Edward "Robot" Goldstein Speaketh

Interesting. I picked this up over at FDL, and several things struck me about it:

A) Surprisingly, Snowden is able to speak quite clearly and the video of him is quite stable in this "robot" presentation as opposed to the herky-jerky, unwatchable and barely understandable presentation ("through seven proxies!!!") at SXSW.




B) He strikes me as someone making a sales-pitch for a product which he cannot quite show or describe. He talks in endless loops about something we're supposed to just "know," I guess, and ultimately it doesn't amount to anything concrete at all.

C) 'Taking back the Internet'? What is this supposed to be? A "Magna Carta?" Would this be some sort of agreement between the Internet Barons and a diminished government such as was concluded at Runnymede? An agreement, by the way, that only protected the Barons from the Crown, not the villeins from their overlords. And which was not anything remotely resembling "democracy."

All in all, I was quite taken with the technology -- my the set up in Moscow must have been dandy, and who did it? But the content? As with so many TED talks, not so much.

Repost of "On Appeals to Orwell"

About three years ago, I did a series of posts under the title "On Appeals to Orwell," based in part on what I thought was a serious -- and likely deliberate -- misapprehension of Orwell's thoughts and politics among a cadre of Libertarians and their fellow travelers who had adopted him as One of Their Own. The triggering issue was what I saw as the misuse of the term "tribalism" to refer to "mindless loyalty" which was being justified by reference to Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism" -- which never mentions tribalism, and in my view is not meant in any way to confuse tribalism with nationalism.

However, there is much more to Orwell and his perspectives as expressed in his writing, including his dismay at the march of totalitarian nationalism in his lifetime, including the many elements of it found in supposed western democracies. He was anti-imperial, anti-totalitarian, anti-surveillance, and anti-conformity. Yet he was, he said, politically a Democratic Socialist, far from the Libertarian Hero he's been made out to be.

He came to his highly negative views of totalitarianism and nationalism and their march throughout the western world, including Britain, from his grim personal experience in British Imperial Service in Burmah, and as a propagandist with the BBC during World War II, among many other experiences in his life.

I initially wrote this series of posts in response to what I saw as the misuse of his legacy as a means to promote ideas and an ideology that were quite contrary to his point of view. But looking over them again, I see they may have some utility again as we realize just how comprehensive the American -- and by extension, global -- surveillance state has become, something we might say Orwell was in on the ground floor of developing and implementing, and which he came to reject utterly.

So. Here are links to the series. Make of them what you will. I am quite fond of the early BBC kinescope of "1984" that is embedded in one of them!

On Appeals to Orwell, June 26, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore, June 28, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore II, June 28, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- UpSide Down, InSide Out, Round and Round, June 29, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- Attacking the Weak, Flattering the Strong and Evaluating Every Contact on the Basis of Advancement, June 30, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- The -Isms on the Home Stretch July 1, 2010

 

On Appeals to Orwell -- The Wrap Up and a New Day Dawning July 1, 2010

On Appeals to Orwell -- The Wrap Up and a New Day Dawning

Finally.

Lawrence Malkin is a hard boiled writer and reporter from the old school. When he wrote "Half Way to 1984" for Horizon magazine in 1970, he was contributing to an issue devoted to the counterculture developing in this country and to countercultural visions from history.

One of them, of course, was George Orwell's dystopian vision of 1984.

The threat of totalitarianism was still very real to people at that time; the Soviet Union was resurgent, Red China was starting to finish up its Cultural Revolutionary phase which had sent shock waves through leftist/Maoist communities, and memories of the Nazis were still raw for many who had lived through World War II.

In Nineteen Eighty Four Orwell was postulating a fantastic totalitarian near future in Britain and through his allegory described much of what was wrong with totalitarianism.

Malkin used his opportunity with Horizon not just to explore Orwell's themes and visions in Nineteen Eighty Four but to probe Orwell's life and letters, and to dig as deep as he could into Orwell's actual political philosophy.

By 1970, it was clear, despite indulgence and mockery, that the Counterculture was real; rebellious youth was not just rebelling but was literally leaving the socio-political construct of their parents and grandparents world, forming distinctive new communities and developing alternative ways of living in the not-so material world.

