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by George Orwell
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The Noxel in Focus
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Utopia. In 1516. Sir Thomas More published a book that criticized the injustice of his own society and at the same time portrayed an ideal state in which peace and order reign and poverty and misery are erased. Its title was Utopia, referring to the name of its imaginary island setting, a word of Greek origin that literally translated as "no place." Since that time, the term has been adopted as a general term for various ideal states in works such as Plato's Republic and St. Augustine's City of God. Other famous pre-nine-teenth-century Utopias include François Ra-belais's description of the Abbey of Thélème in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun (1632), and Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (1627). The concept of Utopia changed in the eighteenth century with the popularization of philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau's idea that a primitive, uncor-rupt society existed before the development of civilization. This faith in natural order and the innate goodness of humankind became the ideological foundation of Utopian socialism, the notion that class divisions and competition could evolve into a new classless cooperative society, whose inhabitants live under ideal conditions. Proponents of the notion included the nineteenth-century social theorists Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Robert Owen.
The mid-nineteenth century saw the rise of the Utopian romance. These novels depicted the sometimes glowing, sometimes frightening social implications of the new industrialism. Among the more prominent titles are Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backard (1888), and H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905). In Looking Backward, the hero Julian West falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 in a Utopia achieved peacefully through the operation of one huge national trust run by the government. All of the nation's citizens aged twenty-five to forty-five work in an industrial army, after which they retire to read, pursue hobbies, and provide the little leadership needed in the povertyless and crime-free society.
The Utopian romance was followed in the early to mid-twentieth century by a number of novels that portrayed negative Utopias, sometimes called dystopias. These dystopias are imaginary places wracked by misery and wretchedness; the people lead dehumanized and often fear-ridden lives. Examples include Yevgeny Za-myatin's We (1924), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932; also covered in Literature and Its Times), and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). These books reflect to varying degrees the sense of general disillusionment experienced in the first half of the twentieth century. After undergoing two wars and their attendant mass destruction, a severe international economic crisis, the genocide of the Holocaust, the totalitarian terror in the Stalinist Soviet Union, and the advent of the atomic bomb, it seemed as if Western civilization was on the brink of certain collapse. Negative Utopias express the powerless-ness and hopelessness of modern man just as the early Utopias expressed the self-confidence and hope of postmedieval humankind. Brave New World, for example, portrays a scientifically balanced state that permits no individual emotions or responses, considers art disruptive, and forbids the use of "mother" or "father" since all the inhabitants belong to one another.
Propaganda. In the novel Winston's job at the Ministry of Truth consists of falsifying historical documents in such a way as to make the Party, or administration, appear infallible. This kind of systematic eradication had precedent, most notably during the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. After Josef Stalin consolidated power, the names of once-revered leaders of the Russian Revolution-men like Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Lev Kamenev-were deleted from the history books, their faces obliterated even on historical photographs. The articles devoted to them were eliminated from the official encyclopedia and new pages were supplied to replace those that subscribers were ordered to cut out (Esslin, p. 128).
But the Soviets were not alone in engaging in such practices. The British government undertook its own propaganda efforts as well, of which Orwell himself was both a witting and later unwitting participant. From 1939 to 1941, Stalin was portrayed in the British press as an arch-villain who had sacrificed Poland by signing a nonaggression pact with Germany's Adolf Hitler. But on the day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin was instantly remade into a hero and friend of Britain. In its radio broadcasts, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) stressed the fortitude of the Russian people and the heroism of the Red Army. Orwell worked for the BBC during this period in which Stalin was so lionized; at the same time, Orwell's satirical novel Animal Farm, which condemned Stalin as a despot, was steadily rejected by British publishers. Only two years later, after the war came to an end and Stalin was no longer an "ally," did Orwell find a house willing to publish the book. In Orwell's fictional Oceania, radio broadcasts consist of special announcements of victories and large doses of martial music and fanfares. This bears a distinct resemblance to the successful tactics used by Germany's minister of propaganda under Hitler, Joseph Goebbels. Additionally, Orwell's concept of the "Newspeak" language, which plays such a critical element in the debasement of society in Nineteen Eighty-Four, bears a striking resemblance to Goebbels's Sprachregelung ("language manipulation"). In Sprachregelung, for example, Churchill was referred to by officials as "that brandy-sodden alcoholic Winston Churchill," and Roosevelt "that syphilitic degenerate Roosevelt" (Esslin, p. 129).
