Rereading 'Nineteen Eighty-Four’ post 1984

Minogue says that 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' ‘presents us with a reductio ad absurdum of totalitarianism.’ I’m not sure how one could write such a sentence in 2020 and not pause for a long time.

Déjà Vu! It’s Dystopia!

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I’ve finished rereading Orwell’s masterpiece, Nineteen-Eighty-Four (and it is) — forty-four years after I first did so. I cannot say I ‘enjoyed’ it, for it is a scarifying read, and all the more so now we understand that our presumed immunity to the kind of tyranny it depicts has been delusional. Reading it again, I was mindful of several factors that I did not have access to the first time, in particular the fact that he did the final rewrite and typed the manuscript while dying of tuberculosis. It is a breathtaking achievement, for the book lacks any (or at least much) trace of agitpropism or didacticism. For such a political writer, he was one hell of an actual writer, a seemingly effortless stylist with powerful imagination and capable of creating believable dialogue in describing even the most unthinkable of situations.

What struck me most forcibly on rereading the book was the strange dualism of response between what I was experiencing in the course of reading it again and what I recall from the first time. But before that, I was impacted by the clarity with which I remembered almost every detail of the book, even the flow of the sentences. The opening sentence, for example — ‘It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ — I practically finished it in my head before I got to the end. Having been in my mid-twenties the first time, and since I have in recent years found myself three-quarters of the way through a book before realising that I’ve already read it, I presume this has to do with some capacity of the brain to preserve more effectively material it encounters when ‘newer’.

What interested me in rereading Nineteen Eighty-four was primarily, if not entirely, these questions: What, after 56 months of a tyranny that seemed impossible the first time I read it, might be said now about (a) Orwell’s prophetic capacities, and (b) of our previous smugness in regarding ourselves as inoculated against his predictions?

I first read it back in 1980, after I decided to repeat a couple of Leaving Cert subjects (English and Economics, as I recall) with a view to obtaining the necessary two honours and getting into Trinity College, Dublin, to study either English or Philosophy. In any event, instead of adopting a strategic approach, I decided to pick out certain writers and learn as much as possible about them. The three I chose were Orwell, Patrick Kavanagh and Dylan Thomas, all of whom were on the syllabus. (I’m not even sure Nineteen Eighty-Four was on the syllabus — it may have been Animal Farm). I decided to read not just everything the three writers had written but everything I could find that others had written about them. So I became, for a time, 'expert' in all three. I never got to Trinity, instead landing my dream job with the music magazine Hot Press the following spring, whereupon I abandoned my academic trajectory, which seemed ill-starred in any event. I would say that those three authors amounted to the core of whatever I would nowadays describe as my ‘formal education’, and all three have stood me in good stead: Kavanagh for the spiritual plane; Thomas for linguistic euphony, and Orwell for just about everything else.

I first read it, then, in the ‘before’ years — before the date that Orwell chose as the title of his prophetic novel, a phase when it loomed large as a cultural trope that could not be ignored.

There are various tellings on the reasons he chose that year as the title. One is that he called it 1984 as a reversal of ‘1948', the year he completed the writing of it.

Another, more substantial explanation, relates to a poem written by Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1934, a year before she met her husband-to-be. The poem, written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of her old Sunderland high school, ponders the question as to how things would be in the world in another fifty years — the ‘end of the century’ of her old school.

To add a conspiracist element, a friend who likes to drill deep into things writes me the following somewhat less poetic and also less prosaic explanation:

MI5 Fabian George Orwell was an insider who used his novels to warn mankind about the concrete plans of his own Fabian Society (dubbed ‘Ingsoc’), for which his employer, the BBC, worked as a key propaganda organ. The title of his novel 1984 was based on an old Fabian boast that it would only take it 100 years, since its founding in 1884, to utterly turn Britain on its head. In the event, it may take the Fabian Society 140 or 150 years to realise all of its collectivist aims, unless of course the slaves finally move to foil the worst-laid plans of ‘Team Antichrist’.

This year, 2024, is the fortieth anniversary of the actual year Orwell fired his dart into. Meditating on these two dates, the current year and its iconic antecedent of four decades ago, I am moved to make an adjustment. Something is wrong with their arrangement or chronology, one in the receding past, disparaged and defamed by presentism, hubris and dystopian prophecy, the other in the present — tyrannised, propagandised, gaslit, devoid of meaningful culture or conversation, sorrowful. What can it all signify? Then it strikes me again: They are in the wrong order. If a Man from Mars, shown some clips from the two years and perhaps some writings by way of evidence, were asked to undertake a brief stab at a comparison between their qualities with a view to pronouncing one or other the more advanced, hospitable, open, interesting and vibrant — and accounting for everything aside, possibly, from fortunes defined economically — he would undoubtedly elect 1984 as by far the more enviable year, and accordingly the obvious choice to be, paradoxically, the more ‘progressive; and ‘modern’ year as well. By rights, had progressivism been a true thing, we should by now have progressed to the way Ireland was (other than economically, perhaps, though not necessarily) in 1984.

