Revisiting Orwell’s Dystopian Novel 1984 in 2019 – a.k.a. ‘The Age of Trump’!

FOR THE THIRD TIME IN 75 YEARS . . .

by Selvam Canagaratna-January 4, 2020,

"Thought is the labour of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure."

– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1863.

Tom Engelhardt, a co-founder of the and the author of The United States of Fear, seems convinced he has not just been reading a dystopian novel, but, seemingly, also living one as well – and even suspects he’s been living one all his life!

He admits having recently reread George Orwell’s classic 1949 novel 1984, in which Winston Smith, a secret opponent of the totalitarian world of Oceania, one of three great imperial superpowers left on planet Earth, goes down for the count at the hands of – who else but – Big Brother himself.

"It was perhaps my third time reading it in my 75 years on this planet," confides Tom.

Tom remembers, at perhaps age 13, reading that book under the covers by flashlight when he was supposed to be asleep; "I can remember, that is, being all alone, chilled (and thrilled) to the bone by Wells’ grim vision of civilizational destruction. To put this in context: in 1957, I would already have known that I was living in a world of potential civilizational destruction and that the Martians were here. They were then called the Russians, the Ruskies, the Commies, the Reds. I would only later grasp that we (or we, too) were Martians on this planet.

"The world I inhabited was, of course, a post-, post- one. I was born on July 20, 1944, just a year and a few days before my country dropped atomic bombs on those two Japanese cities, devastating them in blasts of a kind never before experienced and killing people. Thirteen years later, I had already become inured to scenarios of the most dystopian kinds of global destruction – of a sort that would have turned those Martians into pikers – as the US and the Soviet Union (in a distant second place) built up their nuclear arsenals at a staggering pace.

"Nuclear obliteration had, by then, become part of our everyday way of life. After all, what American of a certain age who lived in a major city can’t remember, on some otherwise perfectly normal day, air-raid sirens suddenly beginning to howl outside your classroom window as the streets emptied? They instantly called up a vision of a world in ashes. Of course, we children had only a vague idea of what had happened under those mushroom clouds that rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"If those drills didn’t add up to living an everyday vision of the apocalypse as a child, what would? I grew up, in other words, with a new reality: for the first time in history, humanity had in its hands Armageddon-like possibilities of a sort to the gods. , for instance, the US military’s Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) of 1960 for a on the Communist world. It was, we now know, meant to deliver more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets, including at least 130 cities. Official, if then secret, estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and probably underestimated the longer term effects of radiation).

"I still remember how visions of nuclear destruction populated my dreams (or rather nightmares) and those of my friends, as some would later admit to me. To this day, I can recall the feeling of sudden heat on one side of my body as a nuclear bomb went off on the distant horizon of one of those dreams. Similarly, I recall sneaking into a Broadway movie theatre to see with two friends – kids of our age weren’t allowed into such films without parents – and so getting a glimpse, popcorn in hand, of what a devastated, nuclearized San Francisco might look like.

"It was with such a feeling growing in me that, all these years later, I once again picked up Orwell’s classic novel and soon began wondering whether Donald Trump wasn’t our very own idiosyncratic version of Big Brother. If you remember, when Orwell finished the book in 1948 (he seems to have flipped that year for the title), he imagined an England, which was part of Oceania, one of the three superpowers left on the planet. The other two were Eurasia (essentially the old Soviet Union) and Eastasia (think: a much-expanded China).

"In Oceania’s Airstrip One (the former England), where Winston Smith is a minor functionary in the Ministry of Truth (a ministry of lies, of course), the Party rules eternally in a world in which – a classic Orwellian formulation – "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." It’s a world of "inner" Party members (with great privilege), an outer circle like Smith who get by, and below them a vast population of impoverished "proles."

"Yes, in 1948, Orwell obviously knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the weaponry that went with them. (In 1984, he even mentions the use of such weaponry in the then-future 1950s.) What he didn’t imagine in his book was a dystopian world not of the grimmest kind of ongoingness but of endings, of ultimate destruction. He didn’t conjure up a nuclear apocalypse set off by one of his three superpowers and, of course, he had no way of imagining another kind of potential apocalypse that has become increasingly familiar to us all: climate change.

"Unfortunately, on both counts Donald Trump is proving dystopian indeed. He is, after all, the President who to unleash "fire and fury like the world has never seen" on North Korea (before with its dictator).

"And keep in mind that this is happening at a time when we know that a relatively localized nuclear war between regional powers like (whose politicians are once again at each other’s throats ) could create a global and up to a billion people.

"And keep in mind as well that all of the above may prove to be the lesser of Donald Trump’s dystopian acts when it comes to the ultimate future of humanity. After all, he and his administration are, in just about every way imaginable, to aid and abet climate change by ensuring that ever more carbon will be released into the atmosphere, warming an planet further.

"In other words, with the American President lending a significant hand, we may make it to 2084 far sooner than anyone expected. With that in mind, let’s return for a moment to 1984. As no one who has read Orwell’s book is likely to forget, its mildly dissident anti-hero, Winston Smith, is finally brought into the Ministry of Love by the Thought Police to have his consciousness retuned to the needs of the Party. In the process, he’s brutally tortured until he can truly agree that 2 + 2 = 5. Only when he thinks he’s readjusted his mind to fit the Party’s version of the world does he discover that his travails are anything but over.

"He still has to visit Room 101. As his interrogator tells him, "You asked me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." And that "worst thing" is always adjusted to the specific terrors of the specific prisoner.

"So here’s one way to think of where we are at this moment on Planet Earth: Americans – all of humanity, in fact – may already be in Room 101, whether we know it or not, and the truth is, by this steaming summer, that most of us should know it.

"It’s obviously time to act on a global scale. Tell that to Big Brother," concluded Tom – in total disbelief, of course!