Be careful how you wield George Orwell

I’ ll start by admitting that I have a hipster’s childish, proprietary feeling toward the works of George Orwell. It’s a common disorder. Being an admirer of the man’s work I ought, reasonably, to be delighted by anything that makes it more popular. But, dammit, all anybody ever buys are the hits.

Donald Trump’s election to the U. S. presidency has set off such a mighty public hunger for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty- Four that the novel shot to the top of Amazon’s fiction charts. That, in turn, has created a land rush in Orwell-Trump thinkpieces. The Guardian even did a full workup of “Orwell experts” who all assure us that the parallels between the 1949 book and the current situation are strong and undeniable, with claims like “Trump takes doublethink to a new extreme” and “Trump is not O’Brien. He is more like a cut-price version of Big Brother himself.”

You can find “Are we living in Orwell’s 1984 (yet)?” articles printed in any year of the last 40 or so. But 2017 has already seen dozens, maybe hundreds. And the great majority of them seem to answer: “Yes, definitely. Here we are. Enjoy your Victory Gin.”

This is not a healthy or sensible reaction to the election of a bold, chauvinistic liar. That, after all, may be a good description most of the heads of government that have ever existed — the leaders under which most modern humans have lived. You’re allowed be afraid of or discouraged by Trump without los- ing your mind altogether. He displays a great deal of the style and technique of a classic caudillo, a Juan Peron or a Ferdinand Marcos; no sane liberal can be happy to see these things brought to the American scene. Trump has terrible power and may abuse it. He may be awful for the world, may even initiate wars.

But, hey: America is not Airstrip One. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a critique of totalitarianism; it is full of unmistakable, specific references to the Communist world of Orwell’s time — references that won it an admiring audience for four decades behind the Iron Curtain because of the fine details Orwell had inferred without ever travelling in the Soviet bloc. I am not sure how anyone can miss the point so widely, or be so ignorant of the book’s allusions, as to think that it is somehow the tale of a bad person called Big Brother.

Nineteen Eighty- Four is often called a “warning,” but it is not a book about the path to totalitarianism; after all, it features no noisy public opposition marching in the streets against the regime. ( It’s important to notice that the world of Nineteen Eighty- Four is not really policed by the police.) Orwell did write that book, and it was called Animal Farm. The polite left is perhaps still not totally comfortable with that one, perhaps remembering that its forefathers, acting on the most honourable patriotic motives, tried their hardest to suppress it.

Orwell wrote so much about the art of political lying that it is abominable and upsetting to see him reduced to one book — a text one cannot possibly decode without understanding, or at least mentioning, the history and practice of the Soviet Union. Handing Nineteen Eighty- Four to persons born after the fall of the Berlin Wall almost seems like a form of malpractice. ( Is there some way to force them to read Koestler’s Darkness at Noon first?)

The regime in Nineteen EightyFour is very specifically a socialist one, armed with new mass media whose possible abuses Orwell dreaded; it was written after fascism in Europe had been trounced. Austere, Labour- led postwar Britain is an important target of Orwell’s satire on “Ingsoc” ( HINT HINT), although this is hard even for a fairly aware reader to see from the vantage point of 2017. Orwell had written war propaganda for the BBC: his “telescreens” are at least as much as a semi-private, self-aware joke about contemporary Britain as they are a science-fiction vision.

There must be more suitable weapons with which to arm the public against President Trump. This is not to deny that he does show an outrageous disregard for inconvenient facts, that he will try to build his personal cult, or that he will abuse history. But he will be, in all of this, contradicted and resisted within the U. S. by a civil society and cultural apparatus that remain independent of the state, and even in undisputed control of large parts of it. When a politician lies and misdirects, we ought to object. But one man, even a president, is limited in the harm he can do in a constitutional republic.

Of course everyone should read Nineteen Eighty- Four. I do not really mean to suggest it has prerequisites like a university class. You should read it for what it implies about political party spirit. You should read it for what it says about the political use of choreographed hatred — how it tends to act as its own justification and fulfillment. You should read it for what it says about the use of verbal formulas in restricting thought. You should read it and think about the use of war — not the fact of war, but the language of war, the mental environment of war. You should read it and think about mass media. You should read it, and then read it again when Donald Trump has done his worst and shoved off to Florida for good.

UPSETTING TO SEE HIM REDUCED TO ONE BOOK.

HANDING NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR TO PERSONS BORN AFTER THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL ALMOST SEEMS LIKE A FORM OF MALPRACTICE. — COLBY COSH