We forget what was being rebelled against. The 1950s and early '60s was an age of rigid conformity, and sometimes draconian punishment for getting out of line. It was a time of McCarthyite anti-Communism, of loyalty oaths, of suburban homogeneity, of very narrow and directed political paths. The class structure seemed to be rooted in permanence. Though most Americans had a reasonably comfortable living standard, there were many pockets of intractable poverty, race-hatred, and oppression. The American Dream was not fulfillable for many millions, and for the rest, their status was practically immutable. Barring the unforseen, the upper classes would remain so, the working classes likewise, and the middle class of professionals would stay in their place as well.

In that context Nineteen Eighty Four might have seemed an allegory to some, but to many others, especially among the young, it was living truth. Our society was already a totalitarian nightmare. We didn't have to wait. It was here.

Yes, there were other totalitarian nightmare societies on the face of the earth, and they might or might not be "worse" -- we didn't know and we couldn't know. The only information we had about the Soviet Union or Red China, for example, was the propaganda we were fed by the media and our various Ministries of Truth. Travel was forbidden except under very strictly controlled circumstances which no one could meet.

Propaganda from the other side circulated essentially underground, and it was clearly as fraudulent as anything on our side. Lies about our "enemies" were constant, as was the fear of what we might do if we learned the truth.

Of course there was a military draft throughout the era and that enabled the conduct of various wars, such as the bloody nightmare on the Korean peninsula and Vietnam engagement which commenced almost immediately after hostilities in Korea came to a close. There were many anti-colonial resistance movements in the disintegrating empires of the European powers, and almost always, the United States backed the Imperial powers against the Natives. Vietnam, for example, became an American enterprise when the French were finally expelled from their colonies in Southeast Asia, but the United States had already been involved on behalf of the French.

Africa was seething with anti-colonial movements, and the position of the United States was that most of it was due to Communist agitation. Nevertheless, the colonial powers mostly gave up their overseas possessions by the early 1960s, leaving their former subjects to sink or to swim.

And then there was rebellion at home, rebellion that could not be put down. It was hell out there.

This was the context of Lawrence Malkin's piece about Orwell in Horizon in 1970. It's important to keep that context in mind as we try to make sense of what he had to say in his hard boiled journalist style.

The principle was that 1984 wasn't the Future, it was the Present which was being rebelled against.

And Orwell was an Honored Elder (now deceased) of the Rebels.

Very difficult concepts to understand now, when clearly the State is so much more oppressive today than it ever was back then. Isn't it?

In certain details, yes. But on an overall objective scale? Not at all. Not even close. "Liberation" has become the standard in the decades since the Counterculture rebellion of the 1960's and 1970's. "Liberation" is taken for granted, so much so that resistance to such things as Marriage Equality -- a concept that hardly existed in the early years of the Counterculture -- seems quaint and anachronistic.

Liberationist movements were countered by Communitarian and Utopian ideals that were being acted on extensively. What we may remember of the era are the Liberationist activists, but there was a whole other Counterculture momentum toward community and unification that is still around, while Liberationism has morphed into something barely recognizable -- for example, the Corporate Liberation Act passed by a one vote majority on the Supreme Court with its Citizens United ruling, or the continuing calls for the "liberation" of the financiers and the big oil companies from the onerous restraints of the Government, no matter what horrors ensue.

Malkin makes much of who Orwell was -- an Eton schoolboy, a British Imperial functionary in Burma, an intellectual and a writer of essays and novels of various things, a propagandist for the BBC, a disillusioned polemicist. He was neither British Upper Class nor Lower Class, nor really was he integrated into the British Middle Class. He was an outlier, and as an outlier, he noticed things that others, socialized to their place and lot in life, did not. (Malkin doesn't point out that Orwell -- Eric Blair -- was born in India, that his mother was French, though she had been raised in Burma, and that he spent a good deal of time in the 1930's in France and Europe rather than in Britain).

Malkin's thesis is that Orwell is anti-Utopian. Given the Utopian countercultures that are the theme of the volume, Malkin is proposing that Orwell dissents from those who would use his works to foster Utopianism: the "Orwell Cultists."

