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George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four

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7 Orwell and totalitarianism

Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning, rather than a prophecy. He was writing on the verge of the Cold War and his critique of totalitarian regimes, monolithic party systems and dominant ideologies was eagerly adopted by opponents of communism, particularly during what became known as the era of McCarthyism. However, the strength of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that the regime he described could apply to a range of totalitarian systems.

As Orwell wrote, in 1942, in response to those who believed that totalitarianism ‘could not happen here’:

Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are really only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that imply military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive…. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run…. But why should it?

(Orwell, 1942)

Activity 6

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as well as his broader writings have been used to explain the meaning of totalitarianism, its main features and the situations in which it could arise.

Listen to this audio taken from The Open University course Modern Political Ideas, in which Dr Richard Heffernan discusses the meaning of totalitarianism today. Listen to the audio at least twice then, when you have done so, note down your thoughts in response to the following questions.

Download this audio clip.Audio player: Audio 3

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Transcript: Audio 3

NARRATOR:

In his magisterial novel, 1984, a dystopian, terrifying glimpse into a totalitarian future, George Orwell observed that the clocks struck thirteen… So powerful was the party, led by Big Brother, it could control the measurement of time itself. The party, Orwell famously suggested, controlled both the present and the past, something which enabled it to control the future.

The party also controlled truth. Orwell wrote, and I quote:

‘In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.’ End of quote.

This Orwellian future was summed up in the chilling phrase, and I quote:

‘If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever’.

Orwell’s vision of the future built upon recent reality when publishing the book in 1949. It owed much to the experiences of the recent past of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.

The notion of totalitarianism is not, however, the creation of a novelist. Nor is the word totalitarian a simple insult. Totalitarianism is instead a historically rooted descriptive concept describing a regime which, among other things, took and ruined the lives of numerous people in the service of the ideology of the state and the interest of the political elite. The price of totalitarianism is written in blood in the history books, with Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia being exemplars. The horrors enacted by those two regimes, replicated later in Mao’s China, reinforced by the bloodbath of the Second World War, saw such states persecute, then liquidate, numerous numbers of its citizenry in the interest of rebuilding the world in their preferred perfect ‘utopian’ vision.

Friedrich and Brzezinski established a theory of totalitarianism applicable to the study of comparative politics. They set out the principal characteristics of the totalitarian regime by offering the following checklist of traits and characteristics:

First, an elaborate and totalising guiding ideology.

Second, a single party committed to this ideology directing the state, typically led by a dictator.

Third, the use of systemic terror and political violence, and the use of secret police.

Fourth, the state possessing a total monopoly on the possession of weapons.

Fifth, the state having a complete monopoly on the means of communication and the provision of information; and

Sixth, the state having central control and planning of the economy through state direction.

Totalitarianism, Simon Tormey rightly suggests, was, and I quote, ‘the modern incarnation of an ancient political form, the autocracy’: end of quote. It was the sum of these parts. Foremost amongst these characteristics, however, was the totalising ideology, the vision of the future society the regime wished to construct. It was the end to which all necessary violent means were directed. Terror and violence were the means by which everyone and everything was changed, the old society swept away, and, in time, the new society defended. People were expendable. Resistance had to be futile. In time, however, the public, endlessly manipulated and deceived, would come to accept the new order. Resistance would not be possible. Nor, in fact, would it be necessary, because all aspects of human existence and public interaction would be organised by the state.

Totalitarian regimes made much of the cult of personality. The historian Ian Kershaw said of Nazi Germany that everyone in the state worked towards Hitler. The leader was infallible, and could not be corrected. And if the leader was a megalomaniac, was suspicious and paranoid, all the better for the totalitarian regime.

These regimes professed a radical ideology and sought all necessary means to enact it. They posited a golden age and they looked forward to what they believed would be a glorious future.

The chosen ideology – communism under Stalin, or Nazism under Hitler – had to monopolise the public realm and dominate the private sphere. No alternative perspective was possible; nor could any be permitted. Dissent, in any form, would challenge the totalitarian ruler, so it must be suppressed and it had to be eliminated. Thus, for Hannah Arendt, and I quote: ‘the confrontation between what is and what must be makes necessary the use of terror in totalitarian systems’. End of quote. Terror is therefore a classic feature of the totalitarian regime.

