Orwell Would Say “I Told
You So!”
By: Bob Bauman
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September 2007
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On this sixth
anniversary of that horrible day that has come to be known in media shorthand
as "9/11" – September 11, 2001 – it is not overreaching to say that many
Americans still live their lives with a latent undercurrent of fear of
what may happen next.
Even as I write
this, America’s top counterterrorism officials are warning today that the
United States will face a persistent threat from Al Qaeda and other terrorist
groups for years to come.
But they plan
to offer no specific evidence of any imminent plots against targets on
American soil. They are probably correct, but yet engendering fear has
been a persistent theme of government officials since 9/11.
Evidence
of History Stuttering
In many respects,
in their misguided efforts to defend and protect us, our government has
curtailed our rights and made us all suspects. Therefore, because history
not only repeats, but at times stutters, it shouldn’t surprise you that
England's Special Branch, the police intelligence unit, was watching George
Orwell during most of his adult life.
It is certainly
what Orwell, a student of political paranoia, would have expected. The
file on Orwell was released last week by Britain’s National Archives. According
to one police sergeant, Orwell’s habit of dressing “in Bohemian fashion,”
revealed that the writer was a Communist. That’s a conclusion that will
seem strange to anyone who has read Orwell’s beloved story, Animal Farm.
In my writings
as a political conservative, I often use the phrase "Big Brother" as shorthand
for any oppressive government. This “Orwellism” is also used to describe
specific government absurdities and depredations. All of these have multiplied
exponentially under the Bush maladministration and its, too often, lawless
conduct in its self-proclaimed "war of terrorism."
For that pungent
Big Brother phrase, and many others (unperson, thought crime, doublethink,
newspeak, Ministry of Truth) we are in debt to Orwell. He achieved so much
in so little time, (he died at age 46 in 1950), that he's become the subject
of an intellectual parlor game: "What would Orwell say?"
Timing is
Everything
It’s appropriate
that Orwell's police file should emerge in the same week that it was reported
that the FBI also has been exercising their own “Big Brother” powers.
Apparently, the
FBI has far exceeded its considerable PATRIOT Act powers, and used secret
demands to obtain records with data not only on individuals the FBI saw
as targets, but also details on their “community of interest.” A target’s
“community of interest” could include hundreds of people that he or she
was in contact with. |
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The FBI stopped
the practice early this year in part because of questions about the legality
of its aggressive use of the records demands, known as national security
letters.
Indeed, President
Bush's resigned U.S. assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith, has just
published a revealing book. In this new release, he explains the faulty
legal basis for the President's massive wiretapping of communications without
obtaining a court order as the law requires.
Commenting
on the surveillance of Orwell The New York Times said: "This is such an
old and forbidding dance, the one between the watchers and the watched.
The political life of the past century has been punctuated by one revelation
after another, as secret files have been made public, either by legislative
fiat or by the accidents of history. The files are nearly always perspicacious
– not about the subjects being watched but about the fears of the watchers.
This is something Orwell understood perfectly well, how fear enhances perception,
but also corrupts it."
Big Brother’s
Birth
The concept
of “Big Brother” was born in 1984, Orwell's 1949 vision of a totalitarian
society where people are kept in line with the warning: "Big Brother is
watching you." Not only is Big Brother watching, but he’s also demanding
that every citizen accept that 2 + 2 = 5 and that "War is Peace, Freedom
is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength."
Earlier in
August 1945, Orwell's little book called Animal Farm appeared. It was perhaps
his greatest work, depicting a Communist society where the animals take
over, with some few far more equal than others.
Why should
it matter what Orwell might have thought more than half a century after
he died, and more than a decade after the Soviet Union – the obvious target
of his two most famous books, Animal Farm and 1984 – fell apart? One reason
is that the kind of folly, cowardice and corruption he fought against is
still with us.
Orwell himself
said: "Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's
own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough,
send some worn out and useless phrase into the dustbin, where it belongs."
Keep that in mind this week as the debate over the Iraq war "surge" rages.
The 20th Century
Charles Dickens
Orwell resembles
his own picture of Charles Dickens: "... a man who is always fighting against
something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of
a man who is generously angry."
That kind of
character, scarce as it will always be, is why The Economist said Orwell's
voice "speaks as urgently to our times as it did to his."
The Times concludes:
"There is an obvious irony in Orwell’s being spied on in a way that can
only be called ‘Orwellian.’ That is nearly a universal adjective in these
Orwellian days. It’s tempting to say there’s something almost nostalgic
about seeing Orwell’s file – a reminder of a less electronic time. Except,
of course, that there was nothing nostalgic about the politics of his era.
Every age, his as well as ours, seems to live up to its sinister potential."
That’s the
Way It Looks from Here,
BOB BAUMAN,
Legal Counsel
BaumanBlog.SovereignSociety.com
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