Everyone today would like to know what George Orwell’s reaction would be to the present state of things if he were currently alive(and if he could only stop rolling over in that grave of his all the damned time). The conventional conclusion is that he would be horrified by things like the NSA and Pvt. Bradley Manning’s arrest and trail. Orwell would, so they say, surely ask how the world he knew could have become so apparently “Orwellian,” to invoke a phrase that he never came up with.

Or perhaps quite a different situation would exist. One in which he would be equally—if not, perhaps, poetically more—horrified by what a tremendous lack of linguistic and logical range contemporary journalists and activists currently posses, especially in forever evoking and minimizing his own work. As Jason Slotkin has succinctly argued, the man who hated written cliches and journalistic simplicities most was George Orwell. Slotkin reminds us that “The destructive power of squishy political language” was something essential to his essays Politics and the English Language, Writers and the Leviathan, and his novels such as Animal Farm and 1984. For Orwell, bad minds create bad language, but the same bad minds are just as often the products of bad language.

But it isn’t simply the issue of language that needs to be reevaluated if we are to redeem Orwell’s critical significance today —the entire field of political imagination needs to be rethought and reexamined in all it’s ideological and sociological complexity. To try and do what Orwell himself was so strict about, a mandate to “see things as they are,” while acknowledging all the material and emotional discontinuities within such a framework. Lately, a clip from the superb BBC documentary George Orwell: A Life in Pictures in which Orwell makes one of his final warnings on the surveillance state has been floating around the internet, and for most people its contents are almost a direct affirmation of a post-PRISM world: but it is exactly this sloppy sublimation of the critical facts to popular conception that Orwell so bitterly fought against. In his own day he was enormously critical of the British Communists who apologized for Stalin, and the Liberal politicians who impeded self-determination in India. To put it simply and absurdly, what we need most is to be freed from the “Orwellian” grasp of proclaiming an imminent “Orwellian” situation.

What does this entail? First, it asks that we stop being lazy Radicals and resting on a crutch like Orwell’s “supposed” vision for the future. In Can Socialists be Happy? he attacked those Leftists who would, instead of providing a solid platform for real systemic change and equality, rested on the purposefully obscure image of an H.G. Wellsian Utopia. He wrote:

Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one anther.

For current purposes we can imagine this being altered to fit the argument at hand: Men and women fight the current system(on the barricades, with the arts, protests, etc.) so that they can avoid having giant TV screens that monitor them, being denied true love, and watching proles being pelted with state missiles.

Now, surly men and women struggle politically so that something like that doesn’t ever happen, but the danger in fighting a false threat is that it might obscure the very real beast quite ready to devour oneself —false cases of neurosis only ever present false symptoms to be cured. The problem becomes especially clear when one considers that almost every political creed in this country is just as fearful of some looming “Orwellian” future prospect as every other. And this is not simply because the fear of such has become so facile(which it certainly has), but because of a much broader Ideological preposition that American culture just isn’t historically or materially suited for such a transformation, not in the sense that 1930’s Germany or Russia were.

With obscene Government policies such as the NSA’s PRISM and Bradley Manning’s prosecution, it becomes very probably that my argument thus far will be quite rejected: how can you say this isn’t 1984 with the way everything has been developing? Isn’t this exactly the kind of situation he warned against? And any effective counter to this claim requires two primary acknowledgements: one, that the idea of totalitarianism as such is distinct from the much more specific notion of Fascism¹, and that when speaking of generally dystopic situations Americans have a nauseating tendency to completely overlook our foreign policy(past and present).

And it is in Barrack Obama’s last election that we find a curious intersection of the two —an election that was, among other things, an experiment par excellence in the art of fear mongering. With the exception of Ron Paul, almost every Republican candidate was built up to be a Big Brother in waiting, monsters who, once in office, would set up concentration camps for gays and immigrants, promptly suspend all American civil liberties, and drive us into never-ending war. Even Mitt Romney, by far one of the tamest of the Conservatives running that year, was soon stamped with a plethora of “Orwellian” connotations.² A vote against Obama was popularly conceived as a vote against Orwell’s legacy. “Obama may not be perfect”, so the argument went, “but at least he wasn’t an Orwellian”.

The logic sustaining such an proposition is absurd at best, especially when put against a critical reading of the facts. For instance, Obama’s policies enacted fulfill almost every basic fear leveled against the Republican candidates that stops short of venturing into any “Orwellian” flights of fancy: immigration restrictions and deportations, foreign disputes, increased internal security and lack of privacy, enlarged executive power, legal rupturing, and a continued system of torture and inhuman detainment are all things that have become common under the Obama administration. But because they are not the hyperbolic constructs of a perceived work of science fiction, but the very real workings of a ruthless neo-liberal system, Americans excuse, ignore, or remain in ignorance of almost all of them, awaiting eagerly for that Big Brother presence that will instead make one do jumping jacks in the morning under a watchful monitor. The point isn’t at all that the Republicans would be any better, the point is that a new political paradigm is to be understood, namely calling out this one for what it is: Bourgeois Democracy.

