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Orwell’s Fable, Bush’s Reality
 Nothing looks as dated as yesterday’s
futurism. If you watch the old sci-fi film Things to Come,
made in 1936 and based on an H.G. Wells novel, you’re struck by the
naiveté of what it prophesied for 1970. It envisioned all sorts of marvelous
new inventions, huge shiny stainless steel gadgets, but it didn’t
foresee what really happened: compact innovations like the transistor, which,
inconceivable in 1936, eliminated the sheer bulk of so many everyday
appliances and made countless others
possible.  Who
ever dreamed we’d be able to listen to Beethoven symphonies on an
airplane?
In another novel, Wells imagined an
invention that has become a staple of science fiction: the time machine,
allowing passengers to visit both past and future. Even modern electronics
hasn’t advanced a step closer to this one, because it’s
metaphysically impossible. Transistors can’t do much about that.
Yesterday’s optimism about
the future now looks as superstitious as astrology. But so, in some ways,
does yesterday’s pessimism. George Orwell gave us a bleak picture of
tyranny to come in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s
a great fable, full of profound insights and warnings that remain pertinent.
But, as a blueprint of the form tyranny would actually take, we have to say it
got some key features wrong.
Orwell envisioned a super-Stalinist
socialist society, efficiently ruled by an “Inner Party” of
diabolical cunning. Winston Smith, the book’s hapless hero, runs afoul
of the Party when he begins to dissent from the lies of the Party line, and
his torturer, O’Brien, explains how the system really works with
Machiavellian intelligence. It turns out that the Party has engineered even
Winston’s dissent! Not only political freedom but free will itself has
been abolished.
It’s a nightmarish idea, all
right, but not even Kim Jong Il’s North Korea has managed to
approximate it. Orwell himself was too sensible to believe his comprehensive
dystopia could ever be realized in fact.
![[Breaker quote for Orwell's Fable, Bush's Reality: Big Brother? Not exactly]](2005breakers/051115.gif) If
we mistake the melodramatic fable
for literal prediction, as too many of Orwell’s readers have done,
we’re apt to become too complacent to recognize the forms tyranny
actually takes, or to recognize the tyrants we actually face. In fact it sounds
overwrought to call the contemporary U.S. Government tyrannical, since
President Bush isn’t even a reasonable facsimile of Stalin, Kim, or
Mao, let alone Orwell’s O’Brien.
Bush, in fact, claims to have
delivered us from tyranny by toppling Saddam Hussein before we reached the
mushroom cloud stage. He now complains that the Democrats in Congress
who voted for war with Iraq are dishonestly withdrawing their support and
trying to “rewrite history.”
But as E.J. Dionne of the
Washington Post reminds us, Bush himself capitalized on
post–9/11 hysteria and the imminent 2002 elections, using dubious
military intelligence (which he also distorted), to bully critics and political
opponents into compliance. Now that the Democrats, like most attentive
Americans, are having second thoughts, he accuses them of making
“baseless attacks” in suggesting that he “manipulated
the intelligence and misled the American people” in order to get his
war.
No, Bush doesn’t much
resemble the villain of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nor does his
“brain,” Karl Rove. But their campaign to demonize Saddam
Hussein and engineer a virtually unanimous public opinion can only remind us
of Orwell’s “two-minute hate” against the phantom
enemy Goldstein, who also turns out to be an invention of the ruling Party;
their huge apparatus of “homeland security” reminds us of
Party institutions like the Ministry of Truth; and of course their language has
much in common with Newspeak. All this is alarming enough; we
needn’t press the analogies too far. Bush isn’t Big Brother.
What Orwell’s great fable
omits is the gradualism of actual tyranny. He shows us an imaginary tyranny
that is already complete. And for the purposes of a cautionary fable, this is
fine.
But in the real world, tyranny
comes on tiptoe, by stealthy steps and often clumsy improvisation, and
it’s usually exercised by men who, unlike the cold-blooded intellectual
O’Brien, don’t even realize what they’re doing. They may
sincerely think of themselves as enemies of tyranny rather than its agents.
And instead of devising new institutions of mass control, they may merely
take advantage of arrangements they find already in place.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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