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It is strange that, in cultural terms, 1984 has become an iconic year due its associations with literary totalitarianism, for here is the clanging irony: The present year, 2024, is the tyrannical one, the one in which the public life of the world has been stripped of all human tenderness, this having been replaced with an ersatz compassion rooted in a fiendish, murderous and grasping ideology, all backed up with the constant implicit threat of state coercion and, ultimately, violence.

When I hark back to (the real) 1984, I enter not so much memories as feelings. The overwhelming sense I have is of a moment of expectation. It is a strange thing, but the celebrations we engaged in that year on account of Orwell and his book were exuberant and ebullient precisely because we felt certain that nothing of that which Orwell had imagined could ever dampen our ardour for life and the future, both guaranteed by the escalating scent of freedom and possibility. This, after all, was the Free World!

In a strange dissonance, the public events of that year — dark or light of them — are of little or no help to me in connecting with those feelings and rendering them present. That was the year that Ronald Reagan came to Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, the alleged home of his ancestors, and met with a mixed reception. I am there in the moment on Eyre Square in Galway, when his eyes connected with mine over my clenched fist, as his car swept through. This was the 500th birthday of our Western capital, a town we adored more than any place on Earth, now reduced to a ghetto teeming with hostile outsiders. 1984 was also the year of the UVF’s attempted assassination of Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, whom I’d interviewed for Hot Press in his lair in West Belfast just the year before. It was also to be the year that the Irish State released Nicky Kelly, wrongfully convicted of participation in a train robbery. In November, 1984, as I was interviewing Charles Haughey in his office in Leinster House, we heard of Margaret Thatcher’s since infamous ‘Out, out, out!’ rejection of the report of the New Ireland Forum. Politically, sociologically, a varied but overall uninteresting year, and yet a year which would stay with me for the rest of my days as the one in which I began to feel that just about everything good and positive was at last possible for my dear land.

The sole area where the pace of Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to flag (as a narrative, I mean) is in Orwell’s reproducing of sections of what he refers to as ‘the book’, a fictitious volume attributed to the mythical enemy of the ‘Party’ and the State of Oceania, Emmanuel Goldstein, a section that is in many ways otiose by the time you get to it. I am not sure of the historical solidity of this assertion, but my suspicion is that the book was a piece of scaffolding constructed by Orwell in advance of writing the book proper, and utilised here — 25 pages inserted just beyond the middle of Nineteen Eighty-Four — as an insurance policy against his having overlooked, in his race against tuberculosis, any vital element of plotting or background. In fact, the ‘book within the book’, which Winston Smith sets to reading just before the novel reaches its inevitable but nevertheless chilling climax, contains almost nothing that Orwell has not already embedded in his narrative. In fact, the sole point of its inclusion seems to be when O’Brien — Winston’s Great-Hope-turned-tormentor — tells him that he is the author of the book, before describing its conclusions as ‘nonsense’ — Orwell foreseeing the age of the psy-op, in which the Regime acts as both establishment and opposition.

In the first chapter, there is a description of Winston, after much prevarication, starting a diary, an activity he pursues in an alcove which he imagines puts him out of the line-of-vision of the telescreen, which can receive as well as broadcast. ‘For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder,’ the voice of the omniscient narrator intones, ‘was he writing this diary.’

Winston answers himself: 'For the future, for the unborn.’

This might have been Orwell speaking. The book, he was to explain, was a warning, not a prophecy. Seeking, in the wake of a backlash from fellow socialists after its publication, to clarify his intentions, he emphasised that it was an attack on totalitarianism — especially the centralised economy — and not on socialism.

He continued:

I do not believe that the kind of society which I have described necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that it something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.

Another thing strikes me forcibly about Nineteen Eighty-Four: that, despite our situation, the book still reads as a story. You cannot but be involved, even though you may know how it ends. Winston Smith’s description of his existence is uppermost, and everything else reads as backdrop. Nevertheless, it is also one of those rare novels that manages to be both political and imaginatively convincing. In her rather excellent Introduction, Sally Minogue writes that readers have been drawn to the book ‘for over seventy years now’, adding that its ‘imaginative verve’ and ‘endless ability to reinvent itself for its current context’, may help to explain its enduring popularity.

There is something possibly odd here: the Wordsworth Classic edition, which I read this time around, was published in 2021, the second year of the Covid coup. This and her reference to ’over seventy years’ (since the novel was first published in 1949) would seem to imply that she wrote and delivered her Introduction to the publishers sometime in 2020, the year the Free World was dismantled. Nowhere in the book is there any reference to this or to the fact that, at no time in those seventy-plus years has there been another moment that came remotely as close to realising Orwell’s foreboding than 2020. That was the year when déjà vu came to call, wearing jackboots and carrying a big stick.

Earlier, Minogue says that Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘presents us with a reductio ad absurdum of totalitarianism.’ I’m not sure that’s any longer sustainable; indeed, I am not sure how one could write such a sentence in 2020 and not pause for a long time.

It has repeatedly be argued in the past nearly five years that the more accurate prophecy of this totalitarianism we now experience is to be found not, as is often suggested, in Orwell’s 1984, but in Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World. Whereas Orwell anticipated a world dominated by torture and terror, Huxley foresaw humanity imprisoned by seduction, sedation, and diversion. Huxley's society is run by a benevolent dictatorship, its subjects kept in a state of pseudo-contentment by conditioning and a drug called Soma. Set in London in A.D. 2540, Brave New World anticipated subsequent developments in sleep-learning and psychological manipulation being used to impose the will of the few upon the many.

