(no subject)

I grew tired of preparing my computer for its funeral arrangements the other night, so I sat down to shout and gesture angrily at the television instead. Channel Four was showing a debate between Tony Blair and young people of Britain. This was fantastic, given that young people are much more vociferous in their distrust and their disappointment in Blair than the older generation. It meant the anger and the energy of my generation was finally given a national voice, a strong voice.

Blair pontificated. He stuttered and tried to drown his listeners in newspeak. They weren’t having any of it, such as when he justified attacking Saddam because he had previously held weapons of mass destruction (“WMDs”, said Blair jovially, as if he was talking about a cool piece of software.)

“I have a criminal record,” said one young man, “does that mean that I’ll automatically re-offend?”

“Well, I…er…I…”

Excellent.

pandorasblog reminded me that the 1984 version of Nineteen-Eighty Four, with John Hurt, was showing after the debate. Um, at 1am. However! My Orwellian admiration knows no boundaries, so I sat up till gone three to watch it. Nearly died, but you know.

1984 was never meant to be prophetic. It was to some extent a warning, but not so much of how Britain could become totalitarian; more that Britain should be aware of the insidious manipulation going on elsewhere. Orwell had seen the Spanish Republicans betrayed by their “brother” Stalin; he had nearly given his life for this cause that he believed in, for these people that he believed in, and meanwhile, Big Brother Stalin was playing them all for fools.

That’s why it is so worrying that his satire has become less fiction than an alarming indictment of what is taking place. At the slightest glance to our freedom, people are extremely quick to yell out “1984!” or “Big Brother OH NOES!!1!” and thus, through these clichéd rantings, the original context loses its power.

The new laws being brought out in Britain mean that terror suspects can have CCTV installed in their homes to monitor their every move. ID cards are to be made compulsory—no country has ever introduced them in peacetime. Criticise the government (US or UK) and you’re unpatriotic; you’re a damned terrorist sympathiser. Language is modified, stripped of its meaning; weapons of mass destruction, insurgents rather than rebels or, you know, native countrymen, support our troops becomes an oppressive cry against reasoned argument with which to shout each other down. O’Brien would be proud.

The film brought all those feelings back to me. It’s a few years since I read the book, and one can become jaded with media saturation. Here, though, was the tale of a man broken by the government; here were the realities of giving up one’s freedom for the “good” of the country; going along with what a government says because it uses terror and patriotism as its own weapons of mass obedience.

A critic once wrote that Orwell wasn’t a great writer; it was just that he put some things into a clear and readable context. I can understand that point in that he wasn’t James Joyce, but surely his accessibility, his concise and questing journalistic style, makes him a great writer, anyway?

It was after reading Down and Out in Paris and London that I stopped being a tight git and decided not to turn my nose up at the homeless; at those beggars on the street. It was after reading Homage to Catalonia that I gazed up at that sad little hotel on the Ramblas where Orwell had stayed to pay my own homage to him and the other fighters of the Spanish Civil War. The rain was falling softly, and I was seized by a range of emotions from sadness to empathy to the feeling that both these things, blood and the written word, meant I could be standing there that day.

If only we had listened to Spain then. If only we had listened to Orwell then, and not the screams of The Daily Mail as it proclaimed the Republicans evil pope-murderers, as Britain allowed Franco, and then Mussolini and then Hitler himself, to spread Fascism throughout Europe. How much more of Europe would still be intact? Would Dresden still be rubble? Would those villages in France have never seen mass slaughter? Would my own grandfather have been spared a painful death after the effects of war?

That’s why, no matter how many times a person alludes to 1984, no matter how many times it must be referenced, that I can’t allow myself to forget. Every time I feel sucked in by Blair’s Cheshire Cat manic grin, I think back to that night in Barcelona, and I remember.