On the Brink of 1984

Here is the story of one of the most widely read novels of our time.

The year is 1984. The globe is divided into three superstates--Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The war among them is constant and never-ending. However, the sympathies of the war change all the time. The people of Oceania sometimes find that Eurasia is the enemy and Eastasia the ally, and sometimes just the opposite. When Oceania's allegiances shift, everyone is made to forget that the circumstances were ever different. The public record is rewritten.

Winston Smith, a minor government employee of Oceania, is one of the thousands who are charged with rewriting history. He spends his days altering news stories, magazine articles and other printed materials so that they'll conform to the propaganda demands of the government. The agency he works for is called the Ministry of Truth. In like fashion, the Ministry of Love is responsible for the torture and elimination of dissidents. And the Ministry of Peace is responsible for waging the never-ending war.

Oceania's head of state is a mustached, Stalinoid personage known as Big Brother. He is never seen in person, but his portrait is displayed everywhere--on billboards and in public squares--usually underscored with the words Big Brother is Watching You.

Winston's troubles with Big Brother stem from the day he wanders into a junk shop in a slum quarter of his city and buys an old blank diary. He begins to record his dissatisfactions. He writes out of the sight lines of the two-way telescreen in his apartment. There is no law against keeping a diary, but if he is found out, he will be executed or sent to a forced-labor camp for 25 years.

His troubles are only beginning. He notices a young woman colleague in his office who gives him surreptitious signs of her attraction to him. Her name is Julia. He works through his suspicions of Julia and meets her in a secluded glen in the countryside, where at least there are no telescreens, though there may very well be hidden microphones.

Winston and Julia become lovers, a treasonable offense punishable by death, inasmuch as Big Brother does not permit sex between unmarried partners and, in fact, condones it in married partners only for the purpose of procreation. Confronted with the problem of how to meet Julia on a regular basis without being detected, Winston goes back to the shop where he purchased his diary and rents a pied-à-terre over the shop, a charming room furnished, as in the ancient days before the great atomic wars, with a soft bed, curtains, a fireplace and antique bric-a-brac. The lovers take to going there when they can steal the time from their bleak existence. They make love, sleep and read the secret manifesto of the subversive revolutionary organization known as The Brotherhood, to which they've decided to give their allegiance.

But, as it happens, the idyllic room is monitored by a hidden telescreen. The antiques shop and the pied-à-terre are an artful construction of the Thought Police. Winston and Julia are arrested and taken to the dread Ministry of Love.

Winston's chief torturer is a high official named O'Brien, whom Winston thought to be a member of the revolutionary Brotherhood. In fact, O'Brien gave him the secret manifesto. Under O'Brien's tutelage, he is beaten, questioned and electrically tormented for a period of months until all the rebellion is expunged from him and he is able to agree, with tears of love in his eyes for his torturers, that two and two are five. What breaks him finally is the threat of the worst punishment imaginable, the torture in "Room 101," where such as he are simply exposed to what they fear most--in Winston's case, rats. As a rat cage is about to be strapped to his face, he begs O'Brien to inflict this torture on Julia instead, thus destroying his last bit of self-respect and moral integrity.

In the final scene of the book, Winston sits in an outdoor café, reclaimed, rehabilitated, totally broken and gazing with adoration at the enormous face on the screen in the public square. "He loved Big Brother," says George Orwell, the author of this tale, by way of an epitaph for his hero.

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Even in synopsis, it is clear that Nineteen Eighty-Four is an incredibly masochistic novel. The chief attribute of the hero is helplessness. The chief characteristic of his antagonist, Big Brother, is absolute, unremitting power. The state personified as Big Brother allows no resistance whatsoever, not even in the privacy of the mind. Individualism is a crime. Thought is a crime. Certainly, justice is out of the question, an obsolete concept. The hope of revolution is denied, because the revolutionary Brotherhood is probably a fiction. But even the personal consolations are withheld. Not only is love a capital offense. Not only is the natural world bugged with microphones. There is nothing to wear except uniforms. There is nothing to drink except a vile, synthetic gin. There is nothing for the eye to see except an industrial landscape adorned with the staring face of the despot.

