On the road to totalitarianism based on perpetual war on terror
In a recent and
well-known article, Norman Podhoretz has attempted to conscript George Orwell into
the ranks of neoconservative enthusiasts for the newly revitalized cold war
with the Soviet Union.[1] If Orwell
were alive today, this truly “Orwellian” distortion would afford him
considerable wry amusement. It is my contention that the cold war, as pursued
by the three superpowers of Nineteen Eighty-Four, was
the key to their successful imposition of a totalitarian regime upon their
subjects. We all know that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a
brilliant and mordant attack on totalitarian trends in modern society, and it
is also clear that Orwell was strongly opposed to communism and to the regime
of the Soviet Union. But the crucial role of a perpetual cold war in the
entrenchment of totalitarianism in Orwell’s “nightmare vision” of the world has
been relatively neglected by writers and scholars.
In Nineteen
Eighty-Four there are three giant superstates or blocs of nations:
Oceania (run by the United States, and including the British Empire and Latin
America), Eurasia (the Eurasian continent), and Eastasia (China, southeast
Asia, much of the Pacific). The superpowers are always at war, in shifting
coalitions and alignments against each other. The war is kept, by agreement
between the superpowers, safely on the periphery of the blocs, since war in
their heartlands might actually blow up the world and their own rule along with
it. The perpetual but basically phony war is kept alive by unremitting
campaigns of hatred and fear against the shadowy foreign Enemy. The perpetual
war system is then used by the ruling elite in each country to fasten
totalitarian collectivist rule upon their subjects. As Harry Elmer Barnes
wrote, this system “could only work if the masses are always kept at a fever heat
of fear and excitement and are effectively prevented from learning that the
wars are actually phony. To bring about this indispensable deception of the
people requires a tremendous development of propaganda, thought-policing,
regimentation, and mental terrorism.” And finally, “when it becomes impossible
to keep the people any longer at a white heat in their hatred of one enemy
group of nations, the war is shifted against another bloc and new, violent hate
campaigns are planned and set in motion.”[2]
From Orwell’s time
to the present day, the United States has fulfilled his analysis or prophecy by
engaging in campaigns of unremitting hatred and fear of the Soviets, including
such widely trumpeted themes (later quietly admitted to be incorrect) as
“missile gap” and “windows of vulnerability.” What Garet Garrett perceptively
called “a complex of vaunting and fear” has been the hallmark of the American
as well as of previous empires:[3] the curious
combination of vaunting and braggadocio that insists that a nation-state’s
military might is second to none in any area, combined with repeated panic
about the intentions and imminent actions of the “empire of evil” that is
marked as the Enemy. It is the sort of fear and vaunting that makes Americans
proud of their capacity to “overkill” the Russians many times and yet agree
enthusiastically to virtually any and all increases in the military budget for
mightier weapons of mass destruction. Senator Ralph Flanders (Republican,
Vermont) pinpointed this process of rule through fear when he stated during the
Korean War:
Fear is felt and spread by the Department of Defense in the Pentagon. In part, the spreading of it is purposeful. Faced with what seem to be enormous armed forces aimed against us, we can scarcely expect the Department of Defense to do other than keep the people in a state of fear so that they will be prepared without limit to furnish men and munitions.[4]
This applies not
only to the Pentagon but to its civilian theoreticians, the men whom Marcus
Raskin, once one of their number, has dubbed “the mega-death intellectuals.”
Thus Raskin pointed out that
their most important function is to justify and extend the existence of their employers. ... In order to justify the continued large-scale production of these [thermonuclear] bombs and missiles, military and industrial leaders needed some kind of theory to rationalize their use. ... This became particularly urgent during the late 1950s, when economy-minded members of the Eisenhower Administration began to wonder why so much money, thought, and resources, were being spent on weapons if their use could not be justified. And so began a series of rationalizations by the “defense intellectuals” in and out of the Universities. ... Military procurement will continue to flourish, and they will continue to demonstrate why it must. In this respect they are no different from the great majority of modern specialists who accept the assumptions of the organizations which employ them because of the rewards in money and power and prestige. ... They know enough not to question their employers’ right to exist. [5]
In addition to the
manufacture of fear and hatred against the primary Enemy, there have been
numerous Orwellian shifts between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. Our deadly
enemies in World War II, Germany and Japan, are now considered prime Good Guys,
the only problem being their unfortunate reluctance to take up arms against the
former Good Guys, the Soviet Union. China, having been a much lauded Good Guy
under Chiang Kai-shek when fighting Bad Guy Japan, became the worst of the Bad
Guys under communism, and indeed the United States fought the Korean and
Vietnamese wars largely for the sake of containing the expansionism of
Communist China, which was supposed to be an even worse guy than the Soviet
Union. But now all that is changed, and Communist China is now the virtual ally
of the United States against the principal Enemy in the Kremlin.