And yet... Malkin also proposes that Orwell believed that there had been an abject failure of "liberal rationalism," and what he means, exactly, is not so easy to parse from his text. In some sense, "liberal rationalism" refers to the Enlightenment which -- though faltering in the face of growing absolutism -- can hardly be argued to have failed in the larger context. "Progressivism" -- in its old line guise, not that of today's internet "progressives" -- is often referred to as "liberal rationalism," as in technocracy, meritocracy, and rule by experts. That was in contrast to the corrupted crony capitalism and its purchased handmaiden "democracy" of the pre-Progressive Era. In Orwell's time that sort of "liberal rationalism" had not failed in the domestic context (it wouldn't do so for another generation or more), but the turmoil internationally from all the wars and revolutions occurring during the Progressive Era is certainly enough to give one pause.

More apropos of Malkin's point, however, is the Libertarian notion that through argument and rational consideration alone can appropriate actions and sensibilities be discovered. Malkin says that Orwell believed human nature did not allow the overly rational to dominate and completely control the emotional, and it was a Utopian belief to think that rationality could ever be successfully supreme.

In today's world, though not so much in Orwell's time, Libertarians assert the supremacy of rational argument in all things, and thus, they are today's "liberal rationality" Utopians.

There is no doubt that Orwell was not a believer in Utopia by any human agency. Yet Malkin refers to him as a "libertarian Socialist," which doesn't make any sense in today's context. What I think he meant was that Orwell was a Democratic Socialist, but the language to describe what that was didn't exist in American political discourse.

If anything, many Americans were more viscerally opposed to Socialism then than they are today.

Describing Orwell as a "libertarian Socialist" may seem dissonant, but the point was that Orwell saw the necessity of balancing personal autonomy and liberty with the needs of society, and he saw that balance being found in part through democratic processes -- which are not always rational.

Malkin quotes Orwell from a 1941 letter to H. G. Wells:

Sensible men have no power. The energy which actually shapes the world springs from emotions -- racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war -- which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action."

Malkin goes on to say:

Orwell's most important discovery was that the managers of our society [which at the time were almost all Progressives of the old school], far from being sensible men, share the irrational drives of their fellows, and these include power.

Indeed.

And in Orwell's conception, the rational idea cannot be made into effective rule.

Malkin again:

For Orwell [the allegory of Animal Farm and 1984] became the vehicle for explaining the major intellectual event of the first half of [the 20th] century, the failed Utopia -- in Russia and elsewhere. The raw material consists of the curiously dated sectarian quarrels of the left in the 1930's, which Orwell freezes forever in the brilliant amber of Homage to Catalonia. But the issue described there is still real: freedom vs. power.

And quoting Orwell again from "As I Please", 1943:

The real answer is to dissociate Socialism from Utopianism.... The answer which ought to be uttered more loudly than it usually is, is that Socialism is not perfectionist, perhaps not even hedonistic. Socialists don't claim to be able to make the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it better. And any thinking Socialist will concede to the Catholic that when economic injustice has been righted, the fundamental problem of man’s place in the universe will still remain. But what the Socialist does claim is that that problem cannot be dealt with while the average human being’s preoccupations are necessarily economic. It is all summed up in Marx’s saying that after Socialism has arrived, human history can begin.

In June of 1949, shortly after the publication of 1984, Orwell's British publisher, Frederic Warburg, issued a memo -- which Orwell approved -- to settle some of the dust raised by the novel:

... Allowing for the book being, after all, parody, something like 1984 could happen. This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the political, social, and economic foundations of the contemporary world situation. Specifically, the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and Liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the USSR and the new weapons, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and the most publicized. But the danger lies also in the acceptance of the totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colors. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: "Don't let it happen to you. It depends on you."

What a strangely and disturbingly prescient statement. But there is more:

The superstates will naturally be in opposition to each other or (a novel point) will pretend to be much more in opposition than they in fact are....

And so it goes.