International political alignment after World War II. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the world is divided into three great powers-Oceania (the United States and Britain), Eurasia (continental Europe and Russia), and Eastasia (China and Southeast Asia). This scenario is grounded in the actual political realignments that followed World War II. At a conference in the Iranian city of Tehran in December 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin and discussed, among other things, the postwar occupation and demilitarization of Germany. Not wishing to lose the cooperation of the Soviets in the war against the Germans, Roosevelt put off confrontational territorial issues until victory was assured. At the Tehran meeting it was agreed that a secret Allied assault on German-occupied France would take place in the spring of 1944. This would force Germany to fight a war on two fronts, both east and west; since 1941 it had been trying to take over the Soviet Union. A grateful Stalin promised to launch a simultaneous offensive effort on the eastern front. This is the strategy that would win the war in the next eighteen months, but it was also a plan that all but guaranteed the Russian domination of eastern Europe. By the time the leaders met again at Yalta in February of 1945, Stalin's armies had driven the Nazi forces back to within forty miles of Berlin, and were in control of Poland and nearly all of eastern and central Europe.
Fearful that the Soviets would impose a totalitarian political system on this vast area, Roosevelt and Churchill pressed Stalin to pledge the earliest possible establishment of sovereign governments in the region through free elections. Stalin conceded verbally, but he refused to allow international supervision of the elections. In the decade following the war's end, a ravaged Europe became a battleground for the two ideologies, and nowhere was their inability to agree more evident than in the political division of Germany into East and West, and indeed even within the former capital of Berlin itself. At Yalta the leaders had also agreed to a founding conference for the United Nations, set up that same year to maintain international peace and security. Yet even a multinational cooperative coalition had little substantive effect on the growing rift between the United States and the Soviet Union. From 1945 to 1955, obstructing the progress of concerted international action, the Soviets used their veto in the United Nations seventy-five times, the Americans three times. The ongoing diplomatic and ideological clash of interest between these two nations came to be known as the Cold War.
The third great power to emerge out of World War II was the People's Republic of China. The triumph of Mao Zedong's (Tse-tung's) Red Army was the final episode in a long civil war between the Guomindang (Kuomintang), or Nationalists, and the Communists that had begun in 1927. The uneasy alliance formed between the two groups in 1937 to fight the Japanese barely held together through the war years. After the war, fighting broke out and continued from 1946 to 1949. Despite the aid given to the Nationalists (who were themselves undemocratic, but at least not communist) by the United States, the Red Army emerged triumphant in 1949, forcing the defeated Guomindang to withdraw to the island of Taiwan. Mao then reestablished the national capital in the ancient city of Beijing, and for the next twenty-seven years proceeded to rule the People's Republic of China.
Totalitarianism. When Vladimir I. Lenin, the leading force behind the Russian Revolution in 1917, died seven years later, his obvious successor appeared to be Leon Trotsky, a companion of Lenin's during the revolution. But unlike Lenin, Trotsky was essentially an intellectual, uncompromising in his devotion to the ideals of the revolution and outspoken in his contempt for what he perceived to be the recent erosion of those ideals. At the party congress elections in 1927, he was displaced by a figure who wielded much less political clout, Josef Stalin. Not long afterwards, Trotsky was exiled to Siberia, and later banished completely from the Soviet Union. With the rise of Stalin, the Communist Party underwent a drastic purge. A third of its membership was expelled for allegedly sympathizing with Trotsky (who in this respect bears a striking resemblance to Goldstein, the traitor vilified by the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four). During the 1930s, large numbers of political insiders and common citizens alike were accused of crimes against the state. In such show trials, the accused confessed in full to their crimes. Many-including Bukharin and Kamenev-were summarily executed. The news that all had confessed seemed highly suspect to the rest of the world, causing it to doubt the honesty of the proceedings.
More than a decade later, these grisly events were to some extent repeated in China. Soon after Mao Zedong's Communists captured power from the Nationalists in 1949 and established the People's Republic of China, totalitarianism again appeared in the newly formed communist state-although its appearance seems less indicative of communist ideology than a long history of despotic rulers in both Russia and China. Mao and his lieutenants manipulated all organs of information for indoctrination purposes. Political education was accompanied by mass arrests and executions, forced labor, and the liquidation of anticommunist opponents. Later, Mao would admit that in the first five years of the revolution hundreds of thousands of opponents had been purged. As the years passed, repression continued , but coercion was often less important in China than the mobilization of social pressures for conformity. Political opponents were rehabilitated rather than liquidated, and often permitted to return to positions of responsibility. The fact that the majority of these events, which are strikingly similar to those recounted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, occurred after the publication of the book is a testament to the novel's uncanny prescience.