Compare the fate of Winston Smith with those of the traditionally beset heroes of English literature and you begin to appreciate the depths of Orwell's prophecy. Consider Dickens' novels of impoverished, scorned, mistreated orphan boys, the lowest of the low: By pluck, or luck, they find their patrimony, their true love, their middle-class ease. Shakespeare's errant kings go to their doom in the majesty of battle or madness. Ending well or badly, boys or kings put up a struggle; their lives have moral dimension. Orwell claimed his novel was a political satire. But the heroes of classic satires, such as Gulliver and Candide, return safely home and find consolation from the weirdness or the evil of the world around them. They separate from their experience and are left whole by their authors. Orwell's satire leaves his hero without dignity, without mind, without a separate moral stature, either tragic or comic. We may be tempted to find in the life of Winston Smith a vision of original sin, except that among all the other things Oceania does without, it does without God.

Masochistic or not, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been in print continuously since publication. Its American paperback edition has had 63 printings. It is a work assigned to high school students as frequently as Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye. What makes its success even more interesting--this grim, joyless book with its helpless hero and hopeless outcome--is that Orwell wrote it from the desire to instruct. Is there a straighter route to library oblivion? After all, readers would be likely to avoid a writer whose characters are less important to him than the ideas he wants to illustrate, who can't quite integrate into the action all the information he has to impart, who gives away the ending of his story in the beginning and, worst of all, who writes to save mankind. Nineteen Eighty-Four met all those requirements for disastrous publication.

Orwell's biographer Bernard Crick tells us that when the English publisher Frederick Warburg read the manuscript, he wrote, in a memo to his staff, "It is a great book, but I pray I may be spared from reading another like it for years to come." That goes to the heart of the matter. Who cannot be relieved to put the book down? But, as it happens, state sadism and individual helplessness characterize our century. Perhaps the millions of readers willing to endure Orwell's relentless despair find compensation in the totality of his understanding--the way he puts it all in place, the daily confrontation of corrupted ideologies, the death and sanctimony that dazzle us each morning in newspapers, deafen us each night on the TV news.

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Orwell's real name was Eric Blair. He was born in 1903 and was sent away at a young age to an English prep school called Saint Cyprian's. There his ordinary miseries of status as the son of comparatively poor parents were compounded by a bed-wetting problem, canings by the school's authorities, awful food, inadequate heat in winter, greasy public-bath water in which he had to immerse himself and other torments. In such a setting there was no shortage of upper-form boys willing to bully the younger students, which suggests to some critics of Nineteen Eighty-Four that the Big Brother state is a metaphor for the awful childhood of young Master Blair. But it is not unusual for critics to avoid dealing with the substantive challenge of a book by referring to its author's life. Orwell's early work as a novelist was clearly autobiographical, and had he wanted to write a novel about Saint (continued on page 156)The Brink of 1984(continued from page 80) Cyprian's, he would have. In fact, he wrote a great essay on the subject titled "Such, Such Were the Joys." He was a modest, plain-spoken man not given to ridiculous aggrandizements of his own experience, and the idea of turning the whole world into a totalitarian nightmare because of an unhappy time in a boys' school would have seemed to him absurd.

Besides which, Orwell's entire life, not just his childhood, was difficult. As a young man, he worked in Burma as a British Imperial policeman (writing about the experience in his novel Burmese Days) and went back to Europe to live in terrible poverty as a free-lance writer (the basis for his novel Down and Out in Paris and London). He had turned politically leftward, and when the Spanish Civil War began, he joined an international brigade, saw action and received a throat wound from a sniper's bullet. His account of his experiences in Spain can be found in his dazzling work of reportage Homage to Catalonia. As a member of the Loyalist coalition fighting the Spanish Fascists led by General Franco, he underwent the crucial political revelation that the Communists, who were his nominal allies, were, from their own intense, doctrinal self-interest, enemies of the Loyalist cause. He realized that at least that one element fighting the Fascists was itself fascist. And from that insight and from what he learned of Stalin's purges and show trials, he derived his concept of totalitarianism as an extent of state power that renders irrelevant the ideology that has produced it.

