Big Brother looks at us with new eyes
On June 8, 1949, the British publishing house Secker & Warburg published the first edition of the novel, which was destined to become one of the most popular books of the twentieth century, translated into almost all languages of the world and sold in tens of millions of copies. In 2017, she again entered the US bestseller list - after the adviser to President Trump made a completely Orwellian (which many noticed) in her "doublethink" statement: "You call it false statements, but in fact these are alternative facts." However, the very terms coined by George Orwell for Britain in 1984 (more precisely, Runway 1, one of the provinces of Oceania) have long been included in the language - and not only in English. “Big Brother is looking at you”, “thought crime”, “newspeak”, “freedom is slavery” - all this is known to almost every person,who has read more than three books in his life. And, alas, the fantastic details of the world of "1984" are becoming more and more reality - for their implementation, neither the third world, nor the total impoverishment of the masses, nor the militaristic totalitarian system were needed. Orwell's predictions came true - almost everything. And it looks like they will continue to come true. Izvestia pondered the significance of the great novel.
George Orwell - British writer and publicist.
Wrong system
For the first half century after publication, Orwell's dystopia was perceived as an evil satire on communist regimes - not least because of the biography of the author himself, who became disillusioned with his Bolshevik sympathies after the Spanish Civil War and openly admitted his desire to warn the world against a possible totalitarian future. “I am not convinced that a society of this kind should necessarily arise, but I am convinced (considering, of course, that my book is a satire) that something of this kind can be. I am also convinced that the totalitarian idea lives in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I tried to trace this idea to its logical end,”the writer said in his dying interview.
Totalitarianism in its communist twist fell ingloriously in the late 1980s; in fact, his unwitting gravedigger came to power in the USSR just a year after the date given in the title of the novel (chosen, as it is believed, by a simple rearrangement of the last two digits of 1948 - the year in which Orwell wrote his book). The Cold War is over - by the way, another term coined by Orwell (he used it in the article "You and the Atomic Bomb", published in the Tribune in October 1945) and entered the political vocabulary of the whole world. But the Big Brother and all the accompanying institutions of total supervision suddenly revived already in the 21st century - albeit in a “velvet”, but no less offensive form for a person.
It is well known that Orwell, describing the mores of the Ministry of Truth (which in 1984 society is engaged in a continuous falsification of the past to please the current attitudes of the Ingsoc Party), was based on his own experience during the Second World War - first in the censorship department of the British Ministry of Information, then in the Eastern Service of the Bi- bc.
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Cover of one of the first editions of George Orwell's 1984 novel.
The writer has never been to the USSR - in fact, he has never been a satire on the specifically Soviet system "1984", despite details like the Big Brother's mustache and a rather transparent allusion to Trotsky (Bronstein) in the image of the semi-mythical enemy of the people No. 1 Emmanuel Goldstein. Orwell was afraid not so much of the Soviet party bosses - by that time it was already obvious that the "regional committee" was unlikely to be able to "fan the world fire" - but the Western intellectual technocrats (whom he separated from the intelligentsia in the original, Russian sense of the word). Technocratic intellectuals did not disappoint - the development of technology in the last decade of the twentieth century led to the emergence of the information society, as we observe it today. And, alas, it bears little resemblance to the rosy dreams of optimistic science fiction writers of the last century.
watch yourself
Big Brother has decentralized, lost his personalized form - neither you a mustachioed man with a burning gaze, nor even an anecdotal "comrade major", according to many, sitting on a wire somewhere halfway from the VKontakte server to your home Wi-Fi router. But the "TV screens" broadcasting propaganda and following users are now in everyone's pocket - unless they keep track of preferences and carefully feeds the next portion of "information" not to the omnipotent state, but to transnational corporations. Which, as it happened, almost all are based in the "bastion of democracy" on the other side of the Atlantic.
