Chapter 1: the hard violence
Old Vinton Smith the hero of the novel believed that
he was born in 44 or 45. That means that he and I are of the same age since 1984
has long since wheezed by and nothing resembling the society created by Orwell’s imagination can be found on the surface of the globe. I decided to reread
the adventures of a man my age the plot is silly in presumably Britain in
presumably 1984.
Extramarital sex between party members is forbidden and Winston violates this
ban and is supposed to be punished by five years hard time. A visit with Julia in a room above an antique
store in the Prols quarter from as it later turns out is a thought police agent and succumbs to villain
O'Brien's provocation and conspires verbally against the party which also is
punished by death. He also acquires Goldstein's
Banned Book; death penalty again.
Smith is arrested tortured his will is suppressed in the last chapter he is released free but it is clear to the reader that immediately outside the book he will be arrested and liquidated. It is also clear that the silly plot is used by Orwell to show the reader the Society of the future the Britain Oceania of 1984 whether the author considered the product of his work a prophecy or only a possible model of the future is irrelevant. Smith did not evoke sympathy in me and I disliked him in the highest degree. In fact he is a standard character of English literature the little man five false teeth and ulcer on his leg. Forgetting Oceania we see a typical middle-aged English clerk; recall T. S. Eliot ‘I grow old I grow old I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,’ or the protagonist of Graham Green’s novel The Human Factor.
Orwell assures us that his Clerk's horrific story plays out in the future in 1984 but a careful reader understands that the book is conveniently set in the past but it was written in 1948 and largely set in 48. The rocket bombs that were dropping on London every dozen pages bring to mind their foul tools launched by the Germans in World War II Winston and Julia meet at the bell tower in the area where an atomic bomb fell 30 years ago gang of young men were in shorts of the same color and stout men in black uniforms with iron padded boots and gloves in their hands are borrowed from German history from 1920 to 1945. The blue and the black jumpsuits of the book's heroes also belong there. Floating fortresses of Oceania are of course copies from the American flying fortresses American bombers. The three-year plan and colonies for homeless children are unmistakably borrowed from the Soviet history. It has long been established that Goldstein with his goatee is written off of Trotsky two minutes of hate and hate week are most likely borrowed from the rituals of some Freudian sect. The great purges of the 50s and 60s in the book no doubt traced their origins to Stalin's purges as absurd as these purges may seem from the West they bear a consequence and the necessity of the struggle for power in order to hold power Stalin had to eliminate his rivals and to not seem like an anti-revolutionary he had to invent all those incredible betrayals and connections with foreign intelligence services and he achieved his goal in 1984 there is an abundance of details of the past and only a couple of details of the supposed future.
First of all the famous television screen of which
it is known that you can turn it off. O'Brien a member of the high hierarchy
had the right to turn his TV off for half an hour. At the time of writing this
novel television already existed albeit in an embryonic semi-experimental state.Orwell had chosen the new invention as the main character of the future and the
main means of control. He had made some remarks in the first pages about police
helicopters hovering over the streets looking inside the
windows spying on the citizens but realizing how limited this method was he
corrected himself installing receiving and transmitting television sets in the
homes of party members. This is theoretically possible however not to mention
the cost of the project. The information processing center would have to be monstrously
large and maybe half to the population would have to watch the other half of
the population even computers don't really solve this problem since spying on
all of your movements and texts via computers is a Sisyphean labor not to mention
the endlessness of this whole observation endeavor. In the absence of a
telescreen does the modern civilized European or American allow himself
extravagant behavior within the walls of his apartment. The most that the big
brother or his employees can expect to see while spying is sex scenes and scandals.
Modern television certainly controls the population but not by watching you but
by showing.
[let
me interject here in this case that of course Limonov not very on point here and Orwell with his
telescreens is probably more right than Limonov of ever knew because while
spying on you on even if you don't have any extravagant behavior is what is
happening right now. But all right, this intro to the book it's basically a
preface was written in 88 so bear that in mind let's continue with the
translation.]
Newspeak also belong to Orwell's present vulgar simplification and
mixing of languages is a normal phenomenon it happens everywhere with all their
languages of the world at once for example the infiltration of English into
other languages from French spoiled by
English it exists and it's bridgehead is expanding but not with the help of men
and black uniforms and with batons in their hands but absolutely voluntarily
according to necessity and the wishes of the masses.
