America needs you, George Orwell
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Sometimes I wonder what George Orwell, the great English writer who sounded prophetic warnings on the dangers of totalitarianism, would think of the world today if he were still alive.
He was a socialist, which in his day wasn't just a casual slur used by conservatives unable themselves to define socialism and therefore prepared to think President Barack Obama is one. To further confuse that crowd, Orwell was a socialist who was critical of the excesses of communism, which was still in its freedom-crushing heyday when he died at the age of 46 in 1950.
He might be glad that communism, with its purges and gulags, had been dumped in the rubbish bin of history, excepting, of course, the Chinese corporate variety that we are glad to have sell us all the rubbish bins we need along with everything else in the way of trash to put in them.
He might have marveled how surveillance cameras were more and more doing Big Brother's work of watching people everywhere, due to all the littler brothers and sisters in government who just want to keep everybody safe.
As to security, he might have been shocked that the world was now in a state of perpetual war, the better for patriotism to rally and control the citizens as he foretold in his chilling masterwork "1984," where Big Brother was introduced to the world as someone anything but brotherly.
Orwell might have been astounded to learn that corporations were considered people now and the people themselves were considered expendable, especially if they were unionized or were seeking universal health care or some other luxury such as clean air not useful to the business class. When troublesome people do make such demands, they are denounced as a threat to freedom itself.
To be sure, things have not quite reached the sorry state of "1984." The most influential politicians haven't yet succeeded in banning the enjoyment of sex as Orwell foresaw, although most on the right do seem to believe it is filthy and may even tickle. Gay sex is seen as worse, because it is likely to occur among people with good fashion sense.
Most of all, Orwell might have been depressed at the debasement of the language, which he also foretold in "1984." Newspeak, he called it. As was explained, "The purpose of Newspeak was not only a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism] but to make all other modes of thought impossible."
First Published October 12, 2011 12:00 am