That was not an easy lesson to learn in the Thirties. Everyone on the left could see and deplore what fascism was quite clearly, but a leftist intellectual on the side of the workingman and against the cruelties of private wealth who could also see the errant energy of a left revolution as it was betraying itself was ahead of his time. Orwell's fate put him squarely inside the world of the 20th Century. It was his genius to see it for what it was. By the time of World War Two, he was in London working for the BBC, still a socialist and writing "England Your England," an essay in praise of the solidarity of the English class structure he was committed, in principle, to change. It begins "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me." He would not for any cause render anything less complex or paradoxical than it was.

For many years, Orwell had suffered from tuberculosis. By the time he began to write Nineteen Eighty-Four, his condition was incurable and terminal. He was then 42, and what he had seen and thought and written had raised his aesthetic imagination to a visionary level. He had lived hard in the world, all over the world, and the world was what he wanted to talk about. He had lived in the trenches, walked bread lines, instructed himself in the matter of German concentration camps and Russian labor camps. He had seen what the U.S. had done with its atom bombs. The Cold War, which is our name for the policy of permanent militarization of the world, was already in place. Orwell composed Nineteen Eighty-Four from the historical evidence of the Thirties and Forties. He intended a work of political satire, a judgment of the world he lived in by a prophecy of what it was in danger of becoming. Transpose the numerals of his year of darkness and you get 1948, the year in which the book was finished.

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But the exquisite torment of authorship is that no book, no matter how great, can legislate the way in which it is to be read. In the U.S., intellectual Cold Warriors read Nineteen Eighty-Four as only a warning against Soviet communism. In the popular press, it was not infrequently seen as an attack on the idea of socialism generally and, by association, on liberals who were less than steadfast in their ideological defense of the free-enterprise system.

More or less in vain did Orwell issue statements through his publisher that his book was not a simple prophecy of what would happen if we let down our guard against communism. He had written a convenient and useful text for the early days of the Cold War. Poor Orwell, a democratic socialist to the day he died, was acclaimed in England by the Tories and in America by the right-wing professional anti-Communists, ex-Communist spies, confessors, repenters and FBI men then publishing Communist-under-the-bed warnings every day in the week including Sunday and ready to raise the only real writer among them, they thought, to their shoulders.

Still, it may have been ingenuous of him to expect otherwise. The surface of the book glitters with descriptions of life derived in balanced measure from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Daily the Oceanians are convened at work or on the streets for a ritual called the Two Minutes' Hate, an orgy of mindless rage directed at whichever of the other superstates, Eurasia or Eastasia, happens to be the enemy of the moment; but more often against The Brotherhood and its leader, a formerly loyal party leader named Immanuel Goldstein. The Two Minutes' Hate recalls Hitler's use of the German media for the frenzied production of hyperpatriotic, racist events by which every appalling excess of his government was justified and every military adventure ennobled. At the same time, the figure of Goldstein is portrayed with an unmistakable resemblance to that of Trotsky, and since Big Brother is described as looking like Stalin, the Soviet reference is substantial. Big Brother's ubiquitous portrait mirrors the personality cult of Stalin, with its giant banners, posters, murals, busts that showed up everywhere in Russia--in every parade, on every wall, in every park. One thinks, too, of the degree of surveillance under Big Brother, the concept of thought-crime--punishable offenses not of action but of attitude--as having a Russian resonance; not just since the Revolution but for hundreds of years under the czars, the Russian secret police have generated a culture of paranoia.

