Language of the Past: Orwell’s 1984

This is not going to be an essay about how, during the George W. Bush administration, America has turned, or is going to turn, into the mythical totalitarian mega-nation of Orwell’s 1984 Oceania. What this essay will consider is the deliberate decimation of language, vocabulary, and linguistics for the purpose of limiting new and revolutionary thought, the concept of perpetual and endless war, and their application to early 21st century American culture. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

After the Towers fell on September 11th, our nation was at war. As the President accurately stated, it is to be a war that may last generations, and will never conclude with anything resembling a peace treaty. America, like Oceania, has entered into a state of perpetual war. Orwell says that this perpetual condition becomes, “… a purely internal affair… waged [by the state] against its own subjects” and that the object of perpetual war is no longer conquest and nation-building but, “to keep the structure of society intact.” Public opinion within the masses, “is looked upon with indifference,” and “intellectual liberty can be granted because there is no intellect.” War does not concern “… the morale of the masses,” it is about the “… morale of the Party,” and that, “even the humblest Party member… be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph.” This adulation and triumph is for a leader who is “… infallible and all-powerful.” Unlike the masses, members of the Party cannot be allowed “even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject.”

When war is continuous, “…the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded,” and the state “…can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.” Perpetual war, then, is no different than perpetual peace, except that war consumes “materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence… too intelligent,” and it creates fear. The state uses that fear to control its citizens. A war fought on the geographic fringes of the state, therefore, creates a fearful, relatively docile citizenry deep within its interior; war outside is peace inside.

The society of Oceania is manipulated through, among many other things, puritanical sexual repression. The protagonist, Winston Smith, remembers a time when any man could marry any woman; by 1984, the state determines who marries and who does not, which man will marry which woman, and what their sexual conduct will be. Until the state determines these conjugal unions, absolute chastity is maintained through constant surveillance. “Sex is dangerous to the Party,” Orwell writes:
… for how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?
The government, then, literally uses what goes on in one bedroom as a method of controlling everything that goes on in all bedrooms.

Woven throughout is the logic of Newspeak, whose “…whole aim is to narrow the range of thought… make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.” In this new lexicon world, “every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed in exactly one word.” The nuances of language and culture would be lost; language becomes a system based on binaries. There would no longer be the ability to create subtle antonyms to the word “good” with words such as “evil,” “notorious,” or even “bad,” using the minute distinctions and innuendo between them to add contextual meaning. Instead, there would only be the word, “Ungood.” The superlative of “good” would not be “excellent,” “best,” or even “better.” Instead, the superlatives become “plusgood,” and “doubleplusgood.” In Oceania, by the year 2050, “at the very latest, not a single human being alive” would be able to understand a conversation taking place in 1984. “How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished?”

The binaries of language in Newspeak are contained within the word itself- for example: blackwhite. “Applied to an opponent, it means impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction to the plain facts.” For those within the Party, however, “it means the willingness to say black is white when Party discipline demands it.” But the Party itself relies upon its members “…to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed to the contrary.” [italics are the authors]

I have stated as my thesis that you are free to draw your own conclusions; by now, you probably have. Here are some of mine. All of the symptoms Orwell discusses as aspects of perpetual war are present. Societal control through the manipulation of sexuality is currently an open question. Although the obvious is obvious in this administration’s use of doublespeak, it is not unique to this administration. I feel the most insidious manifestation being perpetrated today is the reduction of the language to binaries. I use the word insidious because sometimes it is deeply hidden in the message. It is easy to spot the binary in a statement like “if you are not with us, then you are against us,” but hidden within much of the current legislation is the binary. For example, No Child Left Behind- NCLB. It is a ‘good’ or ‘ungood’ paradigm. There is no nuance in the program; it does not allow for a vocabulary of culture, skills, aptitudes, attitudes, or anything that might be an anomaly in the thread of a student’s life. One is either a ‘pass’ or ‘unpass’ and the fates of teachers, administrators, and entire school districts are based upon this binary.

As I said, this is not an essay about how America is turning into an Orwellian nightmare. I don’t think a judge will give the FBI a search warrant to come knocking on my door late at night to search my house for inflami…. Hold on a second, there’s someone knocking madly at my door…

Well Winston Smith, you hit it on the head. And I hope your mad door knocker is not the death squad we'll be seeing in the not too distant future (read Seymour Hersh's piece in the current New Yorker--that should set you back on your heels). What better way to keep everyone in fear is to threaten them with torture and/or death if they speak out against the administration's totalitarian goals.

I was afraid something (much as Mr. Hersh wrote) would happen now that Mr. Bush claims his mandate. It IS happening, and has been in place for at least two years.

Mr. Smith, your op-ed piece is truly a doubleplusgood!

It's scary when you read something like this and it isn't an abstract thought. It's oh so familiar. It's real, it isn't something in the distant future, it's now. Yes, it's doubleplus scary. :o :o

Bush is doubleungood, no question; I'm not sure we're at the point where death squads are being trained in Syria or something. I teach Orwell to my seniors- it's part of their grad requirement- and it was during the chimp's first term that these doublespeakisms became so commonplace. Even before 9/11 he was doing it. It only took me about an hour to research and write the essay- there was so much material! The thing that got me the most, however, is the 'infallibility' of Big Brother and, at least as he claims in the first debate, our President!

