Christopher Hitchens - October 21, 2002
WHY ORWELL MATTERS
Christopher Hitchens
Journalist; Author, The Trial of Henry Kissinger; Letters to a Young Contrarian and Why Orwell Matters
In the last seven days, we've been reminded very forcibly that the totalitarian principle - the principle which enslaves one society, the better to commit an aggression against others - is not something that we can confine to the perhaps compulsory study of 1984 and of Animal Farm, but is a living, vivid, actual principle and a clarifying threat. I'm referring first to the unspeakable degradation that was inflicted last week by the Big Brother on the people of Iraq, forced once again to gather adoringly, unanimously and terrified, and not only to turn out to vote 100 percent, but to turn out to vote 100 percent the same way. After what they've been through, one felt they might have been spared this last Ceausescu-style abnegation or humiliation. Second, there has been the discovery that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, while its people have been starving and screaming with hunger and pain and the absence of all culture, has been choosing to spend all its resources on the enrichment of uranium. Who will say, in the face of this, that the relevance of George Orwell belongs in the past?
Kafka the Realist
I was in Czechoslovakia under the old Communist police regime in the late 1980s and resolved while in Prague to become the first reporter to write an article from there that wouldn't mention the name Franz Kafka. (Like Amis, I believe in the war against cliché). And so what was my horror when I was arrested by the secret police at a meeting of the Charter 77 forces in a private apartment; when I asked them what was the charge, I was told, "We're not telling you." I ended up mentioning Kafka after all.
I've started in a way at the opposite end of my answer to the question, Why does Orwell matter? To answer the question one has to begin a little earlier than his partly Swiftian and partly dystopian novels. In the century that's just closed behind us, the three great moral and political and cultural crises were: the end of empire (the end of the idea that the world and its inhabitants and resources were the property of white Europeans); the question of fascism and national socialism and the threat to civilization that was posed by that; and the delusions of Stalinism. George Orwell I propose as the only writer - some would say public intellectual - who managed to get all three of these questions right.
Orwell was a British colonial official, having had a fairly standardized, what we call in England "conventional" upbringing. Like a lot of other successful writers, he skipped university altogether, partly out of poverty, and became a police official in Burma. He threw up the job, for reasons he never publicly stated, but I believe I understand from a close study of his writing. He thought if he kept on with the job he would become a sadist, a robot; that he'd understood something very essential about what Nietzsche called the master-slave relationship and also the other term often used rather cheaply - exploitation. It was one thing to notice that the British kept Burma forcibly underdeveloped in order that its economy would be a blood bank for the British economy. But there was exploitation of another kind: The most educated, integrated, sophisticated and qualified Indian or Burmese man, however Anglicized, would never be allowed as a member of the English "club" to come and have lunch or dinner or a cocktail in European company. But the least qualified and least literate and least assimilated Burmese woman could be allowed into any Englishman's bungalow, though only by the back door. Flory, the central character in Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days, and the man I believe anticipates by decades the sweltering guilt-ridden anti-heroes of the later Graham Greene stories, admits to us through his author that he'd bought his Burmese mistress from her family.
These two declensions of exploitation condemned the system of imperialism morally, economically and politically. His decision to refuse it and to become instead a campaigner against it was in the early 1920s a very unusual decision. It seemed to most people at that time that imperialism would last for many more generations, that it was rational and progressive and even liberal, and it was a gift from Europe to the rest of the world. Orwell took the side of the underdog and the oppressed for the rest of his life and was determined, as far as possible, to share their suffering, to look at the world from their perspective. That aided him powerfully in the novelistic portrayals in 1984, the essential sadomasochistic quality of the master-slave relationship, the pornographic secret that is at the heart of domination.
We're looking at a figure who knew what it would be like to hold the other end of the whip, to be the one wielding it rather than receiving it, and understanding the ghastly temptations involved. The great test of any writer and any intellectual is their ability to handle contradiction. Orwell's prose retains for us the sinew and muscle that it does because we have a man arguing all the time with his own prejudices and fears, his own bigotries and shortcomings. It's easy to see why he was so quick to detect the menace of fascism, the really pornographic assault on European civilization that began a decade or so later, which took the doctrines of racism that had been evolved for purposes of colonial domination and did what he'd always feared they would do and began to apply them to other Europeans as well.