Thus, a new form of tyranny, which ‘oppresses’ man by cosseting him — Huxley rather than Orwell? But no: the Orwellian fist in the Huxlean glove. In Huxley’s vision, people are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies, but the processes of capitalism, materialism, advertising, commerce and consumer culture all combine to repress in the human being the questing for the ‘something’ that defines the human. But it’s not that simple, as we shall observe.

If Orwell, instead of calling his book 1984, had opted for, say, 2054, would any of what has befallen us have even happened yet? I think there’s a certain sense in which, once the year of its title came and passed in reality, there occurred an almost inaudible sign at the core of our culture and a whisper of, ‘Well now it can’t happen!’,and societies became, they imagined, inoculated, and accordingly complacent about the warnings Orwell had worked into his book. There was even a slight sense that Orwell had gotten it wrong, and now we could all relax.

By the same token there is a strong possibility that, for at least forty years, Orwell’s book functioned as a kind of cultural brake on the eruption within the Collective West of any form of totalitarianism such as it depicts. In this sense, although what has happened now appears to adhere more to the Huxlean blueprint of tapping into human desires, instincts and vices in order to draw humanity into an essentially digital/cultural prison and keep it there, it is the Orwellian model that has remained uppermost in human consciousness and apprehension. This is because of Orwell’s depiction of both the potential of authoritarian state violence and the psychological reality that emerges in response to its presence or threat — i.e., the actuality of the fear of violence, which is, as he also conveys, even more powerful than violence per se. In O’Brien’s electrical torturing of Winston Smith, it is clear that, once he has established the potential of the technique for imposing pain, Winston’s will falls to pieces, and any residual resistance is swept up by the mere threat of ‘the worst thing in the world’ — a different fear for each person —in the dreaded Room 101.

Having started rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four, I decided that I would read in parallel a book I had made several attempts to read in the past but mysteriously failed to progress far into. This is another legendary book about totalitarianism — non-fiction this time — the 1951 essay of the Polish writer and poet (I don’t regard poetry as writing, but something else), Czeslaw Milosz, titled The Captive Mind. Orwell’s book had been published three years earlier, and may well have inspired Milosz to write his meditation on the mentalities of totalitarianisms as observed in his time living within the Soviet bloc (he wrote it in Paris, to which he arrived seeking asylum). The books criss-cross the same territory, and for that reason are somewhat complementary, but Orwell’s is, as I say, an unambiguous story, whereas Milosz’s is as though an expansion or explication of Orwell’s backdrop, though without overt mention of it.

Milosz is a more difficult read than Orwell, who writes fluent prose in a manner that bears no stamp of a former era, but is as though written yesterday. Milosz, being translated from the Polish, has a rather more convoluted style, though — strangely — mostly in the first section of the book. A Polish friend of mine tells me that I am not alone in finding his prose difficult — Poles do as well, and he speculates this will not have been improved in translation. Actually, Milosz’s style reads very elegantly in English; the difficulty arises from the syntax, which creates entirely different constructions than one tends to find anymore in non-fiction books in English. Half poetic, half what reads like literal translation, many of his sentences require multiple rereadings in order to release the correct inflections. Yet, every effort is handsomely rewarded, and it is certainly not that one can read one of his sentences and immediately say how it might have been rendered better. He says complex things in pretty unambiguous fashion, and always you have the sense of being in the hands of a master.

One of the most interesting sections deals with an obscure condition of totalitarian societies which Milosz calls ‘Ketman’ — a kind of practiced doublespeak which can be developed as a form of armour against what George Orwell calls ‘vapourisation’, a standard feature of advanced tyrannies. From Milosz’s description, the concept appears to be of Islamic origin, being somewhat related to that of taqiyya, a technique attributed to Muslims for concealing and mystifying their beliefs in situations where professing them openly might be dangerous or counter-productive. Muslims also refer to a related syndrome, known as kitmān, which literally means ‘to conceal’ or ‘prevaricate’ or ‘dissimulate’, and was especially, as with taqiyya, a feature of the Shia sect, which tended to experience more persecution as a religious minority. In Shia theology, taqiyya and kitmān are permitted in situations where there is a threat to life or property and no denial of fundamental principles arises from such a pragmatic selectivity of speech.

Milosz adapted kitmān to the communist world, as ‘Ketman’, applying it to the forms of prevarication and dissimulation that developed in ‘the peoples democracies’ of the Soviet bloc during the tyrannical reign of Joseph Stalin — a form of forked-tongue speech whereby writers in particular would evince a studied ambiguity to avoid attracting official attention and at the same time shield their integrity as writers.

George Orwell had another word for much the same syndrome: ‘doublethink’:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions whích cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

Parts of Milosz’s definition of the Ketman method might well be added on:

Before it leaves the lips, every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be could occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations.

Milosz used the word ‘Ketman’ to refer to the capacity of the private dissident to keep his true convictions and feelings hidden in circumstances whereby exposing them might risk severe punishment, even death. Sometimes, mere silence is enough to avoid trouble, but often it is not, and then it is necessary not only to deny one’s true opinions but ‘resort to all ruses in order to deceive one’s adversary’.

