had a warning...
...Woodcock limits himself to a long-winded analysis of Orwell's work...
...366 pp...
...He recognizes Orwell as a prophet, a Twentieth Century Jeremiah, exhorting modern man to repent or face a dismal, supertotalitarian future...
...and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth...
...for most scientists it presents an irresistible inducement to doublethink...
...It pledged economic aid to the Diem regime only, and it promised no military support...
...TH E CRYSTAL SPIRIT: A STUDY OF GEORGE ORWELL, by George Woodcock...
...honor...
...But in the intervening years the Cold War has demonstrably corroded U. S. freedom and corrupted us with the vices we profess to loathe in our enemies...
...And the peace-loving Americans' new role as arms supplier to the world is a triumph of the Ministry of Truth's slogan, "War is Peace...
...Then, as Orwell explained, "Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink...
...Shortly after it was published, in a remarkable imitation of its "Ministry of Truth's" annihilation of history, official Communist "historians" removed Marshal Zhukov from the battle of Stalingrad...
...In 1984, however, doublethink is a highly sophisticated feat of mental contortion, perfected through exercise...
...and Eastasia, and he dismisses Orwell's sociological prophecies as "colored by his unhappy experiences...
...Orwell failed to see how easily governments could tame brilliant scientists and make a gigantic extermination industry into a way of life...
...Yet even Orwell failed to recognize the full potential of doublethink...
...A fresh surge of interest in Orwell was inevitable, and not merely because of the dates...
...An incipient "Newspeak" vocabulary hovers over reality...
...Jebb thinks that Orwell predicted the division of the world into the three superstates of Oceania, Eurasia, HALFWAY TO 1984, by Gladwyn Jebb, Lord Gladwyn...
...Can anyone who examines the Federal budget seriously doubt that the same desire to keep the poor underfoot at least subconsciously motivates our power elite...
...The Eisenhower letter pledged U.S...
...But when socialism aids the poor, it is morally decadent...
...Secretary of State Dean Rusk's desperate efforts to create the solemn, honor-bound "commitment," forever cited by Administration spokesmen as sanctifying our military operations in Vietnam, remind one of the record-falsifying work in Orwell's Ministry of Truth...
...Vietnam, of course, has raised doublethink to new heights...
...This approach is better than reading Shakespeare for his geography, but not enough to matter...
...The Defense Department, with its frantic weapons research, is almost indistinguishable from Oceania's Ministry of Peace...
...The clowns of the House Un-American Activities Committee have done their inept best to institute "Thoughtcrime...
...Two isolated compartments of the mind simultaneously accommodate contradictory propositions: 2 + 2 = 4 is a logical truth, but 2 + 2 = 5 can be a political or moral truth...
...Jebb has retained the scenery and banished the play...
...foreign policy today exists in a realm of fantasy where truth and logic are seldom allowed to raise their ugly heads, and the only discernible faith is Big Brother's slogan, "Ignorance is Strength...
...2) that this vastly overplayed aggression from North Viet nam is masterminded by China, the Vietnamese enemy of 2,000 years...
...Despite its apparently pathological gloom, 1984 keeps growing into a more recognizable caricature of the modern world...
...In 1984 the exigencies of fighting perpetual wars submerged the former Western democracies to the totalitarian level of their Eurasian and Eastasian foes...
...While their ambitious, brutal, and self-destructive wars raged against the Spartans, Melians, and Syracusans, they ignored the warnings of Aristophanes and Euripides...
...A brutal battle fought by U.S...
...Ultimately what is at stake is whether democracy is a government for all seasons, or only for political springtime...
...In one of the keenest insights of 1984, Orwell explains the pervasive malice of politics...
...soldiers to secure Premier Nguyen Cao Ky's corrupt dictatorship is part of the ludicrous misnamed "Operation Nathan Hale...
...For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality...
...6.95...
...The Afrikaners, Southern racists, and assorted militarists who claim to follow Jesus are even more mistaken than the simple conservatives who hail socialist Orwell as a defender of capitalism...
...More likely it reveals a total commitment to doublethink developed to its ultimate degree as described in 1984...
...Conservative Congressmen endlessly delay and denounce "spendthrift" welfare bills that authorize, for example, a trivial $12 million annually for slum dwellers' rent supplements...
...Lured on by the Cleons and other demagogues, the ancient Athenians wrecked their glorious civilization and lost their freedom...
...The Federal Bureau of Investigation, with its wiretapping and bugging, has adopted the basic snooping tactics of the Oceanian Thought Police...
...In the Oceania of 1984 even weapons' technology is stultified, Orwell explains, "partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society...
...In The Crystal Spirit, George Woodcock correctly rejects the notion that Orwell can be judged as a geopolitical fortune teller...
...In those days, 1984 suggested far more of the East than the West...
...Throughout the past seventeen centuries nominal Christians have almost unanimously reversed the pacifist teachings of Jesus of Nazareth...
...3.95...
...Nauseous gas is a "benevolent incapacitator...
...Secretary Rusk told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the "fundamental SEATO obligation" justified U.S...
Vol. 31 • March 1967 • No. 3