Within Hitler’s Third Reich, before the outbreak of war, the Nazis controlled Germany with a rod of iron. For the historian Richard Evans, in the Third Reich, and I quote:

‘It was illegal to belong to any political grouping apart from the Nazi party or indeed any non–Nazi organisation of any kind apart from the churches (and their ancillary lay organisations) and the army: it was illegal to tell jokes about Hitler; it was illegal to spread rumours about the government; it was illegal to discuss alternatives to the status quo. The Reichstag Fire Decree of the 28th of February 1933 made it legal for the police to open letters and tap telephones, and to detain people indefinitely and without a court order on so called ‘protective custody’. Political opponents were banned, and political dissent crushed. These same decrees also abrogated the clauses in the Weimar Constitution that guaranteed freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom of expression.’ End quote.

From these restrictions of freedom followed the incarceration of political opponents in concentration camps, the war on the Jews and, in time, amid the horror of war, the obscenity of the extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Hitler’s Germany was responsible for the murder of some six million Jews and 19 million prisoners of war and civilians between 1939 and 45. Across Europe an estimated 36.5 million people were killed in the wars that Hitler prosecuted. Stalin’s Russia, unlike Hitler’s Germany, was not based upon any ideology of racial superiority, but supposedly upon a collective brotherhood of man. But Stalin’s rule saw terror enacted on an unimaginable scale.

Before the war, on a greater level than the Nazis, Stalin terrorised the people, and also terrorised the elites. His Great Terror, the purges of 1937 to 38, saw some 1.7 million people arrested, 800,000 people shot as ‘enemies of the state’. Earlier, in 1932–33, the famine the Soviets deliberately inflicted on the Ukraine led to some 3.3 million peasants being starved to death.

In the Soviet penal system, some three million people perished between 1929 and 1953, and in the life of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1991 some 28.7 million people were forced into labour. Millions of others were cast into darkness.

Under Stalin, key members of the Soviet leadership were executed. Of the 139 members of the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in post in 1934, some 98 were killed in 1938 and 1940.

The subjugation of some knew no bounds. Stalin’s Great Terror saw thousands of communists accept that their death was a final service to their communist party. One Bolshevik, Georgy Pyatakov, himself killed under Stalin, had denounced his wife as a traitor and saboteur, unsuccessfully offered to appear as a witness in her prosecution, and volunteered to personally administer her execution. Others, usually under torture, confessed to crimes they had never committed. For the elite, such was the totalitarian nature of their regime, the party was their life, and their commitment to its ideology total. This fact served to mask all manner of crimes.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, when publishing The Gulag Archipelago, unmasked the reality that the concentration camps of the Soviet Union were not an incidental feature of the communist regime, but an integral part of it. And that had been from the very beginnings of the revolution. ‘With an iron fist’, a sign at one Soviet gulag read, ‘we will lead humanity to happiness’. A claim echoing the grotesque lie adorning the gates of the labour and extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Arbeit Macht Frei: work makes you free.

These two totalitarian regimes cast the deepest, that of Starlin and that of Hitler, casts the darkest shadows over humanity in a twentieth century in which globally some 190 million people met their death by war, massacre, execution or by famine. Understanding totalitarianism is one way its threat can be combated.

End transcript: Audio 3

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Audio 3

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What was the significance of ‘the party’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four?
What are the six main features of totalitarianism?
How important is the ‘cult of personality’ for totalitarian regimes?
What restrictions on freedom did totalitarian regimes impose?
What distinguished totalitarianism under Hitler from totalitarianism under Stalin?

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Discussion

You will have seen that the Party was all-powerful in demanding conformity and orthodoxy and through the state was able to exercise control.
The six main features of totalitarianism are:
1. an elaborate and totalising guiding ideology
2. a single party committed to this ideology directing the state, typically led by a dictator
3. the use of systemic terror and political violence, and the use of secret police
4. the state possessing a total monopoly on the possession of weapons
5. the state having a complete monopoly on the means of communication and the provision of information
6. the state having central control and planning of the economy through state direction.
The ‘cult of personality’, including many myths of personal prowess and achievements, featured in both Nazi/fascist and communist examples of totalitarianism as a way of connecting leaders to the people.
You probably found that denial of free speech, the right to protest and of movement, or to criticise those in power were most common.
Left and right totalitarianisms had common features; for the right, ideas of racial superiority were often dominant; for the left, impositions on property featured. However, the role of the state and the party within it shared some core aspects.

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