Everyone is an actor. Everything must be accompanied by the appropriate emotion; fervour, hatred, rage, lest its absence be detectable by someone liable to alert the authorities. This is a predicament that Winston Smith refers to continually, especially his fear that any lapse of attention concerning his facial expressions may be picked up by the telescreen.

The art of Ketman is a form of brinkmanship and verbal acrobatics by which, with increasing proficiency, the practitioner can enable himself to negotiate the risks of a regime he secretly repudiates, without fear that his statements will let him down. The most adept are able, in speaking publicly, to maintain a line of thought that is in some ways incongruent with the dominant ideology, even to the point of outright heresy, but with such an adroit delivery that this escapes official notice. This is achieved by delicate obfuscation and ambiguity, so that the speaker is able to communicate relatively truthfully while avoiding liquidation. Sometimes this requires a slow process of evolution in his public pronouncements, from strict orthodoxy and even fanaticism, via ambiguity, deviation, self-contradiction, fallacy, hair-splitting concerning certain orthodoxies, and other devices, to the point where such is the speaker’s acquired reputation for reliability that he can publicly contradict the authorities without this interpretation being applied, and therefore without adverse consequences for himself. You might call it casuistry, but it is really a form of pragmatism designed to retain self-respect while also avoiding the kinds of risks that might lead the speaker into perdition.

Milosz lists several categories of Ketman: ‘nationalist Ketman’, ‘professional Ketman’, ‘aesthetic Ketman’, ‘sceptical Ketman’, ‘ethical Ketman’, ‘the Ketman of revolutionary purity’, ‘metaphysical Ketman’, et cetera. In all of these the objective is a constant and simultaneous process of compromise and circumstantial  best-endeavours, with the ultimate aim of staying alive and relevant.

For example, under the rubric of metaphysical Ketman, it was necessary for people of religious mindset not merely to conceal this from the communist authorities, but also to avoid any hint of allusion to modes of spiritual transcendence such as beauty, awe, wonder or uplift, which were equally likely to occasion flashing red lights. Even a liking for certain kinds of music was suspect. Polish writers, even those who had been Catholics before the occupation, had to recognise the all-knowingness of Comrade Stalin and refrain from public acknowledgment of their religious faith. There was, however, some wiggle room. The Regime, though ideologically committed to its secular atheism, was also pragmatic and would tolerate Catholics as a necessary though temporary evil, regarding this as a transitional imperative pending the total wiping out of religion, provided they played the game. An example of the outworking of metaphysical Ketman might be that Catholics, though privately clinging to their faith, would become additionally zealous in their public work, for example by joining the secret services and suspending their Catholicism in the course of carrying  out their duties without undue attention to morality.

Ketman, it strikes me, may have some potential for expansion into a more generalised usage, even in the present situation of countries like our own, being a demeanour adopted in the face of an unassailable power, whereby the advocate of high principle contrives to protect himself from publicly straying into heresy.

This might be achieved by dissembling and equivocating in a manner that leaves open multiple interpretations, thus providing reassurances to the listening Regime that the speaker does not seek to offend its dictates, while insinuating to partisans or neutral observers that he remains as principled as ever. This provides him with a reasonably reliable means of maintaining a sense of self-respect and contact with meaningful things, while publicly conforming to the mandatory line, and accordingly retaining his income and his health and life.

To the list proffered by Milosz, I would add the still evolving phenomenon of ‘Covid Ketman’ — which can be detected by those with attuned senses, right across the Western world. We see this writ large in ‘modern’ Ireland now. It is not impossible (though unlikely!) that the judges who jailed Enoch Burke are daily mass-goers. By the same token, an occasional perusal of the contents of the output of ‘conservative’ columnists will confirm that, here too, these are permitted to continue with their conservating provided they are sound on the big questions — for example, refraining from calling  bioterrorism by its name, or showing undue interest in excess deaths or other ‘conspiracy theories’. Thus, many supposedly oppositional voices are able to survive in the mainstream even in times like these, avoiding giving offence to the batshit crazy ‘progressive’ Regime while also reassuring their followers and supporters that they remain onside for the ‘conservative’ agenda. The very idea, of course, is utterly absurd, for what is ‘conservatism’ in a time when reality is already turned upside down? The conserving of madness?

The Western 2020-2024 practitioner of Ketman might also typically be such as a lifelong ‘socialist’ who has been a ‘rebel’ and a ‘thorn in the side of the establishment’ (though chiefly in his own head) for many years, a revolutionary in a stable society in which insurrection was as likely as flying sheep, so that he was therefore never called upon to put his mojo where his mouth was. In conditions such as have descended on the former Free World in the past 56 months, this practitioner of Ketman manages to have it both ways: to adhere to the concepts — freedom, truth, decency, reason — he has exalted all his adult life, but at the same time contriving not to intrude upon the implicit correctness and morality of what the Regime preaches and demands. Thus, the lifelong socialist was an enthusiast for lockdowns, even though these seemed to contradict everything he had ever seemed to stand for. We observed him in throughout Covid bioterrorism episode — and continuing — paying lip-service to the ‘common good’ while at the same time clinging to his socialist ethos, with all its alleged ‘concern’ for civic virtues like justice and fairness and the rule of law. The contemporary exponent of Ketman constantly bleats about democracy but does not acknowledge (or even realise?) that the usurpers of democracy and freedom have redefined it to vacate the idea of a sovereign people, replacing this redundant concept with the idea that ‘democracy’ amounts to the secure tenancy of the incumbent regime, and anyone who in any way questions this is enemy of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.

