70 years of ‘1984’: Big Brother is still watching us

Seventy years ago, when George Orwell published 1984 (1949), the book he would be best remembered for, the world was recovering from the aftermath of a devastating war. The Iron Curtain had driven a wedge through nations, polities and economies. And even before the baleful shadow of Nazism had receded from public consciousness, totalitarian regimes were digging their claws into vast stretches of Eurasia, especially in the Soviet Union and China. In less than a year, Orwell would be dead of tuberculosis. He wouldn’t witness the turbulence that befell the later decades of the 20th century, or know the prophetic impact of his novel even to this day, especially in nations experiencing the rise of strongman politics.

To give a couple of examples of 1984’s persistent appeal: The book’s sales rose by a staggering 9,500% after Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser to US President Donald Trump, used the distinctly Orwellian phrase “alternative facts” to defend former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s falsification of the number of people who had attended the president’s inauguration in 2017. In a different context, Edward Snowden, the American whistle-blower who exposed the global surveillance network of the National Security Agency, invoked Orwell’s name while making his momentous disclosures in 2013. Along with “Kafkaesque”, “Orwellian” has become a popular buzzword in current social and political lexicon.

Yet, as Dorian Lynskey writes in his new book, The Ministry Of Truth: A Biography Of George Orwell’s 1984, Orwell never once claimed his novel was a prophecy. On the heels of the tremendous (and, to Orwell and his publishers, entirely unexpected) success of Animal Farm (1945), Orwell turned whatever vestiges of energy he had left to completing 1984, which he had deliberated over for years. In the late 1940s, after moving to the island of Jura in Scotland, Orwell began composing the novel at a furious pace. In its final stages, he retyped his densely revised manuscript over a punishing schedule of 4,000 words per day, with little care for his failing health. In a letter written around that time, he called the novel “my new utopia”, conceding that its ambience wasn’t far from the times he was living in.

Born in 1903 as Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, India, and employed as a police officer with the colonial government, Orwell (he was best known by his adopted pen name) had a relatively brief but intense life. Until his death in London on 21 January 1950, his political leanings were ambiguous. Yet his posthumous legacy remains that of an outspoken critic of totalitarianism. Appropriated by both the left and the right to serve their agendas to oppose fascism and communism, respectively, Orwell remains a notoriously slippery “hero” to this day.

Alert to the vagaries of tyranny from early on, he was deeply attracted to socialism, but wasn’t an unqualified humanist by any stretch of the imagination. Some of Orwell’s early work, such as The Road To Wigan Pier (1937), was unapologetically anti-Semitic. Later in life, he maintained a list of over a hundred public figures and intellectuals whom he suspected of having left-leaning sympathies or homosexual inclinations. Orwell’s homophobia was as virulent as his caricature of Jews, though his sharply critical view of colonial subjects, often bordering on contempt, as evidenced in his first novel Burmese Days and in essays such as Shooting An Elephant, was perhaps a notch or two stronger.

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It’s crucial to put these facts straight since, for much of his afterlife, Orwell has enjoyed the reputation of a literary clairvoyant and a spokesperson for the downtrodden. Disenchanted as he was with the ideology of Stalinism, Orwell never claimed to be a futurist in the sense H.G. Wells, who influenced him considerably, was. Like Wells, Orwell understood the key to a successful dystopia. “I had realized the more impossible the story I had to tell,” Wells once wrote, “the more ordinary must be the setting.”

Such was his mastery over this self-professed technique that when Orson Welles and Howard Koch adopted The War Of The Worlds for CBS Radio on 30 October 1938, listeners were struck by a wild panic. So completely were people taken by what they heard that they honestly believed Martians had invaded the world, in much the same way as mass hysteria is fanned by fake news on social media now.

Lynskey quotes columnist Dorothy Thompson’s reaction to the pandemonium back then: The incident proved, she wrote, that “the danger is not from Mars but from the theatrical demagogue”. The sentiment still rings true now as right-wing governments are on the ascendant.

In the dystopia conjured up by Orwell in 1984, the mood bristles with a repressed paranoia. Winston Smith, the protagonist who lives under the regime of the all-pervasive Big Brother, commits two kinds of fatal sacrilege: He keeps a secret journal to record his unpoliced thoughts and falls in love with Julia, who, he is led to believe, is a co-conspirator against the autocracy of their Supreme Leader.

1984, as Lynksey points out, is a tragedy foretold, narrated in a near-linear trajectory. But that doesn’t stop the reader from racing through it. The message of the novel is as brutal as the key imagery it returns to at least 20 times in the text: that of a boot crashing down on a face. This vision haunted the world through the 20th century—as it still does. It is depicted in graffiti and murals in ghettos and suburban corners untouched by gentrification, memorably by artists like Banksy.

Apart from describing the physical and psychological realities of life in a dystopia, 1984 paints a vivid portrait of the dictator as a mass leader and provides a whole new vocabulary to speak about political oppression, one that survives into the 21st century. In the early 1940s, before 1984 was published, the idea of the state as a giant technocracy was already being posited. In his best-selling book, The Managerial Revolution (1941), James Burnham proposed two radical notions. As Lynskey summarizes these, the first claimed that “capitalist democracy could not survive the war, and socialism could not replace it”. The second asserted that “the future was a huge, centralized state run by a class of ‘managers’: technicians, bureaucrats, executives and so on”.

Orwell envisioned such a monstrous world. And it is vividly present around us today, with an ever-growing list of corporate behemoths added to its roster of rulers, entities that keep vigil on our every move, likes, dislikes and thought.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of 1984 is the rich vocabulary of catchphrases it has given us to better imagine our predicament. Terms such as “deepfake” and “doublespeak”, which recur in the current global news cycle, are the inheritors of the lexical possibilities offered by Orwell when he came up with an array of compound words like “newspeak” and “thoughtcrime” (see box).

For a title that has such ubiquitous public recall, the polemical potential of 1984 is prone to being harvested and subverted. It was co-opted, memorably if ironically, by Apple Computers when it launched its first Macintosh machine on 24 January 1984. “1984 won’t be like 1984,” the promotional for the world-changing product promised.

In spite of the dystopian global order we are living in, there is hope still. For were we really living in a universe that exactly resembled the one in which 1984 is set, we would probably not be reading the book and writing about it freely—and the wide network of influences it has spawned.

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Orwell speak

Five wordplays from ‘1984’

Big Brother: an omnipresent and omniscient leader of the people

Doublethink: the power to hold two contradictory thoughts in mind

Memory hole: a contraption used to wipe facts forever from history

Newspeak: politically correct speech taken to its utmost extreme

Proles: the proletariat, who form the bulk of the population

In our special package to mark 70 years of 1984, we bring you a glimpse of dystopia on screen, stage, and video games.