Orwell's 1984: the future is here: George Orwell believed the stark totalitarian society he described in 1984 actually would arrive by the year 2000, thanks to the slow, sinister influence of socialism

Insight on the News, Dec 31, 2001 by David Goodman

Suppose someone 50 years ago had drawn a picture of the future that looked something like this: You live under the governance of an international alliance composed of a North American Union, China and Europe. Major powers are waging permanent low-level urban warfare. Rocket bombs soar over cities to crash into buildings. There are conflicts involving armies, but they are limited to border regions. Large banners fly downtown to celebrate victory over the nation's enemies.

This is a totalitarian state under a benevolent leader in which citizens are detained and arrested on the merest suspicion of espionage. But the benevolent leader is seen only on television; he never appears in public. Personal surveillance is unceasing and relentless: TV cameras that receive and transmit simultaneously are everywhere. The political-correctness police listen in on every conversation to match speakers to the profile of a potential saboteur. Ordinary citizens live in constant fear of arrest and imprisonment for terrorist activities.

No, this is not the implementation of the antiterrorist USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, which Congress just passed in the throes of the anthrax attacks without even reading it (see "Police State" Dec. 3), and whose very name evokes the memory of the late George Orwell's sci-fi masterpiece, 1984. It is the scenario of Orwell's book itself, written in 1948 and published in 1949. It is ironic that the character he calls Big Brother was not meant as a symbol for a U.S. administration but likely for the future of Britain under progressive socialism. What gives pause is that the book clearly satirizes the consequences of Fabian socialism exactly 100 years after its birth in the salons of London.

If Orwell's totalitarian state seems to be arriving about 20 years late, it is not because he mistargeted the book by naming it 1984. A careful review of the literary evidence reveals that he was aiming at the period immediately following the year 2000 but wanted to memorialize the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Fabian Society.

With Orwell's stark vision of a totalitarian society having for more than half a century sent shivers down the collective spine of the prestigious Western intelligentsia, one might assume in the roil of current events that scholars worldwide would be combing the pages of 1984 for triggering incidents of a kind that might lead to the predicted Orwellian world. Yet literary and social critics long have avoided coming to grips with the implications of Orwell's profound insight that socialism, despite its claim to benevolence, would deliver Orwell's 1984 by A.D. 2000.

The major facts about Orwell and the origins of 1984 lay as enshrouded in mystery as when his London publisher, Secker and Warburg, first brought out the book in 1949. In the beginning, he is supposed to have been a committed socialist, a close observer of the founders of the socialist Fabian Society, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of the famous socialist futurist H.G. Wells. Taking as a theme the strategy of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Cunctator, who famously delayed battle with the Carthaginians while exhausting them with endless harassments, the Fabians argued that the grand aim of socialism could be achieved bit by bit, through moderate increments, making small changes in society so as not to alarm the defenders of individual responsibility.

The Fabian Society was founded in 1884, according to its Website, and continues to play a prominent role through the Socialist International in developing the policies of the Labour Party in Britain, of which Orwell once was an active member, and of allied Clintonian liberals in the United States.

But when Orwell wrote 1984, it was more than a show of dislike for the Fabian socialists; it was humorous, biting, Swiftian satire against the socialist and liberal intellectuals. The leftist elites, then as now, praised the book for the wrong reasons. They applauded Orwell's resistance to the loss of civil liberties but refused, and continue to refuse, to see the book as a mirror held up to the totalitarian face of the left-wing intelligentsia. They tiptoe away from such questions as: Why choose the year 1984 as the title? Is it really just a science-fiction fantasy or is it political satire; and, if so, against whom is it directed? Finally, what are the likely sources of Orwell's dystopia?

The critics try to explain away the hot spots. The title, 1984, is said to be simply the reversal of the final two digits in 1948, the year he was writing the book. Some critics say it is not even a serious book but just derivative science fiction on par with Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a book Orwell had read in translation and reviewed for literary journals.

Indeed, even the latest of Orwell's authorized biographers get it wrong. Orwell led a much fuller, richer life than is acknowledged in, say, Peter Davison's 1996 biography, George Orwell: A Literary Life, or in Peter Huber's 1993 book, Orwell's Revenge. They see in 1984 both melodrama and a touch of satire. The satire, they say, is aimed against the Soviet Union (a safe target, now, even for socialists). They assert that Josef Stalin is Big Brother and that Stalin's Five-Year Plans buttressed by concocted statistics are other satirical targets of the book.