Indeed, from the very beginning of the Covid coup, the Ketman approach was to show willing on the fundamentals: lockdown, masks, ‘vaccines’, et cetera, dressing these up as virtuous acts of solidarity in the interests of the common good. The danger here that he might be led half-blindly across lines that rattle uncomfortably against his previous ‘liberal’ stances had to be carefully monitored and delicately elided, i.e. uncomfortable programmes like wrongful discrimination, coercion, health apartheid, et cetera. In this, however, the Ketman practitioner was to some extent bailed out by the Regime’s leveraging of the groupthink concept of the ‘out group’ — the invocation of the spectre of some nefarious domestic enemy who would take succour from any failure of establishment resolve, and therefore had to be intimidated and bamboozled. To these ends, in order to remain within the embrace of the system, the Ketman exponent will do whatever is necessary, including the exaltation of political figures he has previously excoriated, so as to show willing in the contrived collective endeavour. When this becomes necessary, all his previous objections have evaporated from his texts, and the onetime ‘gombeen' or ‘chancer’ is dramatically reborn as an exemplary statesman. 

Take, for example, a stellar commentator who for many years has maintained a reputation of impeccable ideological integrity by adhering to a position which, though not widely shared, is regarded by the society as respectable and highly ethical. Propounding highly virtuous values of honesty, decency, love of justice and equality, democracy, egalitarianism and many other such dispositions, he has acquired in the society a moral stature that once was reserved for archbishops and retired presidents. Then, along comes a set of circumstances which, it is made clear to him, requires his adherence to a set of ‘values’ contrary to everything he had ever uttered or written, including support for the tyrannical imposition of a mendacious programme of social control, coercion, intimidation and propaganda, as well as providing assistance in the demonisation of dissident voices. This places our hero in a dilemma. To fail to support this programme may well result in him losing his position, or at least incurring the displeasure of his employers and the Regime. Yet, to defend it and provide it with the covering fire of his weekly commentary, will offend against every principle he has ever uttered.

There is a solution: Ketman, which in this context means the jettisoning of principle. Our hero merely requires to have a minor and painless operation in which he is fitted with a forked tongue, which will allow him to give coded support to the tyranny as demanded by his employment, while at the same time paying continued lip-service to the values of democracy, egalitarianism, and so forth. Although for many years he has excoriated those who spoke from both sides of their mouths, those who helped to cover up wrongdoing, and those who supported abuses of human rights or freedoms, he now settles quite easily into this new role, which we might usefully recast as ‘KETMAN-19’, providing covering fire for those who speak from both sides of their mouths, those who help to cover up wrongdoing, and those who support abuses of human rights or freedoms and attacks those seeking to highlight them.

During the past four and a half years of life in our formerly democratic countries, Ketman has manifested mostly in institutions like journalism, civil libertarianism, religion, academia, literature and the other artforms, as well as in the more diffuse context of personal and neighbourly relations, where its influence is if anything even stronger.

It is therefore with an explosive sense of irony that we might read such a passage as this from The Captive Mind (addressing the circumstances of Paris 1951):

A visitor from the Imperium is shocked on coming to the West. In his contacts with others, beginning with porters or taxi drivers, he encounters no resistance. The people he meets are completely relaxed. They lack that internal concentration which betrays itself in a lowered head or in restlessly moving eyes. They say whatever words come to their tongues; they laugh aloud. Is it possible that human relations can be so direct? 

The inhabitants of Western countries little realize that millions of their fellow-men, who seem superficially more or less similar to them, live in a world as fantastic as that of the men from Mars. They are unaware of the perspectives on human nature that Ketman opens. Life in constant internal tension develops talents which are latent in man. He does not even suspect to what heights of cleverness and psychological perspicacity he can rise when he is cornered and must either be skilful or perish. The survival of those best adapted to mental acrobatics creates a human type that has been rare until now. The necessities which drive men to Ketman sharpen the intellect. 

Now, twenty years after the death of Czeslaw Milosz, these symptoms and conditions have arrived unannounced in the Western countries, having largely disappeared from the former Soviet bloc. Now, the people of the former Free World are the ones with the lowered heads and the restlessly moving eyes. No longer do we utter the words that hover on the tips of our tongues, but instead require to cogitate prohibitively before acknowledging a joke with our laughter. Daily we live with the internal tensions of having to second-guess each and every bystander before expressing an opinion. We have not yet become sufficiently adept at mental acrobatic or psychological gymnastics to acquit ourselves in the court of Ketman. But we are improving, and soon we shall put on shows of doublespeak that will make the diminishing ranks of the survivors of Stalinism gasp in wonder at our proficiency in the arts of dissimulation and evasion.