Malkin asserts that Britain and Europe have escaped the bogey man of 1984 -- which may have been true enough in 1970, but it is hardly the case today -- but he claims that (even in 1970) the bogey man threat of 1984 "has roosted like a vulture in a tree, most firmly in the American consciousness." Even in 1970, he said, Orwell's dystopian vision was already coming true in the United States. Think how much farther along that path we are today.

As Malkin sums up:

It simply will not do to try to turn Orwell into a prophet of anti-Communism or some kind of New Conservatism. He simply refuses to get into bed with the left or the right, or any programmatic apostle. Just before leaving Spain in 1937 he wrote to Cyril Connolly:

I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism which I never did before."

If his words mean anything, Orwell remained a socialist to his death. But to him, socialism was not a programmatic ideology of social and economic change. It dwelt more deeply in the transcendent values of justice, liberty, equality, and the community of feeling (the brotherhood perverted into Big Brother) in which material values play their role alongside human ones. Its primary motives are neither rational nor public. Life is held together by family, community and the shared values that constitute culture. For the rest of his life, Orwell stressed the human and individual quality of this type of socialism.

And that to me is a nearly perfect definition of the "tribalism" that Libertarians and Glenn Greenwald have been so quick to mindlessly slur and denounce.

On Appeals to Orwell -- Attacking the Weak, Flattering the Strong and Evaluating Every Contact on the Basis of Advancement

In "Why I Write" (1946), George Orwell put together a remarkably honest dictum on the topic of his ongoing literary activities.

Writers, after all, have plenty of motivations -- much like actors and circus clowns -- with the upshot, for many, that they want to Do Good. Somehow. And writing is the way they have found to do it.

Let's let Orwell speak for himself:

[After a lengthy and humorous description of his background and how he came to writing, he states his personal (and generalized) motivations...]

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It's hard to argue with Orwell on those four broad motivational points; every writer I've known has shared them to one degree or another, and these motivations are shared by many other professionals as well. I mention actors and circus clowns in part because of my own long association with such people through the Show Business (one of my previous careers), and by and large, they share many of the same motivations as writers and so many others who seek to have some kind of impact on people.

Egoism is the main point. Orwell, to his everlasting credit, is fully aware of his own egoism in becoming a writer. Makes no bones about it. His insight that the mass of humanity is not particularly egocentric, selfish or self-obsessed is interesting. From the indications of his writing in this essay and other works, he came to this insight through his contacts with the lower classes of Britain, the servile masses of Burma, and his experiences in Europe between the Wars -- particularly during the Spanish Civil War. "They" -- the unselfish masses -- are not like "us:" The egoists. The self-obsessed. The Writers.

Further to his credit, Orwell does not judge the unselfish mass of humanity to be lesser than himself and his kind. For his time and his culture, that is amazing.

But in other works, such as "Notes on Nationalism," he proposes that the British intelligentsia -- of which he is of course a part, though he insisted on his own independence of mind -- is largely captivated with the notion that the Oppressed Peoples of the Empire and the World are actually better than their Betters who rule over them with guns, an iron rod and the lash.

How is an Empire established and how is it maintained and ruled? There were only ever a handful of British colonial officers ruling over vast seas of Natives around the globe, and how it was done is of some interest today as American and British Ruling Class interests conspire to put Our Brown Brothers under the gun, the iron rod and the lash once again in a sort of cracked reimposition of the Empire in those areas where the Lessons of Democracy obviously didn't take.

How could a handful of British soldiers and colonial officers have managed it?

Given that the reimposition is being handled by relatively even fewer Americans and Britons -- leaving out the other nations' few and proud -- than the deed was first done, we may wish to reflect on how it was managed to begin with and that may differ from the way it is being done now.

Attacks on the weak was one of the most obvious means the Empire was established and maintained. Flattery of the strong didn't hurt. And evaluating every contact in the field of interest on the basis of how it could be used to advance the aims of the Companies and the Crown was fundamental.

We see much the same going on now in the attacks launched against the weakest states and peoples: Iraq and Afghanistan most prominently, but including Somalia and the few enclaves of the Palestinians and other Lesser Peoples of the Middle East. Probing for weaknesses in the Other is ongoing, and more and more states and peoples will be added to the list of territories to conquer as time goes by. Iran, of course, is in the gunsights as we speak, and there will be more weak and weakened states to be gathered in to the New Empire.

