George Orwell Remembered
I knew about this, but it slipped my mind to post on it [thankfully, John Derbyshire reminded me]…
Yesterday was the 60th Anniversary of the death of that great seer of The West, George Orwell. I believe him to be one of the towering figures of the 2oth Century, right up there with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but his greatest relevance, in America at least, I think is now, as we are engaged in a struggle against the same forces and mindset that ruled Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
A short biography of the man may be found by clicking here.
Here are some quotes from Nineteen Eight-Four, perhaps the greatest insight into Leftist thinking:
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just to keep people frightened.” [paging Saul Alinsky]
I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.
“How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. [...] we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
For this final one, substitute ‘conservatives’ for ‘Winston’:
If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent.
Talk about being relevant to this day and age.
What’s always been interesting to me, is that even though 1984 is a brilliant warning about totalitarianism, George Orwell (Eric Blair) himself, was a Fabian Socialist … all the more reason everyone should read his frightening (and prophetic) book.
Maybe someone more immersed in Orwell can explain to me how he remained a socialist when clearly his writings warned that socialism at it’s core is evil–or as Ayn Rand would have put it Anti-Life.
Because he was evil, and gloried in it. Its the chutzpah of it, the utter cheek to tell people what your group is going to do to them, and then wink and say “Just Kidding”.
Oh did you think that this was fiction?