Off to Catalonia
Orwell went to Spain and became one of the first volunteers to feel the weight of a pack and a rifle on his shoulder and to physically bar the road to war and fascism as it tried to conquer European civilization. His account of that struggle, almost unpublished in his own lifetime because publishers wouldn't take it, editors censored it or people wouldn't distribute it, Homage to Catalonia, is still the most imperishable account of being both a volunteer and a reporter in a context of war and revolution. It was while engaged in that struggle that he became aware of a third great illusion or delusion or hallucination very prevalent among the intellectuals and those who imagined themselves to be emancipated, rational and progressive, and this was the one which stated that beyond the Ural Mountains in the far distant provinces of Stalin's Russia, a new utopia was being created where history would come to an end, where human emancipation would be consummated. In trying to dispel this hallucination and also in showing that it was a terrible lie and depended upon the suppression or distortion of some appalling truths, Orwell was forced to confront physically as well as mentally and morally the consensus of the enlightened who were the most intolerant people in society because they're sure they're right and they're sure that their motives must be ideal. The last decade of his life was spent in an imperishable struggle, conducted almost entirely as an individual, really only with a typewriter and an attitude against the betrayal of society and its highest values by its intellectuals.
I must briefly say why I think one, lone stubborn Englishman was able to do this. With some part of himself, and with his long wrestling with love of literature and of the liturgy, he was a convinced atheist. He had a strong belief in the long struggle to have the Bible translated out of Latin, where it was the possession of a priestly class - or, to use the analogy of 1984, of the members of the Inner Party: a secret book with knowledge arcane and limited to an elite - so it could be read and understood by the people. He believed in the long struggle of the Protestant revolution where men like William Tyndale were strangled and burned for the right to have a Bible that the congregation could read too. He understood intuitively that there is a connection between language and truth and logic, that there is innate in us an instinct for language that makes us human and that along with that comes the wish for clarity and honesty of expression. It's not what you think, it's how you think; it's whether you are willing to trust in the struggle for liberty and the distrust of lies, the distrust of propaganda and the distrust of authority and the "folded lie…in the brain" as Auden puts it in his wonderful poem, "September 1, 1939." He made it clear that one individual, if possessed of a love of language, an understanding of literature and a respect for truth, can prevail in a time when the mind is in chains and when people's willingness to accept coercion has temporarily eclipsed their will to resist. Since we happen to be in such a time and such a place now and since there is so much fear around us and so much propaganda in the language to which we're compelled to listen, my title Why Orwell Matters is in that extent at least, its own justification.
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: What would Orwell write about today?
A: He would have hoped to make plain to others the survival in our time of the party-state, of the idea of the leader-worshipping, centrally-organized, regimented society, economy and political system and how the existence of such regimes is not just a tragedy for those who live under them, but a menace to those who live alongside them, or have to temporarily coexist with them. He would have noticed in his struggle for truth and language the attack on euphemism: pretty names for ugly things. The contemporary classic would be "collateral damage" as a word for dead civilians. Most people I know, when they hear a trick like that, will reach for their Orwell. They're often not as alert to it in their own discourse. Facile anti-war people now say, "No war on Iraq" or "No war with Iraq." Well, that sounds okay, but since the argument is, Should there be a fight with Saddam Hussein?, it's doing no favor to the Iraqi people to say that Iraq is Saddam or Saddam is Iraq; that's the proposition the Iraqi people were asked to validate in a 100 percent referendum last week. It's one thing to be aware of the lies the power tells in surreptitious propaganda, but one must also be aware of the facile or evasive things that one is inclined to say or let be said oneself.
Q: Do you feel, as Orwell did in his time, that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world?
A: Orwell wrote that when he realized that what he set down in Homage to Catalonia was going to be believed by nobody, that he was never going to be able to publish his findings about the attempt by Stalin to destroy the Spanish republic. He said it will come to a point where what the Leader says is true is true, and if he says it didn't happen in the past, it didn't happen then, either, let alone now. And of course you can see there the nucleus of 1984 occurring to him.