The idea of corrective interrogation, enforced confession, is pointedly Communist--the Fascists simply beat people up and killed them. On the other hand, quite clearly a Nazi inspiration are the children in Nineteen Eighty-Four--vicious little sneaks and spies who turn their parents in to the secret police, just as children were encouraged to do in the Third Reich.

And so on. The careless reader who didn't see beyond the landscape of the book wouldn't understand just what moral was being drawn. The story Orwell tells is not of good nations against bad nations but of governments against individuals. Statism is rampant in 1984. The action is set not in Russia but in the Anglo-American superstate of Oceania. And what has turned life so grim and brought about the monstrous subjugation and degradation of Oceania's citizens is unending and unnecessary war. Living in a perpetual and artificial emergency, the citizenry cannot resist the Spartan militarization of life or the rigorously punitive means by which the government achieves national consensus. The greatness of Nineteen Eighty-Four comes not from its observations of dictatorships of the Thirties and Forties but from its vision of the totalitarianism implicit in the structure of the entire postwar industrial world.

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The reader going back to the book after many years may be surprised to find what it is that commands most of the author's attention. Not the furnishings of the malign state--the police, the telescreens, the torture devices, the famous Room 101. What Orwell comes back to again and again all through the book is the idea of the political manipulation of reality through the control of history and language. Does that sound abstract, overintellectual? Consider yourself in a situation in which you see something on the street: A man is hit over the head, thrown into a car and driven away. Suppose, further, that he is a man known to you and to others--a famous man. But none of the other people on the street will talk to you about what you and, presumably, they have seen. You are ignored. And when you go home to see if there is any report about the incident on the TV evening news, there is none. Nor is there any account of the matter the next morning in the newspaper. Suppose you are a brave or a persevering sort and you know where this famous man's residence is. You go there to tell the family what has happened: The house is unoccupied, the rooms are empty and no name is on the mailbox or the front door. The janitor tells you that no such person has ever lived there. You go to the police station and are told there is no record of that name in the census. Finally, you go to the library--the man was famous, after all--and discover no reference to him in any publication, registry or book. He doesn't exist and never did.

Winston Smith's job, remember, is to alter history. He changes facts and figures on command; he eliminates journalistic references to people who have been murdered; at one point, he even invents a fictitious person to make sense of an earlier deletion of another person from a Big Brother speech. And, until he himself is swept away, he is one of thousands who do that sort of work for the Ministry of Truth. "Do you realize," Winston says, trying to explain to Julia the terrible significance of such work, "that the past, starting from yesterday, has actually been abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them.... Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted ... every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day, minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

Orwell's sensitivity to the political control of language is equally acute. One extremely important function of the Ministry of Truth is to prepare the "definitive Eleventh Edition" of the dictionary of Newspeak. Newspeak is the official language of Oceania. It is being formulated to eventually replace Old-speak, which is English. Why? Not only "to provide a medium of expression for the world view and mental habits" of the population but to "make all other modes of thought impossible." One of Winston's colleagues in the Ministry of Truth who is working on the dictionary explains the beauty of Newspeak:

You think, I daie say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words--scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.... It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.... Take good, for instance. If you have a word like good, what need is there for a word like bad? Ungood will do just as well.... You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston. In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.... In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it now.

The diminishment of thought through the constriction of language is such a crucial element of the Orwellian vision that a separate essay titled "The Principles of Newspeak" is appended to the book. It purports to be written well after the year 2050, when Newspeak officially replaced Oldspeak. "In 1984," we are told, "the word free still existed in Newspeak but could only be used in such statements as 'This dog is free from lice.' ... It could not be used in its old sense of 'politically free' or 'intellectually free,' since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts and were therefore of necessity nameless." In 2050, the word free is gone.