The basic premise on which the intrigue this super book is based on is that in the future extramarital sex will be punishable by five years in the penal camps and this little tidbit Orville did not borrow it from past experience because the impossibility is strikingly obvious. Family is celebrated by all regimes. Though family unit was sacred for the Soviet and hidden regimes, for Petan yesterday, Raymond Barr and Reagan today sex was a legal and deserved right of the German Soldier officer or Party official. Brothels accompanied the German Army. The second man in the USSR after Stalin Lavrentiy Beria head of the formidable KGB drove around the streets of Moscow in a car looking for a beautiful young girls. Everyone knows that a sexually satisfied citizen is less inclined to take interest in social problems. It would seem that the party already in power should be interested in having their population to sublimate some of its energy although of course power always prefers orderly sex unions. Only a crazed and insane power is suddenly capable of banning sex even if only for members of the ruling party and severely punishing violations of the ban. Orwell's phrase describing Winston and Julia's sexual act it as a political strike against the party was nonsense. It sounds beautiful as a chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. Incidentally there is a certain inarticulate volatile similarity between lotramones sons of murderer(?) and 1984 as one nightmare dream is just like another.
Orwell's characters have no ambitions not even human thirst for power or hatred for those who challenge this power, they are bearing machine logic. It not clear why O'Brien chooses to victimize this insignificant little Winston Smith, why he and the thought police drag Smith into the net like FBI agents drag an American Senator into a scandal in order to bring him down. By the middle of the book it emerges that Smith has been followed from the very first page. They were reading his diary following him in the Prols quarters. They were watching his acts of love with Julie through a TV screen hidden behind an engraving. The gothic William O'Brien ( the image of an Inquisitor investigator borrowed from Dostoyevsky) addresses Smith with a theological speeches excusable only to a school boy twisting the arms of another schoolboy in a dark corner. When you finally surrender to us it must be done out of your free will he hisses. It is impossible to believe the seriousness of the superpower one of whose top officials behaves like an operatic villain. The famous scene of the failed torture by rats is done by Orwell in the manner of Edgar Poe, obsolete and patriarchal. More and more people are dealing with Smith as the end of the book approaches. Why are they fiddling with a varicose man with five false teeth unable to bend over without bone pain. A prematurely aged official of the ministry of Truth in fact Smith is a law abiding citizen. He goes to work carefully and even finds a certain pleasure in his work. There is no need to suppress Smith's will, it is suppressed from the first page of the book. All O'Brien’s State, his big brother and Orwell do is follow an already wingless fly on the glass, catch it now and then pluck off one leg at a time release it again and examine how will it behave,if the will fly again. Winston Smith may be convincing in his insignificance. Big Brother O'Brien and the party tearing off its legs is I think literary failure. Mr. Orwell lacked talent. Clearly he wanted to make a book about pure violence but it turned out to be a caricature, a future in the style of housewives novels. The Divine Marquis in 120 days of Sodom succeeded far more to the same end as for me I prefer the futurologist H. G. Wells in his time machine. The creator of 1984 was inspired by a misunderstood foreign non-english past. It seemed to Orwell that the societies of German and Stalinist Russia were bound together exclusively by violence. State violence was undoubtedly a necessary element in the structure of both regimes but the amount and the significance of violence is exaggerated both by Orwell back in 1948 and by foreigners in general (I mean not residents of Germany or the USSR), hell is other peoples’ mythological totalitarian systems erected by the West in its own imagination with innocent grace in order to arouse the hatred necessary to fight the enemy. You need to demonize your enemy and as a result the real countries and systems are replaced by monsters by cutting off their real motivations for behavior. Only phenomenon of ugly abstract cruelty remains of the party in 1984, as brutal and vicious as savage Indian scalpers in westerns. if we forget about the worldwide acclaim of 1984 and try to evaluate this book by the standards of literature one is surprised by the infantilism and melodramatic nature of this book . Qualities inherent to pop literature never declared as such. 1984 is written in fact in the genre of the bestseller. I can see why the book of the month club demanded to remove chapters from Goldstein's book along with an after board that explained the principles of Newspeak. Only those two pieces are not written in pop style. It's also fitting that 1984 inspired pop star David Bowie to create his show. 1984 is the future as imagined by a popular imagination nurtured by cheap newspaper myths always half a century behind reality.
chapter 2: the new soft violence
Soft methods of
controlling the masses began long before the end of World War II suppressing
the populations of other countries. Hitler seduced the Germans with national
socialism while imprisoned in Landsberg Fortress back in 1924. He sketched out
a model of the popular Volkswagen car and the blueprint for the ideal home for
the average German, five rooms with a bath. He seemed to intend to rule his
Nation with gentle violence frightened by the manifestations of its own
cannibalism. In the first and above all in the second world wars ‘civilized
Humanity’ recoiled from hard regimes to the regimes of soft violence plus there
were two new crucial factors; the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons and the
emergence of new production technologies that made it possible to feed the
masses.