We now have the archives from Moscow and from Salamanca the archives of the General Franco regime open to us, and it can be independently verified that every assertion he made in that book is true. He has been vindicated. There's now a square named for him in Barcelona - Plaza George Orwell. Even though there are people of another school now - sometimes rather glibly called the postmodernists, who deny that there's such a thing as objective truth anyway, who have an affect-less attitude toward reality - the tyranny is not anything like the same. They only wear people down by boredom and semi-literate prose rather than by boredom, semi-literate prose and machine guns and rubber truncheons and concentration camps. But it's right to assume it will always be a struggle; that there will never be a point where everyone understands what objectivity and truth is.
Q: One of Orwell's last writings was that the problem with the Left is that it tells lies about its past. Given your recent departure from The Nation, is this a sentiment with which you concur?
A: I don't think The Nation, as a magazine, tells lies about the past, or indeed about the present; I think it has illusions about both. If it was a campaign of lies it would be easy to expose; it is rather a campaign of comforting half-truths, such as the possibility of being neutral in a war between civil society and theocratic aggression. There are people who think one can be morally neutral about it, and there are even some who are a little euphemistic about the other side, are willing to grant more to it than it claims for itself: for example, the idea that Osama bin Laden is an anti-imperialist when he wants to restore the Caliphate. Or that he's a revolutionary when he's in fact a hired pimp for the Saudi Arabian oligarchy and the Pakistani Secret Police and his organization is partly a crime family, partly a bent multi-national corporation and partly a fascist Camorra.
Q: Has the advent of computers drawn us closer to Big Brother watching us?
A: My instinct is to say no; I remember during the Tiananmen Square events in early 1989 - once I'd been able to take my eyes off Henry Kissinger justifying the massacre on television - I was amazed that on my recently acquired fax machine I could get directly from Tiananmen Square faxes that people were sending out. I had before been in countries as a writer, where I couldn't transmit from where I was what I'd found out - unless with great luck, maybe finding the right Telex operator or getting someone who was flying out on the plane to take it. In a way, censorship has been abolished now; no government can say it controls information. We've evolved beyond the fax with email, and though that encourages the state to try and find means of keeping surveillance and some control, we have reached a point that Orwell would never have predicted where it's possible to say that censorship is only really a platonic concept. It's a wish in the mind of the state and of the authorities, but almost nobody now depends upon orthodox sources of information.
Q: In November 1989 a group of university students in Czechoslovakia were preparing a stage performance of "Animal Farm" when the system finally crumbled. How much delusion do leaders in North Korea and Iran live under now?
A: Czeslaw Milosz, who's been living in Berkeley for a long time, was in every sense the laureate of Poland. In 1951 he wrote The Captive Mind, and he was then still a cultural official in the Stalinized party that ran Poland. In The Captive Mind, Milosz writes that within certain circles within the Polish Communist leadership, 1984 was passed from hand to hand in illicit translation by people who trusted one another. They were all astounded by how it captured the texture of life in a closed society and, Milosz adds, they were all astounded later to find that the English author had never lived under Stalinism or even visited the Soviet Union. In that case, how does he know how it feels? The people in Poland got the point right away. I don't think any one writer in the century has ever paid a greater compliment to another, even if it is unintentional.
There is nothing racially or genetically different between ourselves and North Koreans, Albanians, Iraqis and so on; everyone has a rough sense of when they're being lied to, coerced or exploited. That the right bet would be on their emancipation must be the right one; that their leaders deserve better treatment must be the wrong one. Though he'd never been to Stalin's Russia, Orwell did have an idea of what totalitarian society could be made up of, because he'd been a victim of a very sadistic, colonial English boys school when he was very small; he'd been a colonial policeman; he'd been subject to a purge and a witch-hunt in Spain and he'd seen how easy it was to control the colonial subjects and the unemployed with only a few determined officials.
Q: Do you find significance between former FBI director Louis Freeh's disdain for the Clinton administration, his resignation right before September 11 and the frustrated resignation from the FBI and subsequent death of John O'Neill?