There is more operating here than a writer's jealous love of his native tongue. The falsification of history and the emasculation of language bring us to the center of the Orwellian nightmare. The ultimate totalitarianism is the absolute control of reality. It is far more frightening than Room 101. Orwell was a realist; he believed in a self-evidential, objective world of truth that is perceivable by the mind of man. But the book's heavy, O'Brien, Winston's articulate torturer, says to him, "Reality exists in the mind and nowhere else." And he proves it by conditioning Winston to believe, sincerely, that two and two are five. Orwell's obsessive return to this idea over and over again belies his confidence in objective reality. There is truth and it can be perceived, he seems to be saying, but only by the multiplicity of witness. Is he contradicting himself, committing a kind of doublethink? If truth is a perishable, as he shows it to be in the world of 1984, then perhaps it is not self-evident and objective. In fact, under such totalitarian systems as exist in the world today, the effort of governments to command truth seems never-ending, as if it is not entirely possible. Samizdat copies of forbidden texts distributed secretly in Russia have created a new word of which everyone in the world now understands the meaning. Dissidents not only in the Soviet Union but in various Fascist regimes in Latin America and elsewhere have learned the brave arts of the press conference in exile, the uses of international-rights organizations, and so on, to press their claims for the truth of what is happening in their countries. On the other hand, they are small individual voices coming out of regimes whose control of speech and the media is virtually absolute. And so the truth is objective and perishable simultaneously that depends for its expression on the bravery and sacrifice of a few stronger-than-average individuals.

Orwell is not a philosopher of knowledge, and the traditional philosophical problem of where reality originates--in the mind or outside in the physical world--does not, finally, interest him. What he is talking about is a state of experienceable horror in which the mind's volume is filled with authority and fear of punishment, the integrity of the moral soul is overthrown and a person loses corroboration of what is happening to him, of what his life is, by reference to a past or by the educated articulation of the present. In the arguments Orwell gives to the torturer O'Brien, one is reminded of no other writer so much as Edgar Allan Poe. The characterological transformation of a human being lacking a history and a language is what Poe entertains as the experience of being buried alive, of being sealed up in a basement, brick by brick--perhaps having been lured there by an invidious promise--to scream your head off in the black, suffocating silence.

•

"Who controls the past," runs the Party slogan, "controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

We may be tempted to agree with Orwell in principle but may not share his intensity of concern, feeling that as a writer of prophetic satire, he is given to exaggeration; except that some slight attention to stories current in the press on the eve of 1984 reveals that if anyone takes the composition of history and language as seriously as Orwell does, it is the people who run governments.

In Japan, recently, the minister of education decided that the history texts assigned to Japanese school children should be revised insofar as they referred to Japan's invasions and military occupations of China and Korea in the Thirties. What had been referred to as Japanese "aggression" in those countries was changed to "advance," a more neutral military word that gave no indication of who was doing what to whom. In fact, even by 20th Century standards, the atrocities committed by His Imperial Majesty's troops on the Asian mainland between 1937 and 1945 were noteworthy: The references to such atrocities have been glossed over. In addition, the uprisings of the conquered South Koreans against Japanese colonial rule of those days are now designated mere "riots" in the minister's revised texts.

Those are just the latest examples, according to a piece in The Nation by Donald Kirk, of a long-standing campaign by the Japanese government "not to dwell on old days," in the words of the education ministry, nor to allow attention to "extremely tragic subjects," such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but to see to it that publishers emphasize, under quaintly termed "guidance policies" set by the government, a respect for the patriotic mind, the family, and deference to the elderly--all of which sounds harmless enough, except that those were also the cultural values that dominated Japan during World War Two, when it was an imperial terror in partnership with Nazi Germany. The new guidance policies come more or less simultaneously with two political developments: the rise of the right wing in the ruling Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (Orwell would relish the idea of a right-wing liberal democrat) and the year-by-year rise, with U.S. encouragement, of Japan's military budget--11.5 billion dollars annually as of last count--for its self-defense forces.

