When can we forget Orwell?

Falling in love with George Orwell’s writings is a life-changing experience. Although Orwell’s style is straightforward and clear, many readers don’t fully understand the ideas behind it. They often claim to have understood his works, but in reality, they merely skim through his sarcasm without truly appreciating how they mirror reality.  

The ingenious Englishman, who lived in various countries and fought for his beliefs, is one of the great independent intellectual figures in human history. He paid a dear price for being a freethinker willing to speak the truth to masses as well as the power. His ideas brought him hatred, isolation, poverty, a bullet wound from fighting in the Spanish Civil War, but also eternal glory. Orwell could have used his talent to gain fame and wealth and could easily have been elected or appointed to a high office. However, he decided that he cared about humanity and didn’t want to improve his life at others’ expense. He was too arrogant to bow to power. During his life, he was often sidelined, obscured, and cancelled.

Despite these struggles, or perhaps because of them, Orwell’s legacy endures. To this day, his novel 1984 is considered one of the most important writings in history.

People began to recognize his works posthumously, when members of the Polish Communist Party got copies of his work in the early 1950s. They were shocked at how accurately he described the situation of the communist bloc under the influence of the USSR. They thought that 1984, published in 1949, was written by a group of experts under the orders of the governments of the USA and the UK. They believed that the story was based on data provided by intelligence services. They couldn’t believe that no one helped Eric Blair, who wrote under the pen name George Orwell, struggling with tuberculosis while typing his ideas on an old typewriter.

The Russians, under the dictatorship of the Communist Party, thought that 1984 was written about them, with Stalin as Big Brother. In Iraq, the Iraqis saw the eyes and moustache of Saddam Hussein’s countless posters and pictures plastered throughout the country as Big Brother’s face. Christopher Hitchens used to say that it seemed someone had given a copy of 1984 to Kim Il-Sung to model North Korea after it.

It could be argued that in Libya, Syria, and North Korea, 1984 has been used as their roadmap. Each and every idea used by Big Brother’s regime to control the masses is implemented by these regimes. Intellectuals have been discussing whether Orwell wrote his novel about the USSR, Nazi Germany, China, or other dictatorial states.

Orwell’s work transcended specific regimes. He analysed and exposed the mental foundation of totalitarianism. Orwell showed that for dictators to remain in power, they need to control minds through controlling language, fabricating history, installing fear, and cancelling freedoms. He highlights how dictatorial regimes devoid language of its meaning and force people to cancel their minds and follow the regime.

Describing something as its opposite is one of the most ingenious ideas in Orwell’s writings as it unveils a common but concealed phenomenon. In 1984, the cruel dictator is called Big Brother, the ministry that terrorises people is called the Ministry of Love, and the organization that spreads and promotes lies is called the Ministry of Truth. In the same fashion, North Korea is called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and under Gaddafi, Libya was named the Great Socialist People’s Arab Jamahiriya.

Orwell summarised how cruel dictators monitor, censor, and control all aspects of life to remain in power, how people live in fear and how no one knows what could happen to them. No one is safe.

Every dictator knows that freedoms can’t be divided, and once people taste freedom in one aspect of life, they will want more and more. Hence, to remain in power, they must keep taking away all freedoms. Orwell shows how people can easily be manipulated and intimidated to accept fallacies and lies as facts and realities, and how history is constantly being rewritten to fit the current agenda of the ones in power. Once you realise how deep and accurate this simple idea is, it is impossible not to fall in love with 1984.  

The question remains: when will humanity grow and mature so Orwell’s work could become part of history rather than current affairs? When will societies stop accepting irrational, misleading rhetoric and refuse to be dominated by a few self-serving Machiavellian dictators?