As we observe, the concept of Ketman/doublethink was readily detectable from the beginning of the Covid episode, with many signs of these quantities remaining to this day. Those responsible will, of course, immediately begin their rehearsed snorts of derision at the very idea of a comparison between Orwell’s dark vision and the egregious an unpardonable events of 2020. We cannot be serious! They, after all, were ‘saving lives’. They forget that the ‘Party’ in Orwell’s fictional dystopia was also engaged in the selfless philanthropic work of improving its citizens. And yet, at the same time, it is possible to be sympathetic to their pleas of innocence on the grounds of the implausibility of the idea that anyone who had read Orwell’s book — and who hadn’t? — would be capable of becoming embroiled in the kinds of things that were done in innumerable countries claiming democratic status in those dark sunny days of March/April 2020. In other words, those who failed to lift the heavens with their roars of refusal were almost as guilty as those with the blood of innocents on their hands.

This silence, and related questions, have been the most puzzling aspects of the Covid crime: how (for example) by, at the latest, May 1st 2020, any inhabitant of one of the multiple Western societies that had been washed in the futuristic predictions of seers like Orwell and Huxley could possibly find themselves uttering a single sentence suggestive of prior knowledge of such prophecies — never mind engaging in any resonant action in support of the emerging tyranny — without either freezing in self-disbelief or bursting out laughing at their own myopia? I turned 29 in the middle of the actual year 1984, and remember with extreme clarity the sense of superiority that accompanied the marking and celebration of that occasion. Western peoples had a vague idea that such things as Orwell depicted could indeed happen — but to other peoples in other, distant lands. Something like the events he described might even have happened in Russia and the Soviet bloc, but that was because they were less civilised than us. Even if we could not — in necessary liberal humility — claim to be more ‘civilised’, we could certainly claim (couldn’t we?) to be more knowing, having been forewarned by these writers whom we regarded with such respect and solemnity.

No, no, it was unthinkable. And not that we thought about it — a few troublemakers and hysterics excepted.

Orwell’s vision, in particular, by virtue of its constant undertone and more than occasional outbreaks of violence, seemed especially remote. Things of those extraordinarily imagined scenes in the Ministry of Love, when Winston is waiting following his arrest, which read like episodes from an extreme horror nightmare.

While Winston is waiting to be interrogated, Orwell describes in graphic detail the countenance of a prisoner who is brought into the room and sends ‘a momentary chill through Winston’. The man is emaciated, his face that of ‘a skull’, the eyes ‘filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or something’. The man, Winston realises, is dying of starvation. Another prisoner, overcome with pity, takes his life in his hands by trying to pass to the skull-faced man a grimy piece of bread he has secreted in a pocket of his overalls. A voice roars from the telescreen, and two guards, one an officer, enter the room. At a signal from the officer, his underling lets loose a savage blow to the face of the man who has offered his last piece of bread to the dying man.

The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor. His body was flung across the cell and fetched up against the base of the lavatory seat. For a moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, whỉch seemed unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth.

Nothing like that, it will be said, has happened in any Western country arising from the Covid episode or subsequent shifts in political culture (echo asks: What shifts in political culture?), and nor could it ever happen here. Totalitarianism is a matter of violence, of brutal repression, of industrially generated terror. Ergo: Orwell’s vision has no relevance for us today.

But there are differing forms of violence, just as there are differing forms of pain. We need to be mindful of something about state coercion that has always been true, but is not obvious in the quotidian context: that its very existence is in the vast majority of cases sufficient to do the heavy lifting of coercion. With most people, even the ones who have seemed to be indomitable, the very capacity or exclusive entitlement of the state in the exercising of democratically sanctioned coercion and force is itself, in all but the rarest of cases, sufficient to break the will of the dissident or refusenik. It is rarely necessary to turn up the dial on the shock treatment more than once or twice in order for the fear of its potential to do the rest in what seem to be relatively civilised conditions.

This issue has been a concealed element of the Covid crime. As Sally Minogue beautifully exposes in her Introduction to the novel, the two central relationships depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four — between Winston and Julia and Winston and O’Brien, are both ‘affairs of a sort’ — both of his ’lovers’ seeming to seek Winston’s ultimate wellbeing, Julia through affection, O’Brien through torture; both ‘relationships’ start with a meeting of eyes, and both operate at a level of intimacy Winston has not experienced before; both figures grow in his imagination as ‘revolutionary comrades’. In fact, of the two, he is ‘attracted’ to O’Brien much more immediately than he is to Julia, whom at first he believes to be spying on him on behalf of the Thought Police.

Although Orwell does not imply the term, there is an intimation in Winston’s relationship and interactions with O’Brien of something that was to surface as a strong subtext of the Covid coercion in 2020: a kind of sadomasochistic insinuation in which Winston’s ‘treatment’ by O’Brien consists in an alternating of torture and morphine, a process in which he — superficially, perversely — comes to trust and even love O’Brien: He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain.

This rather familiar syndrome seems to work on the imputed guilt of the suspect, and is perhaps a quality of the newer forms of tyranny, which have at their cores some perverted sense of the ‘common good’, in which the coercive authorities-without-authority purport to act not merely on behalf of power and the law, but also for the good of the suspect who has been led woefully astray. In this scenario, the jailer/torturer becomes, simultaneously, a reluctant administrator of state coercion and violence, and also a benign figure who administers punishment ‘reluctantly’ for the good of the victim. In this sense, the modern forms of totalitarianism differ from tyrannies involving an individual dictator, becoming a form of ‘conspiracy’ between the oppressors and the oppressed — indeed, a form of sadomasochistic conspiracy in which both participants crave that which they experience, and the victim most of all.

I have recalled before how, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on May 25th, 2020, at the very height of the lockdown, the (exhibitionist homosexual) leader of the then Irish government, Leo Varadkar, was filmed having a picnic in the park and cavorting with his mates, at a time when picnics were forbidden by Varadkar’s own government. There was afterwards what superficially seemed an attempt to explain this away by claiming that there had in fact been no ban on picnics, but this was almost certainly a way of twisting the dial a little further, for the real message had to do not merely with the power capacities of Varadkar’s government but with a consciousness in the air that, in a certain sense, the public liked being treated in this contemptuous manner. The relationship being briefly exposed — almost in the manner of a stripper’s tease — was that of 'master and subs’.

It is easy to forget, because of a lack of emphasis at the time, the kinds of things that happened in 2020: people being shunted out of public parks by police officers because they had paused to sit on a bench to enjoy the sunshine; maskless people being dragged out of trains and buses and into squad cars; drivers turned around on the road because their proffered rationales for being out driving fell short of the protocols; protestors being truncheoned in the street for daring to protest their right to freedom.

There were also the elderly people who died alone in nursing homes and other institutions, refused contact with their most beloved family members. Was this not violence? Was this not also a total denial of mercy? In what sense can the perpetrators of these obscenities claim to be better than the thugs imagined by George Orwell?

And what about premeditated killing by poison injection? Might we call this manslaughter? Democide? Genocide? Well, in Ireland, the level of excess deaths has this year increased to 19 per cent, amounting to approximately 20,000 additional deaths in the past 46 months — i.e. multiple orders of magnitude over and above what would have been regarded as a serious health crisis just five years ago. Meanwhile, Ed Dowd’s latest international research indicates that one in five people worldwide who took any kind of (alleged) Covid vaccine has been adversely affected. Approximately five billion people on the planet accepted a vaccine of some sort. Applying the scale of the death rate in the US to the wider world, he estimates that deaths from these injections worldwide is somewhere between 7.3 million and 15 million. By the same measure, disabilities arising directly from the injections are estimated at between 29 to 60 million globally, and sundry forms of injury at between 500 million and 900 million. For the avoidance of doubt, all these people received at least one of some kind of Covid-related injection; most are of working age. Might we call this genocide? The legal definition of genocide is the committing of acts with the intention to destroy a people. Maybe the level of slaughter has not yet reached the level of a demonstrable attempt to obliterate a particular population, but overall it amounts to a level of homicide that has no parallel since WWII — which ended just four years before Orwell’s most famous book was published.

Another phenomenon an attentive younger reader might raise an eyebrow to in Nineteen Eighty-Four is snitching: citizens taking it upon themselves to report to the authorities any infractions against the narrative, the ‘measures’ or the Regime. While waiting to be tortured and reconstructed in the Ministry of Love, Winston runs into a colleague called Parsons whom he has known as a grovelling lickspittle of the Party and the regime. He asks Parsons if he is ‘guilty’, and Parson replies, ‘Of course I am guilty. You don’t think the Party wold arrest an innocent man, do you?’ His crime, he relates, is that he has uttered the ejaculation ‘Down with Big Brother’ in the course of a dream while asleep. ‘Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man’, he elaborates. ‘It’s insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep.’

Luckily, his seven year-old daughter, who overheard this outburst while listening at the keyhole, immediately reported the incident to the patrols. ‘Pretty smart for a nipper of six, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact, I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.’

If this seems funny or cartoonish — a reductio ad absurdum? — let us not forget some of the things that happened in our ‘modern’, self-satisfied ‘democratic’ ‘republics’ in the early years of the Covid crime. I have not been able to discover with certainty if Ireland had a formal ‘snitch line’ during the Covid period, although there is evidence that such may well have existed. One of the tiny number of dissident voices of formal Irish political opposition raised against the escalating tyranny of the past 56 months is that of Tipperary TD, Mattie McGrath. In a debate on the Health and Criminal Justice (Covid-19) (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill 2021 (Second Stage), an appalled McGrath told Dáil Éireann — the lower house of the Irish parliament (Oireachtas) — on Dec 3rd 2021, that he had heard members of that very House demanding the introduction of snitch lines. ‘That has come from parties I am very surprised with. They are looking for people to report on people and so on. We are dividing society and creating an apartheid and it is totally wrong.’

In late March 2020, such a ‘snitch line’ had been established in London, and citizens were invited to report observations or concerns about ‘non-essential businesses that aren't closed, activities at closed outdoor structures including playgrounds, multi-use courts and skate parks, residents gathering in large groups, and individuals not following self-isolation orders.’

A month later, the Guardian was reporting that the police had received 194,000 calls to the line. A female deputy chief constable was reported as saying that the ‘troublesome spots’ included ‘beaches and rural communities in the countryside where people want to walk.’