Japan is not a totalitarian state but a constitutional democracy.

Here's another example, closer to home. The U.S. Foreign Assistance Act specifies that for another country to qualify for our military aid, it must certifiably meet U.S. standards of human rights. Human rights is a term of great currency in our political language: When introduced, it tended to refer to a person's right to speak freely or to hold any political opinion of his choosing or to be tried swiftly and under due process of law in the event he was accused of a crime--in general, to any of the collective rights of Americans under the Constitution. But under pressure of world-wide practices, the term has taken on a humbler meaning. Now human rights refers to standards of treatment that you hope to expect of your oppressor after he has taken all your rights away. He should not pack you away in an isolation cell while denying publicly that you're under detention; he should not salt you away in a labor camp after a sentence by a kangaroo court; he should not on a whim machine-gun you in the street or hack you to death in your bed or with relish take you to a ditch and break every bone in your body before killing you. If you're an infant, you have the right not to have your skull smashed against a wall; if a nursing mother, not to have your breasts sliced off; if a nun, not to be raped and disemboweled; if an old man, not to be made to defecate in front of a crowd and eat your own excrement; if a boy or a young man, not to be castrated and have your severed organs stuffed into your mouth. The right not to have those things done to you--the right not to be tortured, mutilated, enslaved or injudiciously murdered--is what we've come to mean by the term human rights.

In July 1982, in order to keep military aid flowing to the government of El Salvador, the Reagan Administration certified to Congress that that government was making "substantial progress" in human rights. Yet, according to Thomas Sheehan, writing in the Los Angeles Times, offices of the archdiocese of San Salvador recorded, just in the first four months of the year, 2334 political murders committed by "government forces or right-wing death squads, which are often composed of off-duty policemen."

Clearly, to advance its diplomatic and strategic interests, the Reagan Government is willing to regard those political murders and atrocities as different in kind from the 84,000 civilian deaths previously attributed to the Salvadoran state forces. Somehow, those 2334 murdered souls are harbingers of gentler times. Orwell, in his essay "Politics and the English Language," says, "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." To defend the indefensible, you have to deform the language, use words not to communicate thought but to prevent it. You have to remake history. So the peasants and priests and nuns, the farmers and teachers and scholars and doctors and nurses and union leaders and school children who have been shot and hacked to death are "rebel elements." The desperate coalition in El Salvador of all political points of view but the ruling extreme right's is deemed a "Communist threat." A historical awakening, through the Catholic Church, of the perennially abused and disenfranchised peasantry is portrayed as a conspiracy of terrorists funded by the Soviet Union and administered by Cuba.

All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible. And insofar as the above examples are concerned, it does not do to say that both we and the Japanese people have, at least, the means of corrective response--an alerted citizenry, a free press, opposition political parties, and so on--whereas the Russians and the Chinese do not. The population of a democracy can be only sporadically sensitive to historical lies. The opposition parties often endorse them. And a good percentage of the press is inclined by ownership to affirm rather than challenge political orthodoxy. Besides which, even in a democracy, the power of initiative belongs to the government. The effort required to check and redress crimes against truth is greater than the effort needed to commit them. Our massive involvement in Vietnam required only President Johnson's authorship of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: It took an aroused youth movement, a cultural revolution, a polarized society, ten years of mass marches on Washington and 57,692 American dead and thousands more wounded to undo that one.