Flattery of the strong was one of the keys to British success in building its Empire in the 19th Century. While weak Native states and tribes would be attacked brutally and mercilessly, strong ones would be flattered and persuaded with gifts and the preservation of status, revenues and control. By this means, loyalty was purchased or otherwise obtained. Thus, for example, India could be ruled effectively through Native agents, simply by convincing a sufficient number of Native princes to submit to the Crown and be rewarded. It worked well enough so long as the Natives did not rebel, but as is the way of these people, rebellion was commonplace, and each one became harder and harder to suppress.

Finally, as Britain trolled the earth for new conquests, their agents evaluated every contact they made with the Natives on the basis of how those contacts could be used to advance their aims and ambitions. They became very adept at recognizing who could be used to their advantage, who could be ignored, and who would have to be taken on and defeated.

All of these factors and more are once again in play as Anglo-American Imperial might asserts itself.

Yet the lesson from the failures of the British Empire was never really learned either in Westminster or in DC. No, in those realms, the Empire was a success, and withdrawal from Imperial control was only made necessary by other events. For example, the two world wars.

Just look at India today if you need an example of the success of the Empire. It is free, self-governing, democratic and an economic powerhouse. Any former colonial officer would say it is so because of the example of the British. Had India not been put under the Crown, think what a mess and what a failed state -- or states -- it would be today.

So God Bless the Queen, and don't you forget it.

But the Imperial Road is the wrong road according to Orwell. The road of liberation and Democratic Socialism is the right road.

How you get from one to the other is the problem.

On Appeals to Orwell -- UpSide Down, InSide Out, Round and Round

Nineteen Eighty Four is a dystopian allegory that clearly illustrates Orwell's distaste for totalitarianism. It's a cartoon, in many ways. Thus, it is ever popular.

It helps the continuing popularity of the work that at least some of what Orwell thought might be in store for the future of Britain in a post apocalyptic dystopian wasteland actually has come to pass, particularly the constant intrusive state apparatus to spy on the populace. While civil liberties extremists in the United States decry the intrusiveness of post 9/11 "security" measures, the United States government is a piker compared to that of Britain.

The protagonist of Nineteen Eighty Four is Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party and a functionary in the Ministry of Truth. The Inner Party is where decisions are made -- for the Good of All, of course -- whereas, outside the party structure altogether, indeed seemingly outside the very conception of humanity itself, are the mass of Proles whose simple, stupid lives don't matter a bit and hardly enter into the consciousness of the Party membership.

Periodic and seemingly random rocket bombs are exploded in the Prole sectors to suppress the constant Rebellion, and to thin the herd of inconsequentials.

All is well, all is as it should be. Big Brother is watching you.

Winston Smith takes a stroll in the Prole sector outside the Ministry of Truth and he makes discoveries. The Proles have lives, simple though they may be, and they live with emotions, with love, with rivalries, and even with laughter, all punishable offenses for Party members, Inside or Out.

The Prole world is a world turned upside down where nothing is as it is supposed to be. And yet something much deeper than the vapid technocracy of the Party endures among the Proles, a connection with real humanity which the Party has lost.

Outer Party members can aspire to become Inner Party members, but that is about it. Otherwise, their lives are constricted and narrowed to mere rote and repetition of nonsense and deception and chastity. For the Good of All, of course.

Glenn has made much of his insight that the real political division in this country is not between left and right but between inside and outside. So far as I know, he hasn't really developed that idea very much, but it is a fairly common understanding in the upper reaches of the A-List Lefty Blogosphere. The adepts have figured out that the left/right political dichotomy is phony, and they want everyone to know. Of course, at the same time, the left/right dichotomy is useful. So it is maintained. But it is phony.

Nevertheless in the insider/outsider world view, the Insiders make the decisions, the Outsiders try to penetrate the seals around the Insiders by finding out about and revealing their secrets. Exactly what this is supposed to accomplish, we never quite hear. But from appearances, the goal of tossing these grenades of "secrets revealed" from the Outside is to get inside the gate -- as Markos had it long ago -- and from Inside... do what?