OMG, you've pegged what has deviled me about the language of "No Child Left Behind", such a seemingly innocuous phrase.

Gives me the shivers.

I'll go you one further: Have you seen the photo of the Shrub with the "halo" of the presidential seal (softly out of focus) behind him? He's St. George the Bush! In Nazi Germany, Hitler was shown in his knight's armor, astride his charger bearing the Nazi banner. He was Siegfried, the Teutonic Holy Warrior. That's how Shrub sees himself, as well as his coterie of sycophants!

To the point I made about death squads: I made the Kierkegaardian leap of faith! If you read the article in question, you'll draw the same conclusion I did. Rumsfeld, by the way, has been working on this for at least two years. His intent is to push out the CIA, and leave the Pentagon the sole custodian of ALL intelligence and operatives/operations. Having been MACVSOG in 1969, and part of the expanded LRRP operations in country (and out), it scares me to think our government is turning over to the military ALL intelligence operations. At some point, the military will engage in some disasterous operation(s) that will humiliate our country moreso than Iraq has. Furthermore--there is to be NO congressional oversight! As I read further, the concept of using/enlisting indigenous people as soldiers in this clandestine war brought to mind something I knew of back in the early 70's: Spec Ops people, handled by the CIA were conducting counterintelligence operations against anti-war protesters (at the behest of Nixon). One of my MACVSOG buddies was involved in it. (It later drove him to drinking, and he was subsequently given a general discharge. He was a SFC, as was I. Neither of us retired, but his was a most promising career--he had two Silver Stars, and several Purple Hearts). BTW those Spec Ops people are American, and are being trained right here in the USA--not Syria!

Pardon the digression. My point is that we CAN expect death squads. Rumsfeld has been working on this for two years. Giving them a mission in the U.S. would be a logical next step for Rumsfeld, and the Shrub!

Yours is an honorable profession. I, too, am a teacher, but of much younger children. I taught elementary for nine years before my state politicized education. I'm currently teaching Early Childhood at a private school in this state, and enjoy it immensely!

SOS Students for an Orwellian Society

What is SOS?
Students for an Orwellian Society (SOS) is a nationwide student group. Although SOS has always been a nationwide student group, there is evidence to suggest that it first appeared at Columbia University. The mission of SOS is to promote the vision of a society based upon the principles of Ingsoc, first articulated by George Orwell in his prophetic novel, 1984.

As an Oceania-wide organization, SOS has a number of local chapters. For a partial listing, see our contact section.


George Orwell
Successes
As to be expected, SOS has been quite successful. Since the events of 11 September, we have been able to convince a number of figures in national and local politics to help forward our aims. How could they do otherwise?

http://www.studentsfororwell.org/

for the last year i've been using "War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery" and found this site in the meantime.

WOW!

Call me naive, but I really don't think he has the time- even over the next four years- to take that dramatic a step. I could be the first to go, however, in which case you can say, "I toldya so," when you find my decomposing body in a mass grave.

Amazing that you made the same connections with the Bush photos as I did. But I'd never connected with the Hitler photos, but there is certainly some interesting parallels.

Peter Jennings just had a piece about the article- I haven't gotten the magazine yet, but will read it when I do. Will probably post a thread then.

Good! We'll chat then.

What a great site!

When you get into it a little bit, it's easy to see it's a parody, a farce- but it really has some great links. There's a great site about 8 misconceptions concerning the war in Iraq- it's dated 10/03, but still is interesting.

They call these things "classics" for a reason. You know, they were reading 1984 during Vietnam too. People have been transposing it onto anything they saw fit, on either side of the political fence, for long time. Previously, it's been mostly connected with marketing...this is what they teach me in marketing classes. It's not new at all, the difference lies only to the extent it has been carried over from the campaigns to the administration.

1984 was written about Socialism, and that's where I saw it first being used. Not about Bush, but I'm pretty sure about Johnson, and retroactively against the "new deal" by the Objectivists.

The other famous Orwell piece, was Animal Farm, and that was required reading in my high school. We saw our own government in that too! All those years ago.

If you read "The Art of War" you will be absolutely certain that so has this administration. It's possible to super-impose all of the "classic" political literature on any government you don't like.

Heart, to a certain degree you are correct: classics are classics because the story they tell can be related to the human condition in almost any epoc. That the themes can be used to argue any side of an argument is not really relevant- that's sort of what is supposed to happen in literary criticism.

1984 is a hyperbole based upon Stalinism; as such, there is little chance it will ever come to pass. Little chance... yet look at things like the PNAC Statement of Principles, and their most recent call to reinstate the draft.

My point, as I stated in the opening sentence, is not to make a case that we are turning into Oceania, only that many of the fears exploited by the Bush administration have a frightening resemblence to the world of Orwell. And as I also said, my greatest concern is their rabid pursuit of making the world one of good and ungood, not one of linguistic nuance. I honestly believe that, were it not for term limits, this president would not hesitate to make America into an Amerika.

seems to me this is becoming truer than you might want to realize.

but the way i see it, there can only be a couple of complete idiots at the helm and soon they'll both drive each other nutz before too bloody long....

poetic justice

- perry

These idiots may want to hold on to the helm for a bit longer than allowed by law... read A Credible Threat- then pray to God that the movie comes out before BushCo's term is up!