A: Mr. O'Neill had become persuaded a long time prior to September 11 that the Al Qaeda network was a serious threat and was being consistently underestimated by the administration and made himself obnoxious inside the bureau by making this point and saying there was a cover-up involved in Yemen, with the USS Cole. He then made the crucial mistake of leaving some secret documents in his briefcase in a conference in Florida, which gave his enemies an excuse to fire him for a breach of security and he said, Well the hell with you anyway; I can get a better job in the private sector and I'll carry on my campaign from there. On September 1, 2001, he became director of security for the World Trade Center and was last seen entering tower two. It's the nearest I've ever come in real life to a study of the Sherlock Holmes-Moriarty global mutual combat. Unfortunately, only one of them falls into the Reichenbach so far, though I actually think for other reasons we won't be hearing from Mr. bin Laden again; I think he's under a rock.
Certainly, nobody who took the struggle against Islamic fascism seriously could have been content with the performance of the Clinton administration, which was culpably neglectful of it and in its one alleged counterstroke committed an atrocity by blowing up a civilian facility in the Sudan on presidential order on the pretext that it was a nerve gas facility. No inspection was required, no warning was given, no reference to the United Nations was made or to Congress. Every liberal in the country forgives Mr. Clinton for that; I don't. It had the paradoxical effect of making Mr. bin Laden look good - a pretty difficult task in the context. As with the whole eight years of Mr. Clinton in foreign policy, those years were eaten by the locust at best and these were eight years we couldn't have afforded.
Q: You've written a book calling for criminal charges to be brought against Henry Kissinger. Recently, however, the U.S. sought to exempt American officials, not just American soldiers, from the International Court of Criminal Justice. How does this affect the effort to bring Kissinger to justice?
A: Since the book came out and since the campaign began, Henry Kissinger was visited by the gendarmerie in Paris in the Ritz Hotel and summonsed to a court to answer questions about Pinochet and the disappearance of French people in that terrible immolation and fled town, but the warrant is still extant for when he comes back. He's been sought for questioning by the magistrates in Chile where I've been to testify against him; Judge Guzman, the main judge in the Pinochet case, and Judge Rodolfo Corral, the main judge in the death squad case in Argentina, are also seeking his testimony. An attempt was made to have a judge issue a bench warrant for his arrest in London recently and will be repeated if he tries to return there. The Brazilian government asked him to cancel an official visit to Brazil a few weeks ago on the grounds that his immunity from prosecution couldn't be guaranteed. Some of the oxygen from around the guy's been sucked out, and he's not free to travel anywhere without consulting lawyers each time; there are some countries he wouldn't dare go to. This is not good enough but it's a start; something like a consistent humans rights ethic of international law touching war crimes and crimes against humanity is beginning to apply to him. He's also being sued in federal court in Washington, D.C., by the relatives of people who were murdered on his orders in Chile. Unfortunately that suit was filed on 11 September, 2001, and hasn't had all the coverage I would have liked, but we are working on it now.
In a recent article by Elizabeth Becker in The New York Times and other reportage it's been made clear by senior members of the administration that their reason for wanting to withdraw the American signature from the International Criminal Court is the protection of Henry Kissinger, that they are aware that this could be a grave embarrassment to the Republican Party and to the Bush administration and they think, because they want to implicate all of us in his crimes, the United States. Think about the insult that that involves for American society, American culture, for everyone here who pays taxes, although it's much worse than that. Think about what they haven't done for Saddam Hussein. What's the obvious thing the U.S. administration should have done? Asked for his indictment for war crimes and crimes against humanity, asked its ambassador of the United Nations to lodge this complaint with the U.N. Human Rights Committee, or perhaps made an application to The Hague for a warrant for his arrest. It's the first thing you would think that a government bent on regime change would do. Why haven't they done it? Because they can't do it, because they've thrown away - to defend Kissinger - a weapon that could have punished Saddam Hussein. Thus, Henry Kissinger helps to protect Saddam Hussein. This is not an irony or a contradiction; it's what you would expect because those of us who believe in a consistent human rights ethic and a consistent international law ethic would obviously have got both by now. If you're not going to get both, you have to be against getting either.
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