Become a Player. Become and Inner Party member and thus participate in the decision making of the Inner Party and direct the actions of those Outside.

The act of Real Revolution is that which unmasks the Truth of the Inner Party.

Thus, someone like Julian Assange is hailed the hero for acquiring and distributing various "secrets" of the Inner Party, and the Inner Party in turn makes Julian into a cartoon character like Emmanuel Goldstein. In other words, it is a mutually rewarding enterprise. Julian gets the attention -- and apparently money -- he craves, and the State and/or the Party gets an Enemy to hound and denounce. No real secrets are ever revealed, or at least none that would seriously damage the Party and its apparat, and yet the semblance of Revolution is maintained.

But there is no Revolution. It's all a show.

Why would one believe that Unmasking the Truth of the Inner Party would result in anything beyond a momentary shrug among the masses? Knowing the Secrets of the Nomenklatura is to be privy to gossip, and what's the point of that?

Knowing the Secrets led to the impeachments of Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, but did those acts result in a freer, fairer and more open government today? Hardly.

To what object do members of the Ruling Classes ever contend among themselves? And make no mistake, Inner and Outer Party are both part of the Ruling Class. They don't struggle on the Proles' behalf.

No, it is a struggle for Power, Influence, and Status, within the Ruling Class, on behalf of no one outside it.

And when those outside the Ruling Class recognize the System itself is the problem, the question of who is operating the levers of Power at any given time is of marginal interest at best. If the System is the problem and the System is to endure no matter who is in charge of it -- the situation we face today quite clearly -- then the only real interest in it we might have is to ensure that the least insane operators are at the controls, if we have any choice in the matter at all.

Orwell seemed to understand this state of affairs thoroughly.

Change, if it is to come at all, has to come from Outside, not from one faction on the Inside contending with another.

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore II

While there's a significant body of work by George Orwell to select from, two works in particular -- his short novel 1984 (published in 1949) and his long essay, "Notes on Nationalism" (published in 1945) -- have become the clearest statements of Orwell's socio-political point of view and philosophy.

The video above is a 1954 BBC version of Nineteen Eighty Four. Its early date and thoroughly British provenance helps us to understand where Orwell was coming from with his deeply cynical dystopian vision of the future.

Of course his vision of the future is based in part on his own experience as a propaganda worker at the BBC during World War II, a position he left -- in disgust -- in 1943 during the height of the War.

The media was fully engaged in propaganda activities during World War II, in Britain and everywhere else. This was no mystery. Everyone knew it was the case, and most everyone agreed it was necessary for Home Front Morale.

Those who, like Orwell, conducted propaganda activities may have had reservations about what they were doing, but most, certainly, felt it was their patriotic duty to put the best spin (a word that wasn't used then) on the events of the day -- even if that meant falsifying the information.

Looking back on news from WWII these days, it's fairly easy to identify the propaganda elements. And yet strangely, the news -- despite the propaganda -- has a ring of truth to it that today's news often lacks. There may have been a "positive" thrust to every story of the War and the Home Front, and yet, the truth was often right there, told honestly, as well. Quite different from the constant and overt falsity of so much of today's news, particularly if it originates in the military. They simply lie today, always, even when they don't have to. During World War II, they would sometimes lie, to be sure, but most often they would more simply embellish or reach conclusions not necessarily justified by the facts, while -- surprisingly often -- providing the facts. Or, seemingly as often, they would not tell the public some particularly appalling story of some wartime event at all.

Even that level of propaganda was too much for Orwell, in part, it seems, because it wasn't being very well done. The Ministry of Truth -- BBC -- was being run by hacks and time servers. How could one expect any originality or consistency under the circumstances?

In Nineteen Eighty Four the Ministry of Truth is being run by timeservers and hacks who really believe themselves to be doing the equivalent of God's Work, and only Winston Smith -- for reasons he himself cannot comprehend -- disagrees.

I could relate.

How is it that one sees -- and knows -- what cannot be?

Yes. Well. That is always the difficult thing, isn't it?

