Reclaiming George rwell

I was in a Dundee pub, The George Orwell, recently chatting to a friend from out of town. He asked if I’d ever read the titular author. He mockingly said that we live in 1984 now: a common refrain. This gave me a cause to wonder what is the view of George Orwell’s politics today; a classical liberal? A MAGA Republican, an anti-communist? To me, a fan, his fiction evokes deep cringe. American conspiracy theorists bemoaning their bans from Twitter or comedian Robert Webb telling Russell Brand – “Choosing to vote is the most British kind of revolution.”, encouraging him to “read some f**king Orwell”.

That his writing is a stick-cum-arm-extension for punching left is not entirely surprising. He occupied a controversial position in the British Labour movement; an opponent of Stalinism in a time when the USSR was generally viewed positively. It was out of this opposition to Soviet repression that his 1945 allegorical novella Animal Farm was born. The fable tells of animals overthrowing an oppressive farmer, led by the pigs, who themselves become corrupted by power. They end up no better than their former master.

A popular retelling of this specific critique takes a subtly different form. Following Orwell’s death in 1950, the rights were sold by his widow Sonia Orwell to film executives Carleton Alsop and Farris Farr. Unbeknownst to Mrs Orwell, these ‘film executives’ were undercover CIA agents working for Howard E. Hunt’s Psychological Warfare Workshop. Through this medium, the intra-leftist critique was transformed into Cold War propaganda.

The sympathetic revolutionary Old Major - a stand-in for Vladimir Lenin - became a bumbling old fool. The Leon Trotsky-based character Snowball, a betrayed egalitarian, became a fanatic intellectual no better than the Stalin-like figure Napoleon. The novella ends on a pessimistic note. The pigs become indistinguishable from their masters - not worse, the same. On the other hand, the film finishes with the farm animals enlisting some kind of local human farmers - think: Capitalists - to overthrow the pigs.

Even more widely referenced is Orwell’s 1948 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book describes the totalitarian society, Orwell believed, towards which the world was heading. The text never serves as a critique of any ideology. Instead, it critiques the brutal accumulation and implementation of centralised power recognisable in dictatorships; be they Communist, Fascist or Theocratic. The only time Orwell’s ideology

Design: Joshua Harris seeps through is in his portrayal of the proles. These poor citizens exist on the outskirts of society; Winston remarks that any revolution would come from them.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, control is the point. When The Party decides something to be the truth, it becomes the truth. Any contradictory info is and always was false. There is no racial segregation in Orwell’s totalitarianism. The party’s error is not gender-based discrimination. Centralised control is their sin. This ambiguity is what lends the text its ability to be co-opted. Big Brother is faceless, defined only as omniscient and bureaucratic. A forcenot for evil - but for its own maintenance. For this purpose, it exacts evil on its subjects.

The missing critique of any existing ideology is why the text is so popular. But this broad appeal also means that it can apply to anything. It’s how a renowned author, the world’s richest man and millionaire talk show hosts can start accusing their enemies - be they “trans rights activists”, “the woke mind virus” or the Trump/Biden administrationsof being the Big Brother. They are under the boot; all Winston Smiths’ and those who seek to criticise them are The Party enacting their vicious mind control tactics.

Orwellian has become a libertarian catch-all to describe anyone attempting to stop one from doing precisely what they want, whenever. Big Brother is the American school board’s meeting chairperson, newspaper editors, even University Students’ Associations. The redefinition of Orwell’s surname is almost ... forget it.

Is Orwell worth salvaging? Those who coopt him for laughable means will never read anything else he published. I would argue that to cede Orwell to those who are either complacent about their belief in freedom or enemies of democratic freedom using his name opportunistically is a betrayal of his principles. To allow the Death of the Author to apply in the case of George Orwell is to not only lose a valid critique of totalitarianism, but to allow a repeat of the betrayal that was the 1952 Animal Farm film. What did the man himself think? Here is a quote from one of his great essays, Why I Write, published in 1946: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.”