Despite being one of the greatest essayists in the history of the English language, George Orwell’s fame rests largely on two novels written near the end of this life – Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Superficially they are about the same subject – the degeneration of Communism from something promising freedom and equality into its opposite. But because of when they were written, they are very different.
The time-gap between their creation, a mere three or four years, is so small as to appear irrelevant. But despite that, they inhabit separate epochs.
The first, Animal Farm, was written at the height of the Second World War alliance between Stalin and the West, between 1943 and 1944, and is about how Communism morphs into something as exploitative as capitalism. The book ends with the pig dictator, Napoleon, (an obvious portrayal of Joseph Stalin) changing the name of Animal Farm back to what it was under the ‘old regime’ when humans were in charge.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, meanwhile, was written as the Cold War began (between 1946 and 1948), and is about how communism vanquishes capitalism – “unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated” — with the result that inequality and oligarchy become permanent.
Ingsoc – originally “English socialism” – is the ideology of Oceania, which incorporates Britain, and is one of the three huge blocs into which the world is divided. In the neighbouring bloc – Eurasia – the philosophy is called Neo-Bolshevism, which comes into being after Europe is absorbed by Russia. The three philosophies in control of the world are, according to Orwell, “barely distinguishable” and “the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all”.
With his bushy moustache, Big Brother even looks like Stalin. The fact that ostensibly totally loyal party members are regularly purged in Oceania is also redolent of Stalinism. One notable feature of Stalin’s rule in Soviet Union, later adopted by other ‘Stalinoid’ countries like Czechoslovakia and North Korea, is that being a devoted Stalinist didn’t save you. The vast majority of delegates to the 17th Communist party “Victors’ Congress” in Moscow, so-called because the ‘Stalinists’ used it to celebrate their victory over inner party opposition, were subsequently arrested and executed.
Orwell’s sporadic attempts to liken the ideology of Oceania to Fascism as much as to Communism were quite feeble.
For example, as he is torturing the hero Winston Smith, inner party bigwig O’Brien reflects on the Party’s place in history:
The German Nazis and Russian Communists came very close to use in their methods but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, they have seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where humans beings would be free and equal. We are not like that.
But the Nazis never claimed, or even pretended, to have taken power temporarily. They wanted, as they repeatedly said, to usher in a “thousand-year Reich”. Nor did they profess any belief in freedom and equality. On the contrary, they fervently believed in profound racial and social inequality, and acted out those beliefs with devastating consequences. Orwell feels like he should make some cursory reference to Nazism, which after all had just ravaged Europe, killed tens of millions of people and carried out a genocide, but he really just wants to expose Stalinism.
Some works of fiction, and this specially applies to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have an influence far beyond any literary merits they may have (and Orwell was a great writer). They enable people, often far better than works of non-fiction, to make sense of the world. And this is the problem with both novels. Though they impart great insights, they are partial. And in the world we are now entering, that of corporate Fascism, this partiality is only becoming more glaring.
Animal Farm gives hints of this, which become more flagrant in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the former, the West (then Britain and France basically) is represented by Pilkington* of Foxwood Farm – “a large, neglected, old-fashioned farm”. Napoleon (Stalin), the leader of Animal Farm, vacillates between making deals with Pilkington or the other neighbouring farmer Frederick, who is a cypher for Hitler.
Napoleon finally puts his lot in with Frederick, only to be double-crossed and attacked (the Battle of the Windmill which represents the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union). This is how Orwell portrays the episode:
Wistful glances were sent in the direction of Foxwood. If Pilkington and his men would help them, the day might yet be won. But at that moment, the four pigeons, who had been sent out the day before, returned, one of them bearing a scrap of paper from Pilkington. On it was pencilled the words: ‘Serves you right’.
But this doesn’t bear any relation to what actually happened historically, misrepresenting both the two-timing character of Stalin and the rightful moral effrontery of the West. In reality, Stalin (Napoleon) resorted to the deal with the Nazis (Frederick) – the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which was ended by the surprise German attack on the Soviet Union – only after years of fruitlessly trying to interest the West (Pilkington) in a military alliance against Germany (Frederick), even formally requesting an alliance in April 1939 and then offering to invade Germany with a million troops on eve of the outbreak of the Second World War.