Worse, what do you do about it?

This was Orwell's problem living in the material world, and it was WinSmith's problem living in his fictional world of the Future.

It's a world that is Britain, most assuredly, but as if it had been absorbed by a Soviet, more or less as if it were ruled by a Stalin with technology. It is not a pretty picture, but as Orwell conceives it, it's rather simple. Oceania, the encompassing hemispheric "nation" that England is now a part of is ruled by The Party, headed by Big Brother -- who may not actually exist. It doesn't matter. He is symbolically present always and watches over all. From him (and the Party) comes all that is Good, to him is given all social love and respect. Simple. Nothing like that occurs now, nor did it occur in Western society when Orwell was alive, and despite the Stalin's despotism and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, nothing quite like this complete Leader Worship and abandonment of reality took place in the Soviet Union, either. Mindless loyalty was inculcated to be sure, but (at least from my interviews with former Soviet citizens who lived during Stalin's time), it was never completely achieved. It wasn't just a matter of dissent and disbelief, it was the nature of Russian society and the Russian people not to accept without question that which they were being told, or rather to accept it, with the understanding that it probably wasn't true. People could see with their own eyes, for example, and if they were being lied to -- as they often were -- they knew it, though they might profess the Party Line and Official Belief. As I was told by so many former Soviet citizens, "Nobody really believed the lies, and eventually nobody believed anything."

It makes it very hard for some of these people to believe Government in this country, too. They assume they are being lied to. Very often they're right.

The character of Emmanuel Goldstein -- the Arch Rebel of 1984, and the central figure in the universal Oceania practice of the Two Minute Hate -- is often said to be based on Leon Trotsky, and the actor playing the role in the BBC video above is doing an imitation of Trotsky in newsreels that I've seen of him before his murder in Mexico City by Stalinist agents in 1940. Indeed, Trotsky's point was that Stalin had stolen and ruined the Revolution (much as Goldstein accuses Big Brother), and it is by restoring the Revolution that peace and freedom can be achieved. The response, of course, to this heresy is the famous chants of "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength."

It's said that in Moscow during the 1930's there were electric signs scattered around the city with the motto: "2 + 2 = 5" which made sense to Soviet citizens, though outsiders might be perplexed, and someone like Orwell might use reports of such things to come up with his notions of NewSpeak. But when you understand that the signs were exhortations to the people to complete the objectives of the Five Year Plan in four years, you can easily see where the apparent false arithmetic comes from, and suddenly it isn't NewSpeak at all and it isn't even false. At least not in that case.

Not that there weren't plenty of examples of the twisting of language for political objectives, and not just in the Soviet Union or Mussolini's Italy or in Nazi Germany. The practice was nigh [o]unto universal.

And given the consistency of our own Storm Troopers to lie or distort everything that happens with the full complicity of the embedded American media, it's a practice that continues unabated.

Orwell's "IngSoc," English Socialism, was largely based on a very jaundiced view of Stalinist totalitarianism. Since English Socialism as practiced by the Labour Party (which was in power when Orwell wrote 1984) was never even remotely like Stalinist totalitarianism, and in fact no European Socialist party was even remotely like Stalinism, and Orwell himself was a strong believer in Democratic Socialism, the idea that Orwell was somehow indicating his opposition to Socialism and his fondness for rightist Libertarianism in his works is just absurd.

He is against totalitarianism. He is for Democratic Socialism. In his own words:

"The Spanish War and other events in 1936–37, turned the scale. Thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism as I understand it." -- from "Why I Write," 1946

It literally cannot be said more clearly and directly than that, yet for generations now, certain right wing and libertarian "thinkers" have distorted his anti-totalitarianism into some crackpot version of right wing hooliganism.

Greenwald is forever whining that his arguments are misconstrued and his plain statements are consistently misunderstood. And yet here's a case where a prominent 20th Century writer's plain words and concepts are still being shot down the Memory Hole -- or are being twisted and re-worked by historical revisionists, modern day MiniTrue drones and hacks -- to fit a preconception of what Orwell "meant."

That it would be done during the McCarthy Era is one thing; that it is still being done is truly grotesque.

On Appeals to Orwell -- furthermore

I think it is fair to assert that George Orwell (né Eric Blair) was one of the strongest influences on English-speaking anti-Establishmentarians and contrarians in the 20th Century. His influence became even more profound after his death in 1950, growing significantly the closer we came to the iconic year of 1984, and then growing still more, it seems, the farther beyond that year global affairs continued.

To read him now is to delve into a world view that is in many respects quaint and anachronistic, in other respects frighteningly prescient.

Yes, the world today is the direct descendant of the world Orwell knew and wrote about so extensively between the world wars, during World War II, and for a few years in its aftermath. The physical, social, economic, psychological, artistic, technological, philosophical and political shocks and upheavals of the era seem to be neverending in retrospect. It was a world turned upside down over and over and over again, with hundreds of millions put to the screws by the various nationalist, imperialist and liberationist ideals, goals, and objectives of the ruling classes and multiple tens of millions sent to their graves by wars and suffering or to the ash pits of anonymous extermination in the various genocides of the era.

Looking backwards, it's amazing anyone had anything but a dystopian view of the first half of the 20th Century, and more amazing still that anyone could keep their sanity through the rest of the century.

And yet here we are. To yak about it, to yak about some of the leading lights of the times, and to consider what went wrong, what went right, and where to go from here.

The recent G8/G20 meeting in Toronto -- for good and ill -- is an example of the direct globalist development that can trace its origins to governmental reaction to the horrors unleashed during the first half of the 20th Century by the Powers That Be (whatever and whomever they might have been) acting out of, let's say, fervor for their own nationalist interests in contrast to all other interests.

The periodic "G" summits, and the commonalities of the ruling classes world wide that are found and developed within the context of these social and political fora, are the chief characteristic of elite rule today, in strong contrast to the way these things were not done in Orwell's time. The constancy of struggles -- the constancy of nationalist struggles between more-or-less giant polities and overweening political philosophies that characterized Orwell's time simply don't have a parallel today, in part because the global ruling elites have found far more common purpose with one another than they have found benefit in continuing ancient rivalries pitting peoples against peoples.

I for one would like to think that Orwell's influence was at least as strong on the ruling classes as it was on the Proles who took to his works and his cynical, almost hopeless, voice so strongly, especially after World War II.

Eric Blair was born in 1903 in British India where his father was an Imperial functionary (in the Opium Department wouldn't you know); his mother had grown up in Burma where her French father had... business... interests. Yes.

Blair was removed from India in 1904 by his mother who returned with him to Britain while his father stayed on in Imperial service for the British Raj in India.

(As a side note, and not to make too much of it, my father was born in the same era as Blair, into the American counterpart of Blair's "lower-upper-middle-class," and though there was no counterpart to the Imperial Service and the British Raj for most Americans to aspire or gravitate to, there were plenty of class and generational commonalities of interest and focus nevertheless.)

Despite Blair's class and the Imperial Service of his father, the family was not wealthy enough to send him to public school or university without scholarships. Ultimately, he went to Eton, but not to university; instead, he joined the Imperial Indian Police (for service in Burma, where his grandmother still lived.) He was in Burma from 1922 to 1927, returning to England after he contracted Dengue fever. He left the Imperial Service upon his return to his home in Britain.

To put it charitably, he was disgusted with the British Raj and the monumental levels of oppression of the Natives that was absolutely necessary to maintain the British Lords of the Empire in the style, comfort and convenience to which they were so thoroughly accustomed. He hated what he had to do as a representative of the Authority of that Empire, he hated what it did to the British people, and most of all, he hated what it did to the servile masses of Burma and the Empire in general.

It was a disgust widely shared among the British intelligentsia which Blair/Orwell soon joined as a writer -- with a specific eye on the condition and plight of the Lower Orders, a long and storied genre of British literature.

I've spent a little time on Orwell's background because his perspectives and insights cannot be divorced from his nationality, class and experience, and his predictions, prescriptions and conclusions grow out of what he knew. That's the fundamental truth of who he was, what he wrote about, and how he came to understand the Ways of the World the way he did.

Specifics next time...