Fear and Loathing on Airstrip One Andrew Kennedy reassesses George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in the light of the recent war drive and the fear and hatred generated by government and media. Big Brother', 'doublethink' 'Newspeak', 'unperson', 'thought crime' are all terms which originate from Orwell's novel, first published in 1949. It's been easy enough to reference these terms over the past few months, but are they just convenient lefty soundbites? On the contrary, I would argue. Vineteen Eighty-Four still throws light on current politics. The novel is set on Airstrip One. which is recognisably London in the aftermath of the Second World War, with its ration- ing and bombsites - but in this world the 'rocket bombs' keep falling, the war goes on, and has done for as long as anyone can remember. Airstrip One is part of Oceania, a state ruled by the Party, with Big Brother as its This hollow parody of a socialist state, where everyone still calls each other 'comrade', is partly based on Orwell's bitter personal experience of Stalinism during the Spanish Civil War (chronicled in Homage to Catalo- nia). But Orwell did not think capital- ism immune to totalitarian tendencies: Winston Smith, Orwell's 'hero', works in the Ministry of Truth (Lies), just as Orwell worked in the Ministry of Infor- He was also influenced by former Trot- skyist James Burnham's ideas about bureaucratic collectivism in The Man- agerial Revolution (1941) - capitalism would become increasingly managed and planned, while State 'socialism' would allow no involvement by workers in the running of the State, so that the two systems would become indistinguisha- ble. In Oceania, as in Eurasia and Eastasia, the other two states, endless war is a device used to maintain the support of both Party members and the proles' for the regime in the face of dire short- ages and hardship in everyday life. Announcements of a great victory are inevitably followed by announcements of cuts in rations. Every day at work there is a Two-Minute Hate, during which the face of the Trotsky-like traitor, Goldstein, appears on the telescreen (television), followed by images of whichever enemy Oceania happens to be fighting at that time. In this permanent war, Winston's torturer later tells him, 'the heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated all over again'. Orwell shows the links between war, hatred of the Other, and racism. All three warring states agree that 'the main fron- tiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs'. In the real world, it is much easier for bombs to enter Iraq than it is for refugees to enter Britain - true to a policy which, as someone has com- mented, is equivalent to shouting 'Fire' in a crowded cinema and then locking Winston's job, like one of Alistair Camp- bell's underlings, is to make the past fit with the needs of the present. If a previous statement by Big Brother is incompatible with his current statements, it was never made - the record of it dis- appears into the 'memory hole' and the text is rewritten. Of course, in the real Oceania, as opposed to the fictional one, the truth is beginning to come to light under the pressure of a fiercely critical section of civil society, something which is not allowed to exist in Orwell's novel. Policing Ourselves In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, television is two-way: it not only func- tions as a means of indoctrination but as a means of surveillance. Of course, this is not on the cards just yet, but 'reality TV' programmes such as (funnily enough) Big Brother and programmes based on video clips arguably prepare the ground for such developments by encouraging us to see surveillance as normal. To fit in, we must be self-surveilling, happily socially inte- grated subjects, each carrying around their issue_001 autumn, 2003 Socialist_Outlook own internal policeman, ready to expunge deviant tendencies. Orwell would have little time for post- modernism. Winston Smith, like Orwell himself, expresses a horror of those argu- ments which see distinctions between lies and truth as unimportant and the external world or the past as having no independ- ent reality. Although Orwell's sturdy English empiricism (empiricism = idea that truth is achieved by observation and experi- ence. Can be one-sided: tends to downplay the role of theory) appears a little boring, nonetheless he had seen both capitalist and Stalinist lie machines at work. If the past can simply be twisted to reflect effec- current preoccupations, then we tively live, as Winston says, 'in an endless present, in which the past is simply a warehouse from which one selects accord- ing to taste, and we have no way of con- ceptualising, let alone acting to bring about, an alternative future. In this situ- ation, with no independent means of ver- ifying what is true, those with the most power over the information media deter- mine what should be believed. Postmodernism But Orwell might have been interested in Jean Baudrillard's three essays of 1991, now collectively entitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Baudrillard is not so crass as to argue that the first Gulf War did not actually happen - just that it did not happen as far as our media-saturated experience is concerned. The first Gulf War, he argues, exhibited none of the usual signs of a war - it was incredibly one-sided, appeared antisepti- cally clean and precise (viz. the high-level aerial shots), moreover the defeated pro- tagonist (Saddam) politically outlasted the victor (Bush senior). It was less a war, as generally understood, than a media dram- atisation of American power. The second Gulf War, however, arguably represents the 'overdue' re-insertion of the reality principle. Imperialism commit- ted itself this time to invasion and regime change, got involved in messy ground fighting, took casualties, regularly killed and injured civilians and is now up to its neck in the famous "quagmire", all of which has been reported on fairly exten- sively. Like the rulers of Oceania. however. our rulers, with their perspective of endless war, sometimes appear to believe that
when war is continuous, there is no need to achieve a decisive victory. Conven- tional criteria of victory and defeat do not apply: what is important is to keep the war going, to maintain a supply of partial vic- tories, but also to maintain the idea of a constant threat. A strength of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the links it makes between politics and indi- vidual and collective psychology. Sex and love are key themes in the novel. Julia, Winston's lover, 'may only be a rebel from the waist downwards', as he informs her, but that at least is a start. In a society where the orgasm is due to be abolished, sex, as the hero recognises, 'is a political act'. Wilhelm Reich, author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, would have recognised Orwell's picture of a society where interpersonal sexuality is repressed and the resultant latent hysteria can easily be redirected towards the figure of the leader. In this respect, of course, the mousta- chioed figure of Big Brother resembles the image of Saddam as experienced by the Iraqi people - omnipresent, repres- sively patriarchal, apparently benevo- lent but with a threat behind it. However, in contrast to Saddam's seemingly con- fident image, a certain insecurity could be detected in Bush and Blair during the build-up to the war. The one could be (and was) portrayed as a scampering monkey-child trying to live up to his daddy's example, the other was often ill at ease with the language of macho heterosexual performance (com- mentators recalled his school nickname of 'Emily'). Still, both paraded their families and hence their healthy virility. Since then, their military machines have par- tially compensated for any perceived lack in other departments, even succeeding in killing members of Saddam's family. The only (faint) hope, in the novel, lies with the proles. The dream of individu- alist rebellion, the heroic heterosexual couple defying society with their love and solidarity, the stuff of so many liberal Hollywood films, is brutally crushed as Winston and Julia are subjected to sys- tematic torture, their personalities are deconstructed and they betray each other. Resistance, if it is possible, can only be But the Blair government collective. would not be in its current crisis unless this resistance existed. The Immigration Myth