{"id":8117,"date":"2017-06-16T09:30:21","date_gmt":"2017-06-16T07:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=8117"},"modified":"2017-06-16T09:34:08","modified_gmt":"2017-06-16T07:34:08","slug":"why-1984-is-a-2017-must-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2017\/06\/why-1984-is-a-2017-must-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Why \u20181984\u2019 Is a 2017 Must-Read"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Source: New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The dystopia described in George Orwell\u2019s nearly 70-year-old novel \u201c1984\u201d suddenly feels all too familiar. A world in which Big Brother (or maybe the National Security Agency) is always listening in, and high-tech devices can eavesdrop in people\u2019s homes. (Hey, Alexa<\/a>, what\u2019s up?) A world of endless war, where fear and hate are drummed up against foreigners, and movies show boatloads of refugees dying at sea. A world in which the government insists that reality is not \u201csomething objective, external, existing in its own right\u201d \u2014 but rather, \u201cwhatever the Party holds to be truth is<\/em> truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c1984\u201d shot to No. 1<\/a> on Amazon\u2019s best-seller list this week, after Kellyanne Conway<\/a>, an adviser to President Trump, described demonstrable falsehoods told by the White House press secretary Sean Spicer \u2014 regarding the size of inaugural crowds \u2014 as \u201calternative facts.\u201d It was a phrase chillingly reminiscent, for many readers, of the Ministry of Truth\u2019s efforts in \u201c1984\u201d at \u201creality control.\u201d To Big Brother and the Party, Orwell wrote, \u201cthe very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.\u201d Regardless of the facts, \u201cBig Brother is omnipotent\u201d and \u201cthe Party is infallible.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the novel\u2019s hero, Winston Smith, sees it, the Party \u201ctold you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,\u201d and he vows, early in the book, to defend \u201cthe obvious\u201d and \u201cthe true\u201d: \u201cThe solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth\u2019s center.\u201d Freedom, he reminds himself, \u201cis the freedom to say that two plus two make four,\u201d even though the Party will force him to agree that \u201cTWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE\u201d \u2014 not unlike the way Mr. Spicer tried to insist<\/a> that Mr. Trump\u2019s inauguration crowd was \u201cthe largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,\u201d despite data and photographs to the contrary.<\/p>\n

In \u201c1984,\u201d Orwell created a harrowing picture of a dystopia named Oceania, where the government insists on defining its own reality and where propaganda permeates the lives of people too distracted by rubbishy tabloids (\u201ccontaining almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology\u201d) and sex-filled movies to care much about politics or history. News articles and books are rewritten by the Ministry of Truth and facts and dates grow blurry \u2014 the past is described as a benighted time that has given way to the Party\u2019s efforts to make Oceania great again (never mind the evidence to the contrary, like grim living conditions and shortages of decent food and clothing).<\/p>\n

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Not surprisingly, \u201c1984\u201d has found a nervous readership in today\u2019s \u201cpost-truth<\/a>\u201d era. It\u2019s an era in which misinformation and fake news have proliferated on the web; Russia is flooding the West with propaganda to affect elections and sow doubts about the democratic process; poisonous tensions among ethnic and religious groups are fanned by right-wing demagogues; and reporters scramble to sort out a cascade of lies and falsehoods told by President Trump and his aides \u2014 from false accusations that journalists had invented a rift between him and the intelligence community (when he had compared the intelligence agencies to Nazis) to debunked claims<\/a> that millions of unauthorized immigrants robbed him of a popular-vote majority.<\/p>\n

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George Orwell\u2019s \u20181984\u2019 Is Suddenly a Best-Seller<\/span>
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Orwell had been thinking about the novel that would become \u201c1984\u201d as early as 1944, when he wrote a letter<\/a> about Stalin and Hitler, and \u201cthe horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible f\u00fchrer.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Decades later, in the 1970s, \u201c1984\u201d would frequently be cited as holding a mirror to the Nixon administration\u2019s duplicitous handling of the war in Vietnam and its linguistic, \u201cNewspeak\u201d-like contortions over Watergate (like the press secretary Ron Ziegler<\/a>\u2019s description of his earlier statements as \u201cinoperative\u201d).<\/p>\n

In his 1944 letter, Orwell presciently argued that \u201cthere is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.\u201d And in \u201c1984,\u201d the word \u201cscience\u201d does not even exist: \u201cthe empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles\u201d of the Party.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This sort of marginalization in \u201c1984\u201d speaks to some of the very fears scientists have expressed in response to reports<\/a> that the Trump administration is scrutinizing studies and data published by researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency while placing new work on \u201ctemporary hold.\u201d Similar concerns about an Orwellian consolidation and centralization of government media control have been expressed over administration efforts<\/a> \u201cto curb the flow of information from several government agencies involved in environmental issues,\u201d and the possibility, as Politico reported, that the new White House might also try to put its stamp on the Voice of America, the broadcasting arm that \u201chas long pushed democratic ideals across the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, all of these developments are being constantly updated, with regular flurries of news and denials and counterdenials \u2014 a confusing state of affairs that itself would not have surprised Orwell, since he knew the value of such confusion to those in power.<\/p>\n

Another book, published two years after \u201c1984,\u201d also made Amazon\u2019s list of top 100 best sellers this week: Hannah Arendt\u2019s \u201cThe Origins of Totalitarianism\u201d (1951). A kind of nonfiction bookend to \u201c1984,\u201d the hefty philosophical volume examines the factors that fueled the perfect storm of events leading to the rise of Hitler and Stalin and World War II<\/a> \u2014 notably, the power that centralized storytelling can exert over anxious populations suffering from the dislocations of history, by offering scapegoats, easy fixes and simple cohesive narratives. If such narratives are riddled with lies, so much the better for those in power, who then succeed in redefining the daily reality inhabited by their subjects.<\/p>\n

\u201cMass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst,\u201d Arendt wrote, \u201cno matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.\u201d This mixture of gullibility and cynicism, Arendt suggested, thrived in times rife with change and uncertainty, and was exploited by politicians intent on creating a fictional world in which \u201cfailures need not be recorded, admitted, and remembered.\u201d In this world, 2 + 2 does = 5, as Orwell noted, and the acceptance of bad arithmetic simply becomes a testament to the power of rulers to define reality and the terms of debate.<\/p>\n

A despairing vision to be sure, though Christopher Hitchens pointed out<\/a> that Orwell\u2019s own commitment in his life to continually seek \u201celusive but verifiable truth\u201d was a testament to human tenacity and \u201cthat tiny, irreducible core of the human personality that somehow manages to put up a resistance to deceit and coercion.\u201d<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n