In the essence of hard violence there is a physical repression of a man. Soft
violence is based on the encouragement of his own weaknesses. The ideal of hard
violence is to turn the world into a Maximum Security Prison. The ideals of
soft violence is to turn a man into a pet. Soft violence does not operate with
black uniforms batons or torture; in its Arsenal there are false goals of
material well-being, the fear of unemployment, the fear of the economic crisis,
the fear and shame of being poorer or worse than the neighbors and finally just
laziness and human inertia. Suicides of the unemployed are an example of this mighty
group of soft violence, the degree of psychological pressure the incitement to prosperity
to which a citizen of civilized parts of the planet is subjected to in the showcase
of modern civilization. The screens of televisions computers and mini-tels glow
enticingly. The French communication system from the 80s that combined
television telephone and computer is a Minotaur. The public is dazzled by the
abundance of information by the power of their cars that propel them in a rush
of collective madness of movement. A portrait of Big Brother on the walls would
look miserable compared to the increasingly powerful tricks of publicity. Blinded
by the juggler of procedures to the rattle of the drums of statistics ( they
decisively favor relative mathematics resplendent numbers which the public has
no time to understand) to the rumble of increasingly worse quality pop music
the civilized inhabitants of happy developed countries make their speedy journey
from birth to retirement.
This lucky western denizen likes to repeat to himself that an unusually high
material standard of living has been only achieved in Europe, the United States
and Australia, mostly white countries on
the planet while the rest of the poor non-white World leads a miserable existence.
It's so much contempt in the term ‘underdeveloped countries’ but the civilized
man is panic-stricken. He's living on credit and often at the expense of those
despised underdeveloped countries, his gigantic yield of interest on his loans
that is why he surrenders himself every day to the patronage of the guardian state
losing or abandoning himself the basic human privileges inherent or biological
species independence and free will. For his obedience he is rewarded with
substitutes. His dreams of travel are embodied in organized tourism, his terms
for adventure can be safely satisfied by turning on the TV or going to the
cinema police novels and movies with an inordinate amount of revolvers and
shots are substitutes for the daily dose of the struggle for life that the
human being needs and used to defend himself. Modern civilized man is paranoid
about his security but his interference with his own security is not only
undesirable but punishable by law and civilized soft regime societies the
security of citizens is the business of the police. in soft regime society and
that is the fundamental difference from hard regime Society. It is not the
party, not a gang of miscreants that suppress the trembling majority but
everyone to one degree or another suppresses everyone. They do it for free and
against their own selves for that is the nature of the relationship. Many,
however, would probably better served by a soft regime Society. The insignificant
Winston Smith would find himself in a better position than the energetic
O'Brien. I can see Smith putting his varicose food out on the asphalt of the
freeway leading to the Côte d'Azur at this very moment traffic thousands of
cars ahead with the Smiths and the Julies and their children going on vacation.
O'Brien with his glasses on his nose reading the Bible in a cell at the Fleury-Mérogis
Prison; he fired his hunting rifle at his Arab immigrant neighbors because he
was unable to bear the noise.
Unless they forget that they live in the
best of societies the domesticated masses derive great pleasure watching
dystrophic African children covered with flies and the skeletons of the
Auschwitz. The moral of the demonstration is this: it is useless to try and
organize any other Society. Look at what happened before, look what those
attempts led to, what Marxism in Ethiopia and Hitler's fascism produced and the
frightened masses sit quietly and pollinate their brains with Jesus wines and
detergents suggesting that they buy super delicate toilet paper and wear not
black but brightly colored childish fabrics (aside from violent mathematization and
articulation of life) there is also forced infantilization.
Among all crimes the most terrible but not at all
punishable is this is the crime against oneself; the failure of an individual
to take advantage of his own life, listening to silly musical, noises parking
the car engaging in unremarkable and uninteresting labor and boom, your time on Earth is out. The collective
so-called civilized humanity has succeeded in creating and imposing on everyone
down to the fringes of the planet a colorless boring stupid life devoid of real
pleasures and life of pets.
Against the violence of Big Brother the old hard regime and boots and Sinister
uniforms it is still possible to rise up in a rebellion but how can you rebel
against your own weaknesses?
Original English translation from Russian by Nikolai
reworked from the transcript here:
