The Continuing Relevance of George Orwell's 1984

Twenty years later, during the first year of the Second Iraq War, 1984 is still fresh, still relevant. Reading it today, we are aware of many of the same general issues of language manipulation and revising history, only the specific names (e.g. Jessica Lynch, Dick Cheney, Saddam Hussein, Donald Rumsfeld, Halliburton) suggested to current readers have changed.

Here's a brief sampler from Orwell:

"[Goldstein] was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters; perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumored-in some hiding place in Oceania itself." (Chapter 1. p.14)

"Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war... The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed --m if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future.- who controls the present controls the past." (Chap III, p.32)

"This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." (Chap. IV, 36)

It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history.

White House officials were steamed when Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said earlier this year that U.S. taxpayers would not have to pay more than $1.7 billion to reconstruct Iraq -- which turned out to be a gross understatement of the tens of billions of dollars the government now expects to spend.

Recently, however, the government has purged the offending comments by Natsios from the agency's Web site. The transcript, and links to it, have vanished.

This is not the first time the administration has done some creative editing of government Web sites. After the insurrection in Iraq proved more stubborn than expected, the White House edited the original headline on its Web site of President Bush's May 1 speech, "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended," to insert the word "Major" before combat.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, administration Web sites have been scrubbed for anything vaguely sensitive, and passwords are now required to access even much unclassified information. Though it is not clear whether the White House is directing the changes, several agencies have been following a similar pattern. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead. The National Cancer Institute, meanwhile, scrapped claims on its Web site that there was no association between abortion and breast cancer. And the Justice Department recently redacted criticism of the department in a consultant's report that had been posted on its Web site.

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the Natsios case is particularly pernicious. "This smells like an attempt to revise the record, not just to withhold information but to alter the historical record in a self-interested way, and that is sleazier than usual," he said. "If they simply said, 'We made an error; we underestimated,' people could understand it and deal with it."

For months after the April 23 Natsios interview on ABC's "Nightline," USAID.gov displayed the transcript. "You're not suggesting that the rebuilding of Iraq is going to be done for $1.7 billion?" an incredulous Ted Koppel asked Natsios.

"Well, in terms of the American taxpayers contribution, I do," Natsios said. "This is it for the U.S. The rest of the rebuilding of Iraq will be done by other countries who have already made pledges, Britain, Germany, Norway, Japan, Canada and Iraqi oil revenues. . . . But the American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."

A White House spokesman, asked later about these remarks, responded vaguely that he had not seen the statement in question. Then, sometime this fall, USAID made it easier for the administration to maintain its veil of ignorance on the subject by taking the transcript off its Web site.

For a while, the agency left telltale evidence by keeping the link to the transcript on its "What's New" page -- but yesterday the liberal Center for American Progress discovered that this link had disappeared, too, as well as the Google "cached" copies of the original page.

USAID spokeswoman Lejaune Hall, asked about this curious situation, searched the Web site herself for the missing document. "That is strange," she said. After a brief investigation, she reported back: "They were taken down off the Web site. There was going to be a cost. That's why they're not there."

But other government Web sites, including the State and Defense departments, routinely post interview transcripts, even from "Nightline." And, it turns out, there is no cost. "We would not charge for that," said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider. "We would have no trouble with a government agency linking to one of our interviews, and we are unaware of anybody from [ABC] making any request that anything be removed." © 2003 The Washington Post Company

Winston Smith's job was to create a biographical sketch to commemorate: "some humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite toward him and began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them ("What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lessons -- which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc -- that," etc., etc.), easy to imitate.

"At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys except a drum, a submachine gun, and a model helicopter. At six -- a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules -- he had joined the Spies; at nine he had been a troop leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen he had designed a hand grenade which had been adopted by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twenty-three he had perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important dispatches, he had weighted his body with his machine gun and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, dispatches and all -- an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible to contemplate without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a few remarks on the purity and single-mindedness of Comrade Ogilvy's life. He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally.

Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit; and in the end he decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-referencing that it would entail." (Chap. IV, p.42)

Rumsfeld: Mainly a Style Thing
By Peter Grier and Faye Bowers | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor | October 24, 2003

"Washington: Is Don Rumsfeld a forceful personality? You bet he is. Are top US generals and admirals assertive too? They sure are.

Does this mean the Secretary of Defense and the armed services sometimes squabble bitterly over the direction of US military policy? Seems logical - doesn't it?

Almost three years after the Bush administration took office, Donald H. Rumsfeld remains the Roman candle of the cabinet. The latest episode of his continuing adventures in bureaucracy involves a memo, leaked this week, in which he questions whether the Pentagon can successfully transform to fight the war on terror.

The comment is a tough one, and of a piece with his struggle to change an organization he appears to believe is slow-footed and stodgy. "He has been fairly critical of his military, and not just undercut, but ridiculed retired generals who speak against him," says retired Navy Commander Michael Corgan, now a military historian at Boston University. Of course, the man they call Rummy has seemed outsized ever since he reappeared at the helm of the Pentagon after an absence of a quarter century.

Jut-jawed, erect, he gives the impression in public that he is forever barreling forward into some personal head wind. At press conferences his habit of prefacing all his assertions with questions ("Would I be happier if we'd caught Saddam? Of course I would!"), plus occasional outright explosions, can intimidate reporters...."

The 12 page extract (Chap. IX) from Goldstein's "subversive book," which Winston is secretly reading, gives Orwell a chance to express his own analysis of the economics and politics of warfare.

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed....

War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labor of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic, whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist."

"[Winston] knew in advance what O'Brien would say: that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others....

[O'Brien responds] "Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power."

Of related interest:

In his novel 1984, George Orwell wrote a bitter parody of the "hero" created by propagandists to act as a role model.

More poignantly, we learn of the real impact of such propaganda on sincere, well-meaning youth in this memoir in Chinese Propaganda Posters From the Collection of Michael Wolf -- By Anchee Min

Anchee Min is the author of "Red Azalea," "Becoming Madame Mao" and the forthcoming "Empress Orchid." This essay will appear as the introduction to "Chinese Propaganda Posters," to be published by Taschen. (Review appeared in Los Angeles Times, December 14 2003)

I wanted to be the girl in the poster when I was growing up. Every day I dressed up like that girl in a white cotton shirt with a red scarf around my neck, and I braided my hair the same way. I liked the fact that she was surrounded by the revolutionary martyrs, whom I was taught to worship since kindergarten. The one on the far right was Liu Hulan, the teenage girl whose head was chopped off by the Nationalists because she wouldn't betray her faith in Communism. The soldier above her was Huang Ji-guang, who used his chest to block American machine-gun fire in the Korean War. The one next to him was Dong Cunrui, who used his own body as a post supporting explosives when blowing up an enemy bridge. The soldier on the far left was Cai Yong-xiang, who was run over by a train while rescuing others. The book, which the girl in the poster carries in her hands, is "The Story of Lei Feng," a soldier/hero/martyr, who was a truck-driver who died protecting others.

My passion for the posters began when I was eight years old. One day I brought home from school a poster of Chairman Mao. Although I did not know that the Cultural Revolution had started, my action made me a participant — I removed my mother's "Peace and Happiness" painting with children playing in a lotus pond from the wall, and replaced it with the Mao poster. My mother was not pleased but she tried not to show her disappointment. I remember my thoughts: why wasn't she happy about Mao looking down at us during every meal while others couldn't have enough of Mao?

The posters had great impact on my life. They taught me to be selfless and to be loyal to Mao and Communism. To be able to feel closer to Mao, I filled my house with posters. I looked at Mao before I closed my eyes at night and again when I woke. When I saved a few pennies, I would go to the bookstores to buy new Mao posters.

The place where I lived in Shanghai became a war zone during the heat of the Cultural Revolution in the late sixties and early seventies. Violence between factions often led to death. Everyone fought in the name of Mao. To be a Maoist was the goal of the time. For ten years I was in charge of the "Blackboard Newspaper" in my school. For the head art, I copied every image from "The Head Art for Propaganda Publishing." Week after week, month after month and year after year, I tirelessly drew pictures. I put out extra editions of the black-board newspaper during the summers and winters when the schools were out. I didn't mind that only a few people would see my work. My hands were swollen from frostbite and I could barely hold the chalk. But I was inspired by the heroes and heroines in the posters, and I believed that hardship would only toughen me and make me strong.

I continued to dream that one day I would be honored to have an opportunity to sacrifice myself for Mao, and become the girl in the poster. I graduated from middle school and was assigned by the government to work in a collective labor farm near the East China Sea. Life there was unbearable and many youths purposely injured themselves, for example, cut off their foot or hand in order to claim disability and be sent home. My strength and courage came from the posters that I grew up with. I believed in heroism and if I had to, I preferred to die like a martyr.

I slaved in the rice and cotton fields for three years until Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, changed my fate. In early 1976, no one knew that Mao was dying and Madame Mao was preparing herself to take over China after him. She was making a propaganda film to show the masses, and she had sent out talent scouts all over the country to look for a "proletarian face" to star in her film. I was chosen when hoeing in the cotton field.

I was brought to the Shanghai Film Studio to be trained to act in Madame Mao's film. It was there I encountered the famous poster-painter Mr. Ha Qiongwen from the Shanghai Art Institute Hua-Yuan. I was brushing my teeth one morning in a public sink when Mr. Ha approached me. He showed me a piece of paper authorizing him to look for models for his posters. He said that he liked my look and asked if I would model for him. I was flattered but asked if my puffy eyes would be a bother because I had just woken up. He said no.

Mr. Ha followed me back to my dorm to choose costumes from my clothes. I was surprised that he picked my green-colored worn-out army jacket which I had brought back with me from the labor camp. I told him that it would only take a moment for me to wash off the muddy dirt on the shoulder. He stopped me and said that the dirt was the effect that he had been looking for.

I began posing after Mr. Ha set up the camera. I didn't know how to pose and was just doing what he asked of me, which was to look into the far distance with confidence. I apologized for my sun-beaten skin and hair, and I tried to hide my fungicide-stained fingernails. He said that he liked the fact that I looked like a real peasant.

He asked me what I would wear when working in the rice paddy. I replied that I would wear a straw-hat, I wouldn't wear shoes, and I would have my sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the pants up to the knees. He told me to do that. I obeyed. I kicked off my shoes and he saw the fungicide-stained toenails. I was embarrassed, but he told me that I shouldn't be. Instead, I should be proud. "I have been painting posters featuring peasants for years," he said, "and I have never realized my mistake. From now on I will paint peasants' toenails in a brown color."

A week later, Mr. Ha sent me a print of his favorite shot of me. I looked quite heroic, like the girl in the poster I had admired as a child. Months passed and I didn't hear from him. One day during the Chinese New Year, when I was walking near Shanghai's busiest street, Central Xi-Zang Road and East Yan-an Road, I saw myself in a poster on the front window of the largest bookstore. The woman in the poster had my face, my jacket, but her arms and legs were thicker. She wore a straw-hat, her sleeves and pants were rolled up, and all her nails were brown-colored!

I rushed home to share the news with my family, and everyone was excited and proud. I wished that I could have purchased a print of that poster, but it was not for sale. The clerk in the bookstore told me that it was distributed by the government for displaying in public spaces.

Michael Wolf's collection of Chinese propaganda posters is unique and marvelous. The posters are a representation of a generation's fantasy. They reflect an important era in Chinese history, which has been falsely recorded for the most part.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so let them speak.