Nobody at the moment can stop the Reagan Administration from doing anything it wants to in El Salvador. Of all the activities of an Administration, its foreign policy is the least constrained by our system of checks and balances. More to the point, what Reagan is doing in El Salvador has the inertial force of 35 years of Cold War, the weight of enormous military and weapons-manufacture lobbies, the malign energy of premises that have not been seriously disputed or even questioned by any President since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. It is instructive to note that within a week or so after the hideous massacre of some 600 Palestinian refugees in West Beirut by Christian Phalangist allies of Israel, 400,000 Israeli citizens--a tenth of the country's population--were rallying in Tel Aviv and demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his defense minister, Ariel Sharon. Under U.S. tutelage, and with U.S. money and weapons, equally hideous Salvadoran government massacres of the peasantry have caused only sporadic protests in the United States. Nobody has even thought of demanding the resignation of our President. How do we explain that? Following Orwell, I would suggest it is because what this President is doing in El Salvador is consistent with what previous Presidents have done in Chile, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Iran. Three and a half decades of Government-controlled reality, however resisted, cannot have left the national mind of our people undamaged; it is, after all, essentially corrupting to insist on carrying forward the ideals of democracy by denying its blessings to others. That is the world of doublethink, which Orwell describes as "to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions ... knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them...." For 35 years, we and the Soviets have been linked in a Manichaean system of state thought that will not, finally, be held accountable to the moral civilization of mankind. And just as we have had our precedents for El Salvador, they have had their precedents for Afghanistan in Poland, Ethiopia, Angola, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Each of the superstates has the demonic other to justify its espionage, its assassinations, its interventions and its invasions. We and the Soviets have actually created an unholy alliance, a gargantuan intimacy, in which, by now, our ideological differences are less important than the fact that we think the same thoughts, mirror each other's responses, heft the same bombs and take turns committing crimes and deploring them, in some sort of alternating current of outrage and despair, outrage and despair, that has with smoke and sulphur generated an ectoplasmic gel of objective reality along the lines of Orwell's tortured vision.

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Big Brother brainwashes his subjects, rewrites their history and deadens their language, but his broadest means of control is the waging of war, or of what passes for war.

In 1984, says Orwell, the three superstates have long since had their nuclear war and stopped it short of total disaster because the end of organized society would mean the end of their power. They do, however, continue to develop and stockpile nuclear weapons in the hope someday of discovering a weapon of such unequivocal advantage that it "will kill several million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand." In the meantime, "propping each other up like three sheaves of corn," they fight a continuous nonnuclear war on the far borders of their territories. Each of them--they are roughly equivalent to the Anglo-American bloc, the Russian-European bloc and the Chinese bloc--has everything it needs to sustain itself, which means that there is no need for war as in the old days, when nations fought for natural resources or markets or cheap labor. But since war goods do not add to a nation's real wealth, being useless for anything but war, the unending conflict serves the purpose of consuming the wealth of each of the great states without raising appreciably the standard of living of its masses. That is desirable because the real wealth of the world must be contained if the masses are not to become too comfortable and therefore too intelligent, for then they will no longer be willing to endure the injustices of a hierarchal society.

The continuous war also monopolizes public emotion, generates public fervor and justifies encroachment on the private, individual mind. The war of superstates is therefore an "imposture," says Orwell. The real war is "waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory but to keep the structure of society intact."

This is satire, of course, but less so than it was when Orwell wrote the book.

The considerable natural wealth of the Soviet Union has for some generations been squandered on its military establishment. These days, about 20 percent of that country's annual budget goes into the maintenance and development of its war machine. Russia's military services and weaponry consume its real wealth and keep its citizens standing in line for their consumer goods. Perhaps resenting the unequal advantage of that, the Reagan Administration has been methodically closing down Federal domestic-spending programs while at the same time plotting a long-term U.S. weapons expenditure of more than one and a half trillion dollars. Presumably, the money saved by depriving students of their tuition loans, school children of their hot lunches and miners of their black-lung pensions will pay for junk-weapons parity with the Soviets. In any event, the social priorities of the two states are now aligned.

We seem to be learning from the Soviets, too, the inestimable advantages of a closed, heavily dossiered society as opposed to a clumsy, open, argumentative one. The current Chief Executive has undertaken to empower the CIA once again with domestic-spying prerogatives, has made Executive-classification procedures for documents more arbitrary and less open to challenge under the Freedom of Information Act and has signed into law the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a criminal offense to reveal the identities of covert agents even if they are publicly available in previously published sources and even if those agents have committed crimes themselves, which gives a nice turn of the screw to investigative journalism.