Along with other
institutions of the permanent cold war, Orwellian New-speak has developed
richly. Every government, no matter how despotic, that is willing to join the
anti-Soviet crusade is called a champion of the “free world.” Torture committed
by “totalitarian” regimes is evil; torture undertaken by regimes that are
merely “authoritarian” is almost benign. While the Department of War has not
yet been transformed into the Department of Peace, it was changed early in the
cold war to the Department of Defense, and President Reagan has almost
completed the transformation by the neat Orwellian touch of calling the MX
missile “the Peacemaker.”
As early as the
1950s, an English publicist observed that “Orwell’s main contention
that ‘cold war’ is now an essential feature of normal life is being verified
more and more from day to day. No one really believes in a ‘peace settlement’
with the Soviets, and many people in positions of power regard such a prospect
with positive horror.” He added that “a war footing is the only basis of full
employment.”[6]
And Harry Barnes
noted that “the advantages of the cold war in bolstering the economy, avoiding
a depression, and maintaining political tenure after 1945 were quickly
recognized by both politicians and economists.”
The most recent
analysis of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in terms of
permanent cold war was inU.S. News and World Report, in its issue
marking the beginning of the year 1984:
No nuclear holocaust has occurred but Orwell’s concept of perpetual local conflict is borne out. Wars have erupted every year since 1945, claiming more than 30 million lives. The Defense Department reports that there currently are 40 wars raging that involve one-fourth of all nations in the world — from El Salvador to Kampuchea to Lebanon and Afghanistan.
Like the constant war of 1984, these post-war conflicts occurred not within superpower borders but in far-off places such as Korea and Vietnam. Unlike Orwell’s fictitious superpowers, Washington and Moscow are not always able to control events and find themselves sucked into local wars such as the current conflict in the Middle East heightening the risk of a superpower confrontation and use of nuclear armaments.[7]
But most Orwell
scholars have ignored the critical permanent-cold-war underpinning to the
totalitarianism in the book. Thus, in a recently published collection of scholarly
essays on Orwell, there is barely a mention of militarism or war. [8]
In contrast, one
of the few scholars who have recognized the importance of war in Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four was the Marxist critic Raymond Williams. While deploring
the obvious anti-Soviet nature of Orwell’s thought, Williams noted that Orwell
discovered the basic feature of the existing two- or three-superpower world,
“oligarchical collectivism,” as depicted by James Burnham, in his Managerial
Revolution (1940), a book that had a profound if ambivalent impact
upon Orwell. As Williams put it:
Orwell’s vision of power politics is also close to convincing. The transformation of official “allies” to “enemies” has happened, almost openly, in the generation since he wrote. His idea of a world divided into three blocs — Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, of which two are always at war with the other though the alliances change — is again too close for comfort. And there are times when one can believe that what “had been called England or Britain” has become simply Airship One.[9]
A generation
earlier, John Atkins had written that Orwell had “discovered this conception of
the political future in James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution.”
Specifically, “there is a state of permanent war but it is a contest of limited
aims between combatants who cannot destroy each other. The war cannot be
decisive. ... As none of the states comes near conquering the others, however
the war deteriorates into a series of skirmishes [although]. ... The
protagonists store atomic bombs.”[10]
To establish what
we might call this “revisionist” interpretation of Nineteen
Eighty-Four we must first point out that the book was not, as in the
popular interpretation, a prophecy of the future so much as a realistic
portrayal of existing political trends. Thus, Jeffrey Meyers points out that Nineteen
Eighty-Four was less a “nightmare vision” (Irving Howe’s famous
phrase) of the future than “a very concrete and naturalistic portrayal of the
present and the past,” a “realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar
materials.” And again, Orwell’s “statements about 1984 reveal
that the novel, though set in a future time, is realistic rather than
fantastic, and deliberately intensifies the actuality of the present.”
Specifically, according to Meyers, Nineteen Eighty-Four was
not “totalitarianism after its world triumph” as in the interpretation of Howe,
but rather “the very real though unfamiliar political terrorism of Nazi Germany
and Stalinist Russia transposed into the landscape of London in 1941–44.”[11] And not only
Burnham’s work but the reality of the 1943 Teheran Conference gave Orwell the
idea of a world ruled by three totalitarian superstates.
Bernard Crick,
Orwell’s major biographer, points out that the English reviewers of Nineteen
Eighty-Four caught on immediately that the novel was supposed to be an
intensification of present trends rather than a prophecy of the future. Crick
notes that these reviewers realized that Orwell had “not written utopian or
anti-utopian fantasy ... but had simply extended certain discernible tendencies
of 1948 forward into 1984.”[12] Indeed, the
very year 1984 was simply the transposition of the existing year, 1948.
