“Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you, and you sold me..”
Utopia, as we have long been promised, by the several antitheses of history, opens up for the government an opportunity to justify the curtailment of privileges and rights handed over to us by nature itself. And a society, wedded to the strive for Utopia, with its people forever part of it, blinds to the totalitarian menace it faces.
Here, the already thin line between utopia and dystopia becomes thinner. And Orwell’s 1984, with its clever literary ingredients and interesting satirical spices, clearly portrays the shift of the promise of a “better life” to a paradoxical, dark and dystopian societal structure long justified by the State in the name of socialism, sucking the masses’ ability to counter-think and then dissent.
An inner struggle of the self to cling to the basic human instincts (to believe in yourself that yes! you are still a human and not a humanoid, what your State want you to be at any cost) like sex and tenderness that is manifested invariably in the covert relationship between the two characters in the book, Julia and the protagonist himself, Mr Smith, goes hand in hand with the Police excesses practised on the individuals who show reservations against the government, even of lilliputian proportion, and their subsequent “vaporization“- Execution.
Believe me, the story sets in such an ethically impaired social formation that the masses enlightened with positive liberty surprisingly “laugh” and rejoice at the movie scene of bombardment on a refugee boat occupied with Eurasian mothers and children (Eurasia is an ideal State in the book), by an Oceanian (another state) Stuka-bomber and sinking of the wooden planks along with the bloodstained bodies of infants and children clung to their mother’s bosom.
Where to laugh at, and where to cry, with whom to be angry and whom to like and love, all decided by the State, more specifically the Big Brother (BB), the imaginary character in the book who is the leader of the state, along with the morality and ethical values accepted by humanity due to its compatibility with our instincts, are abandoned and some anti-instinct dogmas of life are made the “principles of life.” Reasons and rationality is something the State has jurisdiction upon, and therefore, you better agree, 2 plus 2 equals 5!
The book, 1984, by George Orwell, therefore, consists of several logical absurdities that go against the modernist or rationalist dogmas and values of the world. Thus, while going through the book, one continuously faces contradictions and doubts against one’s own way of thinking, moulded by the rational environment.
The book that narrates a phase of humanity where deliberate alteration of past is not impossible, the turning a living man into a nonexistent character by killing him and erasing all his records of life by the agents of the state is a natural phenomenon, brainwashing the general masses by the excessiveness of the personality cult of a leader (BB) and erasing the capacity of the human to think critically by brutal alteration of language and deprive them of basic human needs so that they can never rise above the animalistic cravings for basic necessities and can never arrange an intellectual debate to have a better government.
Thus the status quo prevails and leaders remain the leaders, pawns remain the pawns and deprived remain the deprived. The history is written by the state, and so is the present. The past will be changed even before your eyes and you have to agree the “newly written” past even if you are aware that the past has been altered and the history that has been explained is not the actual reality.
It is the deliberate act of convincing your mind that the history written and altered by the Government is only the true history. This way, The entire value system in the world is turned upside down, where Slavery is considered as Freedom, War is considered as a normal thing and therefore Peace, and Ignorance is considered Strength. Even if you contradict everything in your mind, you convince yourself that everything is fine, if your life is dearest to you.
This way, George Orwell opens up before the readers the dangers of a totalitarian state. And since he is, in his entire life, considered as a staunch Anti-Stalinist, Pro-Democratic and libertarian to an extent, it is evident that the cult novel is undoubtedly a satirical attack on the existing totalitarian state in the world order when the novel was written. It was the time when Soviet Union was flourishing, and the Cold War was on the rise.
The regularly worshipped image of Big Brother in the novel, a character they never know if it existed, resembles the face of Joseph Stalin in reality, with a black thick moustache under his curvy nose and fiery yet stable eyeballs unshakably staring at anyone standing in front of his portrait. If Big Brother is assumed to be Joseph Stalin, then the underworld anti-BB leader Goldstein can be related to Trotsky, in the superstate Oceania, which is nothing less than USSR. Albeit it is my assumption altogether, it is what all can find close to. Since the novel was written in the phase post-WWII, 1947-1949 in Britain, it was the time that all developments were taking place on the other side of the world.
Thus, George Orwell, emerges as a staunch critic of the Communist Soviet Union and the rule of Stalin which got manifested in his epic novel 1984. A man of British origin, where capitalism is the way of life, Orwell’s criticism against Communist State can be seen as an outcome of his own ideological beliefs and trends of his own English society, and therefore liberal democratic propaganda the West likes to promote against the Communist East, of course, during the peak of Cold War. His decision to sketch Joseph Stalin as evil and Communist Soviet Union as a logically absurd society that goes against human instinct (especially freedom) may be the testimony of his allergy against the theory of Communism and socialism.
But, keeping all these apart, it is inherently true that Orwell in his book puts several examples of totalitarian menace that a society under authoritarian regime may encounter, be it communist or fascist. These examples as already mentioned, you can easily predict your own life under it. Moreover, since it is a satirical novel, the exaggeration of totalitarianism is obvious.
When individual freedom is snatched, there is no justification for a greater cause to snatch it, no justification of fulfilling the greater will of people. And that’s why democracy prevails because it guarantees individualism. Thus a liberal democratic state survives and is widely considered as the way of life, because it is the only theory compatible with basic human nature, if not wholly, but at least partially.
Glorifying Constitutional liberal democracy favourable to capitalism is the inner agenda ever-present in the novel. But you know, it is better to be conscious of the propaganda against an unfavourable system of society than to be unconscious of the evils inherent in that very system. It is the same reason why the protagonist of the novel Mr Smith, conscious of the atrocities and excesses of his own government unlike his comrades, took up the dreaded risk of finding the anti-government club and its people with whom he can relate his thinking and feeling ultimately falls into a trap made by his government itself against him. The anonymous quotation borrowed from the book mentioned at the beginning of the article has its meaning in the trap that Mr Smith at last falls in.