You do not have to accept Orwell's analysis to its bitter end to understand the totalitarian presumption of any government that finds reason to make itself unaccountable to its own people.

Last spring, the Pentagon revealed a new five-year defense plan under which nuclear war has been reconceived as something that can be fought on a protracted basis and won. In clarification, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger would not admit that he believed a nuclear war could be won, only that in such a war, the U.S. could "prevail." Undoubtedly in anticipation of this linguistic defense of the indefensible, a world-wide nuclear-freeze movement, which was initiated in Western Europe, has gradually brought millions of people into the streets of the cities of Western civilization.

What has been the reaction of the contending superstates to this torrent of prayer and protest?

The Soviets have given approving press coverage to the U.S. and European antinuclear movement. Tass, the Soviet press agency, reported it to be evidence of the people's "resolute disagreement with the U.S. Government's policy of war preparations." Yet, last June, the Moscow police picked up members of a newly formed Russian antinuclear peace group and warned them to give up their activities. According to The New York Times, the demonstrators were told, "The Soviet government and people are already fighting for peace, and this kind of activity can only be provocative and antisocial."

In the U.S., the appearance of 750,000 people in Central Park in New York for a nuclear-freeze rally seems, by contrast, not at all to have fazed our Government. President Reagan took the opportunity on television to make a charmingly fervent European-missile-deployment offer to the Russians that he knew would be rejected. And the nuclear-freeze proposal was dismissed out of hand by the then--Secretary of State Alexander Haig as not being realistic. Haig's reaction was not as hypocritically funny as the Soviets', but in pre-empting the right to wage peace, in designating to a few men in Government the sole power of intellection on this abstruse subject--the incineration of mankind--it is funny enough.

How far are we, then, from realizing the prophecy of Nineteen Eighty-Four? American elder statesman George F. Kennan has suggested that the politicians and their supporting specialists, having had 35 years in which to create a structure for international disarmament and not having done so, cannot reasonably be relied upon ever to do so. That means that the will and the energy to disarm must come from elsewhere than the complex of political, military and defense-industry establishments that makes policy here and in the Soviet Union. The continuing representation of U.S. and Soviet national self-interests by their characteristic oligarchies--Communist bureaucrats or capitalist businessmen--in fact, imposes on the host populations a system of transideological blackmail. Now, in a world armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons of unbelievably computerized sophistication, we may reasonably be as wary or afraid of our own leaders as of the leaders of the Soviet Union. That is exactly the relationship underlying political life foreseen by Orwell--in which the real war is "waged by each ruling group against its own subjects."

If nuclear war breaks out, Orwell may be proved wrong that it will be a limited war; but if so, nobody will be alive to care. If he is right, we are hardly able to take comfort given the postwar society he describes. What we have now, on the eve of the Orwellian year of judgment, are two coincident reality systems: the human reality of feeling and thought, life and love and death; and the suprahuman, statist reality of contending political-myth structures that would, in our name and from the most barbaric impulses, disenfranchise 99 percent of the world's population from even tragic participation in their fate. Inasmuch as no human being is god enough to grant to himself the disposition of nuclear weapons, and the destructive endowment of even one bomb transcends the limits of responsible human action, it will be the second system, the statist reality, that will get things going. The necessary abandonment of human values and the obliteration of logic and meaning by the ruler who engages a nuclear war ensure that the only surviving reality will be that of the political myth. And that is the heart of Orwell's prophecy. The state-managed death of individualism will have begun. Everyone will love Big Brother. The liberal, enlightened society with its claims of human entitlement--including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--will be history.

Then it will not even be that.

"The story Orwell tells is not of good nations against bad nations but of governments against individuals."