In America, too, the business of informing was proving very popular. Between March 23rd and April 8th, 2020, a dedicated ‘tip line’ in Kentucky received roughly 30,000 calls from people concerned about the alleged social-distancing breaches of individuals and businesses. In mid-April, 2020, the Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, was reported in the Washington Times calling on people to turn in neighbours who failed to follow social distancing rules, encouraging them to text photos of violators and report their location to a government hotline. Tucker Carlson responded on his Fox News programme: ‘The mayor of New York . . . has asked all eight million New Yorkers to become informers, to snitch on their neighbours. Sounds a lot like East Germany actually, except now everyone has a smartphone.’

Third degree burns, however, compared to the question of whether 4 or 5 is the correct answer to the question: ‘2 + 2 = ?’

We remember that scene from the book as stretching credulity. It is unthinkable — is it not? — that anyone could become confused as to the answer to this most rudimentary of arithmetic conundrums. A child could answer it. This is to miss Mr Orwell’s point, which is that this knowledge is not achieved in the first place by reason, but learned by rote as part of our two-times tables. In this sense, it is one of the most foundational pieces of knowledge we glean as little schoolchildren. Having received it in this way, it becomes almost an article of faith, a foundational calculation upon which all others are constructed. As long as such knowledge remains approved, there is no issue; when the Regime decides that the answer ‘5’ would be better, everything changes.

Orwell’s point is that it is possible, by the use of propaganda and fear, to undo even the most rudimentary elements of our knowledge of the world.

The question arises in the course of Winston’s interrogation because he has written in his diary: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four’.

O’Brien holds up his left hand to Winston, with the thumb folded under and the four digits visible. ‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

‘Four.’

‘And if the Party says it is not four but five, then how many?’

‘Four’.

Orwell proceeds:

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle on the dial had gone up to fifty-five.

This, as Sally Minogue writes in her Introduction, ‘is the black heart of the novel.’

As O’Brien said to Winston: ‘Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.’

This, obviously, couldn’t happen here? Or could it? How ‘obvious’, really, is the notion that it couldn’t? What if it were suggested that even worse things are happening, and that the vast majority of observers — even many who have passed with honours examinations in which their comprehensive knowledge of Orwell’s work was a vital factor — seem not to see this?

What about Enoch Burke, an Irish teacher who, at the time of writing, has already spent going on for 500 days in an Irish jail because he refused to address a pupil as ‘they’? Is not the idea of men and women, boys and girls, not at least as fundamental as the adding of two and two?

Oh no! goes up the Pavlovian shout: he was jailed not for that reason but because he refused to ‘purge his contempt’ for which he was convicted on the grounds that he refused to stop attending at the school from which he had been suspended.

Yes, and all of that is as useful as a mugful of boiled snow without it being noted that he was suspended in the first place for declining to be told what he must say: that the boy standing in front of hims is actually a girl.

In other words, metaphorically and symbolically, Enoch Burke refused to say that two and two equals five.

Yes, replies O’Brien: ‘Imposing the will of the Party is easier when people do not understand it.’

‘The Party is not interested in the overt act; the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.’

And again:

‘You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. . . . When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we will never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind; we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.’

This is what is happening; we must make no mistake about it. This is the meaning of the attempt to break a brave and honest man like Enoch Burke.

‘Power,’ O’Brien explains to Winston, ‘is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and in putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our time will be progress towards more pain. The old civilisations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything.’

There are resonances here with Michael Esfeld’s descriptions of the undertows of the Covid episode as the initiating event in a new form of totalitarianism (see 'Whatever' Totalitarianism, John Waters Unchained, May 2023, which is multi-faceted and hydra-headed, in which the purpose is not ideological for the sake of ideology, but purely a code, a software, by which to prosecute a tyranny that is its own end-product and exists purely for its own sake. It can be either fascist or communist or both at the same time, but ultimately neither, because these categories are redundant and otiose, being superseded by the imperative to control for control’s sake.

Who, having paid attention to the world and its devolution in the past 56 months, could assert now that this description of ‘the future’ from the mouth of O’Brien, is not the design of those who baselessly claim authority over us?

We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.'

There is a strange dislocation concerning the events of 2020, arising from the fact that they are not reported or remarked upon by our society in the ways that events of their magnitude would normally merit. This is because the media were essentially paid for (inter alia) not mentioning them, the ‘sentries’ on our freedoms bought off for maintaining silence about criminal activity, for failing to give evidence, for displaying loyalty to the oath of omertà that nowadays governs virtually all ‘public' matters.

This amounts to a special kind of violence, because it adds to the original evil the crime of denial, implying not merely that the atrocity in question did not occur but that it could not have occurred, that, if it is ‘remembered’ by anyone, that memory is false and therefore a lie cooked up in the disturbed mind of the individual, or acquired via channels spreading ‘disinformation’ on the (as yet) inadequately censored internet. This is an obscenity beyond anything that Orwell describes, for at least those dragged into the Ministry of Love, and thence into Room 101, were given truthful accounts of what was happening to them, as well as of its aims and purposes, and, like Winston Smith, given time to put their affairs in order before being shot in the back of the neck.