And for those Americans who see with startled eyes the approach of the NSA as a terrifying convergence of the nightmare to come, the residents of the Third World have been living in such a state for some time now. Global American hegemony has done something that Oceania never cared to, namely the creation of a world-wide market that rules through a lethal and distinct combination of military intimidation, economic bullying, and political maneuvering. (Quite rightly was the analogy made during the Cold War of the US as Athens and Russia as Sparta, with the former being the more accurate of the two.) Orwell, almost everyone—Leftists included—tend to constantly forget, was an anti-Capitalist. He may not have joined ranks with the British Communist party(and their intense bias for Stalin), but he did write for the Left-leaning Tribune, and fought with the Marxist POUM party in the Spanish Civil war. Despite his warnings and cautions about fascism and totalitarianism, Orwell never shied away from the menace that was capitalism, and was particularly vocal about it regarding imperialism(having served with the Imperial police in Burma). He wrote during the war in his As I Please column:

The coloured worker cannot be blamed for feeling no solidarity with his white comrades, The gap between their standards of living and his own is so vast that it makes any differences which may exist in the West seem negligible.

And with everyone so quick to decry this or that as “Orwellian”, one cannot help but think of it as a form of fatalism that would make even the most orthodox of Trotskyist blush. The course of history was by no means at all set in his eyes³. As he stated in England Your England, “That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not.” In the same book he made the sober assessment that the type of political structure that was on display in Germany and Italy wasn’t likely to immediately materialize itself in England(and by extension, America). For one, he argued, England was a naval Empire and as such had no reason to occupy its streets with goose-stepping solders in order to maintain its hegemony. American culture, likewise, rests soundly on its dominating power in all things foreign, and hardly needs to keep troops at home when they are so properly deployed everywhere else overseas.

That the state of things today is horrible is indeed true enough, but Americans too often forget that horrible things come in all different shapes and sizes. The German Social Democrats, fearing more the threat of a radical communist takeover, employed a force easily their ideological opposite, the Freikorps —a decision they would pay for dearly once the Nazis were carting them all off to Concentration camps a decade later. Similarly, Zizek has stated that he finds Orwell a bit naive on the idea of love with regards to state power: for Zizek, love is not only allowed to flourish under this system, but it is almost mandatory. Far from being a simple contrarian(as he is so often accused), his point is instead that this system does not need to crush individual expressions of love and desire because such motives do not hinder its growth or survival(as they would to Oceania’s).° The late-era Capitalist system that it is cushions itself with a level of hedonistic enjoyment that keeps its citizens removed from the actual violent and exploitative functioning of the state apparatus. (Gay marriage is a public political issue, but not the economic oppression of poverty-stricken LGBTQ youth.) If America is becoming ever gradually more tolerant of issues such as gay marriage and sexual openness, it is because such things do not inhibit its Empire.

Orwell wrote 1984 after three powers had defeated fascism and in which two of them had emerged with most of the world under their respective spheres of influence. If he feared a future in which something like the Stalinist mode of Terror was a possibility, it was because it then encapsulated half of Europe, and because many of his contemporary intellectuals were envious of it.ª But we live in a world which really has only one major power(China and Russia’s military budget combined is about half of ours), and this power operates under its own devices and trends, distinct from anything seen before. If anything, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is almost striking it its portrayal of the political and social landscape as it is quickly becoming in the West(just as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was for England in the 1980’s). Did both of these build off of the legacy of Orwell’s 1984? Absolutely. But they simply refused to be pigeonholed and neutralized by it.

So if one intends to thoroughly understand the intellectual and critical legacy of George Orwell they must do more than simply read 1984, just as to better understand the current crises one must do more than to simply relate everything with a whiff to the same book. Otherwise, and at the risk of discrediting the entire essay, Ignorance is Strength.

¹1984 takes almost all its ques from Stalin’s Soviet State, and Orwell was always very careful to never sloppily exchange the terms “authoritarianism” with “fascism”. For him, and unlike so many commentators today, they were distinct phenomenons that entailed different forms of oppression —for instance, 1984 envisioned a totalitarian England, based off of the Russian model and with a Labor government twist, but there was never anything distinctly Fascist about it as he had seen in Germany and Italy.

²Mitt Romney, for whatever else, wasn’t even a part of the hyper-conservative Tea Party.

³In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell emphasizes that one of his biggest sources of contention with academic Marxists was their insistence upon “historical determinism”.

°And it can even use these very same desires as a powerful force for profit, such as corporate sponsoring at Gay Pride parades.

ªStalinist State Terror, apropos of Zizek, is to be discerned as distinct from Revolutionary or Red Terror.