Orwell’s friend Julian Symons wrote that 1984 society was meant to be the “near
future,” and that all the grim inventions of the rulers “were just extensions
of ‘ordinary’ war and post-war things.” We might also point out that the
terrifying Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four was the same
numbered room in which Orwell had worked in London during World War II as a
British war propagandist.
But let Orwell
speak for himself. Orwell was distressed at many American reviews of the book,
especially in Time and Life, which, in contrast to
the British, saw Nineteen Eighty-Four as the author’s renunciation
of his long-held devotion to democratic socialism. Even his own publisher,
Frederic Warburg, interpreted the book in the same way. This response moved
Orwell, terminally ill in a hospital, to issue a repudiation. He outlined a
statement to Warburg, who, from detailed notes, issued a press release in
Orwell’s name. First, Orwell noted that, contrary to many reviews, Nineteen
Eighty-Four was not prophecy but an analysis of what could happen,
based on present political trends. Orwell then added: “Specifically, the danger
lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on 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 danger also lies in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by
intellectuals of all colours.” After outlining his forecast of several world
superstates, specifically the Anglo-American world (Oceania) and a
Soviet-dominated Eurasia, Orwell went on:
If these two great blocs line up as mortal enemies it is obvious that the Anglo-Americans will not take the name of their opponents. ... The name suggested in 1984 is of course Ingsoc, but in practice a wide range of choices is open. In the USA the phrase “American” or “hundred per cent American” is suitable and the qualifying adjective is as totalitarian as any could wish.[13]
We are about as
far from the world of Norman Podhoretz as we can get. While Orwell is assuredly
anti-Communist and anticollectivist his envisioned totalitarianism can and does
come in many guises and forms, and the foundation for his nightmare
totalitarian world is a perpetual cold war that keeps brandishing the horror of
modern atomic weaponry.
Shortly after the
atom bomb was dropped on Japan, George Orwell pre-figured his world of Nineteen
Eighty-Four in an incisive and important analysis of the new
phenomenon. In an essay entitled “You and the Atom Bomb,” he noted that when
weapons are expensive (as the A-bomb is) politics tends to become despotic,
with power concentrated into the hands of a few rulers. In contrast, in the day
when weapons were simple and cheap (as was the musket or rifle, for instance)
power tends to be decentralized. After noting that Russia was thought to be
capable of producing the A-bomb within five years (that is, by 1950), Orwell
writes of the “prospect,” at that time, “of two or three monstrous
super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be
wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them.” It is generally
supposed, he noted, that the result will be another great war, a war which this
time will put an end to civilization. But isn’t it more likely, he added, “that
surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the bomb against
one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who
are unable to retaliate?”
Returning to his
favorite theme, in this period, of Burnham’s view of the world in The
Managerial Revolution, Orwell declares that Burnham’s
geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and
more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great
empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and
each ruled, under one disguise or another by a self-elected oligarchy. The
haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will
continue for some years.
Orwell then
proceeds gloomily:
The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of equality. Unable to conquer one another they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.
In short, the
atomic bomb is likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of
prolonging ‘a peace that is no peace.’” The drift of the world will not be
toward anarchy, as envisioned by H.G. Wells, but toward “horribly stable ...
slave empires.”[14]
Over a year later,
Orwell returned to his pessimistic perpetual-cold-war analysis of the postwar
world. Scoffing at optimistic press reports that the Americans “will agree to
inspection of armaments,” Orwell notes that “on another page of the same paper
are reports of events in Greece which amount to a state of war between two
groups of powers who are being so chummy in New York.” There are two axioms, he
added, governing international affairs. One is that “there can be no peace
without a general surrender of sovereignty,” and another is that “no country
capable of defending its sovereignty ever surrenders it.” The result will be no
peace, a continuing arms race, but no all-out war.[15]
Orwell completes
his repeated wrestling with the works of James Burnham in his review of The
Struggle for the World (1947). Orwell notes that the
advent of atomic weapons has led Burnham to abandon his
three-identical-superpowers view of the world, and also to shuck off his tough
pose of value-freedom. Instead, Burnham is virtually demanding an immediate
preventive war against Russia,” which has become the collectivist
enemy, a preemptive strike to be launched before Russia acquires the atomic
bomb.