But even abandoning a smartphone, a resident of a modern, more or less large city is guaranteed to be deprived of privacy, several times a day falling into the field of view of CCTV cameras (in London there are more than 600 thousand of them - one per 14 residents; on average, each Londoner is recorded about 300 times). Of course, all this is solely for the safety of law-abiding citizens - after all, the invisible enemy does not sleep. However, according to the mayor of the British capital Sadiq Khan, "terrorist attacks are an inevitable part of the life of a modern metropolis." Or, as Orwellian comrade O'Brien said, “this will be a world of terror - to the same extent as a world of triumph” (hereinafter translated by VP Golyshev).
A still from the movie 1984, based on the novel of the same name by George Orwell.
Even the notorious fake news, the scourge of today's infosphere, was foreseen by Orwell. The ideal party member, Comrade Ogilvy, invented by the Ministry of Truth ("Comrade Ogilvy never existed in the present, but now exists in the past - and, as soon as the traces of forgery are erased, he will exist as authentically and irrefutably as Charlemagne and Julius Caesar") - a direct predecessor already somewhat forgotten "girls with red laces" and fake Iraqi photos.
However, today fake news is more and more often used not for political, but for purely commercial purposes, in pursuit of traffic and advertising revenues - the new Big Brother, quite in a Marxist way, believes that being determines consciousness, and profit will support almost any ideology.
Anything expensive
Even 20 years ago, it seemed to the harshest denunciators of the mores of post-industrial society that in the future we would rather have a "brave new world" Huxley, based on compulsion to obedience through carnal pleasures. But even then Orwell had the last word. Instead of harmless "soma" - deadly synthetic drugs (in "1984" it was a chemical gin "Victory", but the difference is small), instead of the joys of love - "transgender", "polyamorous", "non-binary", and right there - the risk of going to bunk for what was once considered innocent flirting. But at the same time - an abundance of pornography on the Internet, designed for modern "breaks". "Pornhubs" of different shades of gray in the world "1984" - "a special subdivision - called porno in Newspeak - that produced pornography of the latest analysis."
George Orwell while working for the BBC, 1941.
At the same time, of course, the modern Big Brother declares - in the newspeak, which is not always understood by the "proles" - a striving for freedom, peace and science. But, like Orwell's, freedom turns into slavish obedience to the principles of "tolerance", the world - "humanitarian bombing", and science - the consistent destruction of the traditions of education.
But there is, of course, a difference between the world of 1984 and the one in which we happened to live. Orwell's Big Brother builds a society based on hatred and fear - and, as the novel's protagonist, Winston Smith, rightly notes, such a civilization is not sustainable. The current liberal Big Brother has chosen a different strategy: they are trying to accustom the modern society of the West to absolutely unctuous "love" - tolerance on the verge of indifference.
The result, however, is still the same as Orwell's: “We have severed the bonds between parent and child, between man and woman, between one person and another. No one trusts a wife, child, or friend anymore. And soon there will be no wives and friends. We take newborns from their mothers, as we take eggs from under a laying hen. Let us erase the sex drive. Reproduction will become an annual formality, like the renewal of the food ration card. We will nullify the orgasm. Our neurologists are already looking for remedies. There will be no other loyalty than party loyalty. There will be no other love but love for the Big Brother. There will be no other laughter than a victorious laugh at the defeated enemy. There will be no art, literature, science. When we become omnipotent, we will do without science. There will be no distinction between ugly and beautiful."
Statue of George Orwell, by sculptor Martin Jennings, at BBC headquarters. George Orwell was an employee of the corporation from 1941 to 1943.
Almost all of these prophecies have come true - millennials are already abandoning sex and procreation, the distinction between the ugly and the beautiful is diligently erased in all areas, from fashion to attitudes towards their own health, “party loyalty” to the liberal-politically correct ideal is gradually replacing both pragmatic and ethical principles … There is very little left to complete triumph.
True, in Comrade O'Brien's chased formula (“If you need an image of the future, imagine a boot trampling on a man’s face - forever”), it looks like the rough soldier's boot will be replaced by an elegant hipster boot. Whether it will be easier for a person is a big question.
Vladislav Krylov
