GEORGE ORWELL – 1984 : THE MOTHER OF ALL CONSPIRACIES

There are two kinds of conspiracies- those of events like John F. Kennedy’s murder or 9/11, which to this day remain highly suspicious and factually left too many questions open for the countless scientists and historians on the search for truth. Such conspiracies are valid, since history is full of lies and collusion by two or more people in order to achieve a goal together, i.e. real conspiracies. And when Tony Blair and George W. Bush lie to us that the Iraq owns ‘weapons of mass-destruction’, and countless headlines in the media spread that lie, then that is a true conspiracy, too.

And then there are those conspiracies who blame an ever-obscure ‘deep-state’ or some secret Satanic world government (or: „Reptilians“) for almost everything that happens- bits of information get bent and reduced and drawn together to be turned into ‘facts’ that fit the theory, while information and events that don’t fit it but disturb get blocked out. Everything gets explained from a paranoid teenage sci-fi-fantasy view-point while history, science, and intellect die.

Such conspiracists are people with a fanatic and paranoid mental disposition which are doomed to be lost, floating in the space of an endless cacophony that can never be wrapped up. Prone to get quick and simple answers, and raging with fear-driven indignation, they are reluctant to invest time in the study of books and history and the refinement of their intellects, and therefore cannot grasp the events realistically and in their historical context. Basically everything that they are talking about is a reduced and sensational derivation of something deeper, bits of information cooked up in a paranoid and almost sexual manner. It is actually mental porn- a cheap, sensationalist fascination and immediate sado-masochistic reward that is intellectually and spiritually unsatisfying.

These kinds of conspiracists are a growing phenomenon and problem in Western societies, and can be regarded as just another expression of the prevailing decadence. They are further darkening and confusing the discourses that are already darkened and confused by the secret services and media control, and make it almost impossible to peel off the many layers of misguided interpretation from events and reveal their core, and therefore gain enlightenment and truth. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said observes that “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.“ Combined with the observation that paranoid conspiracies are not pre-dominant in the mindset and narrative of non-Western societies, one has to ask the question about their origins. Where did this cultural narrative begin, or at least got manifested within a remarkably vast amount of minds?

Published in 1949, George Orwell’s 1984 is the piece of work that has to be thanked for all the growing crazy conspiracies of our times, since it is the single most important foundation and validation of this entire mindset and provided its symbolic political vocabulary- ‘Newspeak’, ‘Oldspeak’, ‘Big Brother’, ‘Ministry of Truth’, ‘Thought Police’, etc. Arguably the best-known and one of the highest-rated English novels of the 20^th century, 1984 is the bible to which conspiracists refer to when making their unconstructive cases about a sadistic world tyranny in the shadows that is responsible for everything that is happening on the planet.

The first thing that has to be addressed with 1984 is the fact that it is a work of plagiarism, or, in Orwell’s words, a „thoughtcrime“. You have probably never heard of the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, but it is his dystopian novel We (1920) from which Orwell borrowed the idea of 1984 almost thirty years later, including the plot, chief characters, symbols and the whole climate and conclusion of Zamyatin’s story. Orwell himself wrote a glowing review of We that was published in Tribune in 1946. In face of his plagiarism, his last sentence, “This is a book to look out for when an English version appears,” reads like a self-imposed assignment rather than a recommendation.

Interestingly, in the same review Orwell points out the similarities between Zamyatin’s We and Brave New World (1932), another piece of classic Western dystopia, penned by Aldous Huxley, who was Orwell’s French teacher at the elitist Eton College: “The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact- never pointed out, I believe- that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanised, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.”

It is true that Huxley’s book was never strongly intended to be a dystopia, but reads as the mixture of its author’s two main influences: Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859, uncensored title), a book heavily advocated by Aldous’ grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, also known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”. As logical consequence of Darwin’s theory, Aldous Huxley was also an outspoken promoter of Eugenics, which is a dominant theme in Brave New World; next to the drug-induced utopia of a non-violent revolution achieved by micro-dosing the population in order to make them love their servitude, a revolution which Huxley called „The Ultimate Revolution“ in a lecture in Berkeley in 1962.

There is one major problem that Brave New World shares with 1984. In contrast to Zamyatin’s original story, the refrain of both plagiarising books is “I do understand how, but I do not understand why“. Especially in Brave New World, an explanation for the dystopian tyranny is never given and a historical context never being built- it is just there. Same goes to 1984 although it is more recognisably aimed at Soviet Russia and the British Labour Party, but otherwise full with suspicion and the look-out for dark conspiracies with no satisfying revelations and answers. In 1984 – The Mysticism of Cruelty, Isaac Deutscher points out that “Winston Smith knows how Oceania functions and how its elaborate mechanism of tyranny works, but he does not know what is its ultimate cause and ultimate purpose. He turns for the answer to the pages of ‘the book’, the mysterious classic of crimethink, the authorship of which is attributed to Emmanuel Goldstein, the inspirer of the conspiratorial Brotherhood. But he manages to read through only those chapters of ‘the book’ which deal with the how. The Thought Police descends upon him just when he is about to begin reading the chapters which promise to explain why; and so the question remains unanswered.“

Orwell’s other canonical ‘masterpiece’, Animal Farm (1945) suffers from similar problems. T. S. Eliot rejected the book for publication in 1944. In his rejection letter to Orwell, he pointed at the shortcomings and inconsistencies in the central parabola. Interestingly, the CIA criticized in the same direction when they described the book as “confusing, with the message of the story remaining nebulous. Although the symbolism is obvious, there is no clear message.” Which made the book excellent CIA material- they funded both films, Animal Farm and 1984, and made it good Cold-War propaganda material by altering it more clearly towards an anti-communist message. In this context, the list of 35 names that Orwell gave to the Information Research Department in 1949 and in which he denounces them as sympathizers or agents of the communist regime (or more simply as “nigger”, “anti-white”, or “homosexual”) is also of interest. But that is a topic on its own.

Back to 1984. Few books- if any- had such impact in political thinking than 1984. It is a canonical book being read in schools generations after generations since it came out, promising intellectual delight, critical thinking, and enlightenment as an outcome. But it has to be highlighted that 1984‘s impact is not as strong everywhere outside of Great Britain and the USA. Even in Europe the further East you go, the more marginal the meaning and impact of this book becomes in countries like for example Germany and France, until upon further moving down the globe its impact completely fades- for the world outside of the Far West, 1984 gave too little answers and was not perceived as a masterpiece, but a rather confusing work of cheap Science Fiction.

Orwell’s book is a hopeless panic-tale of a sinister damnation for no other reason than an obscure ‘sadistic-power-hunger’, a quite evangelical message that is amplified and echoed by today’s media and countless conspiracies, and increasingly unfolds its intellectual and spiritual, even global terror of fear and hate. The novel has helped nobody to see clearer or advanced any understanding of the world, but instead infiltrated the minds of millions with apocalyptic paranoia. It is the sublimation of a fever-dream with no historical and political context or explanation, a psychotic detachment. 1984 is the summary and essence of all the confused conspiracies of our times. It is a machine in itself: the dawn of the dark Orwellian Age.

by Saliha Enzenauer