While Orwell is
fleetingly tempted by Burnham’s apocalyptic approach, and asserts that
domination of Britain by the United States is to be preferred to domination by
Russia, he emerges from the discussion highly critical. After all, Orwell
writes, the
Russian regime may become more liberal and less dangerous a generation hence. ... Of course, this would not happen with the consent of the ruling clique, but it is thinkable that the mechanics of the situation may bring it about. The other possibility is that the great powers will be simply too frightened of the effects of atomic weapons ever to make use of them. But that would be much too dull for Burnham. Everything must happen suddenly and completely.[16]
George Orwell’s
last important essay on world affairs was published in Partisan
Review in the summer of 1947. He there reaffirmed his attachment to
socialism but conceded that the chances were against its coming to pass. He
added that there were three possibilities ahead for the world. One (which, as
he had noted a few months before was the new Burnham solution) was that the
United States would launch an atomic attack on Russia before Russia developed
the bomb. Here Orwell was more firmly opposed to such a program than he had been
before. For even if Russia were annihilated, a preemptive attack would only
lead to the rise of new empires, rivalries, wars, and use of atomic weapons. At
any rate, the first possibility was not likely. The second possibility,
declared Orwell, was that the cold war would continue until Russia got the
bomb, at which point world war and the destruction of civilization would take
place. Again, Orwell did not consider this possibility very likely. The third,
and most likely, possibility is the old vision of perpetual cold war between
blocs of superpowers. In this world,
the fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them. ... It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast super-states, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion. In all probability their structure would be hierarchic, with a semi-divine caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom, and the crushing out of liberty would exceed anything the world has yet seen. Within each state the necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world, and by a continuous phony war against rival states. Civilization of this type might remain static for thousands of years.[17]
Orwell (perhaps,
like Burnham, now fond of sudden and complete solutions) considers this last
possibility the worst.
It should be clear
that George Orwell was horrified at what he considered to be the dominant trend
of the postwar world: totalitarianism based on perpetual but peripheral cold
war between shifting alliances of several blocs of super states. His positive solutions
to this problem were fitful and inconsistent; in Partisan Review he
called wistfully for a Socialist United States of Western Europe as the only
way out, but he clearly placed little hope in such a development. His major
problem was one that affected all democratic socialists of that era: a tension
between their anticommunism and their opposition to imperialist, or at least
interstate, wars. And so at times Orwell was tempted by the apocalyptic
preventive-atomic-war solution, as was even Bertrand Russell during the same
period. In another, unpublished article, “In Defense of Comrade Zilliacus,”
written at some time near the end of 1947, Orwell, bitterly opposed to what he
considered the increasingly procommunist attitude of his own Labour magazine, the Tribune, came
the closest to enlisting in the cold war by denouncing neutralism and asserting
that his hoped-for Socialist United States of Europe should ground itself on
the backing of the United States of America. But despite these aberrations, the
dominant thrust of Orwell’s thinking during the postwar period, and certainly
as reflected inNineteen Eighty-Four, was horror at a trend
toward perpetual cold war as the groundwork for a totalitarianism throughout
the world. And his hope for eventual loosening of the Russian regime, if also
fitful, still rested cheek by jowl with his more apocalyptic leanings.
Notes
[2]Harry Elmer
Barnes, “How ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom,
and Prosperity,” in Revisionism: A Key to Peace and Other Essays (San
Francisco: Cato Institute, 1980), pp. 142-43. Also see Barnes, An Intellectual
and Cultural History of the Western World, 3d rev. ed., 3
vols. (New York: Dover, 1965), 3: 1324-1332; and Murray N. Rothbard, “Harry
Elmer Barnes as Revisionist of the Cold War,” in Harry Elmer Barnes,
Learned Crusader, ed. A. Goddard (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, 1968). pp.
314-38. For a similar analysis, see F.J.P. Veal[e] Advance to Barbarism (Appleton,
Wis.: C.C. Nelson, 1953), pp. 266-84.
[5]Marcus Raskin,
“The Megadeath Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books, November
14, 1963, pp. 6-7. Also see Martin Nicolaus, “The Professor, the Policeman and
the Peasant,” Viet-Report, June-July 1966, pp. 15-19; and Fred
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1983).
[8]Irving Howe,
ed., 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century (New York:
Harper and Row, Perennial Library, 1983). There is a passing reference in
Robert Nisbet’s essay and a few references in Luther Carpenter’s article on the
reception given to Nineteen Eighty-Four by his students at a
community college on Staten Island (pp. 180, 82).
[11]Jeffrey
Meyers, A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1975), pp. 144-45. Also, “Far from being a picture of the
totalitarianism or the future 1984 is, in countless details, a
realistic picture of the totalitarianism of the present” (Richard J.
Voorhees, The Paradox of George Orwell, Purdue University
Studies, 1961, pp. 85-87).
[12]Bernard
Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Seeker and Warburg,
1981), p. 393. Also see p. 397.
[13]George
Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of
George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 4:504 (hereafter cited as CEJL). Also
see Crick, George Orwell, pp. 393-95.
[16]George Orwell,
“Burnham’s View of the Contemporary World Struggle,” New Leader (New
York), March 29, 1947, reprinted in CEJL, 4:325.
[17]George Orwell.
“Toward European Unity,” Partisan Review July-August 1947,
reprinted in CEJL, 4:370-75.
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