Meanwhile the West (Pilkington) continually rebuffed Stalin’s (Napoleon’s) overtures, hoping, unsuccessfully, to convince the Nazis to leave the West alone and be satisfied with devouring the Soviet Union. Negotiations with ‘moderate’ Nazis (i.e. not Hitler) who would agree to ‘limit’ their ambitions in this fashion even continued after the Second World War had begun. They only ended after Churchill became Prime Minister.
In short, Orwell’s representation of events is almost the exact opposite of what actually happened.
Orwell’s rose-tinted view of the British elite can be seen in the war-time pamphlet the Lion and the Unicorn (sub-titled Socialism and the English Genius and written just before Animal Farm). There Orwell was trying to drum up support for the war by emphasising its patriotic underpinnings – ironically precisely what Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union.
In that book, the English are presented as a “rather stuffy Victorian family” which thwarts the young and cedes all the power to “irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts”.
But in truth, as I think Orwell recognised deep down, the British elite was more malign than old-fashioned and thoughtless. They were, in more modern language, ‘Fascism enablers’.
The appeasement Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, for example, not only tried to do a with deal with Hitler so that he would exclusively turn his guns to the East but also previously pushed – unsuccessfully he was only the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time – for the British government negotiate a non-aggression pact with Fascist Japan. This was after Japan had invaded the Chinese region of Manchuria in 1931 (it is a fact still barely recognised in the West that the Second World War in Asia began far earlier than the one in Europe).
But Orwell’s attitude, intimated in Animal Farm, of concentrating on the dangers posed by the official enemy while downplaying the sins of one’s own ‘side’, pervades Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, with the coming of the Cold War, it became all-consuming. In the fictional Oceania the doctrine of Ingsoc grows out of “English socialism” while the Russians have absorbed continental Europe, imposing something called “Neo-Bolshevism”. Fascism, resting on slave labour, war and genocide, though clearly a recent memory, is nowhere in sight.
This is despite the fact that Fascism, or at least extreme right authoritarianism that routinely kills and tortures political opponents, became the norm after the Second World War in the part of the world – which was most of it – controlled by the West. Think of Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah in Iran, Mobutu in the Congo, the succession of genocidal generals ruling Guatemala, or Pinochet in Chile. Europe wasn’t immune either. Right-wing dictators presided over Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the late 1960s, all of which were, by the way, loyal members of Nato.
As the writer Michael Parenti put it in 1969, “our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has”.
And the one thing that really defines Fascism is obsessive anti-communism. In 1936 Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan signed an alliance called the Anti-Comintern Pact (Comintern being an abbreviation of the Soviet Communist International). Later Mussolini’s Italy and Fascist regimes in Spain and Hungary joined.
Despite the fact that Communism, with the exception of isolated hold-outs, is no more, the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four is so great that we are still trapped within its mental architecture. European leaders delude themselves that the real threat to Greenland comes from China and Russia, even though the corporate fascist in the White House openly threatens to invade it.
Our politicians obsess over the phantom of Russia attacking Europe – clearly a vestige of Cold War propaganda about the Soviet threat – but happily pave the way for the quasi-Fascist Reform ‘party’ (appropriately enough it’s actually a limited company) to become the next government.
And Reform looks to Dubai as a model for the society it wishes to create. Dubai is part of the United Arab Emirates, a country “owned” by the Royal Family that rules over it. Dissent is not allowed. In Dubai, 92% of the population (all immigrants without rights) serve (and that is an appropriate word) a wealthy elite that regards the city as a sun-filled playground. Corporate Fascism is an accurate description.
Like imperialism, Fascism is one of those things we can only see in inverted commas, as archaic accusations coming from fevered, extreme leftists. But both are real, and in the First World, becoming realer by the month. That we suffer from such intellectual blindness owes a lot to the aura of the undoubtedly great work of fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
* The fact that in the new Andy Serkis version of Animal Farm the billionaire who plots to take over Animal Farm is called Frieda Pilkington is possibly an indication that it’s not as dumb as people make out.
