Dread Year
Howe, Irving
Dread Year 1984 REVISITED edited by Irving Howe Harper & Row. 276 pp. $10.95. The battle over the meaning of George Orwell's 1984 goes on. The political ambiguity of this brilliant novel left...
...Was he instead an early Cold Warrior, attacking Soviet-style communism alone...
...Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, for example, while recognizing that Orwell himself was a socialist, argues nonetheless that 1984 carries forward the antirevolutionary tradition established by Edmund Burke and other critics of the French Revolution...
...As a result, whole topics of possible relevance to Orwell's novel are barely mentioned...
...Strasser's essay strengthens this collection because it takes a fresh look at the future rather than a stale glance at the past...
...For Western intellectuals in 1949, when the book was published, the Soviet Union under Stalin seemed to possess a monopoly on political evil...
...It remains, in my view, an enemy of freedom and democracy, but it is no longer the only one...
...Never a Marxologist, I am also not an Or-wellist...
...Howe and his contributors are remarkably faithful to Orwell's text, yet in so being, less than faithful to his spirit...
...We are all threatened by an Orwellian nightmare, but "the menace hovering over the 1980s 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...
...Alan Wolfe (Alan Wolfe, a sociologist at Queens College, wrote 'America's Impasse: the Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth...
...Evil has more homes than one, which the international politics of 1984—another subject barely mentioned in Howe's collection—seems designed to prove...
...How Orwell is interpreted will play a role, however small, in determining the condition of our future...
...But I am not as impressed as Howe by the diversity of the contributions...
...Irving Howe had a good idea to bring together diverse writers to talk about the meaning of, as Marc Crispin Miller puts it in the book, both the year 1984 and 1984...
...To me, the greatness of 1984 lies in its unsparing effort to draw from dangerous trends in the present a warning as to how to avoid a horrifying future...
...surely jingoistic television preachers, island invasions, and domestic double-talk warrant some Orwell-inspired reflections...
...A narrow ideological spectrum—from right-wing social democrats to neoconser-vatives—produces a narrow selection of topics...
...Yet for much of the Third World, fascist techniques live on, and in regimes that fancy themselves on the opposite end of the spectrum from the communism which these authors consistently denounce...
...Like Marx, Orwell can be read for what he said about the conditions of his time or he can be read as someone offering an approach that must grow and transform as new events occur...
...Johanno Strasser, a writer and editor from West Berlin, contributes an essay that takes Orwell's warning as more than just one more occasion to reiterate anticommunist cliches...
...The contributors to 1984 Revisited also disagree about the accuracy of Orwell's predictions...
...There is, for example, little discussion of Nazism and its implications for the present time—as if fascism were merely a historical phenomenon superseded by newer evils...
...One can find each of these interpretations in 1984 Revisited, the collection of essays that Irving Howe has assembled to examine the relevance of 1984, surely the first of such books to appear during the dread year...
...To be sure, all the writers disagree with each other, but almost all of them share a set of common assumptions about the singularly radical evils of communism...
...Leszek Kolakowski takes a contrary position: The Soviet Union remains totalitarian, he insists, for its version of socialist ideology demands the complete organization of intellectual as well as economic life...
...One of the essays in Howe's book stands out from all the rest...
...I only wish he had invited such writers as Jacobo Timerman, Roy Medvedev, Noam Chomsky, Garry Wills, Barbara Ehrenreich, Marshall Ber-man, Earl Shorris, Arlie Hochschild, and others whose writings show an imagination and range missing in this collection...
...James Rule, another sociologist, warns us about the dangers of data-collection systems and new technologies in the capitalist countries...
...Nothing could have been more in violation of Orwell's outlook than to bring out a collection hewing to a party line or monolithic ideology," Howe writes, and no effort was made to provide definitive answers in this collection...
...Michael Walzer argues that the communist countries are examples of "failed totalitarianism," demonstrating that the state of mobilization and fear demanded by Big Brother can never last...
...Race goes un-mentioned in Howe's pages, as does Vietnam...
...Nor is there much interpretation of the success of the extreme Right in societies as diverse as the United States, Great Britain, and Israel...
...The political ambiguity of this brilliant novel left Orwell's survivors with more questions than answers: Was Orwell an early theorist of totalitarianism, equating Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia...
...Or was he a prophet of the totalizing trends facing all political systems, including those in the West...
...There are authoritarian tendencies in Marxism, Strasser argues, but they exist in the ideas of Herman Kahn as well...
...Basing his comments on such radical theorists as Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, Strasser calls for a skeptical attitude toward the fetishism of growth and technological perfection that is just as inherent in orthodox socialism as it is in rampaging capitalism...
Vol. 48 • February 1984 • No. 2
