Page 11 - Animal Farm and 1984

people on guard against chauvinism and regimentation and hysteria in all their forms: he was highly suspicious of the emerging Cold War system of competing superpowers who might use the excuse of each other’s existence to impose their will at home and abroad. And in the United States, which has recently taken extraordinary measures in its fight against theocratic nihilism, the excesses of “Homeland Security” and “Total Awareness,” with their new bureaucratic vocabulary, have also led people to reach for the expression “Orwellian.” This, again, is a tribute to his persistent relevance. The insistence upon the importance of language, and of the danger posed by sloganised thinking and official idiom, is among the debts we owe to Orwell. In “The Principles of Newspeak,” an appendix to 1984, the author quotes Jefferson’s preamble to the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”—as an instance of something that would be quite impossible to re-cast in Newspeak terminology. Long may this incompatibility continue and be upheld.
Neither of these two novels is faultless in historical terms. To take one example that is so glaring that few people notice it, there is no Lenin either in Animal Farm or 1984. There is a Stalin figure in each—Napoleon and Big Brother respectively—and a Trotsky figure in each—Snowball and Goldstein —but a whole phase of history and indeed of allegory seems to have been skipped. We have no means of knowing what Orwell intended by this astonishing omission, of which he may only have been semi-conscious himself, but it seems probable that he regarded the self-immolation of Communism to have been at least partly a great tragedy, as well as a great crime. It was this insight and this perspective that allowed him to re-create the mental atmosphere so hauntingly. It is also this imaginative gift that posthumously made him one of the moral heroes of the revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe, and of those who led it. It will, one day, give him the same eminence in China and North Korea.
Having been among the bullies and among the bullied at different times of his life, Orwell had an innate understanding of what Nietzsche called the “master-slave” relationship. He knew that there are guilty thrills to be obtained from domination, and he also realised what few people fully appreciate—that there are also guilty thrills to be had from subjecting and abasing oneself. These books can be read, independently of their time and place, as a strong preventive medicine against the mentality of servility, and especially against the lethal